In the last piece, I wrote about learning to trust the unknown. I couldn't see around the bend, and eventually I began to understand that I didn't need to.
But the future wasn't the only thing that had become unfamiliar.
I had too.
By now you have seen how full of contradictions I could be. I could seem like myself in one moment and feel completely unfamiliar to myself in another. Sometimes other people noticed the difference too.
“We need you to snap out of it,” someone told me. Someone else said, “I guess even the mighty fall.”
Their words hurt. But they weren't the only ones looking for the woman I had been.
I wanted me back too.
I knew her. I knew what interested her, what she enjoyed, how she moved through the world, what mattered to her, and what she expected from herself. She was the person I had spent a lifetime becoming familiar with.
And now I kept looking for evidence of her.
I could not perform my way back to her.
Comparing Myself With Myself
It was easy to use the woman I remembered as a reference point.
I used to enjoy this.
I used to be able to do this.
I was always the one who...
I never used to...
Sometimes I wasn't only missing Darrell or the life we had shared. I was missing myself inside that life.
That didn't mean the woman I had been was gone. She was part of me. But I was living in a world she had never lived in. I began to see that remembering who I had been and requiring myself to reproduce her were not the same thing.
Sometimes, when I caught myself making the comparison, I could simply notice:
That was true of me then.
Nothing had to come after it. I didn't have to explain what was true of me now. I didn't have to decide whether something had been lost, changed, or would return.
I could leave the question open.
Meeting Myself There
While I was writing Twice Widowed, I wrote:
“I don't know what state of mind I will be in when I write the last chapter of my story. I am looking forward to knowing it—and to meeting myself there.”
I didn't know who I would meet.
For so long, I had wanted the woman I knew back. And here I was, curious about a woman I couldn't know yet.
But by the time I wrote those words, I did know something. I would be different. Too much was continuously changing for me to stay where I was.
I didn't know what those changes would mean or what they would reveal about me. I didn't know what kind of woman I would meet there, and I wasn't trying to decide in advance who she should be. I simply wanted to know.
I was looking forward to meeting myself there.
So rather than say much more about it, I'm going to give you some room to notice yourself where you are now.
A Quiet Truth to Carry
A Scribble of Your Own
Date: ____________________
You may recognize things in yourself that feel different now. Some may seem gone. Others may still interest you but feel difficult to reach. There may be things you once did easily that now require more from you, or parts of yourself you simply haven't encountered in a while.
What do you notice?
Something I once enjoyed but now find difficult...
Something I used to do easily...
Something about myself I miss...
Something else I notice...
Leave This Part Blank for Now
When you have read the last piece of this companion, come back to this page.
Don't fill in these lines yet.
When you return, what new things do you notice about yourself?
Date: ____________________