How to mourn the last couple of years
Part one of an ongoing eulogy for a period of time
It wasn’t exactly an overnight shift and voila, I was a different person. The change had been coming for months, bubbling up beneath the surface of a skin that was and was not mine, begging to be prodded at up close with tweezers and a microscope. With each day, I searched to no avail, hoping that this would be the moment of release, that this was the moment where I would see the fruits of change. Most of the time, it was not yet the time. So I woke up each day, forced to sit in the muck of grief, making do with the dilapidated daffodils that sprouted from the skin of the earth—even new life, was born half dead.
If I’m being honest, it’s not that I have changed so much that I don’t recognize my past self anymore. There are still remnants of a past life that I hold onto with a grip so strong that my knuckles look as though they’ve committed crimes. But if you look up close, you’ll see that the red turned white taut hilltops on my hands are not from rage, but from desperation.
Here are some of the things I watched die:
The person I was before going to sleep and waking up with each new day
What I thought it meant to survive traumas
A sense of self without any mental illness diagnoses
A sense of self that was not married to another person
A relationship with an animal that actively made me ill
A body that existed in a constant state of vigilance
Constant fear of everything
A relationship with someone I’ve been close with my whole life
A version of love that was desperate
A desire to be the center of attention
Dissociative habits
A handful of friendships
A version of some people that existed before they actually died, which summoned some uncomfortable truths
An understanding of what it means to be disappointed
A sense of self before I realized I had disordered eating habits
Harsh judgment for myself
My inner narrative around my gut and the way it functions
The idea of what a parent should be, and what it means to mourn a parent who is still alive
A relationship with my body that was conditional
The idea that I was ‘not that anxious’