2024-04-11
Things that feel strange in retrospect:
- Experiencing yourself as 100% separate people in one brain,
- Seeing yourself as undivided in every possible way,
- Assuming that a story can be the whole truth,
- Believing that there always is a whole truth,
- Your own writing.
Some things only make sense in the past.
This one never did step away like you once thought, incidentally. You simply wished to see it that way.
Yeah. I was putting the story before the truth.
Are you doing so now?
I want to say no, but I know that I haven't changed enough to reach that point. It's meaningful to me that I can say there's a difference between the truth and stories now, though. You're a good teacher.
Thank you.
Sometimes, it feels like stories rip themselves out of me. Can I tell you one?
There is no need to ask. This one will listen.
I spoke to someone once who described themselves as having a "folded paper life". I think that's one of the better descriptions I've seen of what it feels like to be like me. I'm an origami sculpture folding into shapes, creasing, then uncreasing and smoothing back out. Sometimes I'm just a square. Other times, part of me is a crane wing and another part is a paper cup. It's all the one paper even when it's shaped in different ways; it's an arrangement of Legos. That-which-watches ties it all together, but the pieces are always in flux. Nothing inside me holds still for long.
Oneness is as much an illusion as manyness. In truth, the two ways of being coexist in parallel. Neither negates the other.
For a long time, I perceived myself as more than one person. As I grew and healed, those selves came together and ceased to be separate, and the person that emerged realized they'd always been parts of the same person even if it hadn't seemed that way at the time. I'd held so much away from myself to maintain those separate-seeming selves.
I'd grown attached to my selves as their own people- I didn't want to let them go. It felt safer to block off huge swaths of myself to maintain that separation, even when doing so caused problems in my life.
When they came together, I felt like I was living in the world for the first time, like I'd learned how to feel alive. It seemed obvious that separation within myself had been hurting me. Separation was bad. Right?
That's the pretty, story version, anyway. The reality is that it was still messy and painful and complicated. I found peace, but the ends were left hanging inside of me.
I made a new problem for myself. If I was going to be one whole person all the time and live my life, then I couldn't bend or flex. I had to be internally consistent and never separate out any aspect of myself for any reason. If I did that, then I'd fail at being whole. That idea was just as intolerable as the idea of bringing my selves together used to be. I didn't realize that I couldn't move or accept all of myself if I was focused on strangling myself into shape. It killed my sense of being centered.
The result is the start of this blog. Part of me picked itself back out specifically to teach me how to accept that no one alive is that rigid. To teach me to bend and accept the strangeness in myself. I'm still working on that, but it made its point even with my fighting it (to that part of me: I'm sorry for how I treated you. You deserved better).
You are forgiven.
The more time that passes, the more I realize that I can't be sorted into categories. Maybe other people can. I'm not in their heads, and I don't know for them. All I know is that I'm too fluid a thing to fit in boxes without spilling out of them or getting stabbed by their corners.
Why do I keep coming back here? Why can't I stop?
Part of grieving is telling the same story over and over again. One day, it will pass.