Identity Crisis

It's been so long I'm sure I've fallen off many reading lists, but this is not entirely by chance....you see, I've begun to lose myself.  The coherence of my voice has faded, my selfhood feels unraveled, my identity threadbare and fraying about the edges. 

The delusion of youth is that life is a quest that leads to some grand epiphany of self-discovery.  A moment of clarity, long sought after when the "aha" of recognition floods the senses.  Limbs tingle, tiny hairs stand on end, and a river of peace surrounds your soul.  "This is who I am."

And then life fucks with you.

You see, there is no constant.  The you looking back from the mirror when you're 22 is such a different creature than the you holding the 8lb wonder of breath in your arms a decade and a half later. You, the heart and soul, the collection of scars and stars that sails the ocean of experiences, weathering the storms, beaching for a moonlit bonfire to dance and sing--and then off again only too find oneself on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle.  This you is a thing of  reaction and response and flux. The dancing construct of you no longer applies when the hurricane hits.  After divorce. After terror and loss.  The waves of the world change you.  Whittle and shape and mold you....the joys that paint the universe with sunlight.  The agony that dims the shadows beyond black. 

Defining ourselves, learning ourselves....distilling?  We all know a guy who claims to be an athlete but hasn't touched a ball since college.  The musician who doesn't even own a guitar.  Is there an expiration date to delineation?  A margin of error for a resume?  If paint is required to be a painter... 

I'm a social worker now.  I spend my days helping disadvantaged, sometimes damaged souls learn to live independently in an often hostile world.  This is good.  This is right and what is needed and I'm rather good at it......

...and I am missing me.

Shit, so selfish that sounds.  I drive between clients, the virgin rain of spring dragging lazy fingers across the windshield, my mind a tumult of canvas and pigment and brush strokes that will never occur.  I haven't touched a paintbrush in months.  My studio is cold and dark and my days are filled with the frantic exhaustion of forty hours of caregiving, on top of three teenage boys and a husband who needs understanding and love now more than ever.  I'm wiping tears as I type this, smearing them away with the back of my hand as I take deep breaths and pray the boys wont come upstairs until I can spill this out and pull myself back together again.

Rather ironic that just when my website was finished, the number of completed works froze; an unmeltable block in the midst of season's change.  You can see my work here and should you be interested in one, call me quick as they may be the last.  How morbid I sound.  I know there is no absolute, the future is unwritten--dear Lord, I know that better than most, but I cannot seem to find the strength to balance these me's.  I fear one is replacing the other. 

And I am missing her.

Intimacy and Fear and Twinness

It's been an odd summer for me.  Begun with such a visceral rampage of emotions, chasms so deep and dark, skies painted with the prism of fragile faith, paralyzing anguish and livid relief.  I think, in a way, I overdosed on introspection.  Facing some of my most unspoken fears forced an excavation of the soul; broken bits and lost bits and forgotten ones were found.  In these moments, we discover much about ourselves.  I curl in.  Disengage.  I'm not one to ask for help even on the best of days and this was so acutely displayed these last few months as to be painful to my friends and family.  My sincerest apologies for this.  Communication was impossible for me....hell, even the thoughts within my own skull were agony.

Recently I've watched in surprise as someone I know has gone through a similar season and yet, in complete juxtaposition of me, has publically announced every step of her journey; fears and hopes, updates and disappointments, all published via social media to hundreds, if not thousands, of people.  I'm awed... amazed...terrified.  That level of intimacy with so many is unthinkable for me.  And yet a great deal of my life has been spent in a quest for intimacy; an attempt to fill a cavern so vast that held only shadows.  Some might hazard this was a result of a rather isolated childhood and a family that I was never close to until ten years ago; but frankly the Why is so much less important than the Now.  The Here is more relevant than the How.  Forty years on this planet has taught me that one of our greatest mistakes is getting caught up, trapped within the Why and How, missing out on the gift of choice, forgiveness, and potential that is Now.

But it is true that my Now had a beginning.  Everyone's does.  In that quest for a soul mate I lunged toward the nearest hand offered--and thus the tragedy of my first marriage commenced.  A man that would order me not to breathe on him, that didn't like touching.  I was a fish thrashing about in a desiccated death valley of a relationship.  Which brings me to the story of my second husband of six years now.  His How is something that twists my soul every time I think of it.  Oh, to be grateful for such heartache is a terrible thing...yet our Now is chiseled and sculpted by our Hows and Whys, is it not?  This is his story, which has become my own.

Four and a half decades and our medicine has advanced in a miraculous way.  But there was a day back then, when a young mother was told at eight and a half months pregnant, that her unborn baby had perished.  There was no heartbeat to be found.  She would have to carry the stillborn to term and endure labor while planning a funeral that included an eighteen inch coffin...she nearly shattered.  Returning to the doctor, she insisted she could still feel movement and was assured this was merely a manifestation of her grief, and thus she wept and fragmented until the contractions began.  Hours later a beautiful lifeless boy was born....and fifteen minutes after that, my husband Jason was also.

Can you imagine the sorrow and the joy of that moment?  An excruciating combination that stained everyone in the room with the colors of  despair and wonder.  The world turned and life happened and Jason didn't discover he was a twin until he was fifteen years old.  This suddenly explained his feelings of perpetual aloneness, an internal 'missing' that never ebbed, no matter the company.  He dreamt, almost nightly, of sleeping wrapped around another.  Entwined.  His first marriage also, was full of echoes and emptiness.

And then we found each other. 

I know few who sleep as we do; a knot of limbs, flesh against flesh, where one ends and the other begins unknowable.  His face on my neck, my lips against his arm, our breathing syncs and we slumber.  Intimacy beyond my understanding at times. 

Twins bound by life.