Who I Am

Reading great writing can do a lot of things. It can entertain us, make us laugh or cry, it can frustrate us, and on the rare occasion we come across a writer who is truly gifted, it can simply take our breath away. Liz at I Am Pisspot has that gift. I am honored her words have found their way to my blog. I am grateful she took the time to write such a beautiful piece and chose to share it here. Enjoy.

And after a while, you learn

That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,

Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure…

That you really are strong

And you really do have worth

And you learn and learn…

With every goodbye, you learn.

 ~Veronica A. Shoffstall

One last, lingering look and an embrace that felt so juxtaposed within my soul; I knew every contour of her shape, her body perfectly enveloped mine, and yet as my arms wrapped around her for the final time, the ones I believed were designed specifically for her, it was clear our hearts had already separated. ‘We’ had become singular, no longer an entity in which we both danced and swayed as one.

I never thought the day would come, the day when my world became a barren landscape of hazy photos and tattered letters of love. I would wander aimlessly, trancelike, through the space we once shared together, my fingers trailing the furniture we had excitedly chosen amidst lucid dreams of ever-after.

“You’ll be ok, it was your choice, breathe, breathe and breathe”, I would placate myself in the dark nights when amidst the haunting silence, I would find myself grappling for air, drowning in the reality of my actions, harangued by the intensity of the words that swirled manically in the raw recesses of my mind.

I’d heard about it before, about this heartache and the emotional and physical pain it caused, and yet innocently, naively, I never thought that I would be one to experience it, especially through my own doing; like some sort of self-sadist, inflicting my own anguish by calling it off.

I would constantly question my decision; chairing an open dialogue between the light and dark shades of my own psyche, hoping for an answer. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was hoping for, nor what I was doing, I was completely directionless and furiously flailing. Never before had I felt so helpless.

I clearly recall the mornings, the waking to find the room filled with nothing but the stark white wall of loneliness and missing; the first few seconds of comfortably numb and hoping that it was all a dream, and then the jarring reality that it was well and truly over and she was no longer a part of my life.

My life; she had been my everything, my reason, my world. I truly felt that I couldn’t exist without her and even the mere thought of losing her would often trigger such deep fear somewhere in my unconscious that it made me fall to my knees in tears at times. I loved her so intensely that it never occurred to me that I had lost myself in ‘us’. I didn’t know where I began and she ended, we were two halves that made a whole, a beautiful jigsaw that one day, I took a hammer to and smashed into tiny little pieces.

On my own, I felt incapable of survival, bare and fragile.

And so my journey began, on my hands and knees, scrabbling around on the floor in an attempt to find the pieces that belonged to me, no matter how insignificant they seemed. Gathering these pieces, my pieces, figuring out who I was and wanted to be, on my own, became a tedious task. But what I was lacking in sense of self, I made up for in determination.

Amongst the devastation, I had the urge to hide away from it all; to crawl under my bed and curl up in a ball of solitary solace, yet I didn’t. I would not allow it.

I started to look hard for things that I liked, that made me who I am. There were amusing attempts, like the time I found myself standing in the local 60somethings Barbershop singing group for an audition, or the night I joined a running group that literally just ran loops of the pitch-black park. I also started to try and find time out for myself. I read self-help books vicariously. I devoured each and every single sentence. When I was finished, I’d go back and read the same book again and again and again. Each time I would find something different that jumped out of the page, smacked me in the face and said, “Apply this to your own life!” I started to ask myself questions constantly about how I was feeling, why I was feeling that way and what I was going to do to look after myself better. It felt egocentric at first, because “I” had never been important in the “we” that I knew. But slowly it filtered through to me that this was the only way for me to feel stronger and self-assured.

And even though I realised that instead of Barbershop singing I prefer singing in a country and folk band; that I prefer running on my own instead of a group – I look back at these steps, no matter how small they were, and see how they helped define who I am now and where I want to be in the future.

I am a student, a runner, a writer, a singer, a friend, an aunt, a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister – and I am a girlfriend again, but this time determined to hold on to everything that encapsulates who I am.

~~~~~~~

I am sure, now that you have finished reading this piece, that you want more. You can find her writing at I Am Pisspot. Follow her on Twitter too.