Getting To Know Myself Again

I feel like my old self. Not ‘old’ as in how I was a few months ago before I started having all the flash backs and other PTSD junk but old as in how I felt when I first started to feel- when I first started to think of myself as a person.

The long story aside- after I moved out of the bio parent’s house when I was 15, a friend’s mom (whom I now call mom) took guardianship of me, I went through this phase of… discovery and change. Change being the bigger concept- discovery being what pushed it along.

I didn’t know the name of certain emotions. I cried so many times when I felt so happy because it was so strange to me. Now I have so many words- sometimes too many and I find myself working to use them all at once hoping to bring the same things out in others.

I didn’t know I had a favorite color, food, or music. I remember being asked for the very first time what my favorite food was and not having a single answer. They asked me what my favorite color was and I responded with the color I had always been told was my favorite- pink. They asked why I didn’t wear any of my pink clothing. My response ‘Cause I hate it.’ And music,… music was an exquisite challenge to discover and pinpoint just what I liked. There was so much I’d never contemplated before. I did certain things, collected certain things and avoided many other certain things and yet I never knew these were likes and dislikes.

I had always worn what was available- regardless of cleanliness, size, how many times it had been worn, and how absolutely horrible it looked. Then I was thrust into a department store and told to pick out things to help make me look however I wanted to look. That was an interesting experience.

All these memories- fond, sad, scary, and exhilarating, are all filed under the same word. Discovery. From each of these discoveries I began to change. They taught me that I was a person- I really mean this and I can’t stress it enough. Looking back I don’t honestly think I ever saw myself as a person and once I learned that I was… well, it’s been an interesting process figuring out who that person was.

You know you’ve changed when a school bully trips you one day- you cry and he laughs…

And two months later you give him the verbal dressing down of his life (even the teacher laughed) for bad mouthing a friend and he asks- “Why are you so different now?”

I’m getting off track. I said long story aside and for the most part I’ve avoided the longer story- to digress. I feel like the person I discovered I was. I mean, I’m always changing- that’s a given, we all are but it’s something else. When I went back into foster hell (foster care) I tried desperately to hold on to the nearly secure person I had become. I continued to fight for my opinions, seek out things I loved and avoid what I didn’t. I continued to look within and have long talks with myself- a process used to figure things out like ‘How do I feel about this and what about that?’

But even rocks can be worn down by the tide and I was hardly a pebble at the time. They broke me- not as bad as others had and I stood firm till the end as far as the important things went but a part of me still broke. It was a familiar feeling I had lived with far too often in a time when I had no names for the things I felt so to protect myself I cut off that wonderful bit of me that was always trying to figure out who I was. The curious child who was too open for her own good.

I was still me but only by a half.

Now though, that time of my life is over. I’m safe, happy, relatively healthy, and loved. I have to remind myself of this more than I’d like to but the facts still stand. Now I’m starting to remember, starting to get back on that rocky but exhilarating path of internal morphing and discovery.

I’m getting to know me again.

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