With family in town this week, I'm stuck in a remembering mode of sorts. Returning to the past as mind adventure--but only in a good sort of way. I must admit that there have been years--not yet distant enough--when the returning has been the most painful, most hellish experience I've ever had. And I must remind you, in case you forgot, that I've given birth naturally before...Birthed a 10.8 lb baby sans any drugs or anesthetic, whatsoever. And the remembering and grief was indeed three thousand times worse.
But.
Somewhere, along the hellish way my real self snuck up on me.
Six years ago I opened up a browser to find the truth in a delusion I was living. My Other turned out to not be who I thought he was. But that story has been written again and again in countless novels and poems. The real story and real delusion was that I turned out to not be who I thought I was. Narcissist be damned. The story has shaped up to not really be about him, at all--at least that is how I'm writing it.
And just who am I?
Not entirely sure. But. These bits I know...
Resilient. Authentic. Real, in a Velveteen Rabbit sort of way. Weathered by life's experiences, yet strangely young in spite of or maybe because of these experiences.
Honest, to a fault, perhaps.
Highly intuitive. Learning not to buy into the world's and my ex Narc's rendition that this means something is wrong with me.
And then there's the compassion piece that I'm not sure about. Is it who I am? Not sure. It's not that I lack compassion. Far from it, I seem to have an excess of it. But it doesn't feel mine. Reason being, I don't have any control over it. Rather, it is just there hovering around me like a cloud, cloaking me in softness.
"My compassion" appears as if from somewhere else--much more than it should be allowed based on the horrific narc shit I've lived through. The compassion is the part I don't really understand. You'd think it would have been banished somewhere along the way. The narcissist certainly tried to drive it underground by pillaging it. Multiple therapists told me to abandon it as it often makes me vulnerable. Which is why its persistence puzzles me. And why I don't think its really mine, at all. It hovers around me like a cloak from somewhere else. When I'm exhausted and empty and completely lacking in every way it appears more prominently from wherever for someone else who needs it, like magic. Usually feels like some sort of river of energy flowing through me. Something I can neither stop nor start--something I just watch flow at the exact point where somebody needs massive amounts of it.
And so that settles nothing, really.
And just who am I? Not sure--but learning. And becoming more kind to myself.
I guess I'm still becoming as I watch my real self sneak back up on me.
