Fever Dreaming

I was going to be complex, cool, and fierce. I was going to leave my hometown behind and travel the world; I was going to be strong, brave, and athletic. For a while, I was going to be a professional wrestler (no, really), then I decided I'd rather be a professor of history. The mind of a child is full of wondrous fever dreams fed on a steady diet of love, outlandish promises, and bubble-gum and neon coloured cartoons.

Eventually the dream has to end, though mine went on a little longer than it had any right to.

How ironic for me to log on and see that this Identity challenge was in its closing hours while the life I thought I would live is slipping away and a new one is forming. Kind of apt, don't you think? Apt and challenging; is it possible to be deeply introspective about something you're experiencing right now?

Broken Mirrors

I have a broken mirror, a compact given to me for my 18th birthday. It's scuffed and well used with a thick crack through the centre of one of its mirrors. It shows exactly who I was, or maybe still am; well-loved but careless, non-materialistic to the point of disregard, and more prone to vanity than I want to admit.

It sits at the bottom of a drawer, carefully wrapped in a scrap of velvet cut from a jacket I ruined on bender. I regret my carelessness when it has consequences; I don't particularly want the mirror, but I want to remember that it was given, by who, and why. I am relentlessly attached to my own story because life slips through my mind like water through a net.

My life is full of broken mirrors and I don't see the best of myself in them. In fact, the older I get the less of myself I see at all; my mother used to say that what other people think of us doesn't really matter. That's not really true. Actually, I believe its utter bullshit; we rarely see ourselves clearly and the opinions of the people we know and spend time with are usually far more accurate to who we are than our own because they're based on what we do, what we say, and how we behave.

That's why I keep my broken mirrors.

They're little shards of self, of my true self given by people who know me. I can gather them together and make a jigsaw of my own identity from the things that were too precious to toss; a broken compact, a chunky chain bracelet, a cardboard and foil Christmas decoration, a tiny felt heart in a cheap box... a pocket knife with a tiny dab of my own blood on it. Do you see the picture? The whole picture?

I used to.

The View From Halfway Down

"It's all ok -- it would be,

Were you not now halfway down."

- S6, E15, BoJack Horseman

The loss of self identity is a death all its own, and it's a little more brutal because it lacks finality. I've tried the ol' escape hatch before and failed (thankfully) and the sudden sense of wanting to reverse time is the same but there's no sudden stop, one way or another, and no going back. In my experience, identity is a loose thread on a well-loved jumper; tug at it and the whole thing starts to unravel.

The first tug was turning thirty and realizing that I was all I had hoped to never be; alone, mentally ill, and living at home... and that slippery little thread started to move even while I was trying to melt it back into the fabric of my life with ever more desperate plans. The lighter ran out of fluid, the scissors were too dull, and that thread was still wrapped around my career when it fell out from under me.

Oh yes, the cliché of it all - I am, apparently, one of those women, one of those women who makes her career her life and hinges her value on it, nails digging into the edge of the cliff until the rip away from the skin and flesh. What annoys me most is that there's no originality there, no panache - no flair.

This is where you join me - halfway down, in free fall with no air in my lungs. You are my witness, not the rescue party, and even if you offer me a parachute I won't take it. Some things have to be done.

At the top there's the dream and who I used to think I was; complicated, intelligent, strong, self-aware. Independent. Interesting. At the bottom there's an inky gloom. I have no idea who's down there, what I'll become when all of this is over... and then there's here. Right here between the dream and the concrete there's us, having a one-sided conversation about what it means to know yourself in full, and if you ever can.

I think we understand ourselves in snatches most of the time, like we're spying on ourselves through the crack in a thick wall. To put it all together we'd have to be so self-absorbed that finally seeing our own vanity would be heart breaking... or maddening. The gaps are important; they're where we let other people in; a court of one is never just and fair.

Maybe that's what's waiting at the bottom; a chance to listen to the people that matter and be told who they see. And if I survive this tumble in a recognizable form then I can carve the word 'resilient' into the foundation and build up from there.