Becoming Her Again

I always find interest in how people choose their IG handles. I’ve always stuck with one that somewhat resonated my name or my nickname, but I’m thirty one now and it was really getting boring, to the point that I was feeling like it would possibly cause a nervous breakdown if didn’t get it right.

Let me rewind. Identity has always been somewhat of a struggle for me, as it seems as though I’ve always had somebody dictating who I *should* be. My stepmom suppressed my nature from the tender age of three by making me feel like a bonafide, grade-A dumbass. She was emotionally and mentally abusive, thus stirring an emotional attachment to food that led to binge-eating disorder and depression. I’ve found, over the years, that binging doesn’t apply to its originator. I’ve spent many mornings filled with dread, regret, guilt, and self-hatred, feeling sick from alcohol. Two innocent glasses of wine turned into a bottle and a half, and at some point I reached blackout. Despite my recent awareness of my behavior, this is one I still struggle heavily with.

But I regress.

The handle came to me in a rush of emotion one evening after a full moon. "Becoming.her.again."

It was so significant in its simplicity. Who is “her?" Why become her again?

I’ll share.

There was such a brief moment in time in my teens, perfectly wedged between high school and my journey to motherhood, in which I was “me." “Her," is that version of “me."

Growing up essentially religion-less, I delved into all things pagan and knew that it was my perfectly-fitted, non-fundamental, spiritual yet not definite answer. Sure, as a Texan, my mother spent a great deal of energy dragging me to the local Baptist church, filled with stereotypical yuppy kids and their expensive and preppy clothes, with no apparent affinity for the god they supposedly worshiped. I can’t scream loud enough about how out of place I felt there. It was hell, talking about heaven. It was all wrong. My mother, bless her heart, decided that I was smart, and that whatever I was interested in couldn’t possibly be that bad, so she let me be.

Cue University. Cue Wicca. Cue the full moons. Cue drums, incense, and a local pagan community center. Tie in freshman college year and activism in university in on-campus circles and you will find “her." The space between.

The space where she could indulge in academics and fiction and drumming and dance. Where she could dream of where she was going to go with an anthro degree and where she would learn and dance amongst the drumming to her heart’s desire, and daydream about the languages she would learn and the histories she would uncover. “She” was free to dream.

Until the dream was interrupted. A lesson learned. A soul mate is not the same as a twin flame. A soul mate can be a force of damage, toxicity, and turmoil.

My soulmate reprimanded me for looking “possessed” while dancing at a summer solstice celebration. He chastised me for not being Christian. He impregnated me with my first child. At 19, just as I had began to love myself and dream about the me who I was to become. I felt the crushing weight of the need to become adaptive to a different lifestyle, get married, and have this baby.

To make a long, six year story bearable and short, I’ll say that the marriage could not work. I could not change the wild nature of who I was, nor could he allow himself to truly see and love any woman who wasn’t a Christian. Yet there was an irresistible pull that had caused us to string each other along for six years. Six. Years.

Without going into detail, I had to end the facade. I can’t ever regret the decision, no matter how tragic the circumstances.

It took years of mistakes, dance, wine, and a new and supportive partner to realize and undo the damages done to my psyche in order to get back to this point. I’ve rediscovered my passion to live, to read, to learn, and to dance amongst the drums again. I’m finally, at thirty one years old, becoming “her” again.