Shards Of Identity
Back in school, one of my all-time favorite assignments on Finnish and literature lessons was to write about yourself as a person. We had one of these writing sessions almost every school year at the start of the first semester in August. I’ve always loved writing, my strongest suits have been academic, analytical, and reflective writing. As much as I love literature and prose in particular, I am not a prosaist by any stretch of the imagination (I suck at story-telling really bad). But self-reflection is something innately natural to me, has always been. That’s probably why I loved those assignments so much, and it seemed like my teachers enjoyed reading my texts too.
Now, as a university drop-out and a person outside of the regular everyday employment, I get good feedback on my ability to analyze myself from my medical team. Many of my nurses and doctors have told me that I’m the ideal patient: I’m able to observe my behavior and emotions objectively, with the intent to understand myself better. I have never really paid that much attention to that part of myself, maybe because that’s just the way I have existed in this world for a very long time. I started keeping a diary at the age of 6 if I remember correctly; I’d learned to read a year or two earlier. Even now, as I am writing the articles for the project, I’m continuing on with the tradition of self-reflection and analytical pondering.
There are a few problems that this situation brings up, however. No matter the amount of self-reflection and analysis I do, either in my head or in text form, I still do not know who I am, what my selfhood consists of, or how to help myself feel better on the cognitive level as a lot of therapy programs tend to go for.
As a Kid, I thought I knew exactly who I was. I had a clear understanding of the things I loved, the things that brought me the most joy, the things I wanted to do. I knew what my favorite school subject was, I knew what I would like to go to university for. I even had an inkling of the kind of career path I would end up taking. Until the age of 14, these ideas and concepts seemed very set-in-stone, non-wavering. They hadn’t changed radically since I started fourth grade.
fractured me.
I think I really knew. I really did knew what I wanted to do, who I was, who I wanted to become. Because there’s a continuum to all of this: at the age of 14, I was finally freed from the everyday, constant, and severe abuse at the hands of my peers, when it came to face-to-face interactions. Once the worst of it ended, things started to shift around in my head. A lot. And it would not stop, no matter how certain I thought I was on what I wanted to do and devote my life to. This lasted for another decade: last year, when I turned 24, I finally started to feel like maybe, just maybe, some of the things that would end up making me the person I am were starting to settle quietly in my heart.
But even then, even with this kind of progress finally happening, I still feel empty. I still feel like I am not who I was meant to be. And I feel like I will never get that me back, because that Kid was never allowed to go where she wanted to go. The me that was the truest, the most authentic, is forever lost in the destruction of childhood trauma and the wailing winds of dissociation that took the last bits and pieces of it with them. And I grieve. I grieve that loss every day I wake up and realize that the place I live in today is a reflection of a me so well known, so well hated, so well abused, so full of life. And it doesn’t feel right.
The real me does not feel right. But the me that came after feels foreign, too. So the only thing that is somehow comforting, the only constant, is the Pain that caused all of this to begin with. So I cling onto her long silky hair that covers the marks on her arms, because she is the only one who can take me the closest to what I once was, what I was supposed to be, supposed to grow up into.
Please, take care of me well.
Diving deep in my bones,
ichigonya