Some of my most treasured possessions are artifacts of my lowest points in my life.
The real joy of those artifacts is how they are concrete evidence that I am resilient- that I have endured before and I will again.
I have a complicated relationship with many past versions of me. As I outgrow myself, shedding skin that becomes too tight for a more expansive POV, my instinct is to cut her off. To disown that previous version of myself because she didn’t know as much as I know now. She was less than.
The path of recovery from perfection has often left me abandoning my past versions because they are now further from perfect.
That’s fucked up. And really hard to come to terms with.
You know how it can feel like wading through rage when you are trying to forgive someone who hurt you? For me, for so long, all I could feel was mad at myself - those previous versions of me- for hurting me. I know she didn’t mean it. I know she was doing the best she can. But, damn, it’s a lot easier to just stop talking to her than it is to forgive.
But then I learned how to forgive and love the current version of myself. And once I could hold space for me in this moment, I found it much easier to have compassion for all the versions of me who came before.
Now, I go back to those blog posts, notes, journal entries, pics, and a few videos- and I tell that version of me thank you, that we made it, that she was so strong. And I truly reap the rewards of her documenting more than her triumphs.
Because there, right in my camera roll, or google docs, or in a blog post or the pages of a haphazard journal, is all the evidence I need to know with certainty that I have the capacity to handle some crazy shit.
I wrote extremely detailed and honest birth stories after my babies were born, and they became powerful tools for me each time I was on the verge of giving birth again. Those past versions of me did not lie. They told me it was going to hurt. They told me they felt like dying. But then… there I was, alive. I fucking did it, and I would do it again.
These days, I’m done writing birth stories.. the traditional kind, at least. Instead, I write notes to myself as I transition into my next authentic self. It’s a different kind of labor, but still uncertain, scary, and painful sometimes.
Sometimes the journal entries and notes are letters to someone else that I don’t intend to send. That’s a practice I came to embrace during my outpatient therapy. I came across this one last night- a timely reminder that I CAN keep showing up with my whole heart for people, and even if they can’t hold it for long or they drop it, I have the capacity to take it back and put it back together all on my own.