Lost and Found

I lost myself when I was seven years old.

Something traumatic happened. I don't wish to unfold the details here. It's something I continue to work past with my therapist and the only purpose it serves us here is as the catalyst for a major shift.

At some point, I was a cheerful and confident seven-year-old girl. I had long hair that curled at the ends, perfectly trimmed bangs straight accross my forehead, and a colorful bow perpetually clipped to the top of my head. I was comfortable in everything I put on: comfy stirrup pants, an Arristacats sweatshirt, courdoroy dresses, princess costumes, Power Ranger costomes.

I loved school. I had tons of friends. Life was pretty great.

Then, the shift.

I didn't like clothes. School stressed me out so badly that I developed my first ulcer sometime after christmas break. I begged my mom until she let me cut all of my hair off in something between a bowl and a pixie cut. The bows were gone.

I existed in jeans, t-shirts, and tennis shoes for the next several years. Anything feminine made me want to gag. I liked boys and they seemed more comfortable with me because I presented myself the way that I did. Girls did not like me. I made them uncomfortable for some reason. I just didn't fit. Maybe the change itself confused them. I don't know. We were all really young.

My mom did not appreciate this, either. She was and is the ideal version of a feminine woman in her age group. She's stayed slender for as long as I've been alive. Her clothing has always been perfectly curated. Her hair and makeupe are always done. She won't even go to breakfast without makeup on.

She continued to buy clothing for the seven year old that I had been, which I refused to wear. Overtime, she stopped.

My behavior was kind of awkward. I was a bigtime nerd in school. It stressed me out, but I fed into that and dove headlong into every assignment that I had. I became an overachiever.

We moved to a new town when I transitioned to the seventh grade and I think it subconsciously felt like an opportunity to change. The town was near a military base, so I had students from all over the globe in my classes at school. Everybody was an outsider, so nobody was an outsider. I made friends more easily with boys and girls. I wasn't made to feel like an outsider for being smart, either. I joined some academic clubs. Tried out for sports teams. Started branching out with more feminine clothing after a revelatory shopping trip on my first trip to NYC. Things were a little bit better.

Then, another trauma. With this one, I lost some friends and was ostracized by their parents for something completely insignificant.

I'd just like to pause here and say that adults need to stop treating kids like criminals for things that simply don't agree with their particular adult decision making. The choices you make are not law, so if someone makes a choice different from yours they have not violated a law.

Back to the timeline. Where were we? ... Ah, yes. Okay.

This is where I discovered my love for rock. I found New Found Glory, Weezer, Jimmy Eat World.

A friend passed away, so Jimmy Eat World was particularly poignant for me at the time with Hear You Me.

We moved again. The school year had already started. Something held up closing on our new house, so we lived in a hotel with most of our belongings in storage. I had to try to catch up by binge reading The Hobbit in the hotel bathroom while the rest of my family slept because everyone else was turning in their summer reading projects and I was expected to do the same, even though I'd been unaware of it. It was stressful to say the least.

I dug deeper into my love of rock, punk rock, punk pop, and emo. We had satalite radio for the first time in my life, so I was also exposed to indie music.

I felt uncomfortable in my skin again, but I'd also started to recognize that I was at least attractive. So, instead of reverting to jeans and t-shirts I started ripping the labels off of any name brand pieces of clothing my mom had purchased for me. My dad had gotten a big promotion, so for the first time in my life the brands on my clothing were recognizable by others and I hated that. A particularly rough moment was when I cut the exterior Abercombie & Fitch label off of a navy and white striped shirt that was skin tight. I mostly ever wore underneath looser shirts, but I knew it was there and that was enough to frustrate me.

I wore ripped jeans. I wrote all over my clothes. I wrote all over my hands. Looking back, it's like I was trying to write over who I was.

This is where I found art. I got along best with the burn out kids and the skater kids in my art class and in my ceramics class. I was ultra straight laced internally, still wound up and stressed and ulcer ridden, but they didn't care. They thought it was funny. I fit because I didn't fit. They tried to teach me how to skateboard in the school parking lot and I fell repeatedly, so we ironically tossed a football in a field instead.

By my sophomore year, though, I was a "poseur" to most of them. My choosing not to parktake in some of the illicit activities they chose to partake in didn't seem funny anymore. Those activities had become a tests of authenticity and I had not passed.

Another trauma. This one wasn't direct, but it was massive. Like a meteor striking the earth, it left a permanent crater in my family.

I turned more inward after this. I sat and ate lunch on my own most days. I was back in gradeschool. I made it clear I didn't want anything to do with the kids who played football or were cheerleaders - not because I thought those things were lame, but because they did more drugs and were on average the most horrendously mean people in the entire school. I couldn't hang out with my burnout friends because they'd kicked me out of their group.

I formed a band, liked the band, but one of the people in the band slept with my last friend from the previous couple of years and that did not go well and I ended losing them both after we played a talent show, the band with it since they were mostly his friends...

Anyway, I got along great with the theater kids after the talent show. They thought I had a great voice and wanted me to try out. They were fun and whimsical and seemed wholy like themselves more than anyone else I had met thus far. They enjoyed wearing the clothes and living the lives of other people for brief periods of time, exploring what made the personalities of others while doing so. I think that gave them a keener sense of what made a person a person, maybe. I'm not sure about that either.

My mom wouldn't let me try out for theater. I signed up for it for my junior year and she found out and quickly switched me into a different class with the guidance counselor.

So, again, I folded even deeper into myself and disconnected from most everything on a personal level. I still participated in school and some extracuriclar activities, but it was almost like I'd split myself into two people by this point.

I started to date the one person I felt like I could trust, but this relationship was emotionally abusive and he was very manipulative. I opened up about the trauma my family had gone through.

There was the me who didn't eat lunch and saved the cash her mom gave her every week to buy CDs, then come home and lay on my floor and listen to music with my headphones on for hours on end. That was also the me who like anime and foreign films.

Then, there was the me who was voted the president of our local technology club, competed in engineering and public speaking, and abided by all of the rules.

My parents trusted me and they trusted who I presented them with.

I broke up with my first love and he did not take it well. He began to spread rumors throughout the school and he took what shred of trust I had left with him.

I started to become good at pretending to be okay.

I had a mental and emotional breakdown over Christmas break and didn't go to school for two weeks.

I gave up on school work and got my first C.

Then I got my first F.

My favorite teacher ever, Mrs. Owens who taught English Lit my senior year, walked in on our class debating who could most likely be a spy before the bell wrang and she quickly said that it was me. I had been sitting their quietly, not joining the debate, and she said clearly that if anyone in that class could be a spy it would be me.

I think she actually saw me. I think Mrs. Owens was the first person since I was seven years old who could see that I was living a compartmentalized existence.

I graduated.

I didn't go to college, but I did get a part time job and I took care of my mother. I tried to fit in some volunteer work. It made me feel better, but it also required a huge emotional cost that I just could not afford on most days.

I had learned how to become a person that people would want as their friend. I could be fun to hang out with, though sometimes I would remove myself because I would start to dissociate. I didn't know what that was at the time, but that's what would happen. I could play it off and say I'm tired and step away.

It got worse and I started cancelling plans. I became one of the least reliable people I knew.

I was being strung along by a guy who was eight years older than me and had moved half the country away. I knew he was keeping me as a backup in case the girl he really liked - also eight years his junior - turned him down.

She did.

I was there when it happened, and I was there for him in all the ways I could be from half the country away. And then he stopped answering my calls or returning my text messages or emails.

Broken hearted, I was not prepared to meet the man I would eventually fall in love with forever. But, I did. And, I did not like him. He was the opposite of me. He was fully present in every single moment of his life. I bubbled over with enthusiasm. He smiled with his entire face. He made everyone laugh, and he was never afraid to be the punchline to his or anyone else's jokes. He was the first person I'd ever met who did physical comedy in real, actual life.

I was determined to, instead, have a hopeless crush on a very brooding guy in our group of friends who came with a warning. Literally, a friend gave me a talk while in a car that included the word "warning".

But, that guy let me down repeatedly, whereas this efforvescent guy showed up, even when I asked him last minute if he wanted to go somewhere. I'd ask him, offhand, just to try to round out whatever group was going somewhere. Too many girls and not enough guys available? Let's call that guy. He'll show up. He did. Every. Single. Time.

One particularly painful night - the night I finally decided to give up on dark and brooding - he stood up in my defense against a person who vocalized their disappointment in the fact that I had chosen not to go to college and that I was working part time while living at home and trying to regularly do volunteer work in my community. He said to this other person (whom I hadn't spoken to in over three years at that point, they were just randomly at the same party) that he respected me. That it was amazing, this choice I had made. He didn't have to. I didn't ask him to. But, he told me later that he could see me visibly deflating under the crushing comments of the other person and he just couldn't stand letting someone be so mean.

I was only nineteen, by the way. My parents, as difficult as our life had become after that big trauma, are wonderful people who had seen their daughter go through some rough mental health near the end of her high school career. We've never talked about it, but I think they could tell I wasn't going to be able to handle the classload. They gave me the space to heal and grow as a young adult, something that isn't offered to very many young adults, and I am grateful for that.

This jerk who made fun of me for not jumping straight into college was a pretty miserable person and we were at odds the entire time we knew each other.

The next day was, oddly, first and last time he ever declined an invitation from me. I invited him over to my parents' house to watch a football game and he could not come. He was helping his grandma move. He kept texting me, though, the rest of the day. Any time he had a chance.

That day was the day I knew he was "the one". The correct man for me. It only took one question from him. He asked me what I thought Kirby's skin would feel like if you could touch him. I laughed, but I had an answer. I told him that I figured it would feel like a balloon stretched over marshmellows.

I had finally met the person I could trust to hold who I was in their hands know they wouldn't break me.

I felt free with him. So, he became my best friend.

I had already fallen in love, but it was a friendly kind of love. A soft and generous love where we encouraged each other and took care of each other. I bought him groceries when he ran out of something. He got to know my mom and dad and my friends when we hung out at my house.

Yep. I had fallen in love with my best friend.

He had a history of heartbreak all his own and he wasn't confident enough to believe I felt for him the same way he felt for me. So, he wouldn't budge. An entire catolog of teen romantic comedies and popular television sitcoms had taught me that the boy is the one who is supposed to ask the girl out, but I was tired of waiting.

So, I admitted to him that I liked him one night. And, he admitted that he also liked me. And he kissed me.

Later, I called him and I said, "So, we're dating now, right?"

And he laughed.

It's an interesting thing, though, the way that traumas and burdens can sneak up on you when you're happy.

We got married, but not long after that crater in my family cracked open to reveal a sinkhole. To protect myself and my fragile mental health, I pulled away from contact with them for several years.

I found myself in that very familiar situation of trying to be a person people could like because I didn't want anyone to know who I was.

Old wounds split open. Sexual traumas I'd forgotten led to difficulties in being intimate with the man I knew could never hurt me like that. Coping mechanisms I'd built to shield myself from emotional intimacy had me keeping him at arms length.

I bottomed out, but he stuck by my side. He insisted on bringing me with him on all of these amazing adventures that I just knew I would dampen with my depression.

He introduced me to friends that I have come to cherrish and trust with who I am as well.

It turned out, though, that the person who judged me the most. The person who laughed at me. The person who tortured me. The person who told me that no one could actually like me for who I am deep down inside. That was me.

After several years of therapy, I have finally found the culprit. I was the spy in my own camp, embedded since I was seven years old.

I am now thirty-one-years old. Nearly my entire life I have been at war with myself. I have had to go through intensive therapy and I now take three different prescription medications for my emotional and mental health.

I lost myself when I was seven years old.

I can't find that person anymore. She's been gone for twenty-four years. Some wounded version of me haunted this body for a long time and I'm just now getting to know who I am now.

A lot of the interests are shared. I still like dinosaurs and I still like to paint. Some of those interests are changing. I used to like to try different craft beers, but now I know that I was using that as something to sound interesting and also as an excuse to drink more than I should. I still love the man I chose to marry when I was twenty-years-old.

But, at my core, there are now three distinctive versions of myself and, so far, I like the version I'm becoming right now.

I don't pretend anymore, but I am more willing to admit that and still give something a try. I'll tell my husband, "Haha, no. I don't want to do XYZ. But, you want to, so I'll try it out." He'll get frustrated, but then I'll point out that he always knew when I was just telling him yes and going along with something just because he wanted to do it, and I was miserable. This way is much better. I get to tell him honestly when something doesn't work out and I still don't enjoy XYZ, or he gets to prove me wrong by showing me something totally awesome I never would have thought to enjoy.

It's scary sometimes being married to a man who knew you at your weakest and is getting to know you now as someone stronger. Sometimes progress makes him overeager and we end up tripping and having to take a step back and reassess the path ahead. Sometimes he's overly cautious and tries to hold me back when I know I'm ready for something. No matter what, though, he is always there by my side and holding my hand.

I'm getting to know my parents again, too. That's a bit surreal as well. I've been trying to approach them more like they're new friends rather than the parents that have known me my entire life. I keep stricter boundaries with them than I used to. Families with trauma are a beast unto themselves and I am finally well equipped to approach that beast, but at the pace I choose.

I'm getting reacquainted with my brother, too. We never fully lost touch, but we were both injured creatures that fled to safety in different directions. We've found we have the same diagnosis. We both have bipolar 2, which is a weird thing when you have just labled yourself as having depression for most of your life. So, now we're touchstones for one another.

The best thing to come out of getting the treatment I needed is that I have real friendships now. I've rekindled old friendships I hadn't nurtured in over a decade. I've made and solidified a few new friendships. I send greeting cards to people at random because, now that I'm thinking of me less, I'm thinking about other people way more frequently.

I'm happy. I almost want to cry typing that sentence. I'm still a little shy to say it for fear that it will go away. My therapist at an intensive outpatient program I did called that "foreboding joy." There's still progress to be made.

My point in writing all of this out is, I was lost for a really long time. I made life altering choices while I was lost. I was hurt really badly and lost all sense of trust in other human beings. But, I was able to find who I am now.

Maybe you're lost. I don't know when or where you lost yourself. I'm not a therapist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I can't diagnose you or give you the help I need. But, I can stand as an example to show that it's possible to find yourself again. And, I can stand in solidarity with you.

I can't promise you'll never get lost again. Some days are still really hard. Trauma never fully goes away and it still likes to sneak up on me from time to time, so the same will probably hold for you. Those days get fewer and farther between, though. The pain gets less severe and lasts for shorter periods of time. It gets much easier to find your way back.

If you've read this far, I'd like to end by saying that I don't know who you are, but I do know that you deserve to be loved, to be happy, and to feel alive.