Lesbian log twenty-six-ten-twenty-one
What’s your why?
I once filled my days with people and experiences. My life was like an ion surrounded by protons and electrons whirling around me. My family made up my molecular whole. Outside of that, I had friends, acquaintances, jobs, hobbies, curious pursuits…an entire universe tailored to the life I’d created swirling around keeping me very busy.
The swirling has stopped. Everything is stuck in a state of suspended animation. There’s a waiting now, as if something one day is going to move, something, at some point, is going to change. And in that moment, things will start swirling again.
Yet, here I sit. Motionless. Inertia.
I’m knee-deep in an identity crisis. I have no idea who I am anymore. I have no idea where I’m supposed to go, what I’m supposed to do or who I’m meant to be.
I thought I knew who I was. I was married. I was a mother. I was a homemaker. I was spiritual. I was fun. I was spunky. I was cheeky. I was tender. I was a nurturer. I was a giver. I was a writer. I was a friend. I was a wanderer. I was a searcher. I was someone who understood my past and who allowed that understanding to guide my future.
I no longer have any surety of who am I or who I’m supposed to be. I remember watching a Ted Talk given by Simon Sinek. I even bought his book Find Your Why. I wracked my brain for hours, days, years, toiling in self-reflection, searching, trying to find my why. But no matter how I angled it, the answers wouldn’t come. I couldn’t figure out my why.
I did things for my family. I did things to feel like I belonged. I avoided things that made me feel like an outcast. I wanted ease. I wanted to be happy. I wanted a good life. But I was lonely, soul-crushingly lonely. There was a part of me that had been shut off, an empty space that lay in waste, desolate and barren like the dessert sand, cracked and hardened by the baking sun.
I spent my entire life self-analyzing, reflecting and ruminating. I threw myself into a quest for understanding. I thought I knew why I did what I did. I applied the best of my knowledge at the time. But it turns out that, that understanding was skewed by powerful filters. A jaded heteronormative lens clouded my vision, but it was the only view I knew.
Let me explain:
I didn’t like to kiss. Well that was easy, I read enough self-help books, consulted enough therapists, to understand that I had daddy issues.
I didn’t like sex. Well that was easy. I read enough self-help books, consulted enough therapists, to understand it was trauma from being raped.
In other words, thanks to a culturally-slanted world view, I could heteronormative-explain my way out of a paper bag because that was the context I understood my life from. There was never another perspective given to me. Any trouble I was facing, any roadblock I came across in my marriage, my life, my family or my happiness… could all be understood from my heteronormative past.
Until I realized I was gay. That’s when the tidal wave of uncertainty came crashing down, obliterating everything I thought I knew about myself, destroying every bridge I’d built to make peace with my past, steamrolling every gain I thought I’d made in personal growth and self-awareness. It was all a sham. None of it was real. The ‘who’ I thought I was didn’t exist.
How do you recover from that?
Never mind coming to terms with the grief of the loss of my family, my marriage, my way of life, my vision for the future…the loss of those alone are enough to crush someone under the weight of pain and trauma. But then to lose who you are, to lose the very core of your understanding of self, on top of all that?
You have to start at the beginning. You need to unlearn everything.
In order to figure out who I am now, I have to unearth which parts of me made it through the fire and ash of my past life and which parts are yet to be discovered as I venture into this new one.
There is no longer an electrical charge buzzing around me. My home is empty. The protons and electrons of the past have all dropped away. There is only stillness now. But in that stillness, I hope to find the nucleus of who am I am and rebuild my identity from there. Perhaps in the process, I might even figure out my why.
In gratitude,
Marissa xo