You're Not Yourself, And Never Will Be Again, And That's A Good Thing

Here's what I'm trying to keep uppermost in my mind these days...

You will be a different person when all of this is over, and that's not only necessary, but right and proper.

The you that you are now was half of an unhealthy and unhappy couple, and in some important ways, a passive bystander in her own life. The you that you are now is hurt and angry, though with good reason. The you that you are now is a victim, a person to whom things have happened.

The you that you will become is a strong, secure person who's gone through a major trauma and has come out on the other side with reserves of hope and energy you never even realized were being sucked out of you on a daily basis. The you that you will become is a person who's newly unfettered, free to make her own choices and explore possibilities she thought had been cut off to her forever. The you that you will become is serene, content, and a lot wiser.

As the proverb says, "Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly." The only world that's over for you is the world of pain and deception. The world that's just beginning is a world of opportunities, a world you get to create for yourself.

When you've lost a relationship, job, or anything else that defined you as a person, you will never be the same. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you should've been defining you as a person instead of letting a relationship, job, or anything else do it. Maybe I should've, too.

In Adelaide Einstein, a novel I wrote over a decade ago, at one point the protagonist explains her holding pattern of a life to another character by saying, "I thought I was done, the way a cake is done, and people would just keep taking little pieces of me away until there was nothing left."

Clearly, the me that was meant to be, the one residing only in my subconscious at the time, was trying to tell me something.