To honor the selves who gave their lives for me.
I have died a few times in my short life.
Once I died laying in the grass in Winter Park, Florida. I don’t remember the dress I was wearing to this friend’s wedding, but I remember the feeling of cheap chiffon fluttering around my legs and gripping to the sweat on my calves as I walked barefoot through the deserted streets of the pristine suburb. I kept dreading and hoping a stranger would see my distress and see the sandals in my hands and ask who they could call. I would not have had an answer for them, but I felt the universe owed me a sign of compassion.
We had traveled nineteen hours by car to get to this event because we would never have been able to afford plane tickets. My husband was a groomsmen. He was inside of the house whose lawn I lay in nursing my bruised feet after my aimless wandering. The grass itched my arms as I stared at a bush, tracing each leaf out of place on its edges. At last, an older woman in a matronly dress asked if I was alright. But the moment had passed. I no longer wanted to be saved.
“I’m fine, just enjoying the day.” I answered, coming up onto my elbows. She saw the hair, the makeup, the general air of okayness and moved on with minimal suspicion.
Depression and chronic illness haunt my life in ways that I’ll never escape. But that day the me devoted to my sadness and brokenness as an integral part of my own special story died so that I could grow up. The tortured genius I believed myself to be was set aflame by the uneventfulness of a single afternoon. I didn’t need a stranger to find me and rescue me. I needed to get on better medication and move on with my life. That trip home led to a screaming match with the girl who’d tagged along for the miserable ride down to a random town in Florida and the death of a friendship I still mourn. So one death in a garden and one death in a backseat. Both deaths were necessary for me to stop living under the weight of waiting on miracles that would never come.
The time I died before that was in group therapy — a place where a little bit of us dies at least most of the time. I had just been placed in intensive outpatient therapy for six hours a day for the aforementioned depression. After three promotions and three raises and three weeks of being suicidal I had told my husband I could no longer get out of bed and go into work. As the gold star standard bearer of “overachiever” the rift that developed between my body and mind and self left me feeling like I was watching someone else live out her days in this fluorescent hospital program with its big windows and lake outside.
I was the youngest person in the room by twenty years. Each patient told the story of watching their life implode when the nervous breakdown eventually came, its inevitability obvious as you heard more and more of these group therapy stories. I was twenty-one, married for three months and unable to find my feet in this life falling apart around me. I had lost everything when I gave in to the sadness, but at twenty-one everything is less than it becomes by fifty. I felt myself mourning constantly, but never able to pinpoint what exactly I’d lost.
Dara, a day before entering the shock therapy that would make her incomprehensible for the remainder of my time in the program, told me I was mourning the perfection I believed myself capable of before this happened. But perfection itself is not a thing you can grieve for. It’s ephemeral in quality, nebulous even. The thing I was mourning was the perfect self I had willed myself to believe in. With 6 AM workouts and singular devotion to my job and the southern wedding before 24 that was so in vogue in Texas at the time. The pursuit of the ideal was supposed to be enough to keep me alive and entertained and fine. Instead, trying to live up to that perfect self had depleted my energy, robbed me of truth and led me to the edge of the final death suicide offered. To keep hanging on, the ideal had to die. Perhaps that #girlboss, manicured me was never actualized in this reality, but she was real to me. Real enough to build an entire life around.
The time I died before that was watching the doors of the church close behind me when I left for the last time. I don’t remember knowing that I’d never go back. But I remember the day well. I was living as an intern in the church’s housing instead of getting paid. A parent of one of the freshman women had given me $700 cash to host a Christmas party, so I did. There was hot chocolate and It’s a Wonderful Life at the Paramount Theatre and books that I had picked out personally for every guest. When I told my boss about it all he asked why I hadn’t given the money to the church. It was a last straw in a bucket of last straws.
The months that followed the decision to leave were agony. I had always been devoted to the cause of saving people. So much of my drive to overachieve came from a distorted belief that doing so would keep literal souls out of hell. I felt myself divinely appointed and heard confirmations of that hubris in every corner of my life. Other girls got told they would someday make a great mom. I was told I’d be a great leader of the people. A Beth Moore. A first female president. A savior.
Without the directive of preaching the gospel, the world felt meaningless to me, a game being played on the surface of a divine, ageless story wherein people as small as me couldn’t possibly matter. I had died to sin, devoted myself to purity. In the Southern Baptist Church they say that accepting the calling of Jesus is to be reborn, to become someone new. In the wake of my exit from that rebirth I experienced a death of that pure creature I believed myself capable of becoming. I watched as the author of bible studies, the prayer warrior and the mentor died beneath a Christmas tree, the hope she carried dying with her.
Maybe death is a dramatic word for shedding the self. But the ideas I had for who I could be were always truer realities to me than the person I was moment to moment. The tortured genius, the corporate titan, the crusading savior of the world were all as real to me as the keyboard clicking away beneath my fingers. I thought of the words the people in my life would say about each of them after they died their real deaths. I knew the words on their tombstones, and the houses they’d live in and the legacy they’d leave behind. I knew the clothes they’d some day have in their closets and the way people would see them as they walked down the street. When those identities slipped out of my grasp, I mourned them as truly as I mourned any living being. I ached for them. I wanted the simplicity of their life instead of the complicated, unruly reality of the life they left behind.
When you build your life on a fantasy of yourself, you do not get to know who you truly are. You make choices based on what they say about you and not on the feelings they give you (A therapist asked me after that death in the garden, “What do you like to do for fun?” I suddenly began bawling. I didn’t know). To live inside one’s real life skin in the present requires a deep self-awareness and the ability to observe oneself without judgment. I had watched all these selves die: the perfect self, the brooding self, the saving self. In their ashes I couldn’t imagine anything blooming into something like joy or fun. Know thyself? My selves were gone.
There have been more deaths. A drunken night where the me who felt safe died. Stretch marks where the me who idolized thinness died. A wedding ring where the me who bartered the possibility of her body died. Deaths of a hundred versions of myself built on a hundred different cracked foundations that could not stand. We are each of us civilizations, after all. To see ourselves clearly is to see where the blocks have been leveled, where a garden has not quite blossomed in the wake of the belief we uprooted.
We mourn those deaths because they all have their precipitating event we cannot take back. Just because those selves didn’t survive doesn’t mean we didn’t want them to, or that life would not have been easier or happier or healthier if they did. There are times when I ache for my old selves like a sweater I wish I could pull on in cold weather. I want to feel them against my skin for a day, to know what it would be like if they’d made it out instead of me.
To think of these losses of innocence and hope and silliness and naivete as death is to give it the inevitability it deserves. We may delay their departure by burying our head in the sand or clinging too hard to the people and places and practices keeping them alive. But in the end those people I used to be had expiration dates as surely as the body that houses them. They served me in those moments but had to fade so that I could get to the next moment and be the next person.
I recognize the deep grief of death. I decide not to put myself through the loss again by choosing to walk around in my own skin instead of building my life around a fantasy that cannot survive. Death leaves in its wake something new, a new life built up around the hole left by the being now absent. In that way, even the things that are gone leave their irrevocable shape on the world crafted in the present. With gratitude I mourn the selves I left behind precisely because they have formed the self I have learned to love with eyes wide open.
