get inside their heads; love their loves.

I’m trying to remember that two years ago I decided to like the person I am, the person I’ve become. I haven’t always liked myself, and it’s hard to like myself right now, but I’d crossed that finish line in the recent past so I must be able to get there again, right?

The old me was always running, always hiding. Hiding in relationships, hiding from myself. I came out of my shell and stayed there after the worst breakup I’ve been through. I reached out to some local groups and basically said, “Hi. I am rebuilding myself. Will you be my friend?” Everyone in my corner for a little while came from that. It’s dwindled now a bit, what with the pandemic and all, but some of the constants in my life now are from those moments. All it took was to ask for help in a vulnerable moment, and so many women showed up. Total strangers. I was embraced by sisterhood.

Through that exercise of building up a support network, I decided to love myself. That was when I started to get heavily tattooed. I’d hated my body for so long, felt it was just this horrible prison I had the misfortune of living in, so I decided to cover it in art that made me happy. In my marriage (not the worst breakup, btw–the worst breakup was the relationship after), I’d been a person so uncomfortable in my body that I didn’t often even take my top off during sex. I wanted what I deemed the worst parts of me to be covered. During my rebuilding, I decided I was always going to be completely naked during sex. And I was. And I had sex with a lot of people. Promiscuity was something I’d never experimented with early on like most people do. I’d only been in a few relationships and only had sex with three people by the time I got married (the third being my husband). So I shook off the cobwebs and began experimenting with my body, with casual sex, with dating. It was exhilarating, and at times heartbreaking. I learned a lot from that, too.

There are these ghosts of my past that follow me, and the ghosts have gotten louder in recent months since I’ve been spending my time entirely alone. I tell these stories to myself: that I am stupid, ugly, unlovable. I also tell myself that I’m a narcissist and I don’t deserve empathy or love because I can’t give it. (My therapist doesn’t think this is true, which makes me think maybe I’ve just fooled her the same way I’ve fooled everyone else?)

I’m 32 now, at an age where everyone else seems to have figured it all out. I never aspired to get married in the first place and I certainly don’t aspire to it a second time, and I never wanted kids, so I think being alone, living alone is actually pretty well suited for me. But it’s so hard not to feel like I’m behind in life. We’re spoonfed this one narrative: that we are not good people, that we are not whole, until we have a spouse, a nuclear family unit. How do you measure success when you don’t want those things?

I’ve thrown myself into my new job a lot. I guess I find meaning there now. For 10 years I worked at a job that didn’t appreciate me and that completely overlooked and underutilized me, and now I am at a job that recognizes me, praises me, sees my value, and I guess I’m high on that. I never thought I’d be a person who cared much about career. I just wanted a job as a means to an end. I wanted a job I could tolerate that allowed me the income to do the things I really was passionate about. Now I’m a person that checks my work email on the weekends and responds to work emails at 10:00 pm on Friday night. Talk about a 180.

I guess maybe I’m molting again. I’ve gone through these intense periods of change every so often in my life and maybe I’m at another crossroads. Nothing is permanent, I keep having to remind myself. We are in constant flux.

If 2019 me was 2.0, maybe I’m entering the age of 3.0.