Who you really are.

to grieve the versions of yourself that will never be is a brave thing to do.

I will never be done grieving myself.
Thousands of versions, thousands of losses
over and over claiming who I am,
holding her close,
only to be reminded 
that she isn’t mine to keep.
How easy it has become to tuck myself away,
to cut out the unpalatable, the inconvenient. 
Like that one eyeshadow in my favorite palette I never use,
or the weird shade of paint my brush never touches.
There’s always one that feels threatening.
The bold one.
The one that could ruin everything with its potency,
Its refusal to be tamed.
I keep them,
But I ignore them,
bury them away
deep in the ocean floor of my being.
Like lost treasure, hidden but never truly gone
becoming more precious, more yearned for, 
the longer they remain unacknowledged.
Which, as it turns out, is its own special kind of pain.
To know that parts of me are a liability,
are not to be trusted.
So there they remain, 
buried in shards of glass and rock
cloaked in white hot shame
for safekeeping.


What i have come to know
is that to feel deeply is to be bold 
in a world that prefers me numb and dead face.
That big shows of emotion have no utility in the assembly line of life,
where softness is too tender a thing
to endure the expectations placed upon us
the heavy armor we wear to simply exist.
And so,
again and again I brace myself
for the swells of social pressure rolling in,
white and foamy as they tumble forward
ready to grab my wrist and turn me over in their arms, 
unbothered by their own might,
an unwelcome squeeze,
like a child who loves its pet too deeply.
Reaching liquid fingers under my skin
to peel patches away 
like a pimple you can’t help but pick at 
leaving me baby pink,
untouched by the world 
and also, somehow, weathered by it.


Lemon tears fall from the eyes of my higher self. 
They sting my freckled skin
and find the nicks and hangnails I didn’t know I had.
They gather in the crevices where certainty used to live
and they beg me to wake up,
to remember
that to be human is to lose myself,
over and over and over
and over.
That to be whole is also impermanent.
That i exist in a world that wants me fragmented,
willing and meek,
but that does not make me its plaything.
They remind me
that the sting I feel is not from the letting go
from the hiding away
but from the dull ache of waking up to what was lost
and the knowing 
that although it was courageous to hide my treasures,
to pretend to be stoic
to survive
it is even more courageous to admit that I am lost
and find my way back.
But to do so?
Means to grieve the version of me that never was,
to hold my breath and dive into the dense slog of shame
without fear of losing myself inside of it.


There now exists in me a line I can’t help but cross.
a silken wall so thin and delicate
I tangle myself in the sticky cobweb of it 
as I dare myself to dance,
twirling (badly),
between the dark still waters of who I am
and the crushing squeeze of who I am told to be.
For in the end I know there is no separating them,
the parts of me that glisten on the seafloor
from the ones that choke on salty air and smallness.
I cannot,
I will not exist only on the surface.
Just as I know in my bones
that I cannot yet bear the weight
of ignoring the world entirely
just to be close to the depths of myself.


So then maybe,
instead of endlessly waiting
for all of who I am 
to be allowed
to be invited to the surface
I must become bigger than the waters that try to contain me
bigger even than the underbelly of sediment hiding my treasures.
I must let the sting of my tears guide me
back to me
as many times as it takes
until I can begin to trust
that just as surely as there have been thousands of me’s before this moment
there will be thousands more to come
and that with each
I am being given a sacred gift
a chance to remember
again and again
and again
who I really am.