my other selves

I will never outrun the terrified, lonely girl I was at twelve. I’ve tried to pretend she doesn’t exist — to pretend she is someone else outside myself who I can set aside and not an echo that lives in my own body. This pretending proved more an act of betrayal to her than a salvation of myself because we are not the same. She would respond to things differently than I do, feel different emotions when presented with the same circumstances. She is just as much a fully-formed human being as the woman I see in the mirror every day, and I should not underestimate the power she holds over me.

She tugs at my heart, wrings it out when I say the wrong thing in front of a room full of people. She escapes in slow, burning tears that roll down my face when I’m left all alone. Not really alone. I’m in her company, as much as I wish I weren’t , and she needs me. She is not a villain, just a scared little girl begging for comfort. Too steeped in a hatred of herself to see the love she could have found. Now it’s my job to give that to her.

She’s trapped at a precarious age, on the cusp of something and not sure she can reach it still intact. A preteen’s insecurity is practically inevitable and sometimes feels inescapable. Logically, the half-developed frontal lobe must understand that there is more to come, that there are people who will become important to it and opportunities that will come out of the woodwork. The conscious young mind is aware that it is a work in progress, but it remains too shortsighted to see anything outside the current moment as something other than illusory. 

The future, to a twelve year old, branches out in too many directions. It is too intangible to mean anything aside from choice, and all choice means trusting a desire they have been trained to be wary of.

To love what you could become is not to love what you are. To want to be a certain way is not to become it. Living for the hope that, someday, I might be something I could love only made the waking hours of that little girl’s life more difficult. It was a reminder that she wasn’t yet loveable and might never be. 

I don’t remember much of being her, aside from the heaviness of it. That heaviness hasn’t subsided, but it has become easier to carry. The world around it has grown and taken me with it. That sisyphean boulder is no longer so large it obscures my sight. Still, in the moments where my arms tire of pushing this boulder, she speaks to me. 

She tells me how proud she is that I have been able to carry it this long. She hopes I will be able to put it down soon, but we both know that’s wishful thinking. 

One of the only ways I got through my darkest moments as a kid was to imagine myself older, in college and having achieved whatever it is I imagined I’d want to achieve by then. I’d be taller, carrying the aura of an enlightened mentor. I would walk over to her in this liminal space, surrounded by nothing but stretching blackness, and let her wrap her arms around me. I’d know that she was the only one who knew what I needed to hear, that she remembered being me, and that she was the only person who could save me. I got myself through my worst times in this way. 

As much as I fantasized about someone coming to save me from the pain I felt, I knew that no one else could. It had to be me. Whether it was me in my form at the time or me as I imagined myself in the future, having survived the world-ending catastrophe of the day: it was me. 

No one is coming to save me. It’s time to get up. 

I still recede into the black crevices of my mind and look for an older, wiser version of myself. I imagine her at forty-five with wondrous crows feet evidencing her decades of joy and a warm smile to assure me that she remembers me. She loves me more than I love myself because she remembers how much love I need. She is not in the business of denying me that love. I stand in front of her, seeing a mirror and something greater that I have yet to discover. I let her give me pep talks and tell me that everything will be okay. She would know, so she is the only one I believe. 

Sometimes, too, I recede into these recesses and imagine my current self, twenty years old and having achieved everything that little girl wanted at age twelve, standing across from the gap toothed kid crying in the dark. I hold her, rub her back and let her weep into my shoulder. We cling to each other. Exhale to the same rhythm. Come away with strength to meet again in the same body. 

It’s a lot easier to love that acne riddled girl I was at twelve from this vantage point. Things are always clearer in hindsight, or maybe the superfluous details just fall away to shine a light on the only thing that mattered: how much love I needed but could not find in myself. 

When I look into mirrors now, I think about how proud that twelve-year-old girl would be to have become who I am now. I think about how excited she would be to know that she’d mold herself into it. I’m grateful that she didn’t give up. 

When I catch myself feeling like she did at the time — dissatisfied with myself, angry at my flesh, despairing with all I lack — I think about the forty-five-year-old self who will have been right where I am. I think about how proud she will be of me for making it through, and for showing enough love to the flesh holding us together to mold her into a reality. 

I’m not sure when the next version of myself will take over like the next face in a Doctor Who — esque regeneration cycle. It seems easier to split myself up into separate people instead of blending all the people I have been into one vacuous blob. They have a lifetime in common, sure. A body in common that they inhabit like Russian nesting dolls. But though they are not technically separate, they all have distinct voices, different things to say. 

Maybe because I’ve always found it easier to love other people than to love myself, splitting these stages of my personhood into separate, complete figures makes it easier to show myself love. If I can find love for myself in hindsight, why can’t I do it in the present? Why should I waste the precious time I have loathing myself only to regret it all later and wish I could go back to change it? I am not a finished product, and I likely never will be. A lifetime is the time to collect more trappings of personhood. The collection will never be complete, and that is not a weakness. It takes more strength to love a work in progress.