I am visiting past versions of myself and interrogating them as I unpack sections of my life in therapy, in my writing, in starting to tell my story. I know I’m maturing because I no longer want to strangle the girl that I was, and want to hold her and love her instead.
At first, I was terrified. I felt angry, unsure, afraid to see myself as I was, afraid to confront the different women I have been. Furious and judgmental at the alcoholic who couldn’t drag herself away from her favorite habit, angry at the wife that stayed and stayed and stayed despite the disrespect and the cheating and the cruelty. It hurts to be angry at me. For a long time, it kept me stuck. I chose to stay only in the present, the fear of having to have a serious conversation with my past was too much to consider.
“The only people you have to impress are you from the future and you from the past,” I’m fond of spouting inspirational quotes to my friends when I hear them comparing themselves to others. I try to take my own advice.
I picture my past self and my future self, I name them my spirit guides and when I wake up in the morning I thank them for the opportunity to live another day. I promise I will do my best. I need them to guide me, to fly me back through the years like Ebeneezer Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Past.
I’m scared to meet myself, to see myself when I owned the record store. I’m afraid I will find myself pathetic and sad, pitiable, locked into my alcoholism and my loyalty to a marriage and a business that were both struggling. I’m angry at myself, that I didn’t wake up sooner, that I couldn’t see the misery I was mired in. My guides hold me by the hand and we fly backwards through my life.
I confront my record store self and expect my fury to spill over, but am shocked to find that I love her. She is struggling. She is working so hard to keep it all together and it is grueling. She can’t see what she can’t see. She doesn’t know what’s coming. She finds so much joy, in the children, the garden, the music, the moments she keeps to herself, the ones she shares with no one, not even her friends. She is someone I could never be angry at. I find my fury melting away. I want to hug her, hold her, shoulder her burdens with her, tell her that she won’t always have to carry so much. I see the struggles of those years and how I labored under them. I learn I cannot be angry at myself for doing the best I could with the information I had.
My guides fly me back further, to a person that I am sure I want to scream it: the young woman who fell in love with a man that would cause her so much pain, the one who married him at age 22. But the result is the same, I meet my young-woman self and I see what a child I was. I was so young. Barely an adult, an alcoholic with no support system who saw in him someone who would make me his world. Someone who said he cared about me and thought I was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. I thought I was lucky he loved me. He told me I was, and I believed him.
Instead of being angry at myself for falling so foolishly in love and deciding to marry someone who was also young and struggling with his demons, I meet her and I love her too. She was vulnerable and alone. It makes sense that she married him. Of course it happened that way. I need to go back further.
My guides lift me off the ground and we race back to 4 years before I met him, age 16. My childhood bedroom swims to view. Pink walls and green shag carpet. Got Milk! Magazine ads hung with pushpins in the wall. The Abercrombie and Fitch quarterly models taped above the line of Trolls on the roll-top desk. My boombox had a double tape deck and a CD player, I thought I was the epitome of cool in Fargo, North Dakota in 1998.
At 16, I was already drinking, hiding captain morgan bottles at the back of my closet, taught how to sneak them to the bottom of the garage garbage by my older brother. Mixing vodka with Fruitopia, my best friend and I snuck booze into band camp in tampon boxes. I was an A-student but a secret rule breaker, drinking and messing around at parties, on school trips, any time I wasn’t being supervised. I was boy crazy, kissing and touching boys in cars, in parks, in hotel rooms. I had big dreams and couldn’t wait to get out of North Dakota. We need to go further back.
They fly me to age 12, the age when I started drinking. 8th grade was when I discovered the joys of going numb via mind altering substances. 12 year old me looks like just a girl with a perm that’s grown out and bangs that are somewhere between long and way too long. It seems like a mistake, that I couldn’t have been this young when I first took a drink, when I first tried smoking weed. I remember hating my body, hating myself, thinking I was fat. The bodily discomfort of a girl shifting into a woman made me ashamed of all the pubescent weirdness. I was still on the swim team, I would later drop out when I moved up to high school. This is who I want to talk to.
15 months after Dave died, I was deeply struggling with feelings of sadness and rejection and hating myself and feeling shame and misery about the state of my entire life and how fucked up and broken it all felt. My therapist asked me to do a visualization exercise where I picture my childhood home and walk through the front door. I was supposed to walk to my bedroom and imagine meeting my child self. My therapist asked me to sit with myself on my twin bed next to the care bears and strawberry shortcakes and ask that girl what she needs.
I thought my therapist was full of shit and didn’t do the exercise. It’s only now, a year later, that I’ve come to understand that she was completely right.
That girl was hurting. She felt alone. She felt abandoned. She felt unloved and unlovable. She thought there was something wrong with her, that it was her fault that her family didn’t want her. She would spend a lifetime trying to be quiet and perfect so that she could be worthy of love. She’d try many things to fill the void left by parents and a family that had problems so big that they eclipsed everything else. They left her unprotected, thinking she was bothering everyone simply by existing.
I can see her now so clearly, see those core abandonment wounds. I want to hold her and hug her and tell her she is not what her family says she is: difficult, annoying, obnoxious. I was not stubborn and awful to be around, I was a child. There was not anything wrong with me. I didn’t understand that the fact that I was a burden to my family was not my fault. I didn’t do anything to make them not love me.
Everyone always asks what you’d say to your younger self but I want to know she has to say to me. What would she think of me? Do I look old to her young eyes? Did I turn out like my mother? Will she even like me?
But she doesn’t have anything to say. I sit with her in my imagination and we are silent. I observe her and she watches me, unsure that we could possibly be the same person. I love her, I realize now that loving her means loving me. Forgiving myself means forgiving her.
I thank my spirit guides for the trip, confronting my past was not the terrifying and infuriating endeavor I thought it was going to be. Instead, I learned something deep and hard that I had been avoiding: my life isn’t broken and sad and fucked up, and it’s not my fault that I turned to alcohol and the attention of boys. I was young. I coped with things the best I could. I did the best I could with the what I had. I was not perfect. I am deeply flawed and I have made mistakes, but I am still just sitting on my bed, staring off into space, imagining what my life could be like.
Meeting the different versions of myself showed me that I can love all the versions of myself, even the ones who were struggling. Especially the ones who were struggling. I can forgive myself and continue to grow, to evolve, to become better as I go.