THE PATCHWORK KID: DEALING WITH THE FALLOUT
Unpublished article for online magazine. Subject: Loss.
I can count on both of my hands the amount of times that I have had to bury myself.
I can count on both of my hands the amount of times that I have had to rebirth myself.
Until I left for college, I moved often, living in a rather nomadic home; we rarely stayed in one place for more than three years. If I wasn’t moving locations, I was changing schools. To put it frankly: it fucking sucked. I was constantly meeting new people, being forced to assimilate and learn to make friends quickly or get swept away by the undertow. I had to adopt foreign places and call them my home, barely settling into them before I’m ripped out of them again. I have had to find happiness in the most miserable places, finding the eye in the middle of the maelstrom of misery, isolation, and self-loathing that I was drowning in.
When you uproot, you lose everything: your friends, your familiarity, the version of yourself that you spent so much time trying to perfect. It’s absolutely, soul-consumingly terrifying, but there’s nothing left but to build something in its wake. You’re never going to get it right, at least not the first time. You have a heap of broken parts and you’re trying to put it all back together, to put the pieces in the right place, and sometimes you get it right. Sometimes, you put an arm where your leg should be and you’re lopsided until you get the chance to break it all down again. If a part is broken, you have the chance to replace it, to hope that it works better this time, that the gears don’t run down and get stuck like they did last time.
Whether it was Texas, or Illinois, or Connecticut, I have had to--again and again-- lay to rest the person that I had been, the person I had become acquainted to, the person I had grown used to.
Starting a new chapter is bittersweet. You miss what you had, the friends you made, and the life you built, but it’s a chance to also start over-- to a degree. You have another chance to do it all, to be a better friend, to be a better student, to be a better person. No one knows your name or your past choices and transgressions. You no longer have to see the person who hurt you. You no longer have to mourn the opportunities you missed. You no longer have to be what those people expected. You can become whoever you want to be, if you try hard enough. You don’t have to tell people about what happened in the Summer of ‘12 or how you lost your best friend because you messed up or how you were never called by the name you wanted to be called by. You know better now. You can fix it. It can fade in the background, stay in the recesses of your mind, and no one will ever know about the things you most regret, the things you wish you could have changed, could have done better.
Though, It is lonely to carry all of that on your shoulders-- the guilt of your past lives.
Yes, there are some aspects of your former selves that will slip through the cracks and melt into the new self that develops. There were good things that stayed with me over the years, like my obsession with the color red or my love for Volkswagen Beetles. There were also bad things that remained, a stain so deep that each new page still contained the same mark. Sometimes, it went away, but sometimes it persisted, like a water stain, warping the pages and leaving an ugly ring as a reminder that it did, in fact, happen. The paper may now be dry, but it won’t ever be as pretty and pristine as it once was.
It took me a long time to come to terms with this, that I will forever keep those things with me. Each place I have lived has left an impression on me. I wish I could forget some of them. I wish they would fade away with all the friendships and the promises that we’ll “never forget each other” and that “we’re best friends forever”. But they don't. Some things change you forever and you’re changed, unable to try to revert back to the person you were before. They may dull, still prominent but a little worn, like a tattoo, or they will fade into something manageable, like a smoothed out and silvered scar. But nonetheless, each time I regenerate, there’s a new blemish from the past that I must keep, that I cannot change and move on from.
I haven’t liked all of the variations of myself that have existed to fill this space, and it has taken me about twenty years to realize that.
Currently, I am on Version 9.0.
I admit that I have become a familiar friend to loneliness and loss has become my comfort. If I have nothing, then I cannot lose it. If I have no friends, there is no one to miss. If I do not care for anything, then it won’t hurt so bad when it all leaves again.
If you fuck up and no one is around to notice it, did you really make a mistake at all?
Part of me is scared that I’ll forever live with losing, that I will forever have to strip myself down bare and let the loneliness eat me alive, to walk into a room full of unfamiliar faces for the millionth time and hope I somehow make it out unscathed. I am scared to settle, becoming restless if anything stays stable for too long. I sabotage relationships before they have a chance to really take root, just so it hurts less when it ends, since I know it will. I choose myself again and again because it’s the only thing I cannot lose.
I have learned how to exist with only myself. I know how to survive, to become friends with Me, Myself, and I. Learning to love myself when I am alone, though, is a journey I still am on.
It wasn’t all horrible. There are many things that I am more than thankful for.
I have a bond with my sisters that no one else does, forged by having nothing but each other. I have learned to be loud and unapologetic, to have my voice ring off of the empty walls and speak so much that silence never has time to settle in. I have learned how to maintain and prosper in long distance relationships-- a skill that is incredibly hard to master. I have learned to value time and affection, that everything is temporary so you should tell the people you love that you care about them. There are halcyon days that I will cherish until I am six feet under.
Still, it’s not a fate I would ever wish upon someone. Not even a worst enemy.
It’s not always easy and it’s never quick. You get tired. You don’t want to work for it anymore. Being alone doesn’t seem too bad. That’s the hardest part, when you succumb to it all, when you look in the mirror and no longer recognize the person in the reflection, when you spend so long tailoring yourself for others that you lose the person that you were, no longer the amalgamation of your past. It’s the coup de grace, realizing that you lost yourself along the way, that during the moves you endured, you were leaving bits of yourself behind and now you’re missing too much.
That’s how the pandemic was for me. I became my only friend and I was okay with that, until I wasn’t. I had to move home. I had to leave my friends. I had to halt my career. I had no reason to write and create anymore.
This August was the first time that I chose to move. I decided to kill the person I was and begin again. I finally moved to Atlanta, going cold-turkey and hoping for the best. It’s still a process, still as hard as it has always been, but I’m not alone this time. I chose to live with my best friends, to put myself into a creative and positive home, to try to banish the bad parts of me that had begun to fester and infect the good. It’s far from perfect but I’m starting to recognize the person in the mirror again.
Beginning again after total loss is different from starting over. When there is nothing left, you have to begin again. This acknowledges the end of one timeline, of one story, and the start of a new one. Starting over means wiping the slate clean, erasing all of the heartache and happy days that made you into you.
I wouldn’t be who I am without the revolving door of loss in my life. I have had many versions of myself in my life, in my short twenty-three years on this earth, but each time I regenerate, I am a step closer to the person I am destined to be. Some of those were good, some of them are people that I hate remembering that I once was. But that’s the beauty of it all, that I was able to create something out of this all, that I won, that despair and loneliness did not.
Crack me open and you can see the epochs of my life, like rings in the trunk of a tree.
When there is nothing left for you to stand on, when even the foundation of it all cracks and fails, what is there left for you to do? You can stay bitter, to shake your fists at the sky and wail so loud that someone must hear you. You can lose yourself even more, becoming a shell of anything, barely even resembling something human. You can become consumed by it all; it’s an easy thing to do.
When there is nothing left, all there is growth. It may be ugly, to watch the weeds grow between the cracks in the concrete, but eventually, it will be rolling greens again. You will be okay. You will grow. You will be fruitful. Nature always wins, didn’t you know?
