It’s been about four years since I began the process of “waking up”: the tumultuous experience of being given new eyes and ears with which to experience the world, and in doing so, having your entire life change. It’s been wonderful in some ways, frightening in others, and very painful in yet other ways. Waking up meant becoming aware of things in my past that had traumatized me in ways I previously couldn’t fathom, which is why my subconscious hid them from me for so long. It also meant becoming aware of some amazing parts of myself I also had not yet met. I picked up painting over the last four years, which has been a very illuminating and enjoyable experience.

As I went through this process of rediscovering myself, I also finished unpacking the house we’d moved into about a year before I woke up, and started arranging everything to be an actual home. In doing so, I ran across a variety of objects that reawakened memories and sensations I had forgotten in the haze of what I call The Zombie Years, a 4-5 year-long black hole in my life induced by far too much of the wrong medications. One of these objects was my Journey Book, an assignment from Dianne Sylvan’s Spiritual Nomad series. It’s meant to reflect one’s life journey in whatever form one sees fit. I wound up filling mine with a variety of pictures and images I had collected over the years, along with quotes from a book called Sunbeams, a collection of quotes from the magazine The Sun.

It’s nothing fancy, just a blank book with an image and a quote on each page, but after living through the Zombie Years and then waking up, it felt like Past Me knew what was going to happen and left Future Me this simple little book to remind me where I was when I dropped out of life. I flipped through the pages slowly, remembering assembling the book and how much I enjoyed it, in spite of or perhaps because of the simplicity of the project. Each page was a spark for some unlit part of my soul, and by the time I finished going through it, I did not feel quite so lost.

I still flip through it on occasion, though carefully, as it is beginning to fall apart, as all well-loved objects do. I’m also making a new one to reflect the journey that New Me is apparently taking. So many things have changed over the last four years that I no longer consider myself the same person now as I was then. It is as though I have passed through some sort of veil, one that cannot be gone back through. I recognize what connects New Me to Old Me and that they are the same person in essence, but I also recognize that New Me does not carry the burdens of Old Me. In setting down those burdens, Old Me’s purpose was gone, and she essentially required laying to rest.

My journey often takes place in my mind in the form of visions, and in one I saw Old Me. More correctly, I saw her body. I was traipsing up a difficult path that represented the emotional and mental difficulties I had been having with my childhood trauma and the kind of person it turned me into. I felt as though I was dragging an immense weight behind me, so I turned and looked, and saw that I was essentially dragging the corpse of Old Me. She was dressed in strong but battered armor and had obviously been engaged in many battles for the purpose of making sure her future self (me) survived.

I immediately stopped on this path I was on and honored her sacrifice by thanking her. I made a hole in the Earth for her body, which I reverently wrapped in a shroud before placing her in the hole with her armor and weapons. I sat there a while in gratitude for her help, then gently filled in the hole. Once that was done, I found a tree nut of some sort in my hand, and I planted it directly in the center of her grave. A small sprout popped up at once, quickly growing upward into a massive tree, the kind you only see in fantasy movies.

This is where Old Me now lies in the ever-growing landscape of my mind. I treat her resting place as I would any other grave and go to visit it every now and then, taking a candle with me. New Me is much more at peace without all of the anger and sadness Old Me was forced to carry around, which is not to say New Me doesn’t still have bit of baggage to process from Old Me. Severing oneself from a troublesome past isn’t like snipping a thread with a pair of scissors. This is the tapestry of your life you’re talking about: pull on the wrong threads or go about the process with less care than it demands, and you risk destroying everything, including your sanity. Things must be carefully teased apart, disentangled, and then rewoven back together so that forward progress can be made.

It’s a very strange thing to find yourself different in so many ways and yet still the same in others. It becomes something of a paradox you can only deal with by accepting it wholly. Yes I am this, but I am also this, and these things are not in conflict. That was one of the most important things I learned over the last four years: that things can be in seeming opposition, and yet not exist in conflict. The conflict is a lie, and if you can see past it, then you see how opposites combine to form what Buddhism calls the Middle Path: the way of wisdom that combines apparent opposites. It can’t be explained, it has to be experienced, just like the taste of chocolate cannot be explained to someone who has never had it.

And so I see no conflict between being simultaneously dead via Old Me and being so obviously alive in New Me. New Me is still learning from Old Me since I still have her memories and experiences, but now it’s time for Old Me to rest and New Me’s turn to march forward on the Path. I have Old Me’s messages in her Journey Book, and New Me’s messages in her newer Book, which unsurprisingly looks much like Old Me’s Journey Book, but with a new perspective on things. I am grateful to Old Me and now understand why she was so often an unpleasant person to be and be around. Where I used to feel self-hatred, I now feel pity.

New Me really is on a new Path in almost all ways. Our family is about to move across the country away from the city I have lived in since 1991, and away from the state I have lived in since 1981. Many, many things will change, but they seem appropriate to the themes of change I have been living with for the last four years. Not only are we all moving, my husband and I will not be living with the kids anymore, officially making us “empty nesters”, unless the kids have to move back home for some reason. One can never tell in these turbulent times. I am also suffering from the indignity of perimenopause, which makes things extra fun sometimes. This is how life hands me change sometimes, though: all at once. It hasn’t killed me yet, and I must reluctantly admit that after all this time and all that I’ve been through, I must indeed be made of tough stuff, in no small part because of Old Me.

So thank you, Old Me. You seem to have passed on your greatest talents and gifts to your future self while simultaneously shedding that which you knew she (me) would not need anymore. I am sorry you had to suffer so, but as is so often observed, a person is the totality of their experiences, and I would not be New Me without you. There will always be a spiritual candle burning by your tree in the landscape of my mind.