It’s been about five years since the beginning of the process of what I like to call my “awakening”, because that’s what it’s felt like.  Not all of it has been fun by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s painful yet rewarding in the same way that rebreaking a poorly healed leg bone eventually enables easier walking again.  This process has involved ditching a whole raft of bad meds and starting new and better ones about a year and a half later after being hospitalized, plus a lot of therapy, not to mention all of the inner work I do at home.  That’s pretty much a full-time job, but it’s necessary in the effort towards disrupting unhealthy neural pathways and establishing better ones (yay, neuroplasticity).

This means I am literally becoming someone different than I was before, very slowly over time, like water running over stone.  Some things are the same, of course, but it’s obvious to me that other parts of me are changing dramatically.  I’m glad for it, but as I said, it’s painful.  I’m often reminded of the song “The Becoming” by one of my favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails, from the album The Downward Spiral.

The me that you know, he had some second thoughts
He’s covered with scabs
He is broken and sore
The me that you know
He doesn’t come around much
That part of me…
Isn’t here anymore

Lately I find myself saying goodbye to a lot of things from my past, like they’re untidy threads in my life tapestry that need snipping and tying off if I want them to stop making the whole thing pucker.  However, that only came after a lengthy period of time, at least two solid years or more, of seriously examining each thread for its significance in how it tied into the rest of the weave, so to speak.  This process brought with it a lot of awareness of both good things and bad things, and only by suspending personal judgment and criticism was I able to even remotely incorporate the former and properly address the latter.

Now I’m in a place where I feel like I’ve got a good bead on what parts of myself I want to get rid of or change and what parts I want to keep.  This leaves a lot of open space for discovery of whoever this new person I’m changing into really is.  My intuition tells me I’m only about halfway done with this process, so I’ve got about another five years to go before full emergence from the chrysalis, as it were.

It’s difficult to engage with the world when you’re all cocooned up, though.  Houses have to be cleaned, bills have to be paid, meals have to be shopped for and cooked, kids need tending.  I sometimes find myself getting snippy and snappy when I feel too much real world stimulation, which are traits I’m trying to get rid of.  I still have a lot of work to do in the area of changing or getting rid of what’s dysfunctional in my life and psyche, but I also have a lot of work to do in the area of cultivating things that are fulfilling, and I don’t know what those things are yet, not entirely anyway.

This leaves me in a weird limbo space, suspended between who I was and who I’m supposed to be.  Who “I” am seems to change nearly every day, to the extent that I sometimes feel like a stranger to myself, especially when I look in the mirror as I go through mid-life.  The old me is dying, and the new me is still struggling to be fully born.  Again, the song:

The me that you know
He used to have feelings
But the blood has stopped pumping and he is left to decay
The me that you know is now made up of wires
And even when i’m right with you i’m so far away

When I fall back into an old, unhealthy behavior or pattern, that’s what it feels like: the old me made up of wires just executing bad programming.  Unfortunately, I don’t think my new OS is completely installed, so to speak, so I wind up back in that limbo space where I can only think “abort, retry, ignore?”  Someone once defined insanity as doing something the same way and expecting different results, so I generally skip “retry”.  I also don’t like “abort”, as I’m not the giving up sort.  That leaves “ignore”, which has mixed and sometimes surprising results so far.  I’m finding that ignoring a perceived problem instead of reacting to it sometimes allows space for the problem to solve itself in an unexpected way.  This is an uncomfortable approach for a control-freak like me.  I come by it honestly and it’s kept me alive for 51 years, so it’s not a personal trait I judge.  I just try to be mindful of it and when it’s appropriate.

An example of unexpected solutions presenting themselves happened to me recently.  As a result of all of the personal changes I’ve been through and am still going through, I really don’t feel like the same person I’ve been all my life.  There are elements that are the same, but the whole is different and continues to change.  As a result, my name didn’t feel right to me anymore.  It’s a lovely name, but it has a lot of baggage and bad memories attached to it.  So much so that whenever I saw my name, I felt a sense of discordance within.

I contemplated this sensation one night and asked myself, “what if you picked a new name?  People use pseudonyms all the time.”  My inner eyebrows raised and the gears began to turn, but only briefly, because it didn’t take long to come up with the answer.  Another one of my favorite songs is by Garbage: “I’m Only Happy When It Rains”.  Which isn’t precisely true, but I am a huge fan of rain, no small part of why I moved to the Pacific Northwest.

And so Rainy was born.  I felt I needed a last name too.  I thought a bit more.  While I feel much more light in the soul than I have in the past, I still consider myself to have been born in darkness to a certain extent.  I’m comfortable in the dark when it scares others, yet do not shy away from light.  When is it dark?  At night.  Rainy Night.  No, not quite right.  I felt my inner warrior needed acknowledging, so Night became Knight.  Rainy Knight.  It was like an inner bell had been rung inside.

One by one, I began changing my name on my publicly visible internet platforms.  I was surprised by the feeling of relief that accompanied doing so, relief that increased with each platform I changed my name on.  I feel more distanced from my old self, and in that way it is actually easier for me to process and grieve certain things.  Doing that is too hard if something is right up in your face, some time and distance have to pass.  And now that more and more of the past is truly resting there, I can get to the business of focusing on where I am here and now so I can make sure I’m pointed in the right future direction.  I can’t move into the future if I’m dragging the past behind me like anchors that are hooked into my back, but I can’t put the past down without really examining it.

I am by no means done with examining my past, but for whatever reason, I no longer feel as bound by it.  I am also by no means done changing, which comes with its own problems when one’s personal relationships are concerned.  Sometimes people like it when someone changes, but sometimes they don’t.  I have no expectation of making it through this process while keeping all of my friends: I moved 2200 miles and changed my name, for Goddess’ sake.  But that means that the ones that stick around are bonafide Real Friends (™) who not only won’t mind my changing, but will hopefully cheer it on.

It’s only been in hindsight that I understand that the process of awakening necessarily gives rise to the process of becoming.  They work together, in fact, in much the same way the two kinds of pumping actions of the heart stimulate one another.  I become aware of something, work on it, and the fruits of that work get dumped into the process of becoming, which in turn gives me yet more to be aware of.  As I observed in my last entry, it’s a process I don’t expect to ever be finished with.  I may not have to work quite so hard at it at some future point, but I’m not going to dwell on when that might be.  I’m working at a pace that’s difficult but fulfilling and rewarding, and I like that kind of work, if for no other reason than it reminds me how capable I am of doing hard work twice as well and twice as fast as almost anyone else I’ve ever met.  I need the confidence boost.

I’m fairly certain that’s why I’ve made this recent shift to being Rainy.  Old Me is a person defined by others and defined by pain, no matter how hard I tried to be otherwise: Rainy is not.  No one has a fucking clue who Rainy is, including me, which means I get to make all of the rules about who she really is.  Rainy has a lot in common with Old Me, but they’re not the same person.  All I know is I feel a lot more comfortable being Rainy now than I do being the old me.  Like if I really want to put the past behind me, I have to really let it rest, all the way.  Rainy is wise enough to know that some of the bad feelings I have about various aspects of my life are probably irrational, and being Rainy lets me distance myself from them so I can get a better grip on them, as counterintuitive as that may sound.  Maybe it’s not healthy, maybe it is, I don’t know.  I just know it feels better, and with every account I change to show my new name, I feel more like…myself, whoever that is, and the dark window to the past continues to shrink to a pinhole.