who am i now?

My friend tells me it isn’t that long. 6 months of loses. Six months of grief and depression, pain and disconnection, yearning and introspection.

And now, the hardest part, groping back to life. I thought things would be where I left them, but I’m not the same person who set them down. That realization was the hardest loss, the loss of myself, or at least the trappings of myself. It was unsettling, scary, like my own horror movie of losing identity.

For a while I was down down to the ground and in some ways that was easy. The instruction was to sit in it. There was nowhere to go. Now my engines are fired up and revving, but irrevocably idle. I lost my steering column, or rather the “I” that decides which way to turn and when.

There is something liberating in it, too. I’m free from the prison of preference, the way I have long been doing things, the style guide I have referenced for how to live my life. Any thing is as good as any other at this point. I used to crave and now I subsist. I used to give and now I need. I used to direct or drive and now I follow or flow. It would be a nice change if only my ego wasn’t constantly and alarmingly reminding me “it used to be a way that it is no longer.”

Once I got beyond the horror of realizing I didn’t know who I was anymore, the shock, I could experiment. Where I once hiked a pack of dogs daily and rode my horse, I now take my sweet senior dog on walks at sunset or sunrise, finding parks I haven’t been to. I’m taking this city I once loved then grew bored of and going to old places again to see them with new eyes. Will I love it again? Will I stay here? The future is wide open, agape, oppressive with possibility and waiting for my wishes to emerge.