Who I Am [according to me]

I sat on the couch in my therapist's office, staring at the heart that always catches my gaze... it's an unintentional heart, a heart naturally formed by the ingrained colors of her stone fireplace.

It had been over a year since my whole world came crashing down, since my life took a very unexpected turn.

"Do you still believe in love? In marriage?"

It was a question she had asked before, a question she and I had discussed at length, for many months.  Through many tears.  Through lots of anger and through so much confusion.

Truth is, I was a girl who not only believed in love, but hoped for it and dreamed of it and celebrated it and prayed for it and got butterfly-tummy just imagining it.  I was a girl who melted for sappy and cheesy and mushy and anything hopeless romantic-y.  I was a girl who wholeheartedly believed in happily ever after, in soulmates, in growing old with someone.  For my entire life, when I pictured myself wrinkled and gray and aged from living, I pictured myself wrinkled and gray and aged from living beside someone whose laugh lines and worry lines mirrored mine, because we'd shared the laughs and the worries together for years and years and years.

"I don't know."

That was my answer to her, by the way.

...

One of the hardest parts of having my world ripped out from underneath me has been the work it has taken to put myself back together again.  At one point, I was diagnosed with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and went through a series of therapies to work through it.  (sidenote: EMDR is amazing.)

It's been almost three years, and I'm now realizing that responding to and recovering from a traumatic event is a lifelong process.  A process that is hard, and exhausting -- but also a process that has enabled me to deeply reflect on who I am... according to me.

You see, sometimes things happen in your life that are so big and hard and unexpected that they shake who you are to the core.  Sometimes things happen that make you question everything you've ever known or believed in...

I found myself in a place where I had my entire identity wrapped up in somebody and something that no longer existed.

All of the dreams I had for my life were in pieces, broken alongside the heart of a girl who had once believed in love with all of her soul.

So did I still believe in it?  Did I still believe in marriage, in what it meant, in the promises it makes, in the work it takes, in spending forever with someone?

...

"But why let someone else change who YOU are?  If you believed in those things, you're still allowed to believe in them.  The reason those things didn't happen were not because of you, or because of who you are.  You are still Jessie.  And that can still be the girl who believes."

And with that statement from her, it was like my heart started breathing again.

I am scared, I am hesitant, and I am always worrying.

But I am still me.

I am self-conscious, I am second-guessing, and I am always over-thinking.

But I am still me.

I am scarred, I am sometimes withdrawn, and I am always emotional.

But I am still me.

And I now know that that "still me" is a girl who always has and always will believe in love and believe in marriage and believe in the work it takes to spend your life with someone, because it's worth the beauty of sitting beside someone with matching worry lines and laugh lines and memories.

I had forgotten.

In the midst of my valley, I had forgotten who I was.  I lost that girl and her big ol' heart.

And I'm starting to find her again, reminding her that who she is is up to HER.

I am who I am, according to me.  Not according to anyone else. And with the shifting tides and the hills and valleys of life, I am working and fighting with all my might for myself -- so that who I am is so deeply rooted into my soul that I refuse to let it falter, to second-guess it, to lose me... ever, ever again.