What do you do when you lose a part of yourself ? Where do you search for it, how do you even find out which part is missing?
I remember asking myself these, among other soul-searching, gut-wrenching, spirit-trembling, heartbreaking questions. They were laced with hard-to-face-truths; in that, I had to face the hard truth and recognize things about myself...often things I did not like. I searched high and low for every answer to the questions. Am I a fuck up? Where did I go wrong? Where did the person I was disappear to? Come to think of it, I don't remember what I looked like when I was in my phase of asking myself these things; I barely looked in mirrors, because I was ashamed at who I had become, scared of facing myself. Negativity had surrounded me and I absorbed it. I had stopped living, and my world had become a whirlwind of these crippling questions.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Eventually, I realized I was asking myself the wrong questions, searching for all the wrong answers. The question was not, "Where did I go wrong", but "Where do I want to go?" It wasn't, "Where did the person I was disappear to?" but, "Goodbye to her and hello, who are you now?" We sometimes lose ourselves on the journey to finding ourselves. Those transformations are what make life beautiful and worth living. The ends justify the means. It's like a slap-your-forehead moment-- like DUH, this is what all that bullshit was for? To teach me a lesson? To help me realize that this life is a journey and change is bound to happen? I'm bound to rid myself of my old, ignorant ways to become a better person?! Well, yeah, duh.
You need to die a little before you can start living again. People attribute death with sadness, decay, rot, dissolution, mortality. We often forget that death begets life, rebirth, rejuvenation, growth, vitality. The county always brings these guys in to burn the brush in the fields down the street from my home. When I was younger, I recall asking my mother why they were burning the fields. "To kill the old brush." Well, why, I wanted to know. "Because healthier, new, lusher, greener grass will grow where the old brush was." And it always did. Similar to the changes our characters, our souls make in a lifetime. Like a trail of fire and ash behind me, I became a phoenix, born of the ashes of the former me.
Don't be afraid of being lost, if you're there now. Ask yourself the right questions. Let the ashes burn off of the old you, and know that a rebirth is coming.
