Letters to Ghosts of the Past

Evolution and Identity

To who I was,

They don't tell you that when you lose yourself, sometimes you get yourself back in the end.

I look in the mirror these days and I feel trapped between two people; the person I was five years ago and the person those five years have forced me to become.

It's strange, because I genuinely liked who I was at 14, but years of fighting my own mind had made me numb to the world I so wanted to love back then.

So what do you do when you're watching yourself become the person you wished to be at 14, but part of you is stuck in the fear that knowing it's finally over has invoked?

I finally have a reason to live again. And with that comes a reason to not be completely and utterly numb to the world. These days, I catch myself searching for a reason to be angry, only to find I have none, and watching a defence mechanism I had for so long slip away like that is nothing short of terrifying.

It's like I'm losing myself all over again, but the person that's taking my place is someone I already know, and never thought I'd get back.

It's so strange to look in the mirror, years beyond accepting I'd never become who I wanted to be back then, and see a flicker of a dream I once had. More and more every day, I see someone I tried to forget returning to me.

The implications of this are beyond me. Because while I'm grateful for the part of me that can appreciate the little things in life again, it scares me to consider losing the qualities these five years have given me, even if I had to go through hell to get them.

I admire the self-respect I have gained. The value I have for myself. I hope to god that I won't lose the "think with your head" attitude I have developed since losing myself. The numbness to the world that I have acquired is not all bad. I have always been exceptionally level-headed but in this moment I can say I am the most mentally stable I have ever been and I can't lose that too. My relationship with my emotions has grown extremely complicated, and yet I fear losing my ability to simply shut them out when needed. I've grown to value that so much, even if I know it's an unhealthy trait brought on by years of emotional trauma.

So I'm left in this strange crossfire of who I am, who I was, and who I want to be, but for the first time I can't distinguish between those three people. I don't know where the person I was ends, where who I am now begins, and where the person I want to be falls. Am I all three? Am I none? And what does it mean to say the person I was? Because she's back now. So was I her, or am I her, or is she gone, leaving behind someone new who is a combination of the two?

I fought for so long to accept the person my past made me. And one thing I know for sure is that she's gone. But the rest is up in the air. And for the first time since fourteen, I'm happy. But it comes at the cost of losing who I knew I was. And I have to learn to let go, that this is a good thing. To love who this ever-changing new version of me. But when the reason the version you lost even appeared in the first place was because you lost people, it makes sense that I'm so terrified.

Maybe there is no "who I am" or "who I was". Maybe there's just me. And I can't waste time missing her. Because she's right here. And for the first time in a long time, I care about her. So I'll focus on her. And who she is. And not who she was. And I'll move forward, not back.
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I was like 40% ✨not sober✨ while writing this and um. The philosophy student jumped out lol yikes.