Sometimes I look back at myself and wonder how I’m that same person in the mirror.  Some days I see glimpses. Some days I feel like myself. Some days I don’t feel like i could be any further.

My body looks and feels different.  My soul looks and feels different. 

I am physically in the same body but I don’t know that I’ll ever be who I was before.

To be honest I don’t know that what’s harder to accept some days.  The fact that some days I want the old me back or maybe the fact that some days I just want to keep on walking and never look back.

On the days the yearning is so strong I can’t ignore it I scan the archives and try to recreate moments in history.  I’ll start listening to things I used to listen to.  Try to bring back old routines. Even try to recreate memories. I recently got super sentimental and bought my toddler the same slide my now 10 year old had when she was little. I look at old pictures more. I want to go back to my old home across the country.

On the days I want to walk away and never look back I struggle more.  The hard part of life altering change when you have a family is that there’s no clean slate.  You can try to start over but you are still living the life you created even on the days you can hardly recognize yourself anymore.  I tend to look at the memories less and try to plan new things.  New routines me memories to make.  I tend to want to change my appearance.  It’s hard to look in the mirror and see the face of the person who broke you.

Fortunately most days I find myself somewhere in the middle.  I’m learning to approach myself with grace. I have learned that I’ll be doing ok and that suddenly the winds with shift and grief will hit me so hard I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me.  I accept the waves better now than I used to.  I have learned my life now is split in two.  There is before and there is after.  It is almost hard to believe that the before was ever once my life. 

I am allowing myself to pick up things from the past and to decide if they still fit now.  Sometimes they do.  Sometimes they don’t.  Regardless there is no judgment.  If it no longer fits I look fondly at it and give thanks for the time and place that it did.  Some things are more complex.  They still fit but they bring up feelings. There was one a time the feelings would signal a problem and alarms would go off . Now I approach those feelings differently. Instead of tossing them aside I sit with them,  examine and try to get to know them.  For me unfortunately it’s been true that feelings demand to be felt,  pain demands to be felt. Even in the frozen isle of the grocery store.

Rebuilding myself has been both one of the biggest opportunities of my life,  but also one of the most gut wrenching things I’ve ever done. Shifting through the rubble has taken me so much longer than I ever would have imagined.  Even now I will have thought I was past something and out of the blue it gets me.  But as I shift through I realize what a blessing it also is. I got my after.  My life was not over the moment it collapsed.  It has become the opportunity to rewrite my life , to rewrite my story.

I must admit some days I do wish I could take a sneak peak at the next chapters to see how things all worked out. Unfortunately life isn’t like that.  There’s rarely a sneak peak. I am holding on to the hope that my story has a good ending,  and that my children have the foundation to write even better ones.