How to grieve who you used to be

A case study in shifting identities.

You have lived so many lifetimes in this one, am I right? 

And as many lives as you've had, you've had that many deaths, minus the final one. 

The painful metamorphosis, mid-life crisis, self-reinvention. 

You, like me, have likely been called at various points in your life to grieve iterations of yourself that are no longer relevant. 

What was it like for you, the first time your skin no longer fit?

When you outgrew the structures that kept your nascent knowing contained? 

Did you break up with family values, a religion, a doctrine, a relationship in order to be yourself?

 

For me, shedding an identity hurts like hell every time.

I spend some time in denial, then fight the change.

Finally, still in the identity, I grieve, wishing it didn't have to be different.

By the time the ill-fitting identity drops away, it's more like a cicada skin left on a tree trunk: an empty husk ready to be recycled into the energy of the Earth. 

The first time I let go was a beloved hippie identity I adopted in college.

Long calico handsewn dresses, Birkenstocks, patchouli.

Call me Daisy, and I'll hug you and hand you a flower.

Ram Dass, Grateful Dead, incense, beads…

I would likely have annoyed the shit out of you with my hippie-speak aphorisms and twenty-something idealism.

I look back on this time with a feeling akin to the cringe of reading a high school journal. 

Once my commitment to justice became stronger than my desire for spiritual bypass of the peace and love variety, my hippie girl identity no longer felt right.

Or was it living in post-communist Eastern Europe that shattered my naivety?

In any case, I couldn't find my way back to the flowered one. 

I had to let Daisy go.

I grieved her loss, her sublime sunshiney beauty.

But she didn’t fit anymore.

The next time it happened was my initiation. 

Something I've never told you, because I've told only a very few people, is that I was initiated in a tantric Hindu tradition in 2006. 

In preparing, I did a year of rigorous study and practice. 

I thought the preparation was the doorway.

But, immediately after my initiation, my entire life exploded spectacularly.

(I've come to learn that this is a common experience.)

Brutal beauty, I'll call it. 

Remaining in my heterosexual monogamous marriage with no emotional intelligence was not an option.

I stepped out of the role of wife.

My identity as a heterosexual, cisgender woman was hard to let go of; it provided so much access and social capital.

But wow!

What followed was awesome.

Queerness!

Femmeness!

The pull of the shaver in the shower, silky soft legs, hair blown out, hours spent at the mirror.

The shaping of a corset and the smoky rose beauty of ritual magick were a threshold I gladly crossed. 

---

Five years that initiatory period lasted.

Old relationships cracked and peeled away like sunbaked paint on the hood of a midwestern Camaro. 

The best part of submerging to your depths is the when you finally, reemerge, as you always do, it's like reincarnation. 

New year, new you, right? 

What gets glossed over when speaking of shifting identities is that the old identity is dying, and has to be grieved.

If you don’t grieve the old identity, don't worry because it will just pop up later like a whack-a-mole, waiting to be acknowledged.

No one here gets out alive, and when parts die, they often want a funeral.

Or at least the grieving and caterwauling of loss. 

What I'm being asked to let go of now is less an identity, and more a subtle strategy:

A part of me that can bypass my own needs to maintain relationships. 

Can you relate? 

How many times have you overridden what you needed and wanted as a price of admission to a relationship that can't hold all of the yous you are becoming? 

All relationships grow and change as the people in them do.

And sometimes, they stop fitting.

We become misaligned.

We complete what we were meant to do with on some soul level, and thus, the relationship ends. 

---

Several important relationships in my life have ended in the past two years. 

I've been grieving them, even as I know the necessity of the end.

I thought I was purely grieving the loss of the former closeness, connection, and intimacy.

The shared laughs and understanding. 

Ready to be godsmacked?

Because I certainly was when I had this recent epiphany:

I am also grieving the part of ME that could overlook my own needs to be in those relationships. 

That part is over.

That part has died.

Part of what has seemed intractable grief is NOT about the loss of the relationships with others, but the loss of the part of me that could avoid naming hard truths. 

I thought I was becoming more intolerant.

More precious. 

I had judgment about ending relationships that weren't working for me. 

My story has been, "I can't maintain community relationships. I suck at community." 

I believed firmer, more ungracious boundaries were indicative of the calcification of my heart. 

But my recent realization tells me the opposite is true: 

My heart is softening to my own needs.

What I was storying as intolerance I am reframing as healing. 

As parts heal up, they can no longer bear the incongruence of being in relationship while denying big truths. 

This is a colossal script flip, so I want to make sure you really get it because it has application in your life. 

For example, I have a new need for clarity about loyalty in a relationship.

So, if I have an ex, and you want to be in a relationship with both me and my ex, that doesn't work for me.

It doesn't meet my need to be clear about what's what and to trust you have my back.

I can't bear it, because the part of me that used to be able to bear it has healed.

Not being able to bear it is not a problem like I thought.

It's a sign of self-love, of healing. 

Make sense? 

Where in your life is your script about yourself inaccurate? 

Grieving parts that have healed is new to me. 

But I'll tell you this: as soon as I acknowledged that my grief was about more than just the ending of the connection, the grief lessened. 

Big life lessons are cyclical, aren't they?

We go around and around, learning the same things again, deepening our understanding each pass.

I hope I've got this one now: healing is not always easy to spot.

What looks like toughening can actually be softening. 

Please, if this was helpful today, drop a comment and let me know. It means the world!