There Is No Elegant Way To Begin
On Spirals, Salt and Becoming Real.
Welcome to un/becoming.
I’m starting over at 35, and writing is my anchor. This is the first of many posts as I begin unraveling who I am after the wreckage. I’m so glad you’re here.
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Beginning again is the messiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Since I was small, I have craved the feeling of a blank notebook; a pure, untouched beginning, snowy white pages ready to be filled. It’s seductive, this chance to begin again from scratch. No reference to previous mistakes made, just me, a pen and a clean page. A desire to miraculously become a whole new person, one who treats things with the utmost care, has perfect neat handwriting and who never forgets that there are only 30 days in June.
With the blank notebook in my hand, I am pure potential.
Even as I cling to this, I know that it’s a self-created myth. I have the idea that I would somehow be brand new if I just stripped everything away and started again from scratch. We talk about “clean slates” and “fresh starts” as if we hold no history within ourselves, as if the person making the fresh start is also fresh and new. “Turn another page”, we say, ignoring the fact that the previous pages contain the mess and wonder of a life lived and that those things are what make the notebook beautiful.
I am, at heart, a perfectionist. I hold all the ingredients for creation, a “potential” for great things and yet I have always refused to take out those ingredients and make something of them. That would require testing, trial and error, mess. That feels too close to failure. Potential allows me to never fail, to say “I could have if I wanted” without ever having to get my hands dirty in the cauldron of failure.
And yet here I am, for the first time in my life, just fucking having a go. Seeing what happens now that my entire life as I knew it has fallen away and I am left holding myself, alone. Do I know where I’m going? Absolutely not.
I know only two things - I am safe, and I am stronger for having a go than I was before.
Our history is tangled in our veins, no matter how much we love the lie of a new beginning. We step into the next moment with our own story, our own patterns, our own ways of existing woven into the mess we bring. We are a tangled web of everything we’ve experienced and everything we’ve been and even when all of that falls away the central thread of who we are remains.
Right now, I’m living my life out of the spare room at my parents house on the Welsh border, surrounded by greenery and hills and actual sheep at the end of the driveway. Whenever I imagined a hypothetical fresh start, it certainly didn’t look like this. Despite the idyllic setting, I am in all areas, in chaos. My belongings are both here and also 120 miles away. This is my home now, but I am also trying to sell a house across the country. The ties I had to my local community have gone along with my move here - my friends reside mostly in my phone now. I am trying desperately to survive alone, but I need support - I am, after all, still disabled despite this new strength. Trying to balance all this against my brain’s incessant desire to see this as a blank slate, completely erasing my own story and needs, is a bit like trying to outrun my own shadow.
All I know is that I am finally, gratefully, able to stand on my own two feet (shakily, and with lots of naps) and that I have already proved to myself that I am orders of magnitude stronger than I ever thought I was.
Right now, all this looks like a spiral of good days and then worse ones, although the ratio of one to the other is shifting. There are moments where I feel so alive, so expansive it’s like I could burst. I write, I want, a wear whatever the fuck I like, I have meandering, sparking conversations with my sister across the table in the sun. I am an explorer, discovering new crevices of my own mind and the landscape around me. I feel joyous and it’s all I can do not to make continuous notes of the random and surprising connections that spark in my brain as I walk, read, listen.
And then, with no warning (but probably some predictability) I am yanked back into a headspace of fear, where I am but a small, silly child whose life fell apart because she wasn’t careful enough and who will never amount to anything. I implode, crying at the top of the stairs because I needed to make a decision and the overwhelm made me want to eat my own eyelids. Who am I, this half-being, to use this time to explore anything? There is nothing for me to become, only the shell of who I was and the sadness that fills it. It creates a world where money is impossible to come by and I will forever be too sick and I’m going to die alone with nothing and noone
Again, I circle back; expansive, playful. Distrusting, hateful. Slowly, slowly the balance shifts in favour of growth and joy but it is a hard spiral to weather, each turn offering me new vantage points of old wounds. Each turn I remind myself, we are processing. This is just a brain who is scared by all this newness and it is looking after you.
I remind myself - to become someone I’ve never been, I need to do things I’ve never done.
I throw a tiny tantrum at this idea, even though I see it’s the truest thing I know.
It’s a messy way to proceed, to be honest. The terrain is unmapped and I’ve never walked this route, never learned how to balance on these particular rocks or how to best navigate this mental quicksand. It’s a progress marked by false starts, slips, ink smudged pages and tear stained sheets. There is no easy way to start moving in a way you’ve never moved before.
Perhaps a little dissociation would be preferable to all this? I watch others in the fog of disconnection and see only one thing; the stagnation of trying to outrun oneself, only to find it right there, again and again. And I feel the momentum of the path I’m taking, or rather, the path I have been gently forced towards by life and I think - I cannot waste this potential. I cannot disconnect from myself. I have to face it, to look at myself and see who it is I am. Every beginning comes in the middle of something else, and you are the constant through all of it. You remain the anchor, even when it feels like you’re at sea without a raft.
I remind myself that I always have myself to come back to, and, for the first time probably ever, I believe it.
Time will keep creeping forwards, and I will keep making progress. And in this day, hour, breath, I am me. The one thing I cannot outrun in all this is that I am me and I will remain me and I am all I have to work with. I carry my history, experiences, quirks with me everywhere, even as I change, though I carry them lightly - they are guides, not maps. I am not my history, or experiences, or my habits. I am something else, something more fundamental.
I move towards her, inch by inch.
I am still the girl with the bags and I get thrown off course often. Need a day to cry in bed often. Discuss the same thing, over and over until it’s raw, trying to make meaning out of the meaningless, often. This isn’t neat, or linear, and I think: the me I’m aiming for isn’t a pure, single concept either. She too, is messy and many things at once. I am aiming for something undefinable while being unable to really see where I’m headed, just trusting the pull.
This new beginning looks nothing like the pristine blank notebook I so often felt would change my life. Among other things, I am still here, still me, still questionable at spelling and bad tempered when tired and often unable to decide on a meal for myself. I am here in the ruins of what I once knew, hoping to build with the tools I already have something entirely different.
But I remain me. Even on the hard days. Even on the days when all I am is a puddle of salt and sheets, willing the day to end so I can try again. Even on the days where I breakdown screaming and sobbing on the kitchen floor in grief. Still I reach. Still, I keep burning. Still I choose myself, even when that choice feels damn near impossible.
So here I am, standing before you messy and moving, hoping to help you remember that you don’t need to have everything figured out, either. It is all a process, even when suddenly your world falls apart and you don’t know which way is up.
You are still, deeply yourself, and deeply human. You can still, always, choose yourself, especially when it feels like the hardest choice. You are still here, still becoming, still worthy of all that is ahead of you. Even when you have no idea what that is. Especially then.
I hope you are safe, warm and as well as possible.