During the season that was the epicenter of my internal shifting–the religious and worldview-shifting I’ve begun talking more about here–I was in a state of constant dissonance. The worst of it lasted about three years, I think. It was dissonance between the me of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, and the me that was newly getting born. The two felt like totally different people, not the natural unfolding or growth of one, and when I finally found myself on the other side of the storm (abyss?), I felt like I had amnesia. It felt like my life before age 25 was mostly blank, and the people who had known me before that point were vestiges of some other lifetime, their attempts at interacting in the present with the me of my past things I watched as a third-party observer. “Now, I know I used to know how to answer this sort of question,” I would think to myself, “but I can’t for the life of me remember now.” I would hear people using my dialect of Christianese, and recognize it, but not have words to answer back. Sometimes I wouldn’t even understand anymore what the words meant at all.

The last five years (I’m 30 now) have been a lot about exploring the world anew–a world far more vast and full of Life and Light and Wisdom than it used to appear to me to be–and about building a new sense of self and identity. They’ve been about releasing the “I’m not this” way of defining myself that was so much a part of that tumultuous season of change, and trying to figure out who and what I actually *am*.

Which brings me to the point I’m really wanting to make, which is that I think even those of us who experience things that shake our worlds to pieces–deaths or illness or break-ups or life just going radically different than we ever wished or imagined it would go–even those who experience such things carry inside of them the worlds and identities that they used to inhabit. There aren’t two of each of us, or four or sixteen or a hundred (however many life-altering experiences we have); there is just one.

I think one of the most difficult parts of healing (or growing up, for that matter), the thing that takes the longest time beyond trust, is the process of integration, the process of finally sitting in the presence of all our former selves, and being able to say, “Hello, dear friends. You are all me.” Being able to recognize them as part of who we currently are, and have gentleness and acceptance, rather than shame or repulsion or feelings of alientation from the ones that embody such different values or drives or assumptions than we feel like we have now.

I’m in an integration phase of life right now, trying to learn how to hold in tension the me’s of all of my years. Trying to find ways to tell a Story about myself that holds all of these stories, that gives them all the sense that they’re Home.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under Healing, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.