After Loss I am changed.
I am no longer the person I once was. Something has been taken away. Connection. Innocence.
Something has been added. Sorrow. Powerlessness.
There’s less of this now, and more of that
These facts alter… everything… about Who I am.
Others, who knew me ‘before’, now don’t know Who I am. But they don’t know that they don’t know.
I’m alone with my new knowing.
I feel disorientated. Little is reliable. Less and less feels familiar. Nothing is truly known any more. I seek to reconnect with something familiar in this unfamiliar space… of awful new information.
My Self.
I begin to sense that I have become disconnected from my past, my future.
From Myself.
This shift within gradually dawns on me. I’m indeed changed and changing.
I feel the sudden and urgent need to turn to my close, trusted person. I must update them. I need them to know of this critical alteration.
I need to locate myself: a point on a map that this Someone else holds.
This Someone knew me… ‘as-before’… loss. This Someone holds all the variations of me over the decades
I need them to help me to make sense of who I am in the aftermath of what’s happened.
This Someone needs to ‘re-see’ Me.
I need to be re-seen, so I can know myself again.
I want to be seen anew.
But, they— and the map… are gone.
The record keeper, the map-holder, the beholding, distinguishing, discerning, perceptive, gentle all encompassing glance… is no more.
Their gaze can no longer invoke Me, drawing the uniqueness of what they alone saw of Me, in me — from me. This Me will never again be ‘seen’.
There can be no entry in the record books; no update to integrate into my whole, long story, that they, uniquely, knew.
Part of me becomes suddenly impalpable.
No objective place for me to be found, and seen, upon the map.
The ‘I’ that I was, is no longer; has become someone else. And this momentous shift, this most significant alteration carries no weight—because no-one else will ever know.
Other than Me.
In the impossibility of reaquaintance; of holding updates that cannot be lodged, I discover…
I am alone.
How do you hold this alone? How do you Be this—alone? How do you hold this as truth, hold that you’re really You—when no-one knows of this vital inner recasting? When there’s no longer a reflection from the mirror that you knew and relied upon? No familiar verification of this new certainty from a trusted source?
Familiar faces are about, who believe they see ‘Me’, but haven’t really looked. Don’t really see. Don’t know the awful truth, the beautiful truth. The truth of Me. The truth: that I-am-always-in-this-moment-forever-changed.
I must encompass this loss too, into my altered Self: I will never be fully ‘seen’ again.
Now I understand ‘alone’.