yes I'm changing

right before your (and my) eyes

Two years ago there was a part of me that thought, naively, and with an almost childlike innocence, that I was fully formed. That six years bedbound had forged the essential parts of me, and once free I would emerge almost complete. A caterpillar exiting her chrysalis a perfect butterfly. It feels almost absurdly sweet in retrospect. That I had reached the age of twenty-three and thought I would never need to change again. A prize, for my pain.

There was, of course, an immaturity in that thinking. But mostly there was fear. Fear that I didn’t know how to grow or adapt into anything resembling a normal life. That when faced with a version of myself extracted from my worst suffering, I wouldn’t recognise who I met.

When people (friends, family, strangers) would ask me how I was coping with my new reality, I would often remark that I was adapting as best and as quickly as I could, but that I had built my internal scaffolding around a set of circumstances that held no resemblance to life now, and I needed to burn it all down and rebuild.

There is a tender interplay between who I was then, who I am now, and who I am becoming. For a long time I felt guilt and grief over any distance put between the first two, as if the space between them was confirmation that something had been fundamentally flawed, that I was imperfect, broken after all.

Two years ago, I was too in love with my own mythology and with how it set me apart. I clung to my story, my individuality, my suffering, because it felt like it was all I had to prove I wasn’t what I feared most: a half-alive, half girl.

What I’ve begun to understand is that I don’t want to be loved or accepted or enough because I’m special. I want to be those things all on my own.

Recently at dinner, when someone reflected to me how much I had improved, as people have done in almost every social encounter for the past two years, for the first time instead of feeling seen, I felt tired. I didn’t want another mirror held up to me, shining light on the distance I’d travelled. I just wanted to be at dinner; I wanted to be.

It’s painful to know, out of fear and grief, I had been holding tightly for so long. I had truly lost so much that I didn’t know what was left beyond the survivor.

Two years ago, I made the questionable but brave choice to put myself online to be perceived. My story, my vulnerability, my pain, to be consumed in bite-sized pieces by people I would never meet. I don’t mean to paint it negatively, it has offered so many surprising and beautiful gifts: a community I couldn’t have anticipated, a sense of being witnessed that I needed. But it did some strange things to my self-image. It warped my relationship with moving forward. It made me afraid I was only loved for who others needed me to be, and not for who I actually was.

I felt an intense need to seek permission both from my former self and from everyone who had witnessed me. Permission for what, exactly, is hard to say. Everyone changes. But on the internet, it can feel less and less like you should. You’re algorithmically discouraged from moving beyond your established niche, as if a person can be distilled to one small, searchable thing. God forbid a girl contain multitudes.

As equally as I feared abandoning myself, I feared others would feel abandoned by my desire to move forward. That the community who had embraced me would feel misled. I felt distressed they would feel used, and in the same breath wondered if I was the one being used. There are moments I have felt like an avatar, like people wished to move me around at their own whims rather than let me move at mine.

The more I let myself become, the less these fears hold. They feel, if I’m honest, a little farcical now. I can be interesting, dynamic, and whole without being codependently entangled with my own lore.

It’s relieving on a soul-deep level to know I can change. To know there is more ahead of me than there ever was behind, to feel with fragile but excited certainty that there are a thousand iterations of myself I am yet to meet. That I might even grow more sure, more embodied, happier.

What I can tell you is that I am no longer in conservation mode. Really, I want to expand as far as my body will let me stretch. Into art, a career (or a few), travel, new relationships, new versions of myself. My days have filled themselves with new rituals: applying perfume, drinking tea, reading, wearing jewellery, getting dressed, making a different lunch every day.

And through this, it feels shockingly sad to understand what a shell I’d become. I had lost my interests, fascinations, curiosities. I’d lost my abilities, my strengths, my skills. I’d lost my appetite, my desires, my dreams. I’ve found almost all of them again and feel a bursting inside of myself akin to a kid before Christmas.

So yes, I’m changing. Before my own eyes.