shaysbrain asked: “How do you remake yourself?”

At first, I was taken aback by this question. Probably, I read it as a negative or an accusation of reinventing yourself for some external audience. (Tangentially, if you saw The Kids Are All Right, and laughed and then sighed deeply at “sometimes I interpret silence as criticism” then we can be friends.) 

But the longer I thought on the question, the more I got it. Of course I know what it is to remake yourself. It might be the only hope in life.

For some reason, Victor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning has come up several times in my past few weeks. Which has had me thinking about how we overcome hardships. Not necessarily anything on the scale of religious persecution or genocide or disease. Maybe just the pedestrian, painful challenges of life - just the road unexpectedly buckling or hooking hard before you. A change in career or relationship or finances, say. A change in some concrete in which you had grounded yourself. 

I understand that attitude is a lot. That how we choose to absorb (or deflect) adversity and subsequently react becomes 90% of any situation.

But let’s be honest. It isn’t just attitude.

It is altitude and where you go to reflect and who you confide in and what you’ll free yourself to think about or do or not do. It is embracing opportunity daily. It is the remaking of yourself when the life you’d anticipated (which becomes so much a part of your fixed identity) burns down or it becomes intolerable or inadvisable to stay.

This question got me thinking of two chapters in my life:

1.) Leaving politics because I knew the role I was in wasn’t healthy for me and the cause I was fighting for wasn’t productive for the community any more. From here, it sounds very clean cut and positive. At the time, it was freeing, but it was also devastating. Walking away from a consuming and sometimes ugly job and choosing to leave the country to travel for six months sounds like a dream, like it is all up-side. But I very vividly remember sitting in the airport on the night of my departure, feeling uncharacteristically unsure of myself and isolated, taking stock of my decision: I am no longer invaluable. I have my days and nights and weekends and life back from my career but the converse truth is that no one is depending on me or my judgment. I won’t save anyone, I won’t be asked for my opinion, I won’t earn praise. I can’t relax under the security and identity of this Title anymore. I have let down people I care about a year before major elections. I am unemployed with no sensible or ambitious or admirable next career step. My relationship is over; And while that may be the right decision for this moment in time, it leaves me untethered. There is no romantic “home” to hold me or to return to. No one I have rights to miss or to email on hard days. (And of course I still did because we are human and we need handles.) I am alone, living on an unglamorously tight budget. I have no apartment. No stability. No role at home any longer.  I am not all the things I was a month ago; My identify is flattened before me and in the days before the reshaping, that is an almost intolerably comfortless place to be.

Of course ultimately, it was the very best thing I have done with my life.  Taking away the parameters and lanes to what I thought I needed to be (in charge, strident, demanding, accomplished, inflexible, ferociously dedicated to work alone) allowed me the terrifying time and space to consider what the hell I actually wanted to be.  I can still instantly bounce back to afternoons on the straw roof of a wooden boat in West Africa. Lying back and watching the pale blue skies and the way clouds rotate aimlessly without a strong wind.  Sitting so still for hours, for maybe the first time in my life and just poking around my mind. Thinking about the people in my life. The things I admired and wanted to invest myself in and the things I was tired and ashamed of. Since the first month of that trip, I have never again worn a watch.  I wear high heels maybe five times a year now and I don’t care if I know everything that is going on with the right people. I don’t feel dumb if I missed a vital news story and I don’t want my employees to excel because they are afraid not to. I care less about credit and I don’t want to invest energy in competing with you. Practically, I work in non profit; philosophically, I value service over power more. I wear chapstick instead of lipstick and flip flops as often as possible and I read more and yell less. I make time for myself and I work to remember the people I love in tangible ways, to prioritize them. I laugh a whole lot more and make fewer careful plans and walk out on to stupid new ground more often. I still have so much more I want to work on and become, but I am grateful from the very catacombs of my heart and guts that I stopped, evaluated and understood it was time for a remaking.

2.)  The second remaking was initially less welcome, mostly because I didn’t have any control over it. In the three years I’d been back from my trip, I had succeeded in becoming less defined by my career but I had made another - probably equally intense - investment in identity: Girlfriend. Potential wife? It’s humbling to talk about now and I don’t much anymore but in light of this question, the experience seemed to deserve an appearance. 

I have seldom been someone who looks at a relationship and thinks in terms of permanency. But I did there. Cautiously at first but then wholeheartedly; maybe the timing just felt perfect. When moving home from a half a year away, stripping down and building back up, you are uniquely open to a new sort of life. To abandoning caution and dreaming in territory you usually approach with logic and rulers. (These traits plus this sensible level of desire divided by this degree of risk = tolerable.)

In retrospect, I became overly tied to what I had invested in this relationship and what I expected (demanded) in response.  Letting loved ones know I was serious about someone, moving in with him, introducing him to all friends and co-workers, deciding that I might in fact be up for marriage and admitting it out loud. Hell, even just blogging about him and letting him proudly exist in my public life meant that I needed an iron-bound guarantee that this was safe. This was life forever and ever. That he would be everything I needed from a partner (character, loyalty, fidelity, passion, humility, depth, faith, ideas, adventure, success, curiosity, thoughtfulness, generosity, a perfect script…the list went on and on) and would clearly and publicly want me with the level of intensity and enthusiasm and devotion I needed to deem this life secure and worthy.

And ultimately, he didn’t. And these years that I thought were ramping up in to something became instead…I don’t know - loose change?  Expired receipts in my clutch? They became rejection and packed boxes and piles of life’s flotsam left behind because you just didn’t have it in you to eradicate every sign. Wouldn’t that almost be like you had never existed at all? These years that I had trusted as foundation became shattered kindling so quickly that it was almost like a death, I suppose. It felt like a death at times if you want to know.  Because just as with politics, being his partner and family was my chief identity. And of course I was more than that but honestly, that was what I invested the most time, physical effort, worry and thought into - to the point that existing without the title of this partnership seemed literally unfathomable.  And when change became unthinkable, I stopped considering whether the relationship was actually good for us. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; we should have talked about it more often. More honestly.

So, to your question. How do you remake yourself? I think it depends on the degree of trauma or readiness.  In the first case, it was self imposed humility and physical leaving. It was extracting myself from a situation that was making me miserable and seemed a mispending of my life, sacrificing an unhealthy identity and then creating time and isolation for reflection on what I wanted instead.

In the second case, the first step was coping.  Getting through the gut-purging, chest beating epiphany that this person you counted on like breath couldn’t be with you anymore, wasn’t happy, couldn’t even find the words to leave you with, wanted to be with someone else and went to her.  Let’s rush those together like a fast food order so we can admit them even from this distance without breaking. Let’s consider them as a specimen and move on to the subject at hand: First, you must cope.  Walk for miles somewhere beautiful or loud, buy a bike, call your mother every night on the phone. Make new friends who bring you to new places and spend a couple of hours a day not crying even if it’s just out of pride.  Read and relate to everyone who has been here before you. Tell your story somewhere. Eat or don’t eat; you know your vice.  Then overcome it. Take a million baths. Reconsider faith. Pray like it is a conversation. Take pictures so you can force yourself to look at something else; learn that forced distraction is underrated.  Find a new place to live and cloak it with the softest fabrics you can find. A new bed that feels like sod. Hang all the pictures you love. Find three new bands to fall in love with. Write all night. Open the windows.

Get your feet.

And then, just like in scenario one, think about what you would like to be. No, you cannot be this lover and partner anymore. You are beginning to understand that. Let yourself sit over pho ga in a warm Vietnamese cafe and consider the upsides of this. The hoops you won’t have to run through any more, the silent messages you won’t fret over, the subtle understanding that you were not enough, that he was not enough. What you could be now instead, the life you could build. Consider the peace in loss.

Consider how things need to be leveled sometimes. How forest fires enrich soil, though that probably won’t comfort you. Make a list of what life might look like instead.

Here is what I believe: Maybe everything we lose (or give up) is an opportunity to gain something else instead. Maybe it’s a trade. I wrote a lot about this discovery over the past year and I won’t rehash it all here. But imagine getting back to the self you actually love, to the things you actually vitally value - to family and clothes you want to wear and time for solitude and enthusiasm for everything. No skirts and white linen for someone else. No trying to live up to standards you don’t value. Imagine the things you will find and leave the door open to them even if you’re not done lamenting what you wanted.

Leave. Leave. Leave. Pack your car, book a flight. Go. Maybe travel is the opening and closing parenthesis on remaking. You can cry in Ecuador as easily as you can cry here and I swear to God you will be fortified for going. Go alone and climb something nearly insurmountable. Go out dancing with strangers even if you come home later and sob in your hostel bed. Smoke a cigarette because you feel like it and there is no one who has the power to tell you not to anymore.  Go make this set of Polaroid memories you won’t associate with anyone but this emerging version of yourself.

Read more. Eat at new places.

Start to cook again. Believe that you deserve the slow hard nutrients of a meal made at home, from scratch, just for you.

Take up yoga or anything else that reminds you of your strength as you overcome the fear of failure at it every day.

Surround yourself with friends who knew you before and with new friends. Stitch a cape of people who are thrilled to help you become something new.

The past year has remade me. The woman I am today (I sometimes forget) is a phoenixed victor.  Is stronger and softer than ever.  Is a reprise of the last reprise and I imagine I’ll be remade again, by want or necessity, again before it is all over.  I want you to believe me that change is the most eternally-hopeful, consistent and vibrantly rewarding resource in life.  It might be my religion. 

You want to know how to be remade? Soften your grip on expectations. Embrace and delight in the idea that this is just one option. You know what surrounds you? A hundred fucking beautiful possibilities and we all ought to be blinded by the field of freedom and potential and grace in which we stand. You can leave. You can change. You can start over. You can choose differently, even now.

Maybe more than anything in my life, I am grateful for the proven understanding that we are never stuck. Are never lost. That we are resilient and resilient and resilient. That we are remade again and again and are almost incapable of remaining in the mire, lamenting our original form and comforts. I am so grateful to understand that change (once coped with) seeds adventure and new characters to love and new travels and this invaluable grace and softening. 

This is the longest bit of rambling advice I’ve ever written, to a question I didn’t initially like. In the end, I feel I owe you thanks for reminding me how strongly I believe in reforming, on grand scales and in daily striving. Thanks for leading me back to myself.