{50} A Lifetime of Eras
Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog post that ended with the question:
What if, tomorrow, I become a different person?
It seemed an amusing thought at the time, precious and optimistic, but now I wonder how it’s done, or rather, how it’s done successfully. I continued the theme last week when I wrote how therapy and meditation have made me feel “fragile like tectonic plates”, a feeling that expanded exponentially after therapy on Tuesday.
No, I’m not going to give a run down of what went down in therapy, I mean, I even bore myself with that kind of navel gazing. I want to write about the geologic eras of our slow slide into maturity, how we tumble and roll down hills and climb cliffs forever until we get to the next stage and have to start all over again.
We leave childhood thinking we’ve done the hard part — the sore bones, the playground bullies, the math exams, the social cliques of doom — but no, we’ve just somehow shifted through the first era. The second? Wouldn’t our incubation in the womb be the first era, after all? I think so. Therefore we become adults with two eras under our belts. We march straight out onto the Plains of the Age of Majority only to end up riding mud slides into questionable bodies of water while getting battled by falling rocks.
As a youth, I honestly believed (based on many “coming of age” novels and movies) that simply becoming an adult would change everything about me. It surprisingly did not. My bra size went up and my feet spread but fundamentally I was unaltered. I’ve gone through the Years of Menses and now I’m back to being a pre-teen, with a wonky, unpredictable period and boy-whiskers on my upper lip. Did anything change, really? It’s like I ran full bore through the Valley of Fecundity (because we’re women, so of course it’s a valley) out the other side and am now stumbling around trying to figure out where I am…who I am.
What I am going through now in therapy is destruction of epic proportions. Yet, I still wake up in the same brain, the same body, the same bed. This does not make me happy. I don’t particularly want a clean slate (I’ve read enough amnesia!fic to know it’s a real pain in the ass to forget who you are) but nor do I want to hold on to the fear, shame, and pain of my life.
Is it as simple as letting go? I suspect it is. Wouldn’t that be the joke? It is, I suppose, the source of the concept “a leap of faith.” We can’t know, cannot believe, how simple it is to put down our burdens and cast off our shackles until we do it for ourselves.
I will not become a different person tomorrow. But this era, I think, is ending, and a new one will soon begin.
