Grieving [Honoring] Who I Used to Be

Written as a follow up to "On the Precipice of Becoming" Published 12.18.24

[Written12.18.24. Edited 12.31.24]

I’m on the precipice of becoming… again.

Becoming the next version of myself. A version that after four years of consistent compounding trauma, can stand up and be as mentally well as possible.

This feels terrifying to me. The unknown always has. But she had me think back to first few IV Ketamine sessions in August where I needed my husband to stay in the room beside me the whole time just incase I felt unsafe. I’ve come a long way since then, surrendering control and growth to the medicine to allow it to work, to do its job.

And now it’s my turn to let my gut override my brain. To note the physical symptoms of crippling anxiety but not to question them. To wait, to sit with them. To understand that I may not feel safe in my body, but that externally there is no threat, there is no need for armor, there is no need for change, there is no need for walls or for shutdowns. The only goal is to to feel the physical feelings until I know why they are there.

So, as that journey transitioned a little bit yesterday into something new, as my doses of medication become more spaced out, and as I have less connection with my guide, I’m committing here that I will do my best to continue the surrender. To be vulnerable. To allow the water to wash over me, leaving me both the same and different as it comes and goes in waves.

---

---

[New thoughts. 12.31.24]

When I started reading Alex Aubrey’s poetry book, “Learning to Love Myself” I knew I desperately needed it. I’d followed her on Instagram for a long time, and I knew her writing made me feel my feelings in real time - something I’ve been working impossibly hard on for the last few months.

I basically stop reading every other page to underline, to highlight, to snap a photo, and to send that photo to someone I know GETS IT, I feel these words deep within me.

I started 2024 without picking a word - the first year out of many that this practice fell by the wayside. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to, it’s because I literally wasn’t capable. I had just been diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, and besides the raging infection in my brain, I had an abscess pushing on my frontal cortex, challenging my cognitive thinking abilities. 2024’s word chose me. Surrender.

And so I did.

Surrender to the medication. To the regiment. To the doctors. To the healing process - which took several silent and isolating months of my life.

In the second part of the year, surrender morphed into something else tangentially related - the word Survive.

Survive was less my word of the year and more my anthem in the dark, but it was critical in my fight and in my mental health treatment.

Truthfully, it still is.

And when I read the quote in the image above, I thought about how it captured 2024 and the lead in to 2025.

For 2025, I’ve chosen the word Emerge.

Emerge from the ashes. Emerge from underground. Emerge from the darkness. Emerge from enmeshment and codependency and self doubt and fear. Emerge as someone ready to reclaim her life in all the parts that she chooses, and to release what no longer feels right.

I chose this word as I thought of metamorphosis. A radical change. A shift from who I was to who I am becoming. And the becoming part - I think it’ll always be in the forefront of my mind after a lot of the trauma processing work I’ve done.

Because without it, without constantly reaching for the word becoming, I will stop. I will stand still. I will try not to rock the boat. I won’t say too much. I won’t say enough, actually. I won’t feel my feelings in real time. I’ll give in to things that I feel powerless against, even if that feeling is only rooted in the lies my brain tells me. Without emerging, without reaching to become, there is only the version of me that was, the version that just. barely. survived.

And emerging - it requires having survived, right? You can’t emerge if you don’t survive.

And without caretaking the broken, the hardest to look at, most uncomfortable to feel version of me, there would have been no survival.

Let’s be honest - I’ve been far from alone in this precipice of becoming - but there are times when I put the phone down, when I’m alone, when my back is up against the wall and it feels like there aren’t any choices to empower myself - sometimes in those moments I am alone. And I have, at many times, had to choose to be brave enough to continue taking care of myself, even when I didn’t want to. Even when it felt pointless. Even when I didn’t think I’d make it through the night.

Where is Amanda?

Yesterday’s Ketamine infusion was choppy and unpredictable. There were logistics that didn’t work in my favor and left me feeling on edge. The things I thought about and saw and wept for - they were each just pieces of this large jigsaw puzzle of my life. But one of the things that stood out the most was almost like an undoing.

Imagine trying to get a knot out of two very thin necklace chains. Trying to extract and pull apart the fragile pieces without bending or damaging either chain, using a safety pin and a magnifying glass and sort of even holding your breath.

Thats what this felt like. And when the chains were free, independent at last, I looked up to realize that there was only one on the table. The other had disappeared.

A lot of this might be hard to conceptualize, but I think the most important thing for me to share is the rough realization that I have lost myself.

I mean, I knew I was gone this summer when my body was in rooms that my brain never entered, but I didn’t realize how long ago I actually truly lost myself.

I think some of started with years of chronic illness and misdiagnosis. It was transformed by acute moments of grief - loss of friends, loss of routine, loss of autonomy, loss of body and brain connection. And then it continued. There were years that feel more stable, more like a homecoming, but ever since we were diagnosed with infertility in 2017, pieces of me have just been chipped away, leaving bigger and bigger wounds behind every time. This is where the grief feels heaviest.

[Authors Note: I paused here to put together a collection of photos that showed me throughout the years - and it felt too intimate, too unsafe, too vulnerable to share. And that feels important to document - that even our favorite writers and photographers and artists choose what to include in their curated work and what to leave private.]

When I became a new mother to our living daughter, everything about me changed for the better. But I barely had time to wrap my head around that as the world shut down for the pandemic, as we returned to fertility treatments and began having miscarriages, as we moved to a new home large enough to fill with a big family (which we’ve been unable to do to date), as I managed anticipatory grief in watching my friend surrender to Stage 4 Metastatic Breast Cancer, as she held my hand when I went into labor at just 11 weeks pregnant, as I navigated trauma school, followed by back surgery, RSV, an asthma diagnosis, hernia surgery, months in and out of the hospital, a brain infection, an ectopic pregnancy, a diagnosis of ADHD, crippling depression, raging anxiety, all encompassing C-PTSD, as I started Ketamine treatments and blew out my knee - each of these moments changed the version of myself that has most recently become.

& this is where I pause to silently celebrate, or nod thanks, or honor the girl that made it from point A to point B, no matter how many times she wanted to give up. Why? Because she didn’t. She didn’t fucking give up.

And now that I can identify that, now that I can name it and label it and think it through in real time even though it aches like nothing I’ve ever felt before, I also think I’m finally in a place to emerge, a new version of Amanda, taking the best pieces from what was and rewriting the newest pieces as I go.

And that, friends, is what progress feels like.

Like crying ten million tears and sending a thousand SOS texts and relying heavy on medical providers and therapists and medication and guides, on connecting with real life mothers who have found themselves in the middle of a becoming, too, and in friends who can witness the transition with profound support and love.

There’s no room for anything else.

There can’t be.

Not if I’m serious about finding out who I am. About grieving, honoring and letting go of who I was, thus making room to determine who it is that I want to become.

Are you with me?