Identity

I was such a broken little girl with false bravado. I had a false sense of self, haunted eyes and an empty heart- too bruised or broken to feel anything. I was firmly enmeshed in self sabotage and didn’t see any reason to let go of that, no proof that anything else worked. I was a ghost in a brittle body that survived the ravages of war. There, I was a victim.

Yet one woman offered perhaps another path on my journey. The one that would not be easy and the one that would require more strength and courage than I knew was in me. All the while she didn’t give up on me…and so how could I have given up on myself when someone believed so firmly in me. I became a survivor.

And so now here I am. Everything is different, my identity has changed yet again. I’m a strong woman who never gave up.

I think so many of us struggle with the question of identity- who we are inside. People tell us to just be ourselves- but which self do they want? Do they want the college student, the therapist, the patient, the depressed girl, the daughter…or the victim. I think before I began the healing process I fell into the category of victim. Once therapy began, I clung to the identity of survivor. The word survivor emitted a sense of strength to me and hope that I could rise above my past.

And so I went from victim to survivor and was all the more strong for it. Then came the time when I ended therapy, when I finally healed and suddenly I became at a loss for an identity again. I was a victim, I was a survivor, but I was so much more than that now. So I settled for woman- strong woman. As much as I am a survivor, the term itself is confining, because it would be a constant reminder of my past and in a sense meant that I would always be searching for a way to rise above it all. But in reality- I had gotten to the point where my past was just that- my past. My life was now centered on the present and future and I no longer suffer through the negative consequences of where I came from. So when someone asks me who I am…I just want to say I’m a woman, a strong woman. Victim, survivor, strong woman. Now that is the transformation of identity that I like to see.