I was thinking, I pretty much lost 20 years of my life down the vortex of my marriage. I was 31 years old when I started dating him, and 52 when I left. Then I spent 3 years in paramedic school and coming to terms with my bipolar. Only in the last year or so have I really started to have fun.
So yes, I am making up for lost time. That is why I am always out doing something and having fun. Dancing has done a lot to restore my confidence in myself. I feel much more like the person I was pre-marriage.
Let me tell you about late-20's me. I was beautiful. Beauty is power, and I had a lot of fun wielding that power. I was smart AF. I was a lot more selfish than I am now, and a little immature. But I was ambitious. I had my life planned out. I bought a condo that I intended to use for a rental property some day. I was a little cocky, too, but why not? I was an honor student working on my pre-meds, a homeowner at 27, on track for a great career, and drop-dead gorgeous. Best of all, I really liked being me. I had all the confidence in the world.
Then I was thinking about married me. Married me had a lot of problems, most of which were caused by the marriage. The slow erosion of my confidence, my intentional self-erasure in order to be a "good wife," my pathological phobia of abandonment, the desperate need to be loved by him, the intentional re-writing of history in order to suit my fantasy... it wasn't that I was weak. He knew how to trigger my worst fears and play on them. He actively set about destroying those parts of myself that I liked the best. When he was done with me, I no longer felt beautiful or powerful or sexy or smart. I felt like something that had been chewed up and spit out.
But married me had a lot going on, too. I think I was a pretty good mother most of the time. I wanted Riley to become an independent, life-long learner, and she is. I was extremely capable, in different ways. I taught Riley how to read and do math. I managed, in spite of my undiagnosed ADHD and bipolar, to juggle her many activities as well as family road trips and free museum days. Since we were always broke but not quite broke enough to get food assistance, I made a part-time career of going to food pantries. I came home and cooked everything from scratch. I could make soup out of undesirable crap like broccoli stems and applesauce out of the raggedy, worm-infested apples from my tree. I raised chickens for eggs and kept a worm bin for compost. I made a lot of things myself. I was definitely in a Little House on the Prairie era. I didn't like myself much at the time, but looking back, I can see I was pretty bad-ass, especially considering what I was up against.
The point was, there are aspects of all my past selves that I like. Today I was missing the me that made bread from scratch and knew dozens of things to cook with eggs and made jam out of surplus frozen berries from the food pantry. Yeah, she had problems, but I miss being her—with that level of competency in the kitchen and running a house. It seems like with each iteration of me, the best qualities of the previous one are lost. I want the best qualities of all my past selves.
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