T The Autopsy of Who I Was

The only temporary downside of cognitive behavioural therapy is that you begin to gain self-awareness. You start to see more clearly.

The blur lifts, the sugarcoated story-lines you wove across the years, just to cope, just to get through, just to make the tragedy something you could swallow, begin to dissolve.

And what lies beneath them is not gentle.

It is bloody painful.

It is so painful, and you cannot simply turn away.

You are just standing there, mortified, staring at the corpse of your old self as though she has been laid out before you on a mortuary table.

You know that body.

You know the lines of your face, the shape and the colours of your eyes, imprinted with horrors by the years that should have been kinder.

You know the skin, healed now but still carrying the memory of being weekly beaten by a man who only ever loved himself.

The bruises are gone but the body remembers. The body always remembers.

You look into her eyes, wide open in shock and find them exactly as you feared , they are sad, heavy, still holding that permanent look of abandonment engraved into their honey-coloured irises like a watermark that never fully faded.

The dread of every morning is still there.

The weight of every evening.

The quiet, relentless exhaustion of a woman who woke each day already bracing for impact, already calculating how much of herself she would have to surrender before nightfall just to make it through.

You recognise her completely.

Every scar, every flinch, every hollow where something vital was taken and never returned.

You know the way she held herself, slightly smaller than she needed to be, slightly apologetic for existing, slightly ready to bolt or to absorb a blow, whichever was required first.

And yet she is not entirely you any more.

The grief-imprinted soul still lingers around her like smoke that has not yet found a window.

She is hovering between who she was and who she is ceasing to be, and for a long, unblinking moment, you lock eyes with her across the wreckage of everything you have dismantled to get here.

Yes. It is you.

And yet it is not.

Every filter you ever placed between yourself and your own life falls apart, and you are left standing there, a thirty-six-year-old woman, turning left, right and centre, searching for an explanation.

You are looking for an answer where all this suffering could possibly fit inside a heart as small as yours, and wondering how your mind did not collapse beneath the weight of it?How you carried it at all?

And yet, there is freedom in it too.

You are undeniably freeing yourself.

You are running on all the extra space now, like a computer that was overwhelmed for years with unnecessary and toxic files, suddenly wiped clean and breathing again.

You feel like a mustang released from it’s tight, airless stable, running freely, or at least more freely than before, and there are moments, real moments, where you believe that nothing can stand in your way any more.

Then the question starts to nag at you. Quietly at first, then louder.

Who are you, truly?

Not who you became in order to survive.

Not the version of yourself that learned to parent her own mother, to absorb other people’s chaos, to scan every room for danger before she had even removed her coat.

Not the woman who loved too hard and forgave too quickly and mistook being needed for being wanted. Not her.

Who could you have been without the baggage?

*Without the pain, the grief, the years of white-knuckled endurance?

What kind of woman walks out the other side of all that?

Can you be anyone at all?

Can you be a totally different person, someone unrecognisable, someone lighter, someone who does not flinch at raised voices or assume that love must be earned through exhaustion?

What if the personality you have known your entire life is actually not yours?

What if it is merely an alias, a carefully constructed front, assembled by a frightened child so that she could handle the relentless tide of what life threw in her face?

Bloody good question.

And then another rises behind it, just as unwelcome:

Do you have to invent yourself again from scratch?

Where on earth do you begin?

Or does it simply , naturally happen , slowly, without announcement, like a season turning when you are not paying attention?

Because without all the defensive systems, without the walls, the vigilance, the armour you built so thick you forgot it was not skin …

What will fill the space they leave behind?

You have lived your entire life fortified.

You have expanded beyond your own limits to accommodate a darkness that was never yours to hold.

If you let it go, what rushes in to take its place?

Can that much joy, that much happiness, that much creativity and love truly fit inside a heart that has been exploited and stretched beyond measure by grief, demise and despair?

Can a heart that has only ever known how to hold suffering learn, at this late stage, to hold something good without bracing for it to be taken away?

You do not know yet. That is the honest answer.

You do not know who you are without the pain, because you have never been without it.

You have never drawn a single breath on this earth that was not coloured by it in some way.

But you are about to find out.

And perhaps that is the whole point of the clearing, not that you arrive with answers, but that for the first time in your life, there is enough space to ask the questions.

Enough silence to hear what comes back.

Enough room, at last, for whoever you turn out to be.