What I make when I miss myself
This week, I’m suffering from a terrible migraine as I type. It’s right behind my eye and makes my vision a little blurry. This is pretty normal for me, but it makes it annoying to focus on tasks that require a lot of active concentration (like writing), so I picked a great day to do it.
For me, a migraine also brings about an existential crisis. I spend so much time lying around feeling bad and introspective that I feel like a big ball of pain, and it’s hard for me to remember what I’m doing at my core.
Tucked somewhere beneath the ache and the static, I am hidden.
I sit and I watch as pain eats time away. Sometimes I lie still for so long that I feel like furniture. It’s hard to remember that I’m more than just a body who needs managing. It’s so easy during an illness to feel like I’ve disappeared.
It’s in these moments that I reach for anything I started when I was me. I collaborate with myself on projects that otherwise wouldn’t get finished.
I finish crocheting the bag that was too small, admiring the colours and appreciating it as a comfort, instead of a practical piece. I edit the photos from two months ago, watching them with new eyes. As I sit feeling unfinished and unaccomplished, I prove my own feelings wrong by finishing these projects. Slowly, steadily, but getting them done, where normal me wouldn’t.
Sometimes that still doesn’t help. Sometimes I can’t bring myself to pick anything up, and I sit scared and useless, feeling like I’m not allowed to exist if I’m not busy doing something productive. Who am I when I can’t reach for the part of me that feels most like home?
I’m still learning to be okay with being no one. Sometimes I’m able to let myself float and not pressure myself into working. Sometimes I make Picrew art of myself to have a sense of identity again. It’s something I’ve done for a really long time, to remind myself of what I look like, what my personal style is, what colour hair I have at the time. It sometimes feels like the only way to get back to myself.
Until I’m able to comfortably let myself exist as a soft blur, I continue to pick up the thread again. I take the trail back to something familiar, and I continue to create. Nothing beautiful, but just enough to remind me that there is a healthy me out there, and she still exists somewhere.
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