I used to think waking up would feel bigger.
I imagined one clear moment when everything would make sense and I would finally know who I was. That has not been my experience. For me, waking up has been much quieter. It has happened slowly, through the uncomfortable realization that I spent much of my life becoming whoever I thought I needed to be.
I became the good girl, the easy girl, the wild one, and the woman who could handle anything. I learned how to need very little and hide what felt unacceptable. Later, I disappeared into men, alcohol, heroin, and anything else that made it easier to live inside myself.
Eventually, I had to ask a question I had avoided for years: Is this actually who I am?
That question can be frightening when you have spent most of your life surviving. Once the roles and protections begin falling away, you may not immediately recognize the person underneath them.
I did not walk out of addiction and suddenly know myself. I came out alive, but many of the ways I had learned to leave myself came with me. I could stop using heroin and still disappear into a relationship. I could be sober and continue shaping myself around what other people wanted. The substance was gone, but the habit of abandoning myself was still there.
In the book, I keep returning to the child I was before she began changing herself piece by piece to belong. I do not want to become that child again. I want to understand what was true in her before fear began making so many of her decisions.
That return often begins with very ordinary questions. Do I actually want to go? Do I even like this? Am I tired? Is this relationship still true for me? Do I want to say yes, or am I afraid to say no?
Those questions sound simple until you realize how long you have been watching yourself through everyone else’s eyes. Sometimes I genuinely did not know the answer. I knew what would make someone else happy. I knew what would keep the peace. I knew how I was expected to behave. Knowing what was true for me took longer.
I wanted transformation to happen in one beautiful moment. I wanted to walk out of the darkness and never look back. Instead, I came out a little less able to lie to myself than I had been before.
That was enough for a beginning.
Returning to myself has happened through small choices that actually belong to me. It happens when I notice I am performing and allow myself to stop. It happens when I tell the truth sooner, even if the truth is simply that I do not know what I want yet.
I no longer think return is one event. It is the practice of noticing when I am asking, Who do I need to be here? and finding the courage to ask a different question: Who am I when I am no longer trying to survive this room?
The self I left was never completely gone. She remained beneath everything I became to protect her, waiting for me to grow quiet enough to hear what was still true.