I have been chasing echoes of myself. Lately, it feels like a past version of me is emerging—one I haven’t experienced in a long time, maybe longer than I realized.
I recently went off my birth control, and I can’t help but wonder if this shift in my inner world is connected to that decision.
I used to love writing. I still have old notebooks filled with my poetry and conversations with myself. I’ve been on hormonal birth control since my early twenties, and somewhere around that same time, I stopped writing. I stopped a lot of things, actually. I always assumed it was just life starting—less time, more responsibility, adulthood doing what it does.
Last Thursday, when I stopped taking birth control, I joked that maybe in a week or so I’d be meeting myself for the first time in a decade. Maybe it wasn’t much of a joke after all.
Lately, things feel vivid—clear in a way they haven’t been. To some people, this might sound like ordinary presence. But for years, I didn’t really experience moments as they were happening. I could look back on them later, fondly sometimes, but I wasn’t fully there inside them. This past week has been different. I’ve been noticing moments while I’m in them, not just afterward.
This is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt compelled to write. I started a blog last night, and here I am again today. It feels like I brought myself back—and she’s sitting here with me now. I know I’m different. I’ve changed and grown in countless ways. I also know I can’t recover the last twelve years or reclaim every piece of myself I left behind. I didn’t know how to carry her with me then, and for a long time, I didn’t understand why.
Now I think I’m beginning to.
I’ve spent years on antidepressants and in counselling. I’ve tried many paths toward healing, and I’m not about to abandon them. But something feels like it’s shifting—like a breakthrough exists somewhere ahead of me.
It feels as though the tectonic plates within my soul have begun to move. A tremor of a past self breaking free from chains I didn’t even know I’d placed. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little afraid of an internal earthquake. I’ve read that it can happen.
I can’t imagine being in a relationship—asking someone out, falling in love, planning a future—and then stopping birth control only to realize everything has changed. I’ve read stories of women who experience exactly that. Suddenly the love, the desire for a baby, the certainty—all gone. Thankfully, I’m not in that place. I’m not navigating a partnership or motherhood decisions. I was already deeply focused on something else: trying to find myself.
My relationship with myself, and my relationship with food, have been at the top of my list for a long time. There wasn’t space for romantic love when I was struggling so hard just to learn how to love me.
The strangest part is this: I’ve always felt stuck in my past. But now I’m wondering if I wasn’t stuck in it—maybe I was stuck without it. I knew my past belonged to me intellectually, but I couldn’t feel connected to it. I didn’t know how to relate to the person I had been. These last twelve years, I’ve been moving forward with knowledge of my past, but without my past self walking alongside me.
In counselling, I talk about the many parts of me—different voices, different roles, different ways of being. Sometimes it feels like someone else is driving the ship, and I never knew how to bring all those pieces together. I often felt like I was holding an incomplete puzzle, missing vital pieces. I hate not knowing, and that sense of fragmentation fed a feeling that something was wrong with me—that I was, in some way, broken.
Perhaps the hormones I was on simply didn’t allow all the pieces of me to come along for the journey. Perhaps now, they’re finding their way back
Lately, I've been wondering whether this is simply another season, one of rest, re-connection and quiet growth, which I reflect on more in this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment