Rakish? Me?

One of the attractive things about online dating is the opportunity for reinvention.  Reinvention is what I'm about right now, after all.  Or, is it recovery?  Hmmm.  I am reinventing my lifestyle, sure, but am I reinventing myself?  I don't think so.

I have always seen myself through others' eyes.  I don't trust my self-assessment, and I'm constantly checking in:  was that annoying?  diverting?  frustrating? enchanting?  boring?  fascinating?  Can I trust the reaction?  How much does it have to do with me, and how much with the other person's issues?  Online dating puts all these questions into a sharp focus, because all you have to go by are the words.  You can't be distracted by the smiles and laughter, the outward game face.  Yes, there is obfuscation and outright lying, but the words are there, ready to be dissected.  And if the grammar sucks, well that's one more thing to add to the critical mix.

So, I'm looking at other people's words and carefully crafting my own.  In the process, I realize that I am not capable of reinventing myself, not really.  My core is as it ever was, and I don't see any way to change that.  I'm not sure I want to.  A few weeks ago I had a bout of extreme weepiness.  I was visiting S;  he was working in his computer lab, and I was sitting nearby writing out my grief, tears dripping down (but I don't think he saw them).  I wrote:   I am the person I've always been.  Stronger, but still needy.  Resilient, but still fragile.  Fragile.  The song D sang to me at our wedding.

I won't share the rest of that writing....too whiny, too self-absorbed, too full of information about relationships, too full of self-recrimination, too sad.  What's important is what came next.  I was walking at sunset one day, and suddenly I felt like Sylvia Plath:  the bell jar had lifted and I was free to the circulating air.  Not only had it lifted, it was gone.  I suddenly understood what others had been seeing for so long:  in its absence it made itself known to me.  In its place was myself.

And what was myself?  At that moment, my self was walking in a landscape littered with juniper, pinon, rocks, and cactus.  The sky stretched overhead, filled with blues and fluffy whites and yellows and pinks and oranges.  The wind rushed through the branches, the mountains outlined on the horizons were grey-green rockpiles, filling in with slate blue shadows.  And I saw every detail, FELT every detail, without that deadening sense of remove.  I was actually there.  I think I took a photo and wrote a haiku, as I have been doing endlessly over the years and months of my depression.  But I didn't need to, as I have in the past.  I needed no product to prove I was there.

So, I was there, but who was I?  And why was I?  I'm still working on that.  Socrates says, Know Thyself.  Descartes says, I think therefore I am.  It seems that I have gone more elemental than that.  I feel, therefore I am.  I feel myself, I recognize myself, but I don't know myself, and I don't know what I was put here to do. (But, that's a topic for another blog.)  What I do know is that the self I want to know was muffled under a coating of stress and grief and sadness.  Pulling off that blanket and keeping it off are the tasks of the moment.

So, recovery, not reinvention. I want myself back. And it seems that it's happened, at least for the nonce.  In my recent visit with my sister and brother, I felt that.  And L did too.  He wrote to my siblings:   [She] looked good - that might have been an illusion but she appeared to be on the mend.  Yes.  I know that depression and anxiety and panic are part of me, but they don't need to define me, nor do they need to separate me from my life.  And, in the meantime, I can toy all I want with lovers and jobs and creations.  I can meet people online and at activities and through others.  I can talk story (and every tale we tell is equal parts invention and truth, our own particular truth.)  Those things I can reinvent.  It might even be necessary to do so, to move far away from the people and things and thoughts that brought me into a marriage with D.

But what I can't do is hide who I am.  The other day I was describing myself to a woman, unknown to me, whom I was scheduled to pick up at the airport:   I am 5'10", 240 lbs, shoulder length white/grey hair, glasses.  E later sent her another description:   She is a big tall woman, maybe 5'11" and perhaps 230 lbs, with sort of rakish white/gray hair, big brown eyes, and a beautiful smile.

Not much disagreement there.  But it doesn't reach the core of who I am.