What is Mine?
how my body has responded to setting a huge boundary:
My reflection is a stranger.
The world is a dream through my eyes.
I move my legs and I feel nothing.
Do they even belong to me?
I look in the mirror and someone is staring back at me.
I’m not sure that I know her.
I hear myself talking to familiar faces.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
I move my hands and they look smaller;
they look unfamiliar.
I worry I have to re-teach myself how to drive.
I hit the road without thinking about the motions.
I still am unsure how I got from point A to point B.
Even right now I am typing,
but these thoughts don’t feel like mine.
If none of this is me, I’m not sure who it is.
It has to be me, it couldn’t possibly be someone else.
I have experienced something similar before.
It scared me then, just as it is scaring me now.
I know I feel this way now, and it doesn’t mean I will feel this way forever.
I am well aware that this is my body trying to protect me.
I must remind myself of this when everything feels against me.
But I sit in the tub and ask myself when the switch will flip.
When will the light turn back on?
I made one decision.
I made one hard, impossible decision.
I do not regret it, but it hurts.
It even hurts when I feel nothing at all.
I didn’t expect my world to turn upside down.
I didn’t expect to lose myself in the process of finding myself.
When something is missing, it doesn’t mean it is gone.
I am in there somewhere.