Never Again

Okay listen.
This graphic… phew!

Folks, pretending to be someone I am not is a rejection of who I am, who I am becoming, and who I am coming back to. I know this from experience, because I did abandon myself for years.

I know what its like to be told, explicitly, to choose to either abandon myself or to be abandoned. Now I have come back to myself enough to be able to say with certainty that if you ask me to choose, whether outright or in some other passive aggressive or gaslighty way, to be someone other than who I am: I will choose me.

Every time.

Because I know, I know that to abandon myself would be to erase me. It would be to yield to the expectation I was raised in, to play small and be invisible in all things except childbearing and acts of service at the expense of me…and even then to be small and invisible. Abandoning myself would be to follow a path that is laid out for someone else’s feet, and to go somewhere I am not meant to be.

Abandoning myself would also be to abandon the impact I am meant to make on the world, the lives I have been put here to change, the systems and institutions that I was meant to help break down.

I believe the world needs more of us to come back to ourselves, to be who only we are, and give what only we can give. For the greater good.

I forget who said this to me once upon a time but it fits here and this is where I will leave it…

“We are symbiotic, you and I. We are best when we come together at our best. When I am me, and you are you, then we can be.”

I am not meant to be anyone other than I am. And I will not abandon myself.