It's terrifying.
Being alone with your thoughts.

I don't scare easily, but it's at times like these when the sadness engulfs me and I am too weak to fight, that being alone with my thoughts and emotions (whatever those are) terrifies me.

In this new season of life, there is a lot to process.  To learn.  To change.  To reflect.  To feel.

It is a new year; that alone is usually cause for reflection.
But I am also about alone as I have ever been in my life up to this given point in time.

The one who holds my heart is gone for the next [at least] 14 weeks.
I am apart from him after spending every day and every spare moment for the past year and a half with him.
Talk about shock.

I used to be confident in who I was.
I knew who I was and I knew the One to whom I belonged.

And then life shifted, and everything became a question.
No answers, no light, just me stumbling around like an idiot, feeling like I was drowning, and like I would live the rest of my life like that.

"In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we're made of."
            - Howard Schultz

I went crazy (so to speak).
I started going on adventures of my own, taking risks (ME, of all people, taking risks), essentially just living my life as one big "fuck you" to God and anyone else around me.
Partially because I felt out of control.  I was tired of not having answers - much less help - and I needed to do things that made me feel alive.
But also partially because I had met someone that I found myself in love with, and wanted to be a better version of me because of them.  To do things that scared me that would cause me to grow, to step outside of my comfort zone, and yeah, for bragging rights.  Because why not, right?

But in going crazy and taking risks and making some pretty dumb decisions, I also lost complete sight of who I was.
I became a stranger to myself, and even now, I'm struggling to figure out - once again - who I am.

Which has not been easy.

Try completely not recognising yourself, moving away from your hometown for the first time ever, struggling with near-crippling depression, going on to working two jobs, meeting someone, having to find a place to live in only two weeks, going from living with family nearby to having essentially no one, needing to prove to yourself you can make it on your own, and then getting into a relationship and trying to learn how to co-function with another being all while trying to remember who you once were.


No one enjoys being left alone with a stranger.

And so here I am.
Two years later.
And I still have no fucking clue as to who I am.

Perhaps the biggest hindrance (while being the biggest help in other ways) was spending time with My Heart.  Always being with him meant no alone time (unless you count driving in your car alone to and from work or to and from home as alone time...and that definitely does not count), which meant no mental processing, no decompressing from the general busy-ness of life, no remembering - much less maintaining - who I am as an individual.

I never wanted to be that person who was so wrapped up in a relationship that I lost sight of and forgot who I was as an individual.
Because while, yes, you two are a unit and you need to learn to function together, at the end of the day, you are still you.  You are left with only you when you are alone.  And if you don't know who you are, if you aren't confident in your identity, if you lose sight of being you as an individual...it just adds up to a really complex equation that feels impossible to solve.

And that is where I am right now.

But oh, it's so much more complicated than just trying to rediscover who I am.

Because while I became a stranger to myself, in that chunk of time of adventures and risks, I was also in survival mode.
I had to be.
I mentally steeled myself to survive.  I shut down (even more) what emotions I may have felt.  I fought to be hard and not have a soft heart.  I had goals to accomplish, days to get through, and that's what drove me.  Focusing from one task to the next, always staying busy, never allowing myself to be alone, to process, to just...be.
I had to do that to fight the sadness, to fight the darkness that was a constant, looming threat of swallowing me whole, in order to barely make it from one day to the next.

So even now, when I'm alone, my default mode is survival mode.
Which never ends up going well when I'm back with My Heart.
Because survival mode Aimee, is single Aimee, which means it's her against the whole world.


This is going to be a lot of work.

Trying to remember who I am.
Trying to be in survival mode, but not as single Aimee, rather as committed-for-life Aimee...which I don't know what that combination looks like.
Trying to learn and grow and change (all for the better) while he's gone, so I can be the best version of myself for him.  To support him, to love him, to communicate clearly, to tag-team life together.
Trying to understand my past and where all my hangups are and how to heal from past wounds; and also how to currently live with who I am now because of what happened in my childhood.
Also just generally fighting the sadness of being so far away from My Heart, of trying to stay busy enough to be distracted, but also have enough time to think and process and do whatever else I need to do.


It feels daunting.
All that I need to do in the next few months.
("Need" meaning tasks I have taken upon myself to accomplish, not as in necessary for survival...although I suppose it could be taken like that as well.)
Couple all of that with generally feeling tired all the time and extra sad and it just gets really messy and feels extremely overwhelming and the general mood is to just want to shut down, shut the world out, not go to work or deal with responsibilities, and maybe just eventually die so as to not have to feel this way anymore.

I know when I see him again, it will feel as if the weeks and months just flew by.
But right now it's dragging about as much as my spirit is.
Which is all the time, all day.

Regardless.

I will probably do what I always do.
Pick myself up by my bootstraps, ignore how I feel, and figure it the fuck out.

Because I know that as much as I want to give up or give in, deep down - who I am at my core - I won't allow myself to give up.
I fight - blindly at times - because I have to.
Because it's who I am.
I fight even when I want to give up, even when it feels like I have no fight left in me, because to me, there is always hope.
Even when I can't see it.
Even when I can't feel it.

And the hope that things will get better, that the light will shine again, that maybe one day I'll stop feeling tired all the time, that I'll remember who I am, that I'll be reunited with My Heart...that is the hope that is worth fighting for.


(And so the battle begins.)