Version 1
The first version of me was belittled, minimized, ignored, dismissed. At home, I was called argumentative because I was always seeking the whys of the thing. At school, I was mocked, made fun of for not acting “like all the other girls,” made fun of for acting “too smart.” Not even the other smart kids accepted me. There were good parts in there, as well. I don’t mean to emphasize the negative, outside of giving context here. The friends I did have seemed to accept me for who I was in those moments, at that time. They were few, but they were precious.
As I entered into high school, I found myself floating along the outside of all the high school experiences. I wasn’t outright rejected, nor was I ever really accepted. Everyone knew who I was, but no one knew me. In those gaps, I made tiny choices, the only ones within my control. When my parents fought, I studied harder and longer. I learned to hyper focus on school so that I could escape. Both my current reality, and this seemingly predestined future playing out before me. It wasn’t a pretty home life, filled with hatred, anger, bitterness, hurt, and two narcissistic parents, who split when I was ten. One of them moved right on, and the other stayed stuck exactly where she wanted to be; mired in the quicksand of her own trauma, unattended depression, body dysmorphia, and myriad other reasons I’ll never know.
Version 2
The second version of me came to be, in part, because of a boyfriend of my mom’s who was gross and creepy. Then he showed just how gross and creepy he could be when he let himself into my room one night. He touched my leg, and I startled out of sleep only to kick him and scream. He panicked and ran out, and I had to start locking my bedroom door. My mother did not believe me. She accused me of wanting to ruin her happiness.
When I told my dad, he called my grandfather and they hired a private investigator. Turned out the dude was wanted for interstate theft felonies. He was a truck driver who routinely stole cargo and sold it on the black market. Then, and only then, did my dad let me move in with him and my stepmother. I was barely sixteen, and he wanted me to pay rent for my room.
This version of me was silently, quietly seething. This version of me was angry, disillusioned, hurt, and left feeling like an alien in a foreign world, born into it or not. This version of me slid down into the tub and tried to stay under forever, experimented with cutting herself with a shaving razor, effectively drowned herself in music and writing, and all the while kept up a facade, a pretense, of a normal, rule-following girl making all A’s, getting along with everyone. The funny one, the class clown. The smart one, the one everyone knows can give you the answer. This two-faced version of me was desperate to find her own identity, separate from that of her mostly terrible family. To make space for herself and her own thoughts, emotions…a presence. She was drowning in expectations she would never meet, and fought that by attempting to become so perfect that no one would again tell her she wasn’t enough.
She was the product of her environment and nothing more.
Version 3
Version three came to be through the birth of my son. My nine week premature son. I spent the first half of my twenty-second birthday commuting back and forth between work and the NICU, waiting to see if my little tadpole would have enough je ne sais quoi to grow into a human, in spite of this setback. Version three of me became a locked-in, singularly focused copy of myself, a little less life in me. I didn’t have room or time to be a human in and of myself; I could only be a worker and a mother.
This version, she’s not my favorite. She let herself be carried into one relationship after another, always knowing she didn’t really want to be in any of them. They were distractions. They were placeholders so my family would stop hounding me about being an unmarried woman with a kid. They were her attempts at fitting into the box everyone kept telling her she needed to fit in.
I don’t blame her for trying, not really, not now. That was the world she had known, had been taught. She had no idea how fiercely independent she could be, would become. She was overwhelmed, terrified of screwing up her kid, terrified that everyone would always leave her, forever. If only she was a bit more perfect…
That version of me worked 50-60 hours a week at a high-up corporate job, went to university business school full-time, and was a full-time single mother with a Swiss cheese support system. She slept two, three hours a night if there wasn’t a test or project coming up. She stayed up 48 hours straight between school, studying, and closing the books for a national company’s final quarter. She was now juggling her own job as well as acting interim AR manager. And that girl, she deserves so much credit there because she managed to do it all well. Maybe not as well as she could’ve done each separately, but we’ll never know for sure.
That version accidentally got married. “What,” people would joke, “Did you trip up to the front?” She would nod and smile ruefully. “Something like that,” that version of me would say, because the truth was so much more embarrassing. One of the relationships she fell into was on and off for awhile, then off. Then, after a chance encounter a year later, on again. Idiot. Once it was on again, everyone around that sweet version of me started telling her what to do. Of course the next step is marriage, right? Right. And a twisting, tumultuous terror in your belly, a foreboding sense of dread, one so large it makes you actually physically ill, comes included with all marriages…right?
No need for too many details here. The marriage only happened because people had already shown up. Nope, not kidding. My distorted, ultra people-pleasing mind wanted nothing more than to flee with my maid of honor. She said we could go anywhere and just reset, regroup. I should have listened, but instead, “People are already here, it’s too late. Yes, I’m sure, I’ve just got cold feet like in the movies. No, I know…I know, thank you, I love you, too…”
It lasted four months. Three of those months were because the state of Texas said I had to wait that long. The only other thing I gained out of that relationship was a fucked up gut from all the pent up stress I’d been holding in.
Version 4
This iteration of me is interesting. I called it my series of mini-revelations, and because I was 26 or 27 at the time, my frontal lobe fully grown and formed now, I really sat with them, thought about things through my own lens, and found the version of me closest to authentic I thought I’d ever see.
After my four month marriage and subsequent divorce, I finally acknowledged my own wants and needs. I didn’t need to be in a relationship. I didn’t need to be focusing on something other than my kid and me. I needed to figure out who I was as a person. Wholly independent of what my family wanted, what my friends wanted…I could just, like, live my life my way.
Now, dear reader, maybe you’ve always been able to do this. Maybe it didn’t take all the heartache and struggle for you that it did for me. I’m happy for you if that is the case, because I truly wish I’d been able to do the same. Nonetheless, version four found herself concentrating on finishing school and raising her kid without leaving him too damaged. This version wondered if she shouldn’t start a therapy fund instead of a college fund…
I did it. After thirteen years, I finally had my BBA in Finance with an Accounting Concentration. And then, four years after I’d had my mini-revelations and just learned to be by myself, I met my second marriage partner. This time, I was in it for real. For life. Idiot.
Thirteen, nearly fourteen years we were together. He seemed kind, supportive, he wasn’t a sexist asshole, he accepted and loved my kid, eight when we first met, as his own. He didn’t mind that I never wanted to get married again (I know, I changed my mind on that one, clearly) and he didn’t mind that I was the breadwinner, the one with a career.
My corporate job moved to Fort Worth, and I didn’t want to follow, so we moved to Seattle. A year later, we got married. On my birthday. In spite of myself, I agreed to do it again. My job there was really cool, but being all alone out there, with no support system at all, was harder than the job was good. After only two and a half years, we compromised and moved to Oklahoma, where he was from.
The next year, he had cancer at 30, and I was laid off, in the same week. The year after that, he was in remission and I was back in school, this time to become a nurse. It’s what I’d always actually wanted to do.
Then I was a nurse, and during the pandemic. Then the pandemic broke my brain and I couldn’t be the kind of nurse I knew I was capable of being. Through all of this, we were a unit. We were a we, he was my person. I thought I had been his.
Ten more years have suddenly passed since Seattle, and now I was at home, still trying to fight my way out of the PTSD I was suffering with. Therapies, meds, coping skills, tools…it took this version of me nearly three years to make it through. Then, just when I could feel myself actually feeling more like…well, myself, he was gone. I still don’t understand what happened.
Version 5
Hi, it’s me, the current version of myself. I have a feeling this incarnation will be the best one yet. Because I am finally, truly, free. I am settled in myself, I love myself. I no longer speak to my mother. I choose myself. I allow all of my creativity to come out and I never hold back. I no longer try to diminish myself so as not to seem “too smart.” I only allow people in my life that are real and true. If I find out otherwise, I remove them from my life.
I can acknowledge, without shame, that I’ve never cared about having some big career, in spite of my capabilities. I’ve always and only ever wanted to travel, to see and experience new things, to learn each and every day. I am at my happiest when I am learning. When I read new information, that feeling I get, deep in my gut, isn’t like the feeling before I was accidentally married. This feeling is deeper, more pure, a warm flush of understanding, of finding insight, meaning, explanation.
I am all of these versions of me. I reassure the scared little girl, always being abandoned, that it’s okay now. I am gentle with the angry teen, forced to grow up too soon and watch as her younger brother was coddled and spoiled while she was abused and, sometimes worse, invisible. I’m proud of the version that got my kid and I through the hardest parts of growing up together. She was such a survivor.
I empathize with version four, because she really thought her life had settled and straightened. In spite of continual crises, she had found a constant, someone who would never leave her. Then that rug was unceremoniously ripped out from under her, and she landed in the dirt patch straight on her ass, wondering why she’d just been pushed down like that.
But most of all, I’m so happy to be meeting the me I am now. This me will go travel, make new experiences, learn new things. This me is funnier than ever, strong, confident, with boundaries and expectations and a comfort in the idea that not everyone will fit those.
This version will not regret her life or the paths upon which it was created. She will love herself in spite of others, in spite of everything. She will be kind to herself, and will try to make the people around her happier; she wants to leave everything she touches better than it was before.
She’s taking all the skills she’s learned over the years and using them to be the change she wants to see in the world. She’ll fail, she’ll make mistakes. She’ll be imperfect, but most importantly, she’ll be okay with that.
Be well,
Ali
