I was an oracle, I am a person

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drafts, former selves, poems, poetry, predicting the future, save your drafts, sense of self

Photo by Flickr user Soya_pearl (Creative Commons license).

TW: brief mentions of physical and sexual violence

Last night I was cleaning and reorganizing my home writing space and found two manila folders stuffed with poem drafts, some nearly 10 years old.

I’m a very organized person, so this discovery was surprising largely because I thought the folders were lost when I moved almost three years ago. I mourned them and forgot them. It’s atypical for me to have printed poems anyway. I draft on screen and only print my work when I’m ready to edit or order a manuscript, because I like marking up my own poems like school; but then I usually recycle them. I’ve never been into saving drafts because I’ve always tried to trust that I’m making a poem better with each round of editing, and won’t want to revert to an earlier version. As soon as I opened the folders last night, I remembered how I had decided yeeeeeaaaaaars ago to keep this particular batch—rife with plenty of horrible writing, but solid ideas and the occasional bit of gunpowder—in case of a technology disaster and so I always had something on hand to try to polish.

Finding these folders was transformative and my skin is buzzing. I’m sipping coffee now, touching the folders in between writing this post, still processing what lies within, because I sat on the floor until midnight and read them all in one sitting when I should have been finishing the reorg and doing yoga and then, you know, maybe sleeping a little. I’m both tired and shot-from-a-cannon awake. I learned some things from my former self.

What does it mean to know yourself?

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identity, identity crisis, inner persona, knowing yourself, public persona, real self, sense of self, soul, values, who am I, who are you

What is an identity? Photo by Flickr user José Luís Agapito (Creative Commons license).

I wrote this last week: “Knowing myself, being myself, even while chaos swirls around me, is my definition of happiness.”

Sounds great, right? A little gooey, maybe, but I was writing about happiness, and how to tell if you’re happy, because I was feeling happy.

But how do you know if you know yourself?

I ask because that very same day, I had a conversation with someone versed in these issues. This person asked me if I had a strong sense of who I was. I said yes, without hesitation. This person asked me to elaborate, and pointedly asked, “So, who are you?” 

My year of reclamation

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alone time, being an adult, coping, gratitude, my favorite things, reclaiming, reclamation, remembering, self-awareness, self-care, sense of self, settling in, trying new things

Mountaintop selfie: the view up here is good.

Earlier this week, I blogged about “taking my life back.” Sometimes you have to high-five yourself, be your own best friend. Rather than dwell on the events that precipitated this…yeah, rebirth seems like the right word…I feel like making a list of things I’m doing or have done in the past year to start over.

I’m a list-loving kind of woman.

I know this list is gonna sound a little Oprah, a little “be your best self,” but I lost my sense of self for a while. This is my welcome-back. This list is full of old and new favorite things that have helped me remember and grow who I am, one for every month of the last year: