The Cocoon Was Hollow: Grieving the Absolute Loss of Self

 

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                                                                      -Lao Tzu

 

Once the decision was made to cut ourselves free from the religious life we had been woven into, Rick and I began the very delicate process of extrication.

 

Actually, it wasn’t that hard for Rick.  He shed his mormon identity like an ill-fitting suit that he had worn out.  He had put it on just six years before, after becoming a fully formed adult.  He wore the coat well, but taking it off was not too hard.  A temperature adjustment.   A loosening of the tie, unclipping the “Brother Poulin” name tag, he went back to being Rick.  He kicked off his dress shoes and pulled out his Birkenstocks, and found his old self waiting to welcome him back.

 

It was me that needed unwinding… the binding thoughts and ideas that had me tightly ensconced were thick and sinewy.  At first, I believed that if I just worked at it, the fibers that had cocooned me would release a new and completely different, freed creature.  The proverbial butterfly.  But as time wore on, I began to wonder if there was a self, underneath it all.  The discard pile grew, and with it I lost my shape.  After years and years of unraveling, I am left with a huge pile of string, a hopeless tangled mass, and no sense of who I am.

 

Such work, to unravel one’s self.

I have been sifting through my pile, overcome with grief.  For the form and structure of my self.  For the loss of what I knew.  For the comfort of having a home.  For the rejection of my cast.  For the familiarity of words and rules and rituals.  For the loss of the tethers that gave definition to my family.

I did not know how to recreate myself from this rubble, and yet inside it, were all my pieces.

 

I have cried more tears in the last year than I have in my entire life.  The grief when I first began this process was a rupture, and the tears spilled out in angry waves.  Now, the grief is residual, it shimmers at the surface, ready to spill over at the slightest ripple.  I cling to the necessity of the tears.  The washing out of the vessel.  The cleanse, as I ready myself to once again try to find a new woman in the old pile.

 

And then, as I was drying my tears the other day, something happened.  I looked up.

 

It is only now, eight years into the undoing and the fingering of my scraps that I have found something that looks…hopeful.

In the very raw process of unraveling, there is a powerful sense of isolation and loneliness. I was selfishly consumed by my deconstruction and loss, and it made me blind to my surroundings.  Not out of spite, but out of grief, the world outside of my own undoing became a vague and blurry mess.  The only pieces of reality and the only choices before me seemed to be born out of the pile of scraps I had created in shedding my entire identity.

The hope came when I looked away from the tangled nonsense I had been stewing in…  and I noticed.  Instead of a presence of separateness that I had been feeling in my loss of structure, I saw others.  They look like me.  Some are crying, too.  Everywhere, people are discovering their empty cocoon, and the task of recreation.  And my story is not so special.  We are all standing in our pile,  trying to rebuild.  I saw my uprooted, raw  feelings reflecting back at me.  And I saw their beauty.   The work of creating something grand and strong, sifting through the rubble to find the shiny pieces… these people were doing it.  All of them.  I felt my unformed self crack open, and love rushed out.  For all the people, for their loss and mine are the same.

 

And maybe, that is the Truth.

 

We are all in various stages of this moment… unwinding and rebuilding and whittling away. Anyone willing to break free from the shell that we begin in, to find renewal and movement and light, is going through this too.   It has taken me a long time to blink away my grief and look around at the wealth of experience we are all standing in.  The survivors of broken childhoods.  The immigrant rebuilding in a foreign place.  The lover, holding a shattered heart.  The parent, reshuffling life after a death.  The woman, peeling away her shame.  We are all chipping away the armor, to reveal the truest version of our Self.

 

The truly freeing part?  I am realizing that we are not limited to our own broken shells.   That pile is our past.  The things that have already been. The shape that has already formed and been undone.  We are not limited to this material, to rebirth ourselves.  There is only so much we can find within, before we must look for the beautiful pieces that others have to offer us.

 

The world is wide, and open, and full of breath-taking pieces that will feel like home when we find them… they are meant for us to discover.  We find unity in the recognition that we are all busy with different versions of the same task.  And then, we are less afraid to see the beautiful offerings of others… and perhaps the value of our own discarded pieces.

So,  I will pick from my pile the material I want to keep, and then step away… to search out the new treasure that will define the woman I want to become.
Her shape is only for me.

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Photo credit:  Gardner Edmunds

 

Discovering Christmas After Leaving my Faith

 

Ringing through the sky shepard boy
Do you hear what I hear
A song, a song
High above the tree
With a voice as big as the sea
With a voice as big as the sea

 

December 3, 2013

I was born and raised a 5th generation mormon.   My ancestors gave their lives to the faith, crossed the plains pushing hand carts to seek religious freedom, and wrapped their posterity tightly in mormonlore, tradition and fierce faith.  Mormonism is a form of christianity… they worship Christ, and celebrate his birth.  We celebrated with Santa and the reindeer, but gave much weight into Jesus Christ being the Lord, Savior and King.

I remember one year when I was about 15, I innocently asked my close friend why they celebrated Christmas when it was a christian holiday to mark the birth of Jesus Christ, and she was not christian.  She was unable to answer my question, only stammered a bit and I backed off, sensing her discomfort.  This memory bubbles up for me every single year because eight years ago,  my husband and I scooped up our young girls when they were still babies in diapers and walked out of our mormon life.

I have often used the word “uprooted” to help verbalize the action of leaving our faith… and I often still feel the effects of our drastic decision in my every day life.

But.

On sunday, Rick and I drove our girls out to a Christmas tree farm in an adorable neighboring New England town.  We rolled down the window and they gave us a sharp saw and some twine, we drove up to a space in the dirt parking lot, and traipsed into the lot among the Frasier firs and Blue Spruce, picked one out, and cut it down.  An hour later it was sitting in water in our living room.

Not uprooted.

Cut down.

Sometimes, leaving your faith feels like that.

Because the truth is, my roots grew in mormon soil.  They were nurtured by loving stories of a newborn babe who eventually suffered immeasurable pain for me.  My roots tangled themselves around the belief that I must conform tightly to a long list of do’s and be’s in order to find happiness and eternal life…in order to feel Spirit and experience Joy.  I ate a lot of ice cream, green jello, dixie salad, funeral potatoes.  I sang a lot of “I Hope They Call Me on a Mission” and “Follow the Prophet” and “Praise to the Man” and “I am a Child of God.”

I am not sure it is possible to uproot yourself and replant in new ground.  The roots belong wrapped around my ancestors.  It has been a deep and complex struggle to figure out what this means for me.  How I define myself. When we walked out of our mormon faith, I felt as if I stopped existing altogether.  And then, after the shock wore off and I realized it was not a death, but an awakening that left me feeling like an alien in my own body.  It is hard work, to sort out that kind of disorientation.

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Eight years later, I am beginning to understand.  I no longer need to feel cut down,  separated from my roots. Alienated.  I am beginning to see the more beautiful parts of the culture I came from once again, but this time, with my eyes wide open.  I can appreciate how I grew into a compassionate, strong, intelligent, curious, open and sensitive adult… It is no longer necessary to frantically search out the mormon pieces of me to be thrown away.

The Christmas seasons have been the hardest, as the “true” meaning of Christmas, the bible story, seemed like an untrustworthy lie.  A scam.  I struggled to find meaning in the celebration without getting sucked into commercialism.  I have been fighting  to answer my own haunting question I asked more than 20 Christmas’s ago.

Why do you celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ when you are not a Christian?

The answers, swirling within me, are finally settling.  And I know.

Because Christ does not need to be historical fact.  He can be an idea.  A representation of the most powerful source there is.  LOVE.   And I can get behind LOVE, and see all the beauty that springs from it…Joy, Peace, Light, Happiness, Gratitude, Compassion, Grace, Understanding, Mercy…   I do not need to invest my life into anything other than those ideals.  I can find those things in the brilliance of a star, the excitement shining in my little girls’ eyes, the sight of their snowman melting on the lawn.  I can immerse myself in my favorite holiday music, bake the best damn Christmas cookies you ever tasted, drink champagne while turning our home into a place of magic once a year, and let nostalgia take me into my past and feel rooted once again.  Christmas is a practice.  A purposeful rising up, once each year, to get carried away in love.

This Christmas, I can finally honor the roots I grew from, but I can reach for my own sky.

And watch my children do the same.

….Written to participate in the holiday writing advent at http://onetreebohemia.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/3-december-holy-days/