The Small Changes That Gave Me Back to Myself

I thought I was removing things from my life.

I didn’t realize I was removing the static.

The drinking.
The addictions.
The little ways of altering a moment because apparently the moment, exactly as it was, wasn’t enough.

None of it looked particularly dramatic from the outside.

That might be why it took me so long to notice what it was doing.

There was no spectacular collapse. No single morning when I woke up and decided I had ruined my life and needed to rebuild it.

I actually liked my life.

That was part of the strange realization.

I liked waking up in it. I liked the places I went. I liked my thoughts and the strange places they wandered. I liked creating things, disappearing into words, wandering around by myself and noticing things other people seemed to walk past.

I liked the person I was becoming.

So why did I keep reaching for ways to leave her?

Maybe escape doesn’t always mean wanting another life.

Sometimes it is simply the habit of stepping a few inches outside of your own.

A drink to loosen the edges.

Something to inhale when there is nothing to do with your hands.

Another drink because everyone else is having one.

Another night built around the same ritual, with the same people, having conversations that feel enormous while they are happening and somehow evaporate by morning.

And somewhere inside all of that, I started wondering:

What do I actually think?

Not what the room thinks.

Not what the person sitting across from me thinks.

Not what makes me agreeable, entertaining, easygoing, desirable, fun.

Me.

What do I think?

It was an uncomfortable question because I realized how often I had borrowed other people’s perspectives without noticing.

Their opinions became possibilities. Their judgments became things I questioned about myself. Their comfort became something I accommodated. Their version of me occasionally became more convincing than my own.

And when you spend enough time adjusting yourself to the temperature of every room, eventually you forget what temperature you naturally are.

Choosing clarity more often has been teaching me the difference.

There is a particular kind of silence that appears when you stop constantly altering yourself.

At first, it can feel empty.

Then you realize it isn’t empty at all.

It is full of information.

I began noticing which interactions left me peaceful and which left something buzzing underneath my skin.

I noticed how often I had been out of character.

I noticed the difference between being liked and being known.

That one hurt.

Because I am someone who lives very deeply inside myself.

My mind wanders into strange rooms. I think about why people behave the way they do, what experiences change us, what we carry without realizing it, why certain moments follow us for years and others disappear before we even get home.

And yet some of my connections lived almost entirely on the surface.

We could laugh.

We could drink.

We could make plans.

Yeah, we should totally do that.

We have to go there.

We’ll definitely keep in touch.

There was always a future being casually constructed between sentences.

Very little of it ever became architecture.

And maybe that was okay for what those relationships were.

Some people are wonderful company inside a moment.

But I kept mistaking shared moments for shared depth.

I confused being welcomed with being held.

Someone could be happy to see me when I arrived and make absolutely no effort to keep the connection alive once I disappeared from their immediate world.

That distinction became harder to ignore when I became clearer.

Without the rituals that had held some relationships together, I started seeing what was actually underneath them.

Sometimes there was something beautiful there.

Sometimes there wasn’t much at all.

And I cried about that.

More than once.

Not necessarily because anyone had done something terrible, but because clarity can carry its own grief.

You begin mourning things before they technically end.

You realize you were assigning depth to places where there was mostly proximity.

You recognize that some connections knew the social version of you beautifully and barely knew the woman underneath her.

And perhaps most painfully, you realize you helped create that arrangement.

Because if I didn’t completely know how I wanted to show up in the world, how could I expect anyone else to know me there?

So the changes remained small.

One decision.

Then another.

Choosing not to numb something.

Choosing to sit through discomfort long enough to hear what it was saying.

Choosing sleep.

Choosing mornings.

Choosing the version of myself who wakes up without searching the previous night for something to regret.

And my body noticed before I fully understood what was happening.

My sleep became more normal.

My anxiety quieted.

My body began returning to its own rhythm.

There was less negotiating with myself.

Less recovering from my own choices.

More ordinary mornings.

I have developed a profound appreciation for ordinary mornings.

There is something almost rebellious about waking up and simply feeling like yourself.

Somewhere along the way, these small acts of subtraction began finding their way into my poetry too.

I have been quietly building a collection around addiction, although I’m beginning to understand that addiction may only be the doorway into it.

The poems hold the places where I reached for something outside myself. The rituals. The bargaining. The temporary versions of freedom. The strange loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling untranslated.

But they are also becoming a record of what happened when I stopped reaching.

When I stayed inside the moment.

When I let discomfort finish its sentence.

When I began discovering which parts of my life remained after the numbing was removed, and which parts had only ever existed because of it.

I don’t know exactly when I will release that collection.

Maybe I’m not supposed to yet.

Some things need to be written while the door is still open.

Because I still struggle.

The old path has familiarity on its side.

It knows the shortcuts. It knows how to make itself look fun. It knows how easily nostalgia can dress something up once enough time has passed.

It knows how to whisper:

Just tonight.

Everyone else is.

You can start again tomorrow.

And technically, I can.

There will always be a later available for becoming.

That is what makes later so dangerous.

The other path is quieter.

It doesn’t offer much spectacle.

It offers sleep.

Clarity.

A body that feels like mine.

A morning without anxiety.

A mind I can hear.

A life I don’t feel the same need to escape from.

And increasingly, that feels like the more interesting adventure.

Maybe finding yourself isn’t one enormous revelation.

Maybe you find yourself through subtraction.

You stop doing one thing that makes you disappear.

Then another.

You stop automatically agreeing. You stop overriding discomfort. You stop calling every connection intimacy simply because you had fun together. You stop treating your own instincts like suggestions.

And eventually there is less noise standing between you and the person who has been underneath it all.

I don’t think I needed to become someone new.

I think I needed enough quiet to notice who was already here.

And now that I can hear her,

some things simply don’t sound the same anymore.