I Have Changed My Status To "in a relationship with Kellie-it's complicated"

I have decided I want a relationship with me. I will be honest here, I haven't actively wanted to be a part of my own social circle for a long time. I find myself to be droll, most days. I live simply, but sometimes that requires me to be simple, not a compliment in my house. I am an intelligence snob. I find myself drifting from conversations about someone's kids or dogs or jobs, if what they say doesn't tell me who they are. It's a little like discussing weather. If I want to know the weather I have Google, The Weather Channel or hey, better yet I will just look outside. Being a bed wetting, band geek did nothing for me either. I knew my own stories and found most of them to be boring, or embarrassing, rather than funny or interesting. I had spent most of my twenties trying to forget my past, thinking of it as irrelevant and more than a little pathetic. When I turned twenty eight, I had a child, my youngest, where I had a full arrest including no blood pressure, no pulse, no respiration. I was gone, Man, really gone. For two and half minutes I ceased to exist. When I awoke I found that my memory had taken a hike. I got exactly what I asked for. No more embarrassment due to bad young behavior , no remembering how I got through high school, junior high or elementary school. I remembered who I was, who I was married to, who my kids were and my immediate family. I didn't know how to read and write, how to drive or why I would even want to. I knew who my immediate friends were, but lost the ability to recall anyone else. After years of wanting to be anybody but me, I got exactly what I asked for. I was that way for months. Actually, since I have decided to be more honest than politically correct, I was that way for years. For about two years, I had no idea of who I was prior to that moment in time. I could literally start over and be anybody I wanted to be. The question then became, "Who do I want to be?" versus "Who was I?".
Everybody I have seen who has had a near death experience watched the bright light. I had no bright light. My experience was totally different from anything I had ever heard about before. Mine was about not being afraid of the dark anymore. I had been afraid of all things dark and scary. Where I had once loved horror movies, once I was married and had kids they terrified me. I no longer found any fun in dark corners, dark bars, dark theaters, dark anything. I am night blind and have been since I was a kid and figured out I didn't know what was going on because I couldn't see. Once when my friends and I were in a cemetery playing tag at night, I bumped into a statue and excused myself. My friends were bowled over laughing about how I talk to statues. I ran into trees, tripped over rocks, fell into gutters, and generally hurt myself weekly from trying to navigate the night. That is how I had pictured my childhood, me bumbling around, bumping into things, always doing the wrong things in order to feel a part of my surroundings. With this in mind, it doesn't take Einstein's theory of relativity to see why I was wanting to forget my relativity to anyone while I was a child.
Once I had conquered my biggest fear of the dark due to my extraordinary experience, I wanted to find out more about what I could become rather than who I had been. Whatever had happened to me in the past was just that. But here I was in my late twenties getting a clean slate. I had hoped that if I stayed away from those who knew me when I was young, I wouldn't get caught up in who they thought I was, and who they were certain I had become. By deleting my past I was certain I would be able to be anything I wanted without paying the price of changing anyone's perception.
The downside to this was all I was giving up too. It meant I had to give up going and catching up with old friends, going home to see anyone but Mom and Dad, and letting go completely of who I had become as I traveled through, learning the lessons. I had to stop trying to exercise my brain to get it to recall anyone from the time when I was someone very different. Not everyone accepts change, especially big change when you are going through it. Thus began my time of staying away from the childhood of someone I could no longer relate to.
I did actively choose to be alone rather than be with people who knew me before February 21, 1992. Having to learn how to read and write, drive and do activities of daily living helped me in my cause. When I would see people, I would choose to not try and remember. I did remember, by accident, those whom my mother thought was important, in the beginning. Eventually, many memories came back to me, but not before I had the chance to morph them into innocuous ideas instead of concrete facts.
I wasn't living a lie, I was living a limbo. I didn't refuse to believe my past, I just didn't seek it out anymore. Until I hit the wall and found I had run out of time and path away from it. That is the funny thing about living longer than you had thought you were going to. I had thought when the doctor I might not make it, that I would be gone at 28. I had thought by taking the time to get my "things" together that I would not have to face the future, so why bother figuring things out. But I had lived, I had been given a second chance to be better, do better, think differently, learn more, teach more, live in a way I could be proud of.
It was no accident that my divorce happened two years later. It had been a very rocky relationship and I had been a battered wife, waiting for things to get better. I had waited for years, ever hopeful if the house were clean enough, if the kids were taken care of enough, eventually I would be enough. But the truth was I wasn't enough for either of us. I hadn't initially fought for my own life in the hospital. I wanted to go, be done. I had a bad marriage, no job and felt trapped in a life that I had helped create. When I saw Betty for the first time was when I wanted to live, just for her.
I will confess, that while I was "on my way back" I yelled at my doctor for saving me. Being illiterate, having gaping memory lapses and having incredible difficulty with my short term memory as well, I was less than enthusiastic about being "still here". Eventually, I saw for myself in real terms what being here could mean. I was given the gift of a George Bailey moment of knowing what it would have meant for my children had I not made it.
While I got so much bravery to go out and start my life again, I also got all the pain that comes in waves, too. I got to see just how much damage was caused my husband and me to each other. I got to feel to my very bones what it was to walk out on someone who never in their thought process believed I would have the guts to do it. I watched Danny be reduced to a shaking child as he said, "No one will love you again! You didn't deserve me! I rescued you from that shitty little town. You are nothing. I never really loved you!" And there it was...the verbal vomit of someone who had now been hurt a bad as I had previously. Not having a brain cell in my head that I was able to count on for life experience, since I denied my own past, I took it all in. I became the guilty party. I allowed all the fault driven hate to fall directly on me, knocking me clean to the ground. I wore that iron suit for many years, until I could look at the child me full in the face and say what I should have said long ago,"If you were me, what would you do?" That's why we have those visceral memories, those hurting haunting images of the lessons we learned in the past, so we can draw on them and remember that we won't die of a broken heart.
So I am now in a relationship with myself. I have decided I need the child me to protect the adult me from breaking down, from having to learn all the hard lessons over again. I need the child me who looks at clouds still creating dreamy images in my head while lying on the grass. I still need the little girl who is awestruck by magic tricks, fast music and heart pounding feeling when my husband looks at me in that way that makes me giggle. Yes, she was stupid, ignorant, naive, dorky, a bumbling fool. Yes, everyday she gets up, so much of that is still true. But I need that child to remind me that I am still here. I didn't really start over, I didn't really leave all of who I was behind me, without it I am a hollow shell of person, whether I have improved or not.
I am in a relationship with me, the dorky bed-wetting, verbose, bossy, bumbling fool. So far things are going well, though not without pain. But as it turns out, we have so much in common.