Who's That Girl?

“I am still not sure why cutting my hair upset me as much as it did,” I said as I slumped in the old soft red leather chair and dabbed at the tears that rolled down my face. 

“You want to know what I think,” he asked and waited for me to say yes.

I always did.

“I think this was a very powerful symbolic step you made.”

I gave him a confused look.

“This cutting of the hair,” he said from his now standard laid back position in his matching soft leather arm chair across from me, “This was you saying to yourself that you are ready.”

“For what?”

“To face it.”

“Face what?”

“Yourself.”

I sighed. Sometimes I cannot tell if he is being deliberately inscrutable or I am just incredibly dense.

“I have no idea what you mean.”

He smiled and steepled his fingers together as he spoke. “When you cut your hair off, I assume you cried almost immediately when you looked in the mirror?”

Tears welled up again as I remembered and rolled down my face. He paused as I chased them with the tissue and then blew my nose as I nodded an affirmative.

He continued, “You took that last thing you could hide behind. Your hair. In essence, you stripped yourself naked and down to the base level and then looked up and looked yourself square in the eye. You saw the naked raw truth in front of you and confronting yourself like that can often be rather intense and disturbing especially if your self image is skewed as we now know yours to be.”

What he was saying sort of seemed to make a little sense.

“You have gotten rid of everything that had to do with your old life. Your old clothes, old behaviors, old ways, old stuff, old fat, your old name, your old car, you are even changing your career and now, finally, you stand on the deserted battle field amongst the old corpses and discarded weapons and you slowly reach up and begin to cut off your hair.”

I raised an eyebrow at the picture his words painted. Suddenly, it did start to make sense.

“But….” I faltered… “But, what now?”

He smiled and said, “Now you tell me, who is that girl?”

Again, I was confused and my face made that clear.

“This is not the time to be nebulous, Doc,” I said. He laughed. “No, seriously, none of this psycho babble crap tonight. I need you to tell me what to do. I need action words from you. I need VERBS!”

He laughed. I think I truly and most endearingly entertain him like no other patient he has ever had.

“Action words,” he said with a teasing smile on his face.

“VERBS!” I insisted, “What do I DO?”

He continued to lay back casually in his chair and look at me while he formulated an answer.

“What do I DO,” I asked again. My voice was a mixture of exhaustion and sadness.

He opened his hands wide and looked at me directly, “I want you to tell me who she is.”

Such a simple statement.

But not a simple task.

Because….who WAS she?

Some will get this but many will not: I am not anything I can experience.

So…..

Who is she?

Who’s that girl?

I understood.

“The hair,” I gestured to my head, “that was the last of it, right? I cut the final tie to that old self. I shed the final skin? I now have a blank slate and she is open to me to define.”

He smiled.

I sat for a bit. Thinking. I like him because he will sit quietly and let me think. Alpha does the same. I will get to a moment when I literally hold my hand up in a pause sign and my eyes start to move back and forth like I am speed reading and, as Alpha said once, “You can almost hear your processor speeding through the problem.” I didn’t think anything in particular. I thought all sorts of different unrelated things all at once and felt the realization moving towards me in a tidal wave preparing to break on shore.

For all the time that Josephine has “been”,  she has always been a separate entity. She was not me. I was not her. (My shrink did assure me I was not schizophrenic). For a while recently, I have been feeling disappointed that I had to keep the two so separate. Why? The whole atheist thing mostly. Some of it privacy. Some of it protection. Some of it was that I always felt that I could not merge the two. Again, mostly because of work, I felt this need to have a shelter. A safe place. A security blanket. She was where I could go after a long day at work or home. She could say and think out loud all the things I was not allowed to for fear of being hated or fired or punched in the face. But now I find myself wanting to bring more of “her” amazing aspects to the table. I really liked her. She was strong and tough and no nonsense. Whenever I wasn’t sure what to do or was scared or afraid or unsure, I would ask myself, “What would Josephine do?”

And then I would do it. And everyone thought I was so amazing and all I could think was, “But, I am not. That was Josephine. She is never scared or nervous or timid or if she is, she puts it aside and gets things done. That’s not me. I wish I could be like that for real and not just pretend.”

Silly me. Just like in the Wizard of Oz, it was me all the time. I just had never really realized that until now.  And there were wonderful things about me, also. I brought a wisdom and experience to the table. A tenderness and gentleness that Josephine had never had. She was rough and tough and brash and course and I brought something that smoothed her jagged edges. That made her stop and listen first. Made her act instead of just react. I was the Yin to her Yang. 

Then…. it was as if suddenly she and I were hurtling towards this collision into becoming one.

And I looked at him and realized that it was time.

He smiled again as he could see that I got it.

I made my way to my car that night. The early summer air thick with the first humidity of the season. Rain lurking at the fringes like a shadowy figure stalking me as I walked to my car. I had this distinct feeling of being a spectator inside myself. Who is this woman I ride inside of? Is she strong? Brave? Fun? Beautiful? Will she ever find true love? Will she go on great adventures? Will she begin a new career? Will she accomplish all those goals she has? Will she come up with new ones? I wonder what they will be?

When I was married, I had felt life was done and defined. Over. Now there was the hint of a great big adventure stretched out before me. I had absolutely no clue who I was but I decided it was going to be great terrible scary fun learning. And, I decided, I can become who I want to be. Not how others wish to define or label me. I can reject their opinions and ideas and criticisms if they are invalid and do not contain any value.

To paraphrase a line from Terminator 2 that came to mind as I stood with my hand upon the door handle of my car. The moonlight illuminating my blank face in the window glass as jagged lightening in the distance caused the reflection to flicker from light to dark:

The future, always so clear to me, has become like a black highway at night.  I was in uncharted territory now... making up history as I went along…