The Hard Part Of Getting To Know Yourself

Last week I was sitting on the floor with papers and pictures spread out around me. In my mind I could see the playpen my mom used to park in front of the TV just a few feet away from where I was sitting.

As a toddler, I’d bounce along to Barney. Outside of the playpen, I used the floor as my training ground for crawling and learning to walk.

As a kid, I learned about real estate and the importance of Park Place while playing Monopoly with my cousin and aunt on that floor.

Building piles and pushing memories around on this floor to make room for more has always felt normal and like home. Even though last week didn’t look much different, it was. I was trying to find my birth certificate and social security card because coming home here was no longer going to be an easy, viable option. I couldn’t keep splitting myself between two homes because in a few weeks, my boyfriend, my puppy, and I would be hopping on a plane and moving across the country.

I was choosing to turn our home into my only home, but more than this, I was making room for all I have always been. There were parts of me that never truly fit into the space my family provided for me. My identity, my needs, and my wants extended beyond this floor and I was finally in a place to give all I am a new home. The homecoming started with figuring out what I was taking and what I was deciding to leave behind.

I’d said to a friend recently,

“I feel like we’re floating on this cloud that has roots sticking out of them. I don’t have a rush to figure out where to set them, but it is becoming more and more true that choosing to be uprooted means we are our own home now.”

No moment had underscored this reality more than being in the room I lived in the majority of my life and actively rummaging for pieces of my identity that I now had to be responsible for safeguarding. The act of self-preservation comes down to answering the question, “what matters most to me that warrants only a passing thought from others?”

I value the papers that will help me identify as “Vivian” at the DMV when I try to get my license in Portland. They are afterthoughts for my family because they decided who “Vivian” was a long time ago. They don’t need papers to prove it, not even my life looking different from what they expected of me would make them change their minds.

I’m the holder of the pictures of me and my mom that prove I had a childhood, even if some days it’s hard for me to remember. There were parts of me on the floor - crumpled report cards from elementary school and the portfolio of article clips I used at my internship interviews - that show the progression of my becoming.

My becoming has admittedly never managed to be on schedule with what others my age are actively going through. I was either too many steps ahead of where most people my age were, like when I was 10 and became an adult as a result of my mom’s death. Or too many steps behind on the role I wanted to play because of the ones I had to, like when I was 21, my grandma’s caregiver, and yet had never gone on a real date.

Looking for my birth certificate brought up the same shame that appeared whenever I couldn’t answer the question, “Is this normal for someone my age?”

Over years I’d learned that the only way to push the shame away was by cutting off its air supply. The comparison game for what in my eyes a “normal” 27-year-old who had parents went through didn’t matter. If I stopped focusing on it, maybe I could instead give myself more space to breathe and grow.

Moving to Portland from NYC had been my late-twenty something response to wanting to live my own life. In making that decision though I don’t think I’d realized that I’d be taking over where my mom left off, this time in a way I could manage and would do me justice.

Growing up my mom loved getting to know me. She would buy me my favorite books, my favorite CDs, take me on my favorite bus rides, and comfort me whenever I hurt myself. She erred on the side of being too afraid for how willing I was to live and experiment, but over time she started trusting my gut. I’m still shedding the fears I inherited from her, but I’ll take it if it means I get to keep the way she helped me hone and trust my intuition.

Liking and getting to know myself felt harder after she died for a myriad of reasons.

On the floor last week I outwardly started again.