#thriving while multiple

Who I was changed regularly, faces coming and going without warning; I was so many, too many, thus I wound up being nobody. Nothing stayed static — I never stayed static — there was no starting point. We were a jumbled, erratic galaxy, a constantly-shifting kaleidoscope of constellations, incapable of being neatly filed into a list.

Nostalgia is sweet, precious, and tastes like rotting flowers. Reminiscing is like walking through a garden where half of the plants are poisonous, but all look and smell exactly the same. The only way to know is to pick one and see if our skin blisters.

Dissociation whispers to turn our backs, while integration makes room for others to join the circle. Integration brings us together, and that might be the crux of this whole phobic phenomenon: our past taught us that love hurts, that closeness is dangerous, that connection is lethal.

Far off in some inner distance, a flame is never extinguished, never diminished. In every despair, at every junction, at every dead-end desperation, there is a stubborn, unyielding glimmer of hope.