The Middle of The End

By Anna Charisiou, October 19, 2018

Read time: 5 Mins

The Middle of The End Image

I’ve spent a lot

of time not writing yet it’s all I do.

I’ve spent months thinking of everything I want to achieve, although I’ve never been busier.

I’ve spent years thinking I know where I’m going but I still feel lost.

A year ago I lost a part of myself.

I’m not sure where it’s gone, or if it will come back.

I’m trying not to look. To just keep on keeping on. Whatever.

Recently, I’ve been told I can’t be the person I once was, all that’s left to do is figure out who I am now. I find this concept strange, but I guess I lost myself the first time, I’m just waiting to lose myself a second time. 

There’s this persuasion that comes over me when I lay awake at night thinking of everything that I try so hard not to think about when I’m awake. Do I look sad? Can people tell I look sad? Do people talk to me because they feel sorry for me, or because I’m just there? If I go, where will I end up? Will there be someone on the other side waiting? These questions go round and round until they end up, somehow, at the comforting chestnut I have arched on for majority of my adulthood: you’re fat and ugly and too much. Too much that it’s not enough.

Over the last year I have lost almost every physical attribute I worked hard to attain and then maintain: my body, my hair, my clear skin, my sex life, my usually too active, too out of line sex life. I lost my laugh and the crinkles in my eyes when someone tries to make me crack a smile. I lost a taste for things – everything. For the smell of grass and gooey sticky cheese on fresh sourdough. I didn’t want to go out for dinners or dance. I love dinner. I wish someone paid me to just have dinner. I didn’t want to do anything. I tried on all the clothes and all the wigs and drew a new version of myself in my head until I opened the door and the idea of being seen as a phoney was almost worst than being seen as myself.

I was sick. I was really sick. I spent 6 months being a pincushion. I had to freeze my eggs. I had to answer questions like: ‘How was your poop today?’ and ‘Those hot flushes aren’t fun, are they?’ While a camera was in my vagina (news flash: cameras don’t belong in there). Somehow these questions I could answer. But when someone would ask: ‘How are you feeling?’, well that just seemed near damn impossible, so I didn’t.

I’ve always been more of a listener than a talker. I think it’s why I’m drawn to beautiful dysfunctional people. They always have the best stories and little awareness for their self-indulging tendencies. It almost feels like you’re helping them by indulging their behaviour. For six months I still played this part. The active listener. The, ‘Oh, no.. tell me what’s going on with you.’ And the, ‘Just wanted to check-in’ text messages. The random ‘xxx’s’ not the midnight ‘XXX’s’ I used to send. I started to get resentful after. I thought, why won’t they listen to me? When really, the question was: why didn’t I talk. 

Why don’t we say anything until it’s too late? Why don’t we say anything at all? Why do we spend all our time trying to be people we’re not, hiding what we’re feeling, showing what we think we should? Can we get out of our own heads? Can someone just get into mine?

I have this idea of who I want to be, the businesses I want to start, the words I want to write. Everything I see on HBO that makes me sad because, I wish I made it first (yes, Amy Adams would be the lead, obviously). All the feelings left to feel and all the ones I wished I never did. There’s all this future ahead and I’m paralysed or, I was by who I used to be and what I don’t have – I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time. I don’t know where to start, I don’t know where I’m going with my thoughts of no ends. For every ‘if’ there wasn’t an ‘is’ that could convince me to just start because for whatever reason, the person I could be someday, wasn’t as great as the person I was.

It’s strange, how the past never really goes anywhere.

A month ago (because by now you’ve probably caught on that’s how I measure time), I decided to stop being angry at myself and try to make peace. To stop punishing myself when I had too much fun or berating myself when I didn’t. I am who I am and I can’t keep running away from my shadow. It’s with me. At some point, I have to turn around and face it.

I make no apologies glueing back together what I broke.

This is the middle of the end. The road bump in the break-up with ‘the one.’ You know it’s going to hurt and it’s going to hurt for awhile, maybe forever but that’s ok. Once it’s done, all that’s left to do is try again. To find that next person.

I hope to whomever is reading this and has gotten this far, that you’ve met yours. Maybe you’re still on your first chapter. Maybe I’ve lived too many lives and this analogy is now lost on me. The point of my long winded ramble is that it’s ok, not to be ok. For the love of it, stop trying to be.

All we have are endings. I think it’s amazing we get to start them again.

Six months ago I lost a part of myself and I wish I didn’t spend another six months trying to find it.

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