"You know what? I'm still making excuses. I've always cut myself off. I've always... Being the Slayer made me different. But it's my fault I stayed that way. People are always trying to connect to me. And I just... slip away."
It’s kind of funny how it happens – how you can lose yourself and not even realize it. One moment you can be bopping along in your own little world, happy as a clam, secure in yourself and pleased with your life, and then the next you meet someone – a friend, a lover, what have you – and they turn your life upside down. It happens slowly, it happens subtly, and most of the time you don’t even realize it until it’s too late.
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So you settle into a new routine – one that’s theirs. It never starts out that way, but that’s how it winds up. You bend to their whims a little, then a lot – more often than you should. Loving, caring conversations turn into critiques you start to take a little too personally, but rather than tune into that, you try to change – you try to be better, faster, more. And the more you fall down that well, the less you’re the person you know… but you don’t know how to stop, because it’s so familiar. It’s something that you’ve done before, and somehow they know – they can sense it. It’s almost like a source of power for them.
Many never have that moment of clarity that jerks them out of that dream-like state, instead choosing to follow that friend into oblivion, marry that lover, what have you. Maybe they’re happier in that state – acting as a servant, a subordinate, something to pump up the other person’s ego. But then there’s you. It happens slowly, it happens subtly, and most of the time you don’t even realize it until you’ve finally made a move to put an end to things. You try to reason, but it doesn’t work. You try to help them see the light, but they don’t want to. So you finally cut the line and bail.
And then it happens: you wake up one morning and look in the mirror, and realize you don’t recognize who you’re looking at. The body you live in has morphed into something you fight, the mind exhausted and weakened… none of it makes sense. You hate it. You revile it. But somehow you find the strength to rebuild. The process is long and slow, often feeling like an uphill battle. You want to give up and let go and pretend it doesn’t matter, but something inside you keeps you moving forward – to the breaking point, in some cases. But it’s those breaking points that matter most because in those moments of pain, you finally understand where you lost yourself, why you lost yourself, and why you were able to be broken down.
While you’re going through your rebuilding, it feels like it’s taking forever. But then one morning you get up and look in the mirror and suddenly you don’t see a stranger staring back at you. And while you’re not quite at 100% yet, you’re at least at 85… and that feels way better than the 25 you were at not so long ago. You start meeting better, more quality people who are secure enough in themselves that they want you for who you are, not what they can make you be. You start noticing the opposite sex in a way that tantalizes and intrigues you, and when they approach you, your intuition is more in tune, allowing you to sniff out the duds almost immediately. And when you return home at the end of the night and curl up in bed, you don’t feel lonely. You feel whole.
And as you notice these things, as everything starts shifting, as you more and more become the person that you are, you wonder how you ever lost yourself in the first place. So you say a silent thanks for the lesson and recognize that you learned it faster this time than the time before, or the time before that. Soon, it’ll be a lesson you don’t need to relearn at all.
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