"Boundaries in Healing: Choosing Me Over We", Project Heal 2024

Reflection

Revisiting my essay, "Boundaries in Healing: Choosing Me Over We", published by Project Heal in February of this year stirs up many emotions. 

The hardest essay I've written to date; confronting the content of this piece was more challenging than I predicted. When I originally pitched the concept in December '23, I felt very confident in my ability to address the difficult subject matter, however, transitioning from concept to reality was beyond what I ever expected. 

As an autobiographical essayist, I should of course be aware of how difficult it can be to reflect, revisit, and share what can be very intimate and painful experiences, but typically this process only occurs when I feel myself to be at a healed place with the content. So, when it came time for me to begin writing this essay, my understanding of my level of healing in relationship to disordered eating and body dysmorphia was critically challenged.  My relationship to my body and appearance existing in a matrix- gender identity, inherited trauma, racial trauma, misogyny, sexuality- suddenly seemed like more than I could handle psychoanalyzing, let alone reduce into 2000 words. 

Yes, I could unpack all these elements of my identity, but then what do I do with them? Now they're all just sitting in the open, exposed to air and eyes. Am I all of these parts? Or am I the bag that holds them?  And after all of those parts have been pulled out, I'll never be able to fit them all back the way they were before. Confronting these questions, lead to the one that was most important- whether writing this essay was worth it.

But nothing like an editor and a lifetime as a people-pleaser to make me persevere!

It was hard. I would start and have to stop many writing sessions, becoming overwhelmed with emotions. But it was cathartic. Every session would have a new breakthrough in store. Regret, disappointment, and strongest of all, fear, would possess me. I would want to run away from my Macbook, but that could not change anything, because it was just a proxy for the parts of me I wanted to continue to hide from or abandon. So, I would come back to my computer, and thus come back to myself- especially the most tender, and at one time I believed, most unlovable parts.

So now, seven months post publishing, the emotion stirred most strongly is gratitude. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you for persevering. Thank you for having hard conversations with yourself. Thank you for choosing yourself (us). And thank you for choosing love over fear.


You can read my essay here.

-Elizabeth

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