By Jenna Levin
Earlier this year, I read The Crane Wife, a spectacular essay by CJ Hauser, documenting how she broke off an engagement to a man who did not see her, and how she finds herself on the Gulf Coast, observing whooping cranes, and how she re-discovered the self she had lost, and it made me feel so…wistful. Sad. Familiar. That familiarity- how relatable it was to military life- is what made me so sad.
My husband is nothing like the man in the essay – he’s always been my biggest fan, cheering my accomplishments with lots of exclamation points in e-mails from half a world away, even if I think my accomplishments don’t really matter that much, as I was always led to believe that they didn’t. His career had to come first, I was always told by older spouses. You’ll have time after his retirement to fulfill your own dreams, I was always reassured. At 19, a newlywed with a lot of dreams of my own, twenty years was forever to wait.
What was I supposed to do in the meantime?
When I told him that one of my essays was accepted for publication, he said that I was the only one surprised- he’d always believed my writing was worthy of being shared, and he’d known that for years. I never shared his optimism in me for myself. After being told for so long that you don’t matter, that your thoughts, your opinions, your dreams, don’t matter, you start to detach. You compartmentalize, you rationalize, you gaslight yourself, you tell yourself that your idea was ridiculous anyway, that nobody cares, and you convince yourself that your own needs are selfish, silly, unnecessary, because they don’t matter to anybody else but you, and who are you, anyway?
I am both the fiancé in the article and the author. I let myself fade into the background in front of my own eyes, and I did nothing to stop it from happening. I followed frantically behind myself, trying to collect the shattered fragments of my heart, trying to catch my soul in a jar like a firefly while my husband’s career flourished and our walls became full with framed Navy Achievement Medals, sailor-of-the-month awards, and unit commendation certificates, but it was hopeless. I disappeared like the Cheshire Cat, piece by piece, until nothing but my own eyes, staring reproachfully at me from the darkness, were left. Those eyes followed me for years, sometimes silently observing, sometimes watching me sadly as my mental illness swallowed me whole, as if to ask, “What happened to you? Who are you?”
I was always told that in military life, nobody cared what I had to say, so I just shut up and, to borrow from Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club, desired nothing, swallowed other people’s misery, ate my own bitterness. But eventually that bitterness began to poison me, and I saw myself slipping away. To lose who you are, to convince yourself that you don’t deserve to need, is to slide into a type of hibernation, collapsing exhausted after circling for hours, lost in a blizzard, helpless to stop the snow violently swirling overhead, the wind screaming in your ears, over your own screams, as it swallows you whole.
To slowly find out who you are, who you have always been underneath the layers of hurt that you’ve swallowed for years, to dig through the layers of ice and snow surrounding your own heart and begin to heal, is to wake up frostbitten after being at the mercy of nature for too long. It’s digging yourself out of the snow, gasping for air, as the light hurts your eyes. It’s the searing pain of your body thawing out when you get to safety at last. You have to re-warm yourself slowly so you don’t cause permanent damage to your extremities, but you wobble to your feet eventually. You take a couple of steps, feel your own heartbeat, and as you thaw, as you heal, as you open your mouth to speak to thank your rescuer, you see that set of eyes that’s been following you for years. You see the shattered pieces of yourself that you thought were gone forever, your very soul, coming back together- scarred and weary, but intact, ready to tell the world what you need, unashamed.
Who am I? I’m still figuring that out, but it’s good to be out of the snow.