At some point in life most all of us will experience loss. And when it happens, it will change our thinking.
We’ll yearn for a do-over…to listen to someone we didn’t listen to and appreciate something we didn’t appreciate. We might also think that if we could just go back and be a better version of who we were then maybe everything would be okay, again.
The thing is, we can’t really recover. All we can do is rebuild our lives and move forward.
That Friday, a few months before my eighth birthday, I climbed on to our ungrounded washing machine and held my feet under the running water in the nearby sink. I set off an electrical chain reaction that stopped my heart. When I came back I was different, the shock had erased my memory of myself and left my family with a child they didn’t know.
For years afterward I tried to be the person they remembered, because I knew that they loved her and I wasn’t sure that they would love me…the new me.
In 1997, looking through my old hospital chart notes, I read the words, “Lisa should have a full recovery.” I felt sick. Recover? How could they think that I’d get back what I’d lost?
Back then, I must have thought this too because I had spent years trying to be who I used to be. But somewhere along the way I’d also given up. I guess I really knew the answer. It wasn’t until I read those hospital chart notes when it all came together – that trying to recover only sets us up for failure.
Now with my clients I never help them recover, at least not in the traditional sense. It feels cruel. So I help them grieve the loss of who they were, before it happened, whatever it was.
I learned the hard way that whether or not you are the picture of health, you cannot be who you were yesterday because recovery is an unattainable status.
You’ve lived another day full of new insights, conversations, experiences, thoughts and ideas. In many ways you are you because of what happens in your life.
I hope you’ll forget trying to recover who you were so that you can see who you’ve become.