When my mom died, and then a few years later when my dad died, I was told that I would “never be the same.” I would always nod, smile, and accept what was being said to me, without pausing to think about the actual implications of the phrase. Sometimes when something is so cliche, so colloquial, and so overused, people think less about what they are saying. Only later, by which I mean a couple of days ago, did I pause and wonder, what is “you’ll never be the same?”
Part of me wants to make a long list of everything in my life that has changed since both my parents’ deaths. I had this clear ideal of who I was, and what I was going to be. Life was planned out like a blueprint, complicated but practical. I am not a college graduate like I wanted to be, nor am I on track to become a Constitutional Law professor. That isn’t me now, and those aren’t my priorities. But am I not the same person, maybe with a different outlook?
Telling someone that they will “never be the same” bothers me, because it implies that whoever they were before the traumatic event, will be erased forever. I like to think that I am still myself, just changed. I have experienced significant loss, so I view the world a different way. I recently read about something called “post traumatic growth.” I do not purport to be an expert on the topic, but it stuck with me because I related so strongly. After a trauma, sometimes interests shift, and people can develop new passions and pursue new ideas. When my mom died, I took on a great interest in politics, and I even interned on a presidential campaign at the age of seventeen. Several years later, however, when my father died, my path shifted. The knowledge that I prided myself on having faded, and I felt lost. I wondered what I would become, what I should become, and why I couldn’t focus on what I used to love. In that way, I was not the same, and probably never will be.
I know that my fifteen year-old self would look at me now in horror. So much has changed. So much hasn’t. I still love Norah Jones, and have five of her albums on my phone. My work ethic is still strong, and so is my sense of responsibility. I still love too deeply and hate too strongly. I definitely have continued to overuse commas, I just love commas, who doesn’t?
Today my focus isn’t on what I can become, it is on who I am. No matter what I have been through, all the identities that I have gained and then shed, I am still the same. I am still Alice. I might even argue that I’m who I was meant to become.
I’m forever changed, but will always be the same.