I listened once again to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking to Oprah about her stroke and how she lost all contact to the person she was before the stroke and was left as an infant in a woman’s body, unknowing who she was.
What struck me were the differences between the two Jills and how I can relate having lived as two of me.
We both like our second self much better than the first and it took her eight years to grow her second self, and then parts of her old self memories filtered in, but by then a whole new her was in its place.
My experience wasn’t quite so dramatic physically, I didn’t have to re-learn how to walk, talk, read and write, but my self -identity was equally destroyed, my past all a fraud.
The me I thought I was wasn’t real and the real me was nowhere and I had to get myself away from the false relationships and places that abused me.
My healing relied on me walking away from family.
Her mother came and mothered her a second time and fully embraced her where she was, an infant who needed to be taught all over again. They mourned the loss of her first self, but never expected the second one to be like the first, but a new Jill.
While they had a second mother and daughter relationship…my mother and I went our separate ways.
In fact my new self and wellness depended upon whether I could separate myself from my family of origin, the family who created the false files.
My old self drew its energy and life from being in the old relationships and in doing all the old behaviors and my new healthy self emerged from walking away.
The tricky spot I was left standing in, was that I knew the old self, and yet the old self was built upon lies, and I had no clue of the new self, but the new self depended upon me walking away from all that I knew.
I had to learn how I grew wrong to then grow correctly the second time.
My whole world crashed around me, and my left hemisphere (the storyteller of who you are) was all wrong and it led me to cling to the right hemisphere where intuition, nature, being, now, artistic, and pictures lived.
While she didn’t understand words, I didn’t trust them.
Dr. Jill spent 8 years connecting back to the Left side and I have spent 6 years disconnecting from files that were all wrong and then filling them with new contents or meanings.
I find it interesting what I have learned from her stroke experience, how the brain works and where the self lives.
What I feel makes a great self is when you occupy the right side most of the time and use the left to communicate.
We both learned that we couldn’t live unattached to the left side, even though the left side was so damaged, we had to bring it back in order to live whole.
Somehow hearing Dr. Jill speak of never expecting the second self to appear like the first, took away an unconscious fighting that had been going on within me that it was almost adultery to accept the new me, like I was cheating on the old self.
My love of my old self and my love of the new self were at odds…it has taken me time to get used to loving the new me, while unloving the old me, if that makes sense?
There is a wistfulness at times when I struggle to do what my new self needs, a wanting the comfort of being used to this new self.
While I see my husband in new eyes, it isn’t him, but the eyes looking upon him.
It is strange to have a new me in an old life and to feel the new self being rejected in places the old self was accepted and it is harder to find confidence in the new self’s love.
This self loves differently, this self sees differently, this self believes differently.
This self was grown from the wisdom that my first self experienced.
I would not be the woman I am today, if I hadn’t lived as the first self first.
As I learned how she grew to be that way, I discovered the real me.
