#5 Mourning Rituals: Re-Mapping the Self
What does it take to restitch oneself back together? How does one create a roadmap to find oneself? How does one come to know oneself as a new being, scarred, marked by loss, without seeing the old imagined being? How does one emerge, burned from the ashes of destruction, to become a new version of a self, changed through the burning, but somehow closer to the truer version of yourself? How does one go about finding a self, lost perhaps, perhaps never found?
Maps guide us, but the do not determine where we will go. Maps provide information, a world view. One location can have hundreds of maps that explain the viewer and guide them to find what it is they are hoping to find. Maps provide choice, not resolution, certainly not the destination.
Unraveling is the unstitching, the unweaving, the unsewing, the unmaking of something. So what is the opposite? To stitch, to sew, to knit, to weave, to make. Embroidery is the embellishment of something, once it has become “a thing”. It is unnecessary and decorative and bold and colorful. Stitching is essential. Stitching leaves evidence of the passage of time and the passage of the needle. When repairs are made, rarely is the rending not implied beneath the repair.
How does one discover one’s essential self? For me, I often write myself into existence. I don’t know things about myself until I begin writing and then I discover things about myself from what I have written. But what are the building blocks, what is the essence of a self? The body is the house for the self, the shell, the container. The body holds vast information about our experience passing through the world. Joy and memory, trauma and history. Everything gets lodged in the body whether we want it to or not. The body tells all our secrets through scars and wrinkles and birth marks and defects and age and prematurely gray hair, why else would we try and hide it with clothes and make-up and cosmetic surgeries. Our body is both the ultimate betrayer (we all die) but it is also our truest and most honest friend. Grief is housed in the body and the body must must be unraveled, released, and repaired.