I’ve got a bit of a conundrum lately, it seems to be a side effect of the death of my marriage, I no longer have any idea who I am. I was with the Ex for seventeen years, seventeen, that’s a really long time. I’ve been his girlfriend, his wife, the mother of his children…. for so long that I have no clue who to be without him. More often than not, when you’re married, you mesh with the other person, each one spending a good portion of their time thinking about the other, their wants and needs and would likes, how to make them happy, how to move forward with them, each one slowly losing their individuality, their identity, becoming a hybrid, a bit of the old a lot of the other.

So now not only do I need to learn how to live my life without him, how to be a single (most of the time) parent, how to be my own woman, I also have to figure out who and what I am.

Who am I?

It’s a hard question to answer.

I’m forty years old, I’ve been many things in these forty years, but who do I want to be now? I’m about half way through this life I’m living, this one life I’ve got to live, and I don’t know where I go from here. It’s frightening, and exciting. I get to make decisions for myself, but I don’t know what myself wants. So where do I go from here?

I won’t go anywhere from here until I figure out who I am, independently from all the other things in my life, just me. It takes time, I’m told, but apart from that I’m not sure I know what else it takes. Do I have what it takes?

I’m not used to all this self doubt.  I thought I was good at self reflection, but in reality now I wonder if I’ve acutally ever done it. Am I over thinking? Should I just live and see where I go? I don’t know. All of the certainties, all of my foot holds, the ones I’ve painstakingly created in my life till now are crumbling beneath my feet. It’s destabilizing, and it’s scary. Can I be a person without him?

I have no answers now, just lots of questions. I hope these questions lead to something, because I’m ready to be me, whoever she may be.