My Imaginary Time in Witness Protection

I finally figured it out. When I first moved here five months ago I thought that my main problem was exhaustion. I had been working long hours, living various places, and moving heavy things for months before the move. I would be happy here just as soon as I got caught up on sleep. Or as soon as I got finally got unpacked, or found the right drapes and got them hung.

After a few weeks, I realized that my restlessness wasn’t just caused by fatigue. I had left friends and family a thousand miles behind. I had no cell phone coverage and no land line. I knew no one here, and no one I knew had ever been here. I’ve died, I thought. This feels like I’ve died. Well, my husband was here with me, equally discombobulated. Maybe we’d died together? Scenes from the movie “The Sixth Sense” kept running through my head. Was it possible?

I looked out the window and saw the gorgeous mountains and bright blue sky and amended my assessment. Clearly if I’d died, I’d gone to heaven, whatever that was, and I should be happy. There were reportedly far worse alternatives. But I still just felt confused and disconnected. Being in heaven didn’t turn out to be such a great thing.

I was also unemployed, by choice, and this should have made me wildly, deliriously joyous but it didn’t. I had hoped to write for forty to sixty hours a week, but the open expanse of time was overwhelming and for the first time in my life I could barely write for an hour.  I signed up for yoga classes mostly for an excuse to get dressed, look at a clock, and get out of the house. The yoga turned out to be wonderful on many more levels, and one day one of the wiser instructors managed to give me a key clue to my dilemma.

“Today, let go of whatever it is that defines you, to you,” the instructor suggested.

That’s it! I almost said it aloud. What defines me to me! It was my job. Rather my profession and all the people who knew me as such. It was where I had lived. It was the places I liked to go, for lunch and ice cream and shopping. It was the clothes I wore to work and my habits and the way I lived my week and now all of that was gone.

It made perfect sense. I’d come to define myself by a fairly shallow set of behaviors and now that I had none of them, I needed to redefine me and I wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it.

I’ve gone into Witness Protection, I thought. Nice home, just enough money, and none of my old self to fall back on. No one knows me here, or knows what I can do. I’ve lost myself and I need to make a new me.

I mean, being in witness protection is an amazing opportunity if you think about it.  You get to leave a lot of baggage behind. You can be nicer, more fit, interested in birds or herbs or any old thing you want and no one is going to ask “What’s gotten into you?”

A little bit of looking around established that a lot of people of all ages have moved to this area, and some have taken on some amazing challenges once they did so. Who knows what they were like before. I could redefine me too.

What do I want to be? Well, I am and always will be a writer and now that I’m making sense of the void that intimidated me at first, the writing ought to come more easily. But writing will also always be a solitary part of me, and it’s the social, interactive parts that are needing the fleshing out.

I’d already taken steps to reconnect with loved ones.  I’d gotten a new cell phone carrier with coverage at my house. Some friends and family came to visit and that helped and now I’m making plans to visit some of them. But I had to figure out what else defined me besides a connection with those who will always be close to me.

Well, I want to help people; I want to put something back for all the good fortune that I’ve had. So over the last week I’ve found four or five volunteer opportunities I’m excited about and looking into. It turns out that I don’t like being broke or never working as much as I though I would, and it looks like I’ve also found a chance to work a day and half a week. The money and the structure will help. Better and better.

I already like the ways I’m starting to define me as me, to me, and once I’m comfortable enough I won’t be in witness protection anymore. I’ll just be Sherrie, the lady who works from home on her computer a little and volunteers over there every week and writes books on the side and does a lot of yoga and seems very happy in her new life.

(Read more at “My Imaginary Prison Time“)