Haunted by a Former Self

The cover up really is worse than the crime

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then.”

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Tis the season of hauntings. Last week, I was haunted by a previous version of myself, in the form of an old Facebook account under my married name. I think your Facebook has been hacked, the text from my sister read, followed by a screen shot of my old name’s account with an updated AI generated avatar-ish profile pic. I felt immediately triggered around two wounds that felt like gut punches:

1. My married name had so much pain associated with it that I didn’t want anything to do with it ever again after I changed it in 2014. The aversion/paranoia was so strong, that for years following the divorce, I carried around a copy of the decree which showed my name change (and handily, the restraining order).

2. My sister hadn’t noticed in ten years that I wasn’t actually behind that account, despite #1 above. I had felt very alone while I went through several things which are taboo in my family: a divorce, sexual assault, a mental health break down, getting sober publicly, and leaving a conventionally successful career. I now know my belonging wounds go further back, but all of those more recent feelings of being an outcast came back.

However, I realized that when I am triggered, the immediate thoughts are often inaccurate, because the trigger activates the primitive and protective part of the mind. I had to wait a day or so until the root cause of my discomfort surfaced.

I clearly still had work to do to integrate that part of me that I relegated to just a name buried in my past. Name, Facebook account, status in my family? What had I really left back there that was now haunting me?

If you have been following my journal entries from my first year of sobriety, you are starting to see the emotional thawing out after years of numbing with alcohol that took place in that year. Frozen inside that iceberg were parts that had been conditioned since childhood, there were parts created to cope with the conditioning, and parts to cover up the pain of all of that. I have been diligently working on unpacking and sorting these abandoned parts over the last two years.

So if I had done so much work, why was I so triggered over this? I am still working this out, but I think it is because while I cheered on the version of me who was so determined to get sober from alcohol and approval-seeking behaviors, I was keeping the version who barely made it through marriage and divorce muzzled and buried alive somewhere. In Facebook-land, apparently.

Unlike in my first year of sobriety, I didn’t journal consistently during my marriage or divorce. I couldn’t stand having my own feelings, let alone writing them down. I was not equipped to deal with how difficult it was to first be trapped, and then to get free. I sought solace in alcohol, travel, men, joyless exercise, and being thin. So, yeah, I shoved that poor desperate woman aside and left her tears unshed, her voice unheard. If I am honest, I was angry with her/me for years because I didn’t defend myself with my ex, the lawyers (even my own, but that is an essay for another time), and my family. 

I guess I should amend this a bit, because in rereading my journals from last year, when I was doing some healing work, I noted that I wrote a letter to that self of ten years ago, thanking her for surviving. But also, boasting a little about where I am now. Oops. Clearly, I missed an opportunity to allow those repressed feelings to emerge, because that abandoned self sure was ready to rise from her Facebook grave to give me all kinds of feels.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

I want to allow her to rest in peace with the knowledge that she did an amazing job getting us through a treacherous time. To maybe continue the memoir that I started writing last year about that time period. In fact, I think the urge to write about it was not mine at all, but her will to be seen and heard, before I can no longer reliably remember.

I don’t go on Facebook (with my current account, I mean) except to access my recovery and herbalist groups. It is a little eerie to think that there has been another version of me out there, one with many more ‘friends’, on autopilot before being AI’d back to life. On this Samhain, I think I need to post on her timeline a modified version of the quote I opened with:

“Maria [old last name], may you rest as long as I am living. I didn’t mean to kill you, rather to move past our shared pain. Haunt me not, then.”