Claire v Cassie
Back home there is a young woman stuffed inside my dresser, haphazardly tucked away in my cluttered one-bedroom apartment. She’s soft and malleable, wrinkling away like a child’s blouse in a consignment shop.
Sometimes I’ll open the drawer to let her gasp a much overdue deep breath, taking her out long enough to re-memorize her facets and the weight of her in my palm. I hold her tightly on the nights I spend alone, and leave her dusted with shimmer, stranded amongst false eyelashes and hair rollers and my half-empty glass of wine.
But between bets and Old Fashioneds I remember her, my heart quickening as if I left the oven on back home, planning my exit strategy to go let her out. But more martinis are served, more false promises snare me, and she becomes forgotten by the time I agree to the afters.
I, at one point, relay these facts over breakfast at midnight, which begs questions I lack the answers to and concern that makes me squirm. “I didn’t mistreat her, I just grew out of her,” I object. But the brown eyes before me soften, sensing my sensitivity, and drops the subject, for now.
At times I think I can hear her begging me to leave, to stand up for myself. I confuse her for my precocious inner child, though, always hesitant and twice as desperate. Tsk Tsk. One day her naivety will get the best of her; it’s good I’m the one to sit at the big kid’s table.
Yet something about others’ concern for the young girl I’ve abandoned finally starts to nag at me. Do I even remember her name?
“You see, I had this little arrangement in the past that if someone truly knew me, they could call me Claire. Otherwise, they were on Cassie probation until further notice.” I repeat my overused rule to my therapist, who waits a beat longer than I expect before saying anything at all.
But by now my old parlor tricks have grown tired, boxed up with other outdated habits and former ways of thinking. I’m nearly 27 and finally coming to understand what my ego death looks like. Somewhere between another client crisis and another situationship, I ran out of energy. Every identity, habit, thought process I’d so carefully assembled began asking something of me I could no longer give.
It was freeing at first - to not carry the weight. But no one warns you on what to do when you finally have the wherewithal to not (text him back / tie your self worth to your corporate 9-5 / compare yourself to HS mean girls / etc.), but lack a new, healthier habit to replace it with. What is my identity if not the anxieties and insecurities and masks I so carefully relied upon? If I strip that all away - who would I be?
It pains to me admit, but it took me a while to realize that that young woman and I are one and the same.
It was scary at first - to make the realization, let alone to put action behind it. Being vulnerable in front of a crowded room felt easier than being honest with myself. To open the drawer and face “core me” was a confrontation I dreaded. Yet, as with all identity crises, I reached the point of no return; it felt incongruous to return to the facades I had so meticulously crafted because they simply were not me.
The young woman in the drawer was a lot more forgiving and welcoming and comforting than I had anticipated. That’s the thing about being a child - she hadn’t yet learned to be resentful.
Part of me now winces when comparisons are made to her. I’m told I’ve glowed up - but she and I have the same eyes, the same freckles, the same dry sense of humor. She was quiet where I’ve become louder. While she was reserved, I’ve leaned into a secret brazenness I never knew she had. She is younger, but a bit more wiser. If only I had opened the drawer to begin with.
So she’s out of the dresser and finally sitting at the big kids table now, interjecting with random fun facts as her cackle ricochets through the room. It’s not lost on me the humor in it - how hard I strived for perfection, to be liked, accepted - for it to not really serve me in any way in the end. Time stripping me bare led me back to who I was before the heartbreak, bullying, glow ups and likes. I was a child until I tried to fix it, before realizing there wasn’t anything to fix to begin with.
“You’re really different than you once were,” I’m backhandedly told. But in a way, it kind of feels like coming home.