All the Incarnations of You

In praise of remembering who we used to be

They other day my sister and I were talking about all the lives we have lived. All the versions of LaDonna and Johanna (that’s my sister) we have been.

Country girls. Church girls. Midwest girls. Small-town girls. Good girls. Barefoot girls. Horse girls. Farm girls. Hicks. Nerds. Naive. Young. We were so many things, and that was all while we were still bona fide girls.

Then we grew up and paths diverged and our adjectives did, too. We became new versions of ourselves, women versions, parts of us unknown and mysterious to the other.

And now that we’ve reached middle age, we’ve got quite a collection of previous lives in our memories. “Remember when you were so goth?” she says. “Remember when you smoked cigarettes?” I shoot back.

Somewhere I’ve read that to shed your old self is to slough that erstwhile you off like a snakeskin. “You’ve outgrown yourself,” the metaphor goes, “like a lizard, like a snake. The skin that once fit is too tight and worn out. Time to shimmy out of that thing and show off something more shiny and new.”

Preachers especially love to use the metaphor of the snakeskin. “Put off your old self,” they admonish, waving Ephesians about, “be renewed in the spirit of your minds and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness!”

There’s an intimation in this sort of instruction that the old you isn’t worth a whole heckuva lot. Look at all those mistakes you made! This new you is far better. Wiser. Closer to God and all that. Why not leave that empty old shell behind. Let it disintegrate back into dust.

Good riddance.

I don’t believe that. Any of it.

I think your old self is still there. And so is the you before that and the you before that.

All the previous versions of who we used to be, living on inside us one after another like a decreasing stack of Matryoshka dolls.

Outgrown, yes, and perhaps buried deep. But not forgotten, not altogether abandoned. Not set aflame like the bridges we burned to get where we needed to go.

Somewhere beneath my ribs beats the LaDonna who used to frequent goth clubs, still clad in velvet, spinning across a blue-lit dance floor. Somewhere there shines a yellow mid-August where a much smaller LaDonna runs browned and barefoot up a gravel lane. Somewhere waits the LaDonna who has not yet flown on a plane, seen the ocean, owned a passport. Somewhere sits an idealist who believed in Jesus and America. Somewhere growls the feral child who chased fireflies, hid on rooftops to read books instead of washing dishes, galloped bareback on a cream colored Quarter Horse through wide wild fields with the wind in her teeth. Somewhere sleeps the LaDonna who wanted to be a missionary, the LaDonna who wanted to burn it all down, the LaDonna who didn’t want to be a mother, the LaDonna who feared she would die alone and unseen.

I’m not any of those LaDonnas anymore, but I wouldn’t be this LaDonna without every single one of those prior incarnations.

Recently I resurfaced 25-year-old LaDonna. I was digging through old journals for a writing project and oh girl, wow. I’m pretty sure I haven’t read any of these pages since the ink dried…

{Monday, August 11, 1997: I do not understand anymore. Who I am or who I want to be or who I ever thought or hoped or dreamed or said I could be. Yesterday I knew. Yesterday I was sure. Yesterday was fine. Yesterday is gone. Today I am nothing but I feel everything. The sweat of the ink seeping through my pores, the fading ache of knotted muscles on the left side of my spine, the burning, the red burning on the backside of my eyelids, and the lump that is my heart. I feel it. I feel it falling through the vacuum of my soul. My silly soul. Half-empty pessimistic sad sarcastic little soul. So I find these fingers writing now. Writing to escape. Writing to run away, to feel something real. Writing to understand why there are no answers. Only this whirlpool, this black, this falling. This chasm of whys. Frivolous arrogant whys. Writing to ask why I ask any questions at all. Writing to believe I am not alone. Writing to know that I always will be, in some sense, alone. So alone and beating my head into walls I’ve erected to keep myself from beating my head into walls.}

Whew. Yeah. I think that was all about some stupid boy whose name I barely remember. The 20s sure are a vibe, aren’t they? But wait. There’s more…

{Monday, October 13, 1997: I’m feeling the fear of the void again. That fear that I will forever be wanting, and sometimes getting what I want just to find it wasn’t what I thought it would be. If I’m afraid I will always be disappointed, does that mean I’m reaching too high or just feeling too much? It’s not that I’m permanently unhappy. I just feel incomplete. But bitching and moaning accomplishes nothing except to make me feel like a bitch. Which doesn’t help all the other shit I already feel like. I’m noticing I’m repeating myself, scrawling pages and paragraphs of feelings and in the end what do they really amount to? If feelings were truth, what a wrist-slitting world that would be. But if truth were all there was what would there be to feel about? I think I’m just writing to feel the pen move.}

So it goes, page after page after page. A veritable repository of Very Big Feelings. Cringeworthy feelings, if I look back on them from a 20+ year distance.

But I feel very tender toward that young me, bowed beneath the weight of all my angst. So eager for yet fearful of what might await me in the yawning dark unknown.

I feel tender toward all my former selves, even the ones who did stupid shit and thought ridiculous things. Give me 20+ more years of distance and—if I’m lucky—I’ll look back at the LaDonna who is at this exact moment typing these words and I’ll think, “Awwwww, honey. All the things you did not know!”

The best part of this particular journal I was excavating with all its overwrought but absolutely genuine mid-20s sentiment is that the very last entry is about Marido...

{Monday, April 6, 1998: I want to make sure I write this all down because someday I’ll forget, and I have the distinct feeling that this will be important to remember. Although I hope someday when I read this again I won’t think that all I could ever write about was boys. But I had a real date Friday, and by “real” I mean that he picked me up at my house with a rose in his hand… (skip forward after two pages in which I go on and on about the date) I’ve never really experienced anything like this before. I am excited to see where it will go. And it’s odd to not be worried about what that “where” is.}

All these lives I’ve lived, all these people I’ve been—I can’t bear the thought of completely discarding and disregarding them. Maybe that’s why I believe we’re nesting dolls instead of reptiles. That, and the fact that sometimes an Old Me returns to the foreground and takes the stage for a bit.

We lived in Chicago when Marido and I were dating, but on weekends sometimes I’d take him to my parents’ farm 100 miles west of the city. He used to joke that once the horizon was stretched with cornfields instead of skyscrapers, I transformed from Big City LaDonna to Country LaDonna.

“It’s amazing. As soon as we get out of the car at the farm, you start climbing over fences and milking goats and slinging bales of hay around. You just become a totally different person,” he said.

“I’m not a different person!” I protested. “This is just another part of me.”

A quarter of a century later and that farm girl still makes an appearance now and then in the back roads of a completely different country. I’m glad she’s still around. She comes in handy with all that knowledge of rural life.

Speaking of which, I have close the keyboard and go help my neighbor give her sick goat an injection. (No lie.) I’ll see you around…

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