Not The Same Person

During later no contact, you may start confusing people. You start changing so much. People don't know what to make of you. I am confusing people lately.

The deconversion is just one layer, there's other layers too. I don't act the same, the people pleasing vaporized. I got a bigger mouth on me. I feel less afraid of everything. Life still has problems don't get me wrong--I have been sick for two months straight. Whatever flu is spreading nation wide, it lasts a lot longer. It's scary to be sick all of December and then all of January after recovering from the first illness. Religious me would have seen God as punishing me, scientific me, figures when they are warning of nation-wide flus maybe I should start wearing a mask when I go out. The second go around has given me extreme exhaustion. Grief over lost friends is affecting me too especially with those who have died.

Overall, it's strange. I feel like I am backtracking to the old me, when I had my first no contact and rebelled. I think then I was crawling out of the cage, but then due to trauma, got locked back in it part way. I was trying to become the person I wanted to become and then went back to trying to become what would be "accepted". I had gone metaphorically back to sleep under the pressures of low contact. I still wanted to earn their love, their respect. I hoped my life would "turn out" and I lived for the fantasy of a day where I would have a family who loved me.  The book Women Who Runs With Wolves may have said I became like the Little Match Girl with all the power inside suppressed.  This probably took me into extreme religion, all those years of trying to become "acceptable" and digging myself into a hole of repression and like a cage.

With my husband--things are fine, he always got the "real me". The "real me" is who I am returning to find.