The Community Garden Collective

Introduction

In the last year, I've been reflecting a lot on grief and loss for many reasons. There are so many ways to tackle healing from grief and heaps of writing exists on navigating such a complex emotion. What I've come to notice however, is that there is not a lot on grief from the loss of potential. In particular, many of our first instincts is to understand grief as losing something you had, but what about the grief of losing something you thought you had or the grief of something you might someday have.

So much of life's plans don't go as we expect--for better or for worse. I think of the moment I could no longer bear living with the career choice I made and having to contend with acknowledging that I couldn't simply push through. I made the decision to upheave my life and return to school, to undergo a cascade of changes and experiences that were all shades of small-t traumatic. Even though I am writing this after I've "come out on the other side", I can't help but wonder whether I've lost that younger version of me who dreamed of different things. I can't help but wonder who she would've become if the world was kinder to her then. Such upheavals are common. How many of us, mired in academia for most of our lives, are yanked out into the real world and forced to face a new reality of who we must become, for who we are is no longer an option.

If not for career and school, many of us have likely undergone a relationship upheaval or two. Whether you'd had to turn away from friends, cut yourself off from family, or broken off a long-term relationship, each of these moments have a reverberating impact on people.

In each of these moments, our sense of self becomes rattled. We wonder how we came to this point, what we could've done, and what comes next? Uncertain, we may even lose our sense of self. Who are we now that the people, places, ideas, dreams, and ideations that make us us are no longer available to us.

This particular project was inspired by my friend, Chrysanthemum, who made the brave decision to end a long-term relationship. I asked her to write me her story, now that she was on her journey to rehabilitate her sense of self. In solidarity, a couple of us shared our stories too.

Perhaps our stories will remind you of something in your life--a person, a time, a version of you that you've buried in your memories. Perhaps they will inspire you into gentleness as you navigate your own journey. After all, we're all still wondering: where do we go when one version of you ends before another version is ready to begin?

This guide aims to help folks rewrite their own narratives about themselves--restorying, as they say in narrative therapy. The guide is simple: a few stories, a few reflection questions, and a few optional activities to bring your circle into the process. Eventually, I hope to collect a few more stories to show that none of us are alone on this journey--a soft reminder that our stories are constantly being written, unwritten, and rewritten. So, thank you for being here to witness the stories here today.

If this exercise inspires you with a story to share, send me an email at florenceng@protonmail.com.

Stories

The Chrysanthemum Story

I wish I could say it’s a nice day today but it isn’t. It is gloomy; grey clouds looming, the cold mist making me shiver no matter how thick my hoodie is. I feel tired. The kind of tiredness that an 8-hour long sleep cannot fix. The kind that is worn thin by life. I know things will get better but in this very moment they are not. I cannot wait to meet my future self who has it all figured out as she somehow always does.

On paper, I have it better than most. I have a stable and amazing job. I love the people I work for and with. It can be demanding but it is a very rewarding work. I live in a cozy apartment with my perfect cat. My friends are the best support I could ever ask for. I don't even need to ask them for anything. They just show up. Constantly reminding me I am not a burden or a bother, however much the people closest to me made me feel otherwise. But there is this thick melancholy that follows me around. As an eldest daughter, I was raised to be the third parent, to take care of everyone around me, to minimize my needs and wants because people had it worse.

One of the questions my mother posed to me that stayed with me was "why do [I] always find people who use me?". I slowly turned my head to look at her. Shocked. Mouth agape. Somehow, she conveniently forgot. She is one of the first people who used me, who taught me transactional love.

I think that is why I stayed so long with my ex-boyfriend, long after I should've left. Loving him felt familiar in the worst way. I gave and gave until there was barely anything left of me, mistaking exhaustion for devotion. I thought that was how you love someone. I made excuses for the ways he diminished me because somewhere along the line, I learned that being needed was the closest thing to being loved. I thought that when it was my turn to break apart then he would provide the same devotion that I gave.

Even now, I catch myself grieving not him, but the version of me that thought enduring mistreatment was proof of loyalty and genuine love.

It did not start that way though. He was exactly what I needed 9 years ago. He was the person who sat outside the bathroom door while I cried in the tub, sick and exhausted. He knew that was the only thing that would make me feel better.

I held onto that moment, onto that version of him for years. Hoping that same person would show up for me again. He never did when his mother called me a foreigner in front of the whole family. He never came out when my father blamed me for things that I had nothing to do with. That version of him stayed silent while I was drowning in a pool of my own tears.

Instead, I got the version of him that grew tired and sick of me. The one who thinks I am too much. Too difficult. Too emotional. The one who wants me to be palatable. The one who wanted me smaller, quieter, and easier to love. He cared for me only when it was convenient. He loved me only when I asked for little.

He knows how to give the biggest and most comforting hug. I still look for that whenever I am going through the ringer. I liked how we could sit side by side and just share space. Now that i think of it maybe that is us disconnecting long before I am ready to admit it.

I liked how he made me feel wanted. Needed. He asked for help so easily and I gave it just as easily. Slowly, I stopped being his person and became his mother, cleaning up after him, running around making sure he does what he needs to do. That became our default.

No one checked up on me to make sure I am okay. I must be, right? If I have the capacity to be there for him and everyone else then i must be. Someone described me as sturdy but I was not sturdy because I wanted to be. I was sturdy because I was never allowed to be anything else. I was also told that I had it all. That I was smart. Pretty. Optimistic. As though those things somehow made me immune to loneliness.

After spending so long alone in a relationship with him came the most pivotal moment that led me here cry writing this. I was not asking him for perfection. I was asking him to show up for me when my family was taking too much from me. I was asking him to protect me from his own family when they disrespected me in my own house. I just want him to provide me with the same comfort I was freely giving him every single day. Somehow, he could not. He wanted to ask his father whether my recollection of my own experience is correct. He was too burnt out. He wanted to see his friends instead of holding me while I am falling apart. In that moment I realized something deeply devastating. I was completely alone. I was not loved the way I loved. I was useful. A tool. It was transactional all over again.

One year after leaving him, I am still picking up the pieces of my broken self. I am still trying to accept that I am not too much for the right people. I am more than what I could offer. I like my big mouth open laugh that can also be described as me cackling. I like (and also not like) my word vomit and how you can see what I'm thinking of on my face. I like showing up and spoiling my friends. My bad experiences and loneliness do not define me. I know this time next year I will be a better version of myself where I understand that I am allowed to exist without earning it.

The Sunflower Story

I didn’t ask to be changed. I wanted, more than anything else in the world, for things to stop happening to me. I yearned for stability, not knowing or caring what that looked like. For three years, everything felt out of control, and to be honest, I don’t know what held me together. If I was held together at all. I think I carried with me a certain naïveté—I’d gone through one of the worst schooling experiences in my imagination, and I didn’t believe it could be worse. If it were, I was confident that I was older and wiser now, and that I was much better at making friends.

I didn’t expect the housing crises, the relentless onslaught of fucked upness inside the academy, or that I’d be so desperate for someone to take my heart that I’d let the most undeserving woman in the world stomp on it. I didn’t expect to lose my friends. I didn’t expect how much labour it would take not to lose my family too.

Still, it stood to reason that nothing was insurmountable, and in our current state of constant polycrises, I believe deep in my heart that Ayesha Khan is right: hopelessness is a privilege. There was always space for me to be stronger—braver—better. There was work to be done, and I ignored the voice that told me this was unsustainable.

I have a lot of anxiety about dying young, and in this way, I’ve tried my best to live a life without regret. I believe deeply that the experiences you have, the people you meet, and the things you do can all have a beautiful cosmic reason that is beyond the comprehension of our current selves. So, on my good days, I remind myself that everything that happened to me happened for a reason. I am who I am because of those things, and every success or failure is weighed equal in terms of the lessons I learned. Gotta love all of the mind tricks I play on myself.

On less good days, I wonder what happened to that other version of me. The version that didn’t need to work so hard to build a practice of hope, who believed in all the good things to come, who wondered and marveled and loved the world so whole heartedly that it felt like the world had no choice but to love them back too.

I still love the world. I just wish I could feel love reciprocated.

Throughout the last three years, I’ve gained a lot too. I learned I could be braver than I previously imagined. I learned the power of community—I felt finally like a part of a larger whole. Then, the pieces of the whole started falling away. In our closeness, in some cases, we built resentment and lost each other on the way. Somehow, I began to feel like the villain of other people’s story, and it felt like everything I was made to feel belonged to someone else.

Seemingly overnight, I felt alone. Forced to confront all of my mistakes alone. Several people told me to go to therapy. I didn’t have a therapist at that time, and the labor of seeking one felt so immense. I remember fighting back—made to feel as if I didn’t believe in therapy as a therapist myself. I remember just wanting to be fucking asked how I was doing. I wanted to be told it was okay—that we could get through it together. To be honest, the greatest privilege I could think of during that time was to have a shoulder to cry on.

And in that regard, where we are all expected to do our work in our private hollows so we can be presentable for one another, fuck therapy.

I did find momentary reprieve in the therapist I eventually found. She is an amazing somatic practitioner. Still, that did not change the reality I contended with outside the session, and that there is no one to hold me but me. Me, and the lady I sometimes pay to ask me how I’m doing, I suppose. I was told by a friend that therapy isn’t meant to change reality, only build capacity for it, and in that moment where I could not show up for my friends as the person I was, all I heard was the accusation that the person I became was not okay. This version of you wasn’t you, and we don’t want her—she’s too difficult, she’s hard to be around, she doesn’t laugh like she used to. But, of course, it was me. Even now, as I’ve come back to feeling more like myself, I still carry that version of me. She is my raw emotional self that had somehow escaped the closet she’s usually trapped in, a monstrous little thing that no one in the world could bear to look at.

For three years, I wrote and dreamed of all that was possible when we have community, and I still know that to be true. Simultaneously true is the side of me that grew out of pushing monstrous me back into the closet: the weary, cynical side that turns my dreaming into static.

In parts work, we hold all of the tensions between these parts—they co-exist despite the contradictions. Sometimes, because I did not ask for all that happened to me, I’m not ready to hold that wounded part of me, and I don’t want to carry it forward. I worry sometimes that that is all that I am left with now.

And it’s not true that I’ve completely lost myself. I’ve kept a lot of parts that I really like, and I’ve grown a lot in ways that I’m proud of. Even so, the darker parts scare me sometimes—they think in ways that run counter to so much of what I believe in and fight for. In the current leg of my journey, all I can do is listen and notice and keep track of the patterns. For a long time, I waited for some magical moment that would snap my soul back into my body—some kind of reset where I’d wake up as a previous version of me that people seemed to like more.

Now, it’s clear that every iteration IS me. I’m grateful for each of those versions, even the monstrous one, in the ways they’d helped me survive, but it’s also hard walking around feeling like there is a better version of you deep inside that you can no longer pull out. It’s hard still feeling alone, still feeling like people remember you by the monster you once were. Still feeling like people are waiting for you to fix yourself.

But maybe there is something liberating about this too—if you can never be fixed, you can only ever look forward. If you can never become what was, then you can only ever become what you are and what will be.

One thing I know for sure: I will be okay.

The Iris Story

Reflection Questions

In this section, you’ll find a number of questions to help you reflect on the stories. Feel free to simply ponder, write your answers down, or even use them as a conversation starter with a friend.