People want to know how you can be certain. How, in the middle of the worst pain of your life, you never once wavered. The answer runs through the person I used to be — and the first thing I have to say about him is that he was not my enemy.
But let me be precise about what he is, because the language can mislead. When I speak of him as a separate person, that’s a metaphor, not a diagnosis. There were never two of us in here. No split, no lost time, no voice that wasn’t mine, nothing I ever mistook for real that wasn’t. This isn’t a dissociative identity and it isn’t psychosis — I want to say that plainly, because the words I’m about to use could suggest it. What I’m describing is something quieter, and I suspect far more common than anyone admits.
It’s what can happen when a child too sensitive for her circumstances is put somewhere unsafe. One of the ways she survives is to stop feeling. She builds a self that can function without flinching — competent, armoured, producing the correct responses from a catalogue rather than from the heart — and she runs the real, feeling self underground, where the danger can’t reach it. The feeling doesn’t vanish. It goes quiet, and the armour takes the front. That armour is what I call the façade. One continuous person, in a very convincing disguise, for a very long time.
I personify him because, after forty-six years of wearing him, that’s the truest way I’ve found to describe what carrying that disguise actually felt like. So, with that understood:
He was built by a very young child, out of whatever was available, because the world was not safe. He began early — six or seven — and he was finished, sealed shut, the year the one safe person in my world died and a twelve-year-old was made to stand at the front of the room and carry it. He took all of it — the fear, the grief, that loss, the years of having no one after — and carried it for decades, so she didn’t have to.
He wasn’t kind. Armour isn’t. He was cold where she would have been warm and hard where she would have been soft, and he hurt people she loved, because that is what armour does when it doesn’t know the war is over. I don’t defend the damage. But I understand the bargain, and I know what it bought: he got her here. Intact. Still warm underneath everything. Still capable, after all those years of suppression, of joy and love and full presence the moment she was finally allowed them.
So when people ask how I stayed certain through the worst of it, this is the answer. I wasn’t choosing this over some good life he’d built. I was finally taking a turn he had spent forty-six years keeping safe for me. He held the place. He waited.
That’s why every day has been a yes. Even the worst ones. She waited long enough — and he made sure she’d still be here when it was finally her turn.
