It’s okay to restart and recreate. Don’t spend time beating yourself up over something that went wrong. There’s always another chance.

I guess this is where the journey of my recreation starts. With me meeting HisLordship and realising that I had a second chance. It definitely took some restarting, and with it came the uncertainty and the fear that it would all go wrong again. The stakes seemed high but it felt right and so I threw myself into something that I knew I couldn’t walk away from. I have not been disappointed. In fact I have ended up with so much more than I ever could have anticipated from that leap of faith in a second chance. It has been a chance to be happy, a chance to love and to learn, a chance for security and safety, a chance for excitement and joy, but most of all, a chance to be me.

It is not only my life which has been recreated, I have been recreated too. I don’t know when I first became lost. I don’t even know if I did become lost or if I was just always hidden but I do know that I knew that I had been found. It was an overwhelming feeling. I was seen. I was known. And he didn’t run away screaming – he picked me up and kissed me and kept me. It is not that I am recommending this course of action, the grass is always greener syndrome. But it was the right thing to do for me and I am glad that I followed my heart and didn’t let that internal voice which would have held me back ring louder than the little squeak that stirred somewhere deep inside when I was around him.

In order to do great things, you must be unafraid to recreate yourself.

Of course the louder voice was my fear. It had held me back and kept me safe for so long and that had worked. It reminded me of who I was. What I had built. It saw me the way that other people saw me – defined by things rather than by feelings. Because we are made of feelings rather than things it told me falsehoods and played on my insecurities. It told me that I couldn’t recreate myself, that I couldn’t be something other. It reminded me of the fear of the unknown and told me to stick with what I knew rather than taking risks. You can’t do great things it said. You need to stay here and be measured by what you have.

But the squeak promised something else. It played with my mind and sent it pictures of a different future. It sent me reminders of the emotions which were so strong they shook my self-control and did strange things to my physical responses. As I fell under the spell it told me that there was more. It whispered of regrets and told tales of a future where I was free to explore things that I had never dared to dream about. It told me to be strong. To trust. To take a chance. It asked what was the worst that could happen and it reassured me that I could cope with that. I was strong enough to be remade. I was wise enough to learn, and with help I could find that lost girl.

Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself – what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.  

And so I jumped with both feet into something that I never wanted to come back from. I leapt as those who are afraid they will turn back leap, high and wide and clear. There would be no going back. I would recreate. I would rework the parts that didn’t work. I would rebuild the parts that had fallen away. I would use strong foundations to make sure that nothing would get in the way this time. And that is what I did – with help of course. For I didn’t feel in love with myself – not at all. I was actually quite detached from myself. I knew myself as a therapist knows their patient, from the outside.

I was lucky – you loved for me. In connecting me to you, you also connected me to me. You let me feel. You recreated me by reconnecting me. You made me whole and with that I became something new. Something different. I became those moments of love and you recreated them for me and with me, time and time again. I became free to explore, to love and to be loved with an intensity and passion I had only dreamed of.  We developed an intimacy that made us so close we became one and our feelings and emotions were no longer individual experiences.

This is our life and we are living it every minute. We love with a passion and we follow our dreams. We create and recreate all the time, focussed on the moments we feel most in love, not as much with ourselves as with each other. We remake the moments from our reality and tap into those hidden in our imaginations. We are moving always forward, building on what is great and taking our chances. We stumble and fall, as is life, but we learn and adapt, leaning on one another as we go. You did this for me. You allowed me to be remade, to become something new, something other, something better.

Prompt #318: Recreate