I believe that our identity begins to form as a small child, and we begin to see ourselves by how others respond to us. If in this lifetime, we are each day drawing our own self portrait, then we would start with some details and add to it as people react and respond to us. Each of our behaviors and choices result in emotions, feelings, and memories. Some are good and some are bad, but every moment adds to the self portrait that is being drawn, layer by layer.
When trauma happens, something breaks within us and we become disconnected from parts of ourselves. Sometimes it feels like it is not our own hand which is doing the drawing of our self portrait, even as we watch what looks like our hand draw and erase it. It feels almost like our hand is being manipulated like a puppet on strings.
I suffered quite a lot of trauma in childhood and then endured more in my marriage. I learned how to dissociate without even realizing it to escape from the pain of what I was going through, which likely relates to the feeling that I had been drawn, erased and redrawn so many times that I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was controlling the pencil, but it didn’t feel that way. What came out on the paper was the person that everyone told me I was, overlaid with the person that I thought they wanted me to be, and the lines would blur together. It’s so confusing and unsettling to be identity confused.
When God gave me a vision of myself as a self-portrait sketch, it was on a piece of sketch paper that was getting frayed and fuzzy from too many years of drawing, erasing, and redrawing over and over. (I think of Jason Gray’s song where he sings, “Order, Disorder, Reorder, over and over.”) My vision of “being erased” showed me the fuzziness and thinning of the damaged paper covered in eraser dust like tiny little dead worms. I held my breath as I saw the portrait of myself in my imagination, because it seemed that it would all blow away (I would all blow away) and scatter if I exhaled a full breath. I was dust, and I didn’t know if any of myself remained under the parts of me that weren’t worth keeping for the next drawing that I continually watched myself create based on everyone’s needs around me.
But then God showed me that I was indeed holding the pencil, and I could start to see myself not as eraser dust on tattered paper, but as the woman who he had lovingly created on canvas with layers of lines, life, tears and smudges adding depth to my eyes. My eyes… no longer dull and sad, they continue to brighten and shine each day that I live.