Belonging Through a Metamorphosis of Identity

by Louise Lowrie

It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. — Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

I belong here, as we all do, amongst others but in our own individual vehicle of travel. This is what I now know.

My story started somewhat differently. I came into this world with a sidekick: my twin brother. Two minutes older to be precise. My sense of self was about being part of another in a symbiotic relationship.

However, the journey of forming my identity as an individual wasn’t planned, and it felt like it came from nowhere.

To cut a long story short it happened when my brother decided to get married. It felt like a loss so raw, cutting, deep and wrenching that it was as though I had lost part of me. My other half was still in this world, but I no longer was part of him, nor he part of me.

It was like I had a silent witness by me as I grew up. Until eleven we were at the same schools, and then made our way to college and university in different parts of the world. We had our respective girlfriends/boyfriends, but still he was there; my best friend, my soul mate.

He was the quieter side of me, but he saw me, knew me, accepted me and loved me. He still does but in a different way now.

My brother’s engagement felt like a severing of all I knew in relationship. It felt like a death. So, I struggled. My sense of self and of belonging in this world felt utterly lost. I felt like I was living on this planet while having been sucked into a vortex. So much of what I saw in myself was through my brother’s eyes.

The pain and inability to adjust to such a seemingly natural development in life knocked me. I realized that unconsciously my brother felt like my core, and I suddenly felt like my core had abandoned me. This sense of abandonment was intensified by my brother’s lack of communication and a sudden lack of physical contact. We never spoke of these changes.

It was a natural development; my brother meeting the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. However, I wasn’t prepared; no one had prepared me for this complete psychological upheaval.

The message I internalized was that I was no longer needed in his world. I was therefore no longer seen. I no longer belonged in his life, and so I did not belong in the world. I felt as if I did not exist. That was the story I created. I felt as if there was no way through.

The whole world of psychotherapy would probably label this as co-dependency. Whatever label, it was very real and had grown out of a very innocent, unconscious, womb state.

I now see he was attempting in his silent twin way to draw his own boundaries between us. It was new for him. He had two women in his life, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. He had to begin and create his own identity, a new aspect of himself, but he had to do this separate from me.

This separation made us reevaluate ourselves apart from one another. Of course we had been apart before, but now there was a conscious sense he had a made a decision to part from me, and I needed to accept it.

After the grief began to lift, I felt a sense of bitterness. With plenty of time, and personal work, and a bitter pill to swallow, I have been able to comprehend all this slowly.

I have had to find a new route to belong. I had to unravel the painful mess of my feelings and really look at them in order to understand and create my new identity.

I didn’t realize at the time that perhaps there were other ‘witnesses’ that might support this new quest. Others who had the time to listen and reflect back at me what had been going on in my inner world, in a therapeutic container. The revelation that my brother wasn’t my only witness was huge.

I also began to realize that witnessing and self-work could happen in many different containers. At age 38 I embarked on a child counselling course for children in schools. I was asked to dig deep. God damn it, I thought I had!

Further feelings were triggered and rose to the surface. I realised more than ever ‘healing’ of the soul doesn’t come in one swift move. It can take a lot of shimmying and learning to groove with it all.

Perhaps part of it is time — allowing the space for time to shift and create identity. I have had to navigate this world internally and externally, and I am still learning to do so — to see myself and get to know me.

It has been especially difficult to see myself without the soft filter of my brother’s projections. I now see so much judgment coming from my inner self.

What I am aware of is that as I learn to be vulnerable in a safe space (e.g., a therapeutic environment or whatever it happens to be) of my choosing, so much can change. As I am able to give myself the chance to reveal myself to a witness of my choosing who is accepting of me, it gives my inner witness a chance to be seen by another and accepted. I can then integrate this acceptance into my sense of self and belonging.

As I write this, the image that comes to mind is that of a metamorphic process — the chrysalis is ready to open into the butterfly. It is a constant journey of curiosity, learning to shape-shift from the place of striving for authenticity: belonging here however or whoever we are and however we came into this world.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Louise Lowrie has worked in Montessori child education and independent tutoring. She is now a Homeopath-in-training living in London. She is a believer in magic and being invited to delve deeply into Life’s mysteries.