Your Eight-Year-Old Self Knew What She Wanted. Find Her Again.

THE RENEGOTIATION DIARIES

By Lyn Smith Gregory

At my first NYC party, I dressed to fit in, sipped the offered glass of wine, and held a cigarette to calm my nerves. I looked the part, like I belonged, in my thigh-high black boots and mini-skirt, my careful, made-up, nonchalant face. But when a handsome stranger asked me about myself, innocent cocktail chatter, I froze. Went completely blank. Lost any sophistication I was attempting. Stunned, I realized I simply didn’t know what to say.

Who was I without my ex-Mormon, heretic identity? I had no sense of how to describe myself to the questioner. I truly didn’t know who I was without my prior identity, which I intended to keep a secret.

I fled Utah for NYC, sight unseen, after leaving the Mormon Church at nineteen. As the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, its founder, I was hoping to find anonymity and outrun my family legacy in the iconic city of reinvention. I’d adopt the mannerisms, style, and beliefs of its native inhabitants and become a New Yorker. That didn’t work out, by the way.

The self I was performing had no content. The self I had abandoned at nineteen did, content I hoped to shed, like a snake sheds an old skin.

So, who am I now?

The question comes for people leaving high-control religions. It comes for people getting sober. At the end of a marriage. The loss of a child. Anything that catapults you into new and unfamiliar territory. It can feel like devastation or like freedom, but it is almost always disorienting, the vertigo of looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing the person looking back.

Maybe the question is not who you should become. Maybe the question is who you already were before the religion, the drinking, the marriage, the career, or whatever else made you someone else.

GO BACK BEFORE THE TAKEOVER

The most direct route to your essential self runs through your childhood, specifically, through the version of you that existed before the religion claimed you, or the drinking started, or being a mother consumed you. Eight, nine, ten years old. What did you love then? What made you lose track of time? What were you curious about before curiosity got managed or extinguished?

It is reconnaissance, not nostalgia.

The things that absorbed you at eight were not random. They are data about who you are at the level underneath socialization and survival. The child who read everything about Anne Frank or Arctic explorers. The child who took apart the toaster to see how it worked. The child who wanted to bike over the other side of the hill. That child is still in there, waiting with considerable patience for you to come back.

Ask the people who knew you then. Ask your mother, a childhood friend, a sibling. “What did I love as a kid?” You may be surprised by what they remember that you have forgotten. You may also be surprised by how quickly you recognize yourself in the answer.

“Mom? What was I like as an eight-year old? Was there anything I was crazy about?” She paused. “Hmmm...well, I was surprised at how obsessed you were about horse books. Black Beauty. The Red Pony. Misty of Chincoteague. You read everything you could lay your hands on. While practically ignoring your own horses in the corral just outside. I couldn’t figure it out.”

I was transported back to my reading spot, the window seat in my bedroom, eagerly devouring a new horse book. Books that showed the private bond between a young girl and a perfect horse, one that only she could tame. Nothing like our three horses: Pinto, the old, tired mare who wouldn’t ever gallop, Smoky, the gray Shetland pony who always tried to scrape you off him on a fence, or Dorkie, no explanation needed. My reality wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted passion. I wanted adventure. I wanted more. And I got my first clue about who I am underneath what I became: the dutiful, high-achieving, obedient Mormon girl.

I also wanted a project with a completion date, but it doesn’t work that way. It spirals and surprises. The path back to yourself is rarely straight or fast, and it tends to happen sideways, in a sentence that catches you off guard, in the thing you found yourself doing for two hours without noticing, in the moment you stopped performing and felt somehow solid.

Last week, I gathered with girlfriends in the mountains and watched the stars come out, sitting around a fire pit, listening to old rock ballads, tired from an afternoon of horseback riding. No glass of wine. No cigarette. No thigh-high boots. No pretending. Having a sense of myself as transparent, that my insides line up with my outsides. Integrated. Comfortable just being me. And knowing who she is — not fully, not permanently, but I recognize her now.

The eight-year-old you wanted something from life. Go back and ask her.

What did you love before life told you what to love? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.