Removing The Covers

Imagine an old room, in an old house, with hardwood floors barely visible under inches of thick and stale dust.  Old pieces of furniture covered with white sheets that appear grey with the passage of time are placed sporadically throughout the room in a fashion suggesting, that just maybe, someone used to live here once.  That room… that place… is this blog.  In the corner is the sleeping, shrunken giraffe that lays missing and forgotten, hurt, emaciated, and unsure if it will ever be who it was before.

I walk through the room, leaving dusty footprints in my wake, and an emotion wells up from the depths of my being and catches in my throat.  And, it is this emotion which calls me to the drawn window shades to force them open.  Piercing white light blinds me and wakes up the giraffe in the corner of the room.  The giraffe looks at me, and I at her, and we finally admit to the thing we never wanted to admit: that I am the Giraffe and she is Me.

I, the stronger of us, helps my other self up and together we reach for a dust-laden sheet closest to us.  We pull it from the furniture with a fury, dust filling the room and swirling in the streams of light falling across the Room  We have uncovered a bright, crisp, and clean sofa that brings us back to the place we both knew well.  This sofa, so vibrant in it’s life, is where we used to be one together – where we explored everything that was meaningful, exciting, depressing, and everything in between.  At least it was that way until everything shattered.

I left the shell of myself in that room when I closed down this blog almost 4 years ago.  I tried to erase the Giraffe and I attempted to become something different.  I recognized that blogging was a part of me that could never really go away, so I took (what I thought) were the best parts of me and started over.  I wanted to become a new person, but I was the same blogger.  And I continued my journey in another domain.  It worked for a while, until I realized that I missed the giraffe and without her, my passion was just not the same.

In reality, the circumstances surrounding the shutdown of this blog broke me.  It has taken me 4 years to recover from all the aspects of those events and most days I am amazed that I survived and am at the point where I am ready to open back up.  The truth is that I was never the same.  My writing dwindled and lacked the fiery nature that it had before.  There may be parts of myself here that I am less proud of, or even ashamed and embarassed about.  But it doesn’t change the fact that it is me.

For 3 of the last 4 years I blogged under a different identity here.  I chronicled my struggles, my strengths, and my attempts to start over, even without the part of me that lay dormant in the corner of this dusty blog.  For the past year I lost my passion for blogging, but not a day goes by where I don’t think about it and realize how much I am missing by not embracing the part of me that loves to write.  Writing, in any capacity, is part of who I am and it was wrong of me to let people take that away from me.

I wanted to wait a few more months, until I finished residency, to bring myself back to this blog for two reasons: 1. I am currently studying for my licensing exam and have very little time to actually commit to blogging right now, and 2. I thought it might be best for my debut to coincide with a new chapter in my life.  But something kept pushing me to do it today.  And so here I am.

Today, Agatha Ann rescues The Cranky Giraffe, and two worlds that were unfairly separated will again become whole.