Missing pieces

"When you love something, every time a bit of it goes..
you lose a piece of yourself."

----- Jodie Foster in "The Brave One"


And the greater the love you have for what goes away, the bigger the piece of yourself you lose. The point isn't whether you *should* have loved the person or thing.. just that you did. And if many people or things leave .. one right after another .. you lose a *lot* of yourself.

You have to work with what you have left. And the people you know may not recognize what's left of you - you don't seem the same to them. That's because you're not. Some of what they knew of you is gone, and they see you compensating for that loss with what remains, plus what you slowly add to yourself to make up for the loss. You change - and they see it. But they don't know all the reasons why.

Since the end of 1999, many things I loved, for right or wrong, and some people I loved, have gone away. And some of the new that I've added (for right or wrong) - have also left, have come and gone. I've gained (for a while).. and lost again. I really haven't gotten used to what I'm missing and all the new parts yet. The changes (some gains, mostly losses) have just kept coming - too fast to adjust well. It's like swapping out styles of artificial limbs before you really learn how to use them. It'd be good if everything just got stable for a while, and I could gain some self-mastery again - this time over the revised me.

I'll never be the same as I was - the losses are too big. But maybe the new version will be an acceptable susbtitute for people. I'll certainly have to learn to accept it, won't I?