Becoming

The second season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is considered by many to be one of the best if not the best episode of the entire series. The two-part episode is the climax of everything the first two seasons of the series had promised – Buffy shares her truth with her mother, is forced to choose her calling over her family, makes alliances with enemies, experiences tremendous loss and betrayal, and ultimately sacrifices the love of her young life to save the world (again…she saves the world a lot…it says so on her gravestone).

I cannot claim that my life is anything like Buffy Summers’. I have never had to put myself on the line to defend earth from demons and monsters. I have never battled my way to a homecoming dance or become part of a secret paramilitary organization that hunts creepy-crawlies, or discovered I had a teenage sister after spending most of my life thinking I was an only child. I have done a song and dance routine in a cemetery, but that is a story for a different day. I have never saved the world. The one thing Buffy and I do have in common, however, is that we both lead something of a secret life.

Where Buffy’s secret life is one of necessity (the world can’t know that vampires and demons and monsters are real), my secret life is far more prosaic. I’ve learned through the years that there are parts of me the world at large seems to find abhorrent. In an effort to find community I’ve shoved some of the things I love, the things I believe in, the things that hold value to me, aside. And the more I seemed to “fit in” the less I was able to find a place for these things in my life.

It’s not that I stopped loving them, valuing them, or believing in them. It’s just that I had to ignore them to be a part of the world. Or so I thought.

I’ve realized that the impression that a lot of people have of me has little relation to the way I see myself. Most people don’t know about the things I’ve put away in order to fit in better, nor do they care to find out about them. In the past few years this dichotomy of external-self and inner-self has become untenable for me. I’ve been trying to find a way to put my pieces back together. There have been some successes (true crime/criminal psychology being chief among these) as well as failures (John Philip Sousa, anyone?), but I think I am more myself today than I have been in at least a decade.

In a way, I feel like Buffy in “Becoming Parts 1 &2.” I’ve shared my truths, chosen my path, found unexpected allies, experienced loss and betrayal, and sacrificed things I love in order to be who I’m meant to be (to save my world). I’m not whole yet. I’ve got a lot of change to still go through, a lot of challenges still to face, a lot more me to integrate into my everyday life, but I’m becoming myself again.

And just like Buffy, it’s hard, painful, complicated, and it might force me to change everything. But…it’s what I need to do. It’s what I am doing. I’m becoming me.