This has been my week of Doing Scary Things, this blog post included.

One of the things I’m drawn to in stories, both the ones I write and ones I consume, involve characters having to become someone else in order to survive. The most literal example in my work would be Zara Lain.

Exhumed contained three flashbacks: the first follows newly-turned Ana as she hunts the living humans in her old home, ending up at last in the bedroom where her husband (and betrayer) sleeps with his new wife.  The final flashback is when Ana has fully embraced being Zara Lai(ghea)n in 1739, no longer the broken woman she was but now the heroine we (really awesome people with excellent taste) all know and love.

The middle flashback, though, was her turning point, after she slaughtered everyone and had her revenge but knows she’s lost everything she once was:

Ana is gone and I don’t know who I am. What I am, beyond a monster.

But something lingers under my skin, pushing, pushing. Something urges my eyes open, forces my head to lift. I look at the canopy of trees, at the stripe of black that is the night sky. My heart is torn, chest ripped in two, hurting so badly that it surprises me the times I glance down and see it still looking whole. A sob wracks me, anguished cry tearing up to my lips, and my hands clutch my smooth belly, where a babe once grew before being snuffed out.

I could die. It would make no difference to anyone. But still, something is there, a thread so deep I can scarce comprehend it that simply says: No.

No, you will not die here.

It is no god. No devil. No spirit. Perhaps it is my own insanity, but still, it whispers to me.

No.

And then the rain comes.

It patters down, beating leaves and striking my face, rolling down my forehead and into my closed eyes, tickling my parted lips. I let it wash over me, soak me, weigh down my bloody clothes like I’m drowning in it.

I am lost. I am tiny and broken and I can’t imagine a world in which I don’t hurt so deeply, so constantly. I am a weak girl, not yet eighteen, who let herself be betrayed, who could not fight off a vampire when he descended upon her, who relied on her husband and believed the only life she would ever have was as his wife.

But the whispering continues, faint in the darkness. I can no longer be Ana. I can no longer be this demon. I can no longer be a damaged little girl nursing her wounds and contemplating death.

I have to be more than that. And while I do not yet know my name, I know who I need to become.

Although she’s my polar opposite in many ways, this is why Zara’s always meant so much to me. Her ability to become someone else in order to save herself helped save me when I needed it.

*

We adapt and we change all the time to better exist in this world–we’re forced to, interacting with people, learning to navigate life. This is one of the reasons the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot appealed to me so much, to play Lara as she realizes she won’t escape Yamatai and save her best friend unless she becomes someone else–someone less squeamish, more brutal, more daring; a believer and a killer:

In our darkest moments, when life flashes before us, we find something. Something that keeps us going. Something that pushes us. When all seemed lost, I found a truth.

Some wounds leave us scarred but able to continue on. But other times, other traumas, cleave too deep. When you lose your future, part of your identity–when you have no other way of continuing on–you sometimes have to become someone else.

I realized a few months ago that I wasn’t going to survive.

*

We talk about depression as a chemical imbalance, which it is, but it also has triggers. And when you’ve lost everything you’ve ever wanted, and your life is over, what the chemicals are doing in your head is irrelevant; no amount of drugs, even if I was inclined to take them, was going to fix that. I had no hope, no aspirations (I still don’t). For eight months I spent 80% of my waking hours in tears, every day. I didn’t want to get out of bed, or wake up, or breathe; I didn’t want to be alive.

I knew time was running out and depression was going to win. I wasn’t going to survive because there was no part of me left that wanted to.

Several years ago, I was nothing. Literally. Someone spent a decade taking me apart piece by piece until I was a half-person, unrecognizable, and so deeply broken after a trauma that I had to become someone else (like Zara).

So I did. Bit by bit I made a new person. It’s a surprisingly powerful position to be in (regardless of the Hindu accuracy of that post, it’s an excellent point), when you are nothing and have nothing and get to decide who you become. I picked traits of mine I’d always thought–been told–were negatives and learned how to twist them into virtues (with Aunt Judy’s help). I became someone I liked.

But things happened last year that this girl I liked wasn’t going to make it through. And she has to go away now.

I still don’t want to say goodbye to her, or to her hopes and dreams even if they’re all dead now. I mourn her. I’ll miss her. Others will too, and those not super close to me will likely drift away as they don’t find the same Skyla they used to know. But I hit the Depression Event Horizon, and she wasn’t coming back from that.

So I’m becoming someone else. Rebuilding piece by piece, deciding what characteristics might fit and what to discard, picking the qualities that will let me survive and deciding who I want to be. It’s an uncomfortable process, like my skin doesn’t fit right; a physical process as much as it is a mental one. I’m a little colder, a little more distant, a little less patient while I work out becoming the girl who will live through this.

*

The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. So it’s okay, if you ever find yourself in a position like that, to become someone else to survive. The thing you have to realize, the thing I keep reminding myself of when I have no hope, is that you never know how your story is going to end. I look at the things in my life I never in a million years believed would happen–most recently, that I spent the holidays with family who only learned I existed less than two years ago and who have welcomed me as part of their pack–and I am entirely certain, I can promise you, that you just can never know.

But you have to be here to see it.

It’s okay to change and adapt. It’s okay to become someone else. It’s okay to mourn who you were.

It’s okay to survive.

I don’t know yet what I’m becoming, but I think at least I’ll be here to find out–and that’s more than I had a few months ago.