Looking for the real me

Where has the real me gone?

There is a stranger looking back from the mirror at me, she has a haunted, tired look, like someone who has forgotten what it means to be happy. It is not a person I recognise, this stranger staring at me.

Why can't things be like before? Will I ever be happy again?

I cry tears of frustration and despair when I look in the mirror, searching, hoping that one day the real me will be looking back, but part of me knows that things have gone to far for that. My sense of me and what it now means to be me is snarled up in a mess of negativity.

I am looking for a way to cut myself free.

The sun is shining but it feels like it is raining deep inside my heart, when did summer so suddenly become winter?

Where is the warmth that happiness brings, more than that - where is happiness and why has it abandoned me?

It's a cold and lonely road to traverse when you feel that sadness rides on your shoulder chasing the good things away, its weight bearing you down.

I want to love the new me but she's an awkward child to love; difficult to look at and even harder to call my own. She desperately needs me to love her but I am struggling to look at her, let alone embrace her as mine. This is a new relationship, all raw edges and hard choices and I struggle to do the right thing.

What is the right thing and where do I go from here?

I look in the mirror again. 

Yes I know that woman. 

Older, sadder, worn and weary, one day soon I will have to call her my own.