When "I used to be someone else" is all you can think

The thought arrives while your hands are busy. Rinsing a bottle, folding a sleepsuit, waiting for the kettle. I used to be someone else. Six words, fully formed, in no particular tone of voice, and then again on Thursday.

The repetition is the part nobody describes. The loss gets written about at length. The looping does not.

The sentence has a timetable

Mine came when my hands were occupied and my attention was not. Loading the machine. Driving the same four minutes to the shops. The last stair on the way up, in the dark.

It almost never arrived during the genuinely hard hours. At four in the morning with a screaming baby there is no room for a sentence, there is only the baby. The thought needs a gap, and early motherhood is full of gaps that look like nothing from outside.

This is personal observation and not a rule. But if you have wondered why it ambushes you during the calm parts rather than the awful ones, I think that is the mechanism. It needs just enough spare attention to run and not quite enough to be interrupted.

The four hundredth time carries no new information

The first time the sentence arrived it told me something. A true thing had been noticed and put into words, and that was worth having.

The four hundredth time told me the same thing, unchanged. That is what makes it a loop rather than a thought. It never develops, it does not get more precise, it does not reach a conclusion, and agreeing with it completely does not retire it.

I spent a long time trying to answer it, as though it had come to be settled. I would argue back with evidence. I would concede everything and wait. The frequency was unaffected by anything I said, which is eventually what told me I had misunderstood what it was doing.

A refrain does not want answering. It is there to keep something in the room.

The woman I keep comparing myself to has been improving

This is the part I did not expect and have not seen written down anywhere.

The version of me that the sentence refers to has got better since she stopped existing. She is more competent every year. She reads more. She is funnier at dinner, better dressed on an ordinary Tuesday, and she answers emails on the day they arrive.

She has also lost her bad weeks. I cannot picture her tired now. I cannot picture her canceling on a friend because she could not face it, or lying on the floor at half past six because a project had collapsed, both of which she did.

Around my daughter's second birthday I went looking in my sent folder, in the year before my son was born. I do not entirely recommend this, but it was clarifying.

The woman in those emails was rescheduling constantly. She was anxious about work in a low, chronic way I had completely forgotten about. She used the word "exhausted" more times in one spring than I would have guessed she used it in the whole decade.

She is not the woman the sentence produces. She is worse at the things I miss and she is having a harder time than the loop remembers.

Memory is not playback

I am not a researcher and I want to be careful about what I claim here. The one thing I do know about memory is old and well established: Frederic Bartlett, in his 1932 book Remembering, showed that recalling something is an act of reconstruction rather than replay. We rebuild the account each time out of fragments and expectation, and the account shifts with every rebuild.

Which means the woman I am mourning is partly a composite. Some of her is real. Some of her is my mother at that age, some of her is a friend I envied, some of her is a person I fully intended to become and never got round to being.

She is edited every time she is called up, I am the one editing, and I have been editing her steadily in the direction of whatever I currently do not have.

So the sentence, said accurately, would run: I used to be someone I can no longer check. That is a duller line, and it has never once arrived on its own.

Noticing this helps a little

I want to be exact about how much, because this is where a piece like this usually oversells.

Knowing she is partly invented does not stop the sentence. It arrives at the same rate, in the same flat tone, over the same sink. What changed is the second afterwards.

There used to be a slide. The sentence would land and I would follow it down into a comparison I was always going to lose, because I was measuring an ordinary Wednesday against a highlight reel I was assembling myself, in real time, to my own disadvantage.

Now there is a small interruption in that slide. Not a rebuttal. More like recognizing a number that comes up on your phone: I know what this is, I know roughly how long it runs, I know it has nothing new to tell me.

That is a real improvement and it is not a large one. Anyone who tells you that seeing through the comparison dissolves it is describing something that has not happened to me in four years.

When a loop is not this loop

The repeating sentence I am describing is uncomfortable, it is ordinary, and it gets out of the way when something in front of you genuinely demands attention.

That is different from a thought you cannot put down at all, or one that arrives with images that frighten you, or one that has started to interfere with eating, sleeping or leaving the house. Rumination that never shifts, and intrusive thoughts that horrify you, are clinical territory, and they respond to treatment.

I am not a clinician and I cannot tell you which of these you have. If yours does not move, or it frightens you, take that sentence to a GP, a midwife, a child health nurse or a psychologist. That is not an overreaction. It is the thing they are there for.

The only lever I have found is size

I used to be someone else is unanswerable because it is about an entire person, and an entire person is too large to check against anything.

When I got specific, it had less to hold on to. I miss reading for four uninterrupted hours. That one is true, it is checkable, and it turns out to be oddly survivable once it has been cut down to that size. It was also carrying most of what the bigger sentence had been carrying, which was humbling.

The bigger sentence still comes. It comes less often and with less behind it, and I cannot honestly tell you whether that has anything to do with the specificity or whether it is simply what four years does on its own.

What I have not settled

Whether I want it to stop.

That one surprised me when I finally noticed it. The sentence is unpleasant, it is inaccurate, it costs me something every time it runs, and some part of me is unwilling to give it up, because it is the only thing I do that keeps her in the room at all.

If the loop went quiet I think she would go with it. Not the accurate woman in the sent folder, who is fine, who I can look up any time I like. The other one. The composite. The version I have spent four years quietly improving.

I do not know what it would mean to let her go, or whether letting go is even the right description of what I would be doing to her.

So it still arrives, on the stairs and at the kettle, and I have stopped treating each arrival as news. That is the whole of what I have, and it has been enough to be going on with.