On launch day for the World-Changing Writing Workshop, Pace posted a link to the video we made the day we started the Freak Revolution.

I watched the video, which I hadn’t watched in a year.

I was really struck by my face. I watched myself talk, watching my lips, my facial expressions, my own eyes – all with this surreal feeling. Something felt very odd, not quite right.

Then it hit me.

This video is only a year old – but I look much, much older now, especially my eyes. My eyes are stormier, sad, somehow less. As I sat watching my own video, tears slid down my face and I thought, “I’ve lost something. I’ve lost my innocence.”

When I look at pictures and videos of myself from only six months ago, I get the same feeling. When my uterus collapsed, I started dealing with very intense physical trauma – followed immediately by very intense personal trauma, and it hasn’t let up.

This has been one of the hardest years of my life. I’ve spent months in a deep depression. I’ve undergone a massive spiritual crisis. I threw myself into the creation and launch of the World-Changing Writing workshop so I wouldn’t think about it.

But still, this has been here, in my core, swirling around and changing me. Whether or not I admit it, whether or not I deal with it, I have changed.

I have lost something.

And I don’t yet know what I’ve gained.

But, for the first time since this whole thing started, I know I have gained something. Somehow, my life has been enriched by this experience. Somehow.

I just don’t see it yet.