Excavating Fossils — Digging Up the Girl I Used to Be
Time to get dirt on my hands
I always wanted to be an archeologist.
I pictured dusty me in my khaki shorts and sunburned cheeks on some roped-off site in Egypt or Pompeii with my scrapers and brushes, gently removing time from the relics buried below.
I’d be a cross between Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park and Marion Ravenwood in Indiana Jones — sexy love interest and drinking tolerance included.
Instead, I got my first bachelor’s degree in history, which is kind of the same in its attempt to gather evidence from the past. Though history relies on the narratives of people.
Words.
Whereas archeology unearths the past by digging that shit up, which was exactly what I needed to find the girl I used to be.
Getting dirt on my hands
I couldn’t rely on the historian in me when looking back at what I’d been through — the abusive marriage I’d escaped, the husband who was diagnosed a narcissist, my kids becoming trauma’s collateral damage — because the role of historian was to ensure accuracy of information through the written word.
How could I ensure accuracy when I couldn’t trust any of the words from that time?
