#1: Honestly, who am I?

An essay on identity following loss. Welcome to the GRIEF AND MEDIA PROJECT!

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I’m in an incredible support group for people who have also lost both parents, something I would recommend to everyone. Not the losing-both-parents part, but the incredible-support-group part. This month, we briefly landed on a discussion about identity and how you sort of lose everything after losing someone—your sense of self included. 

I realize this questioning of your identity isn’t something unique to people who experienced this sort of grief. I was hanging out with my best friend who has both parents in her life, and we discussed what our identities were outside of our jobs. I decided I deeply resonate with being a writer, a social butterfly, a creative, a daughter. But if that’s truly my identity, what happened when I was all consumed by grief and couldn’t write, didn’t have energy to socialize, felt as though I wasn’t creating and literally didn’t have living parents anymore?

I think, from the start, I’ve put a lot of stock into my identity. I remember being in elementary school and telling a teacher that I wanted to be a journalist. She got me a journal and encouraged me to write, as did my writer parents. I wrote books about my Webkinz and pretended I was Giuliana Rancic while watching red carpet interviews. At the end of middle school, I decided I had been a little more reserved and quiet than I meant to be over the previous three years. That wasn’t who I was, I determined, and I would be more loud in high school since I identified as a loud, outgoing person. And so I was. When I was nominated for class clown my senior year (but didn’t win, mind you), it felt right. That’s who I am, I thought, so I’m glad others can see it too.

Despite losing my dad in high school, it felt easy for me to continue showing the world the person I was, especially in the confines of who I am in school. The first time I really started to question my sense of being was when I graduated college—I no longer was this sort of person in this particular major at this university involved in this organization. I just was. And that was scary to grapple with. But I had a plan of who I was, and I ended up being that person for a little more than a year—a woman in her 20s living in Los Angeles and working in entertainment. While I fulfilled the plan, the plan didn’t fulfill me. It felt all wrong. I was deeply unsatisfied with what I’ve taken on as my identity, and I felt like the only way to make the situation better was to assign myself a brand new identity centered around my career, and quickly. Okay, easy. I was going to become a sex therapist. 

Reader, it was not easy. The pandemic wore on those plans, and getting furloughed from my other jobs and not being around people in real life meant scrambling to find a new identity. Of course, all the loss around me meant grieving the loss of my dad stronger than I ever had in the seven years prior. I had nothing to do but confront his loss head on. Amid this, I realized how much this constant search for my identity was all due to a need for control I had. It’s the tale as old as time: You don’t have control over losing your dad at, say, 17, so you’re under the delusion that you can control all other aspects of life.

Then my mom got diagnosed with cancer, and any other mistaken sense of control went completely out the window. And when my mom died eight months later, that was it—the Alex Piscatelli I had come to know over the last 25 years was not there anymore.

The craziest part about grief, besides literally every single part of it, is how much it can change your physical being, too. Picture this: my mom is dead, so is my dad, I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know how to talk to anyone anymore, I can’t even pick up the phone to text my sister back, AND now I don’t fit into any of the jeans I’ve worn the past six years and my 10-step skincare routine can’t help my face full of acne and I don’t even look like myself. I ended up getting diagnosed with PCOS and Graves’ disease, two newfound pieces of my identity I’d never be able to share with my mom. 

I didn’t look like myself, and when getting together with people that first year and a half, I didn’t know what to say. I, the person who decided she was to be the life of the party no matter the party at 13, felt like I couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone. 

I was desperate for people to know that I was in a fog of grief, without me having to actually say it. I still am, I think. It’s like that meme of the guy in the corner of a party thinking, “They don’t know I’m insert-whatever-you-want-the-meme-to-say-here.” I’m constantly in the corner of life, thinking, “They don’t know I’m longing for something that I can never have, for my parents to be here and a world where I never had to see them in pain.” But I need them to know! I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want anyone to ask, but I want people to know—I wished it would just reek off of me, that you could just click a link to my brain in real life and see a bio of the trauma I’ve been through. Without that, people didn’t know. Or maybe they did, but it felt like I had to be a version of myself people had always known. 

Which raised the questions: Do only a select few people even know me? Are my mom and my husband Jack the only ones who will ever really know who I am? Even my dad only knows up to 17-year-old me, but not 18-through-27-year-old me. Who am I? How do people see me? Are those the same thing?

I’m someone who loves watching the sunset, and I like to put together an outfit as much as the interior design of my apartment. I love to dance, and I’m into making playlists and listening to podcasts about reality tv shows. I strongly identify with my Taurus sun/Gemini moon/Leo rising placements, and Jack said I would be a fire bender if I were in Avatar. I can’t go to bed without having a dessert, nor can I go through my day without a few more. I’d like to think I’m an artist, and I hope other people see me that way. And, frankly, my identity feels completely intertwined with my grief and the loss of my parents. The loss of my parents has shaped me as strongly as their presence in my upbringing did. 

It took two years after losing my mom, but I’m starting to find myself again. Though I don’t know if she was ever truly lost. I’m still processing that my identity doesn’t ever go away even as my thoughts around it ebb and flow. I am who I am, and I am who my parents knew me to be, too. At least I’d like to think so.

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