Sitting in the middle of my half-empty apartment, I take the knife and cut the tape on the next box. I open it slowly, savoring the discovery process. Buried in a sea of handkerchiefs, I find my top hat.

I've had this hat for almost a decade. I remember the moment I got it—New Year's Eve, Y2K. I was wearing a silver dress and this hat. Friends and strangers danced together inside the pyramid-shaped club in Oceania under a fountain of champagne. I remember the blue lights and the incredible lightness of being one with the world. I felt, at that moment, like the future belonged to me. I didn't know where I was going or how I would end up there, but I knew the future was mine and nothing, nothing was going to stop me.

That's what this hat represents. That's why, after so many years, I still have it. It reminds me of the promise of knowing, without the shadow of a doubt, that the future is yours to shape at your desire.

I should be honest, though. There was a time period that I didn't have my hat.

After I got engaged, something came over me—it wasn't conscious, exactly. I don't know what it was. All I remember is the afternoon in Lima where I threw my closet doors open and began taking out all the things that described the life I'd led up to that point. My hat, the feather boas, the costumes, the naughty dresses, the sequin bikinis, the too-tall shoes—I had no use for them in the life into which I was walking.

I didn't throw these items out—I bequeathed them to my cousin Monica.

Almost two years into my marriage, my aunt wrote me and told me she'd been cleaning my grandmother's closet and found all her hats. She told me she wore one to a party, a gorgeous black hat made entirely of black feathers.

“I felt like the whole world was looking at me. I felt like I could do anything. It made me think of you.”

When I went to Peru, she gave me the hats. The act touched me deeply. It made me wonder why I had let go of my things when I got engaged.

Yes, it's true that my ex-husband never liked my hat. And it's true that to this day his reaction to seeing me in my hat for the first time still makes me think of that scene in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Sabina tells Tomas of the other man in her life, “I've met another man. He's the best man I've ever met. He's bright, handsome and he's crazy about me. And, he's married. There's only one thing; he doesn't like my hat.” But I didn't discard these things because of my husband. I discarded them because I had redefined myself at the beginning of our engagement as someone who didn't have a need for those outlandish accessories and costumes.

What I didn't realize until later was that the flat-heels-cashmere sweater-and-pearls suburban wife was more of a costume than any of the other items I had discarded.

By some strange coincidence, while looking for a sweater at Monica's during that same trip to Peru, I found the items I had given her neatly arranged in her closet.

I asked for my hat back. She let me have it.

I take the hat out of the box now and look at it. It's been abused by the years and the uncertainty of living in a box for weeks.

Definitions. If we are our own masters, as I believe we are, it is within our power to change and become who we want to be. But what if we want to be something that's not true to us?

I put the hat on and turn to look at the mirror on my bathroom door.

Who is this woman in the hat?

My phone rings. It's a man I met recently. He wants to know whether I want to go out with him tonight to the premiere of a film about fire dancing. He dances with fire, too. Who plays with fire? I'm nervous about it. It's happening in Hollywood, a place in Los Angeles I seldom visit. A different crowd, a different world.

I'm hesitant and he can tell.

“You don't have to perform tonight,” he says to me. At first I think he's talking about the fire, then I realize he's talking about putting on a show for a group of people I don't know.

Do I perform? I do. And he can tell.

“Just be you,” he says.

It's the most wonderful thing anyone has ever said to me. I sit in shocked silence on the phone.

Just be you. Who am I?

I don't know why it's so important to define myself. I don't know why it's not enough to simply go on unpacking and restarting my life based on whatever my heart desires. Is it that I need a meaning? A label has a meaning. A meaning has a purpose and a function. It has boundaries. Am I scared of my freedom? Yes. I am overwhelmed by what I can choose. I am overwhelmed by the idea of following my heart again into a place that I will find unfulfilling.

Know yourself.

Shopping for new furniture, I was faced with the choice of varying styles and shapes, different types mattresses, a rainbow of sheets, of towels, of shower curtains. “Who are you?” each piece I looked at asked me. “Which of us fits your idea of a sanctuary?”

I couldn't decide, so I picked black for everything. Black, black, black. You can't go wrong with black. Black and streamlined. The walls will have color with my paintings. Once I figure out what those colors are.

My canvases sit against my wall, still wrapped.

Who are you?

“What are your goals?” a friend asked me recently as a means to solve my crisis.

Change, even good change, can be deeply confusing. I know what I want more than anything. To live and to write. To feel things and enjoy them. To write it all. Yet instead of giving me comfort, I feel like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I know my velocity toward my goal, but the more I know my momentum, the less I understand my position.

It reminds me of another change in my life—a vital one—that shook my blueprint.

One day some four years ago, I woke up completely disoriented. It was still dark outside even though the clock said it was already 6:05. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I felt parched, but I couldn’t move. When I did, I felt wet. I sat up quickly only to be knocked back down by an unbearable headache. It wasn’t just a headache. It felt like someone had slammed an ice pick into the crown of my head.

Impulsively, I touched my head and screamed in pain engendered by the simple act of touching my hair. Carefully, I tapped at it. Crunch, crunch. Weakly, I reached for the lamp in the dark.

The first thing I saw was that the bed was filthy with mud. The second: my pillow was stained with blood.

Later, I would realize that it wasn’t 6:05 AM, but 6:05 PM. As I washed the sheets, I racked my brain trying to understand what had happened.

The last thing I remembered was leaving my apartment in Lima with Paloma, a girlfriend, and her friend Talia in a cab and asking the driver for suggestions about where to go. And then nothing.

My ex-husband, who was my boyfriend then, later told me that at some point, I’d called him crying. In the middle of this phone call, he’d heard a crash. He’d called out to me, but heard no answer for a long time. When I did manage to come back on the line, I was hysterical, saying that I had been attacked by a dog.

Yes, yes, I remembered through the brain-static, a Great Dane had come running down the dirty Barranco street and pounced on me so I was flat on my back in the filthy, muddy, piss-booze-vomit-covered street. I don’t remember the dog, I only remember acknowledging what had happened as I stared at the sky and tried to reach my mobile, which had fallen out of my hand.

“I am in the middle of the street floating in shit with a dog on top of me and I think I just split my head open,” I told Richard, “I don’t have the strength to get up. This is fine. I have done everything I have to do. I am tired now. I am tired.”

And then I hung up.

I don’t remember much else. It’s like the sequences have been shuffled. I don’t have any awareness of time when I am drunk.

In my bed of filthy mud and blood that evening, I realized that there was a big difference between being young and having reckless fun and being an alcoholic. The difference is that young and reckless fun seldom goes that far: at some point, it knows how to stop. But when it comes to alcohol, I have no brakes. How am I not dead? I take off like a plane without a landing strip to receive me. I just cross my fingers and hope to god the crash landing isn’t too brutal.

I went shaking to my computer. It was one of those moments five seconds from repentance and horror, those moments you are watching yourself from the outside. I opened a browser and looked up Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control,” I read from the Big Book on their site. “He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking. He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk. His disposition while drinking resembles his normal attitude but little. He might be one of the finest fellows in the world. Yet let him drink for a day and he becomes disgustingly, even dangerously anti-social. He has a positive genius for getting tight at precisely the wrong moment, particularly when some important decision needs to be made or engagement kept. He is often perfectly sensible and well-balanced concerning everything except liquor, but in that respect he is incredibly dishonest and selfish. He often possesses special abilities, skills and aptitudes, and has a promising career ahead of him. He uses his gifts to build a bright outlook for his family and himself, and then pulls the structure down on his head by a senseless series of sprees.”

Sure, I’d joked I was an alcoholic before. I had even quit a few times. I’d moderated. I’d decided to only drink wine. To only have one drink a night. You name it, I’d done it. What I had never done was seriously look at myself in the mirror and realize that I was, in fact, an alcoholic.

“No, no, no,” I told myself. I am just freaking out because I had one bad night. I just need to relax and everything will be fine. As a symbol of how serious I am about controlling myself, I am going to rid myself of the alcohol in the house.

Standing over my toilet with the bottle of Stoli Gold in my hand resolutely, I took a deep breath and opened the bottle. The smell of vodka filled my nostrils. It suddenly occurred to me that it was a shame to waste vodka—especially in a country where so many people could not afford something like this.

One must not waste, I thought, the bottle getting so close, I could practically taste it. And I wanted to taste it.

(It’d been years since I’d mixed vodka with anything. I didn’t even shake it anymore. I just did shots. And if I had no shot glass, I’d drink it from the bottle. Good old Polish blood, I told myself. Na Zdrowie!)

Yes, I was using the starvation of my fellow countrymen and some story of unconfirmed origin regarding my family history to have vodka during my cleansing ritual. The very one that was meant to prove how serious I was about getting control in my life.

You never see this part in the movies, they always skip to the AA meeting, the jail cell, sanitarium or tombstone. Now I know why recognizing the fact is a step all its own.

I turned the bottle upside down, screaming, letting it splash all over the place. I dumped the whole thing into the toilet as best as I could manage and fell to my knees before it. I wanted so badly to stick my head in and drink. Yes, I wanted to stick my head in a toilet and drink its contents.

This is how badly I needed a drink at that moment. This is how dependent I had become on the lightness and lack of concern for consequences.

I vomited. I vomited and vomited and vomited in horror.

I stayed there for a while, shaking. Then I flushed. I washed the bottle psychotically at the bidet, scrubbing it like a mother scrubs a child she is not ready to admit is dead, trying to revive it, or revive herself.

Then I began washing myself one-handedly, erratically, getting water everywhere, flooding the bathroom, staining the wooden floors as I wandered around my apartment, wet, naked, weeping, shaking, still gripping the empty bottle tightly in my hand.

I collapsed against the wall in my hall, in a puddle of water, covered in the stench of vomit and vodka. And then I reached out and took the phone from its cradle on the small table beside me. On my palm, I’d written the number from the website. It was the central AA office in New York, but I didn’t care.

I let go of the bottle, looked at the number and dialed.

That was the moment I decided to choose myself. I haven't had a drink since that fuzzy night in Barranco, but I don't congratulate myself on it. Every day is a new battle. Every morning, I eat my fear—the fear of what will happen if I have that one sip.

But even that daily battle is nothing compared to the confusion I experienced during that time, which had been brought about by the change in my lifestyle. I still went to bars, clubs and parties, but the experience was changed. It wasn't really that much fun to hang out with people who were drinking any longer and I'd been the party girl so long, I no longer knew who I was.

So I began a list of things to do. This included things I'd once done that I recalled enjoying and things I had never done before, to try on for size.

That's how I began rediscovering Lima and falling in love with the city. That's how I found myself, then, too, and made a place for myself within my country. And how, having found and accepted myself, I was able to go back to the party, among those who can drink the way I never could—in moderation—and enjoy their company as they enjoy mine.

So here I am, more changes. More metamorphosis.

I start a list of things to do.

At the top, I write, “fire.”

And it couldn't be more appropriate. It's a baptism by fire, so to speak.

I pick up the phone to call my friend back. Listening to it ring, I put on my hat again and look in the mirror. Then I wonder if he'll like my hat.

BLOGGIE TREATS

In Finding Myself, Carolyn begins her journey to getting to know herself by facing her fears. A few weeks from her twenty-fifth birthday, she concludes, “That’s what I want for my birthday. To be happy with who I am. To finally stop being afraid and to just go for it. Whatever IT may be.”

Marybeth writes about her path to self-discovery and the fulfilment she has found in I'm Worth It!: “I think that the next few years will be full of moments like that – from a life based on one essential dishonesty to one base on total self acceptance. My first goal is to be able to say, honestly, that I love myself. Once I do that then I will be able to trust myself more instead of second-guessing my decisions all the time.”

In Antidepressants on the blog From Mess To Success, the author writes about her depression and explores the possibility of beginning treatment with antidepressants. “If you want change,” she writes, “you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.”