Another Day.
"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon.I've had an eventful week. I've had a hell of a lot of fun, and I've been nearly as miserable as I've ever been. I've said far too much, and not nearly enough. I've been sleepless, and had nightmares, and I found a little peace at last. Not a bad week on the whole.
Increasingly, I'm finding myself at this strange crossroads. All these conflicting feelings that I've been struggling with for years are coming to a head. What's funny is, I hadn't thought that it all would go back as far as it does.
I don't remember worrying very much when I was younger about things like, what was to become of me and what would I be when I grew up. In fact, due to a lot of circumstances in my pre-adolescence, I think I specifically learned to avoid thinking about those questions. They didn't really become a serious preoccupation again until I was in college. Since then, it's been so damned pronounced that I've been tripping over my own decisions every time, and it's only rarely that it's happened, I've managed to make one.
But I had a kind of strange experience this week that made me reevaluate some things. A lot of things, actually. Maybe even everything. And suddenly, I'm a lot more encumbered, and somehow freer than I remember ever being before.
I didn't have a bad childhood, but, like all children, I had some bad things happen to me. My parents always wanted the best for me, and they did everything they could to see that I had it. But they're flawed people and couldn't always acquire it. And I'm a flawed person, so I couldn't always receive it even when it was given to me.
In a lot of ways, I've fetishized that awful period in my life that fell approximately between the ages of say, 9 and 14. And in a lot of other ways, I never have really dealt with it, because I buried all of the pain and misery that went along with it.
I'm only just now realizing how very pivotal that time in my life was. I became an adult then, even though I was, and am in many ways, still a child.
I was maybe eight or nine when I overheard that my mother was terminally ill. By ten, I'd convinced myself that there was no God. By eleven, I had lived independently of my mom and dad, and I considered myself my own person, the captain of my own soul. By thirteen, I was making choices that no child should ever have to make; and so many of my choices were bad ones, the consequences of which I'm still dealing with now. By fourteen, I'd given myself this new identity, with new behaviors and expectations. I was then really beginning to build in earnest the person that I now am.
And at 22, I'm only now starting to realize the faulty, adolescent reasoning that so many of those behaviors are rooted in. I'm having to make the decision to keep my demons or expel them. And it's a more difficult question than it sounds. A demon might drag you down to the pits of hell, but they don't abandon you. They're nothing if not good company. So to leave them behind is not a small decision.
Nevertheless, I do not want to live my life based on some battered part of my intellectual development that I did not, and do not, understand. I want my thoughts to be my own, not those of some wandering, miserable spirit of desolation. I don't want my best friend to be my worst enemy; I don't want my confidence to stem from my conviction that my life is not, in fact, worth living.
So here's to a new beginning. To surrounding myself with influences that are a little better. To renouncing Satan, and all his works, and all his worship, and all his angels, and all his pomp. To becoming the person I was created to be.
posted by Sarie @
4:24 PM
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