Hindsight
Yesterday, in between battling the online library for school and fighting the vacuum cleaner (which can apparently only work when touched by the magic hand of Tophmonster), I took a break and found myself prowling through Myspace. My life at the moment is all about change and taking on new challenges. We’re getting ready to move in a few months, I’m about to start a new job about the same time, and most recently, we’ve both just gone back to school. I suppose it’s only fitting that, any time change is the predominant thing, we start to look back at where we started.
After updating myself on the people current in my life, I started looking back at the ones who used to be there. A majority of them were just classmates. People I knew of more than I actually knew. But a few were close friends. Most of them have kids – two seems to be the most consistent number – and quite a few are married, mostly to other former classmates. Looking over the acquaintances was interesting and a little odd. The last time I saw these people we were all teenagers more consumed with getting drunk or stoned than anything else. Now we’re all in our mid-twenties with the only resemblance being slightly older faces. Seeing my old friends was a little harder, though. I was tempted several times to email a them and see what they’ve been up to. Then I realized I had nothing to say to them. I didn’t have any idea how to explain how I went from the person they knew to the person I am now, and that I didn’t really care about their lives now. We spent most of our time together seven or eight years ago, but now we have no real place in each other’s lives. Honestly, the only high school friends I have any interest in seeing again are dead. That wasn’t a particularly happy realization either, because, of course, being dead, I can’t really expect them to be great correspondents.
But it got me thinking. So many of these people have stayed where we all started. They still have the same friends and go to the same places. I was always the transient one. I couldn’t even stay in one place for the three years I was in high school. I never expected the rest of my life to include this tiny little town in West Virginia, and so far, it doesn’t. I have absolutely no connections in the place I spent most of my childhood and whenever I’m asked where I’m from, I answer without hesitation: Savannah. In a way, it feels like my time in the WV never existed, at least not in any tangible sense. My time there feels like one big waiting room and once my name was called, I walked through those double doors without looking back.
I miss some of it from time to time, but even as a teenager, I had the sense that I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I’d go out with my friends and hang out at the theatre, but I always knew I was biding my time until something better came along. It would be nice to be somewhere I had long term attachments. People who’d seen the progression from rambunctious little kid to odd young man. But it’s not necessary. I have a home, and attachments and commitments, and the fact that most of them only date back two or three years doesn’t make them any less valid than if they’d lasted forever. I’m slowly learning that what we’re taught is expected from us isn’t always realistic, and deviating from that plan doesn’t make us any less worthy. Every person has their own challenges to face and goals to accomplish. There are still things I want to do, things I’ve wanted to do since I was younger, and I’ll admit to a slight amount of jealousy knowing that some of my former classmates have done these things. But I also know there’s still time. I’ve done things none of them will ever imagine being able to do, and that fact doesn’t alter anything. We each have our own lives to live and what is right for one isn’t right for the other. Would I be happier if I’d gone to college right after high school and then leapt into a career? No. For one, if I’d stuck with my original plan, I would’ve been working on my senior year at UNO when Katrina hit. I wouldn’t have met any of the wonderful people in Savannah who I now consider part of my family. I wouldn’t have met the Tophmonster.
Everything that happens, happens because it’s meant to. Sometimes it might hurt. Sometimes we might think it’ll kill us. In the end, we always step through it still more or less intact. It doesn’t matter where we start out, or even where we end. It really is how we get there that makes us who we are meant to be.
Nice blog!