There’s Something Happening Here

Introspection is so much like everything else in that you hold onto certain things longer than you should and you use old lenses to view a new life.  You know you know yourself and that causes as many problems as not knowing yourself at all, because you have this identify as a self-aware person and you don’t know who you’d be without it.  You cling so tightly to the knowledge you have of yourself that it sometimes blinds you from seeing the person you’re becoming.

I’m feeling very differently and realizing months too late that I’ve been trying to stuff myself into old molds, trying to make sense of myself with dated categories, and not being honest in admitting that things aren’t lining up anymore.  It seems not to make sense, because it’s not a regression.  I’m not holding onto the past, because it’s better.  I’m holding onto it because it’s what I know and for all my thinking and planning, life has surprised me.

I’ve been slow in waking up to this new reality.  It started when I first began talking about the anxiety I was experiencing.  I just kept thinking, this is not me.  Depression I would have expected, but anxiety and feelings of near-mania were nowhere to be found in the person I knew as myself.  Even now that I’m not experiencing either as a problem, I have to realize that the person capable of going to those places is different from who I was before.

One image of myself I have been holding onto for far too long is the girl who was in remedial reading, who did not measure up to her advanced placement friends.  It’s been fifteen years since I suddenly and surprisingly made the turn toward caring about school and succeeding at it and yet I still carry those feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.  Thinking about that history, I realize that this big change I’m feeling now is not unprecedented and my need to hold onto old identities is nothing new.

As much as I feel like a million different people all at once, I can identify movements of my life, their beginnings and ends marked by big mostly-internal changes.  They make more sense looking back than they did when I was experiencing them.  The first movement was ages 1-11 when I seemed to change quite suddenly from lost and messy and remedial to focused and driven and compulsively organized.  The second was ages 12-20 when I changed from complacent and uninspired to engaged and deeply interested in so many things.  I think this is the start of the fourth movement and I can’t precisely define the change, because I only know the people I’ve been.

When you change, even dramatically, you don’t shed your former identities.  I talk about the people I’ve been only because I’m surprised at how different they are from who I am now, but your past is always with you and it powerfully shapes how you see the world and who you become in that world.  The movement that follows is always a reaction to the one before.  That’s in part what’s so confusing about it, because you go from one extreme to the other–scattered to focused, indifferent to engaged, passionate but very uncertain to whatever I’m becoming now.

I keep trying to put words to the way I feel now and how it’s different from before.  Recognizing it as different was the first step.  I still have those earlier insecurities and the love for school that developed out of that and the apathy that turned into before I later found so many things to care about that I couldn’t make sense of them all, but I have more clarity and more confidence and I feel more empowered and more excited about life.  I haven’t figured out the downside and I don’t mean that to sound pessimistic.  It’s just that the freedom I felt as a kid came with insecurity, the life I created for myself as a good student came with rigidity and a preoccupation with perfection, and the move from apathy to engagement came with overwhelming confusion.  Every person I’ve been has held together contradictions.  None was simple or easy to understand.  It seems I could only make sense of it once I was onto the next.  Maybe it will be two and maybe it will be ten years before I’ll be able to define this change, but I will spend every day trying to figure it out.