brings on many changes

[jazzfish]

Counting years for something else, and I just noticed that it's been twenty years since I embarked on the two-year crash course in hell that's better known as "junior high." Which means it's been just under twenty years since the first time I considered killing myself.

I dunno. If you'd asked me what I thought my life would look like at this point, and I'd been able to answer you, the only things that would look at all similar would be that I have a job involving a computer, that I live in the DC area, and that I have lots of books and a couple of cats. Just about all of the rest of it would either appall or baffle twelve-year-old me, from "glasses and ponytail" on through "nearly failed out of college" and into "nigh-atheist" and "poly."

I think, on balance, that's a good thing. Certainly I'm happier as I am now than as I'd thought I would be. I don't think "happy" even entered into that. Getting to be happy was like getting to choose where I lived: so far out of the realm of the possible that it couldn't be seen with a telescope. Now. . . I'm happier than not, most days, and actively working to improve that ratio.

As for the other. . . it's hard to look back, to know what's to come in those two years, and in the greater part of the six that follow them, and still look myself in the eye and say, "It's worth it." Any time the question comes up I tell people that I don't want to have kids because I wouldn't willingly put anyone else through junior high, and I'm only half kidding.

I can look around and say "I'm glad I'm here." I have tea, and the Internet, and a small but real cohort of people I care about that also care about me. I just can't say "it's worth the pain," because I don't know how to gauge that, or if it's even possible to weigh pain and joy in the same scale.

I said By the fires I see this is hell
By the looks on your faces you're damned here as well
They said Come and be welcome wearing your curse
To get here you must have walked through hell first
-SKZB, "More Thumbscrews"

There was, eventually, camping last weekend. More on that tomorrow.

Comments

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Somewhere around a decade ago I tried using melatonin to help with sleep difficulties. I kept having dreams I was back in middle school. I stopped taking it. I'd rather have lost the sleep.

I don't remember who I thought I'd be back then. There's been massive tectonic plate action moving me away from there, and I can't even see that country anymore.

If I somehow had the choice, through some twist of time travel or dimensional travel or something sufficiently hand-waiving science fantasy like that, to go back and change the course of who I was then to who I am now... I like who I am, and I like my life, and I've done a lot of work to get here, but I think I'd steer myself out of the danger. You can like who you are and like your life without having the dismiss or minimize or (god forbid) glamorizing the horrible things that brought you to that point.

We are shaped by where we are pruned as much as by where we grown, but that doesn't mean the pruning isn't a loss. And the best map in the world does not make the rocks in the path soft.

(I am the Queen of Weird Analogies!)

your analogies are like a cool glass of water to a man without shoes

[jazzfish]

Oh, believe me, if I had the choice I'd undo so very much of the damage. Part of the trouble is that at this point I can't see anything different I could have done, not while still being who I was then.

Sometimes I mourn the flowers on the branches that could have been. Sometimes I grieve for an overbookish twelve-year-old with limited social skills thrust into the gladiatorial arena.

But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.

Re: your analogies are like a cool glass of water to a man without shoes

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Your subject line made me laugh till I scared the cats.

I figured someone else had already said what I wanted to say here, I just had to find it. And I may have.


Thanks, Robert Frost
- David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

Re: your analogies are like a cool glass of water to a man without shoes

[jazzfish]

My apologies to the cats, but that /was/ sort of the desired reaction. . .

As for the poem, I was feeling exceptionally fragile last night, but it still made me start crying somewhere around the third or fourth line. Which I think means it's pretty much exactly right. Thank you.

Re: your analogies are like a cool glass of water to a man without shoes

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction when I first found it, which is why I saved it. I'm glad it helped you as well.