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

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Funny... 6th through 8th grades were the *best* years of my grade-school experience; it went back downhill again in high school.

The thing about asking if the present is "worth the pain" of the past is that you can't really separate one from the other. If where you are now is worth being, then excellent, but middle school wasn't an optional or career driven ordeal that you signed up for. It's not the same as wondering if your latest training class was worth the potential experience you might have gained from it.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

Same here. Middle school was the best period of my life, and then everything went horribly wrong for the next fifteen years after it.

[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!)

[ivy-lee.livejournal.com]

My life is absolutely nothing like I thought it might be in middle school, except perhaps "married" and "still playing video games."

I was hard core Southern Baptist, so you can imagine where the changes might be.

As for my past... I know that I must have had happy days when I was younger... But I don't remember them. I remember nothing but pain from my past; the painful memories are easiest to remember. But I'm happy where I am now, even if I struggle sometimes. But you couldn't pay me enough money to go through my life again.

[jazzfish]

Aw, but I was there for your first two years of high school!

[jazzfish]

Junior high, along with the back half of elementary school, was in Fayettehell, NC. For high school I not only got to return to FCPS, I got to go to Jefferson and surround myself with People Like Me, who as far as I knew up until then existed only in books about telepathic horses and gay men.

I dunno. I stuck with it at least partly on the theory that what came after would be worth it, would be enough better to make up for all the pain. In that sense it was. Of course, I also stuck with it out of deathly fear that to do otherwise would be Doin It Rong and thus subject to even worse.

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.

[jazzfish]

Born-again Methodist, myself (how does that work? i'm not entirely sure myself; i fell in with some evangelicals at one point), so I can imagine pretty easily.

There were times I enjoyed myself in seventh and eighth grade, but I don't think I was ever actually /happy/.

If I were given the ability to change three or four decisions, I'd actually be willing to relive my life from high school on. Dropping cello, taking AP computer science, and being just a bit smarter about my relationships would have made all the difference in the world for my high school experience, and in turn would have prepared me better for a lot of the crap I went through over the next ten years. That would even be worth reliving junior year for.

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.

[ivy-lee.livejournal.com]

I suppose you're right. I think my life would have been much better if I had just realized that there really was something wrong with me, it wasn't my fault, and I needed to see a doctor about it. Christianity is actually what kept me from getting help for so many years. If I just could have learned to fight depression much younger, so much in my life would have changed. On the other hand, who knows if I would be with Tom then? I wouldn't want to mess with that.

In the end, I guess it's just best to be glad things are better now. =)

[jazzfish]

Heh. And I needed to realise that there wasn't anything wrong with me. That not being Good Enough for my parents (and later myself) was a fault in the expectations and not in me.

In the end, I guess it's just best to be glad things are better now. =)

Yes, this.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

That was a comfort. :)

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.

[elvenyukiryu.livejournal.com]

I find it inordinately amusing that I know exactly which series of books you are referring to, and that I have the entire series sitting on my bookshelf right now.

As to the rest, *hugness*. and I have NOTHING of what I thought I'd be in Middle School... except that I am writing a novel. 'course in that plan I was published already. *shrug* Middle School sucked. I shudder to think of how many times I almost ended things. Thank God for lethargy.

Anyhow, too much babbling. *hugness* miss you.

[jazzfish]

On the off chance you've not seen it, I refer you to Ursula Vernon's moment of enlightenment. Which wasn't /exactly/ how it happened for me, but close enough.

Lethargy, or fear of punishment, or fear of failure, or just not being able to do /anything/ for whatever reason.

And when I chose to live
There was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found

And, no such thing as too much babbling. *hug* Miss you, too. I'm glad you're here.