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.

[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.