It appears I'm back....
Future Casey,
I was messing around on some website and a picture appeared showing the names of older websites that my generation grew up on. Lo-and-behold, LiveJournal was there. By some miracle, I remembered my username and password and I began my romp through my yester-years.
I was a fucked up kid. I rambled quite a bit. I hated the hell out of my mom. I cried and laughed, loved and despised. Hell, I even wrote songs!
Not too much has changed. Let us begin.
Quite a bit is different since I last wrote to you. I have 2 kids now! I was (am for about another month) married! I worked at a real job making real money. I maintained a life.
I hated most of it.
It's an odd feeling being able to read your own work for the first time in almost a decade. I can hear the words resonating through my own head like I was typing them that day. The emotions, the smells, the feeling of keys under my fingers, everything came right back.
What surprised me the most was the overwhelming sense of happiness. Sure, the earlier years of my journaling career were bleak and distraught ramblings, but somewhere along the way I was able to capture own my sway and tone - and I can't get enough of it. It was similar to that feeling you get when you hold a door for an elderly woman and she stops to say, "Thank you." An almost sense of self accomplishment.
But I digress. The happiness. Not from journaling my tales, which is quite awesome I might add, but remembering what happiness is and being able to relate that tone to where I am now in life.
It makes me feel a little selfish, sure. I'm leaving a woman that I took and molded into something I wanted her to be. For all intents and purposes, I should be disgusted with who I and what I was, but I can't shake this feeling of pride. I'm so unimaginably satisfied with the decisions I've made and the direction my life is going that the other emotions have been plowed through with such ferocity that I found myself crying in regular intervals, not the normal 5 year gap. It was as if I had been starved of this foreign emotion for so long that my brain dealt with it all in swift justice.
Now here I sit, the hopeful shell of the imagined figure I wanted to be. Don't take that in the wrong tone. Of course, I had once planned out my life, and by that scale I should be close to finishing my Ph.D., but life happened. I had two beautiful kids. I walked a path that every man will [probably] face in his life, and at an early stage, and didn't come out of the fire jaded.
I don't sit here in contempt. I sit in joy. I ponder things, not worry about them. I deliberate the options that I have with my new found freedom. I'm finding love in unexpected places and feeling an overall sense of "Your life is going to kick ass."
So now what? Here's what:
Patience
-This degree is going to take time and effort, but I'm not going to let myself and others down I'm doing this if it kills me, damnit.
Time
-I've only recently learned that time heals all wounds. No matter the battle or disagreement, all things will come full circle. For reference, see the first bulletin.
Love
-How I've managed to skate through the last 7 years of my life with so much anger and distaste for people astounds me. There are far too many good ones out there for me to let the few bad get me down.
How do you start your change, future Casey that's reading this? Open up. Your heart is yours for the giving. Sure, some caution is in order, but not to the extreme point you've had it the last few years. You recently opened your heart to another, and look how it's going! Keep that in mind every time you get down, bud. You'll be fine.
I'll leave you with that. I'll write to you soon.
Love,
Past Casey
I was messing around on some website and a picture appeared showing the names of older websites that my generation grew up on. Lo-and-behold, LiveJournal was there. By some miracle, I remembered my username and password and I began my romp through my yester-years.
I was a fucked up kid. I rambled quite a bit. I hated the hell out of my mom. I cried and laughed, loved and despised. Hell, I even wrote songs!
Not too much has changed. Let us begin.
Quite a bit is different since I last wrote to you. I have 2 kids now! I was (am for about another month) married! I worked at a real job making real money. I maintained a life.
I hated most of it.
It's an odd feeling being able to read your own work for the first time in almost a decade. I can hear the words resonating through my own head like I was typing them that day. The emotions, the smells, the feeling of keys under my fingers, everything came right back.
What surprised me the most was the overwhelming sense of happiness. Sure, the earlier years of my journaling career were bleak and distraught ramblings, but somewhere along the way I was able to capture own my sway and tone - and I can't get enough of it. It was similar to that feeling you get when you hold a door for an elderly woman and she stops to say, "Thank you." An almost sense of self accomplishment.
But I digress. The happiness. Not from journaling my tales, which is quite awesome I might add, but remembering what happiness is and being able to relate that tone to where I am now in life.
It makes me feel a little selfish, sure. I'm leaving a woman that I took and molded into something I wanted her to be. For all intents and purposes, I should be disgusted with who I and what I was, but I can't shake this feeling of pride. I'm so unimaginably satisfied with the decisions I've made and the direction my life is going that the other emotions have been plowed through with such ferocity that I found myself crying in regular intervals, not the normal 5 year gap. It was as if I had been starved of this foreign emotion for so long that my brain dealt with it all in swift justice.
Now here I sit, the hopeful shell of the imagined figure I wanted to be. Don't take that in the wrong tone. Of course, I had once planned out my life, and by that scale I should be close to finishing my Ph.D., but life happened. I had two beautiful kids. I walked a path that every man will [probably] face in his life, and at an early stage, and didn't come out of the fire jaded.
I don't sit here in contempt. I sit in joy. I ponder things, not worry about them. I deliberate the options that I have with my new found freedom. I'm finding love in unexpected places and feeling an overall sense of "Your life is going to kick ass."
So now what? Here's what:
Patience
-This degree is going to take time and effort, but I'm not going to let myself and others down I'm doing this if it kills me, damnit.
Time
-I've only recently learned that time heals all wounds. No matter the battle or disagreement, all things will come full circle. For reference, see the first bulletin.
Love
-How I've managed to skate through the last 7 years of my life with so much anger and distaste for people astounds me. There are far too many good ones out there for me to let the few bad get me down.
How do you start your change, future Casey that's reading this? Open up. Your heart is yours for the giving. Sure, some caution is in order, but not to the extreme point you've had it the last few years. You recently opened your heart to another, and look how it's going! Keep that in mind every time you get down, bud. You'll be fine.
I'll leave you with that. I'll write to you soon.
Love,
Past Casey