Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road....
I'm pretty sure if you clicked on the cut text, you have a good idea as to the kind of entry this is going to be.
I've been playing with this idea for a long time. There isn't any one thing prompting this, aside from the fact that it's time.
Past time, really.
Over the past year and a half, I've hardly written anything in here at all, and certainly nothing with substance. I don't like writing that way.
Maybe I should explain myself more fully:
Writing, for me, has always been an outlet, a safety valve of sorts. While there are moments where I'm happy, and sometimes almost frighteningly euphoric, I'm not always that way. I think most people would be concerned if I were. Honestly, I'd be concerned. When there's something I need to figure out, or something that needs to be let out before my head explodes, I write. My mind is not always a happy little place to wander; I'm human, I have my faults, my doubts, my fears, and my moments of self-loathing. I write not to escape, but to set it down in tangible form and discover that my problems are only life-sized after all.
I stopped writing here because, somewhere along the way, I lost who I was and all perspective on what my life was about. There were thoughts that I didn't want to put in the tangible form that I usually crave because I'd start and they'd either not ring true because I felt the need to leave so much of my inner dialogue out, or because I'd realize that I had nothing that I wanted to share in such a public forum.
Let me make this clear: there is no fault, no blame, no one person that caused the fire to go out of this journal. It simply went out on its own. Sometimes it will. And when it does, it's because that's the way it needs to be in order to move forward.
I'm not sure that I can say that I'm not the same person who started this journal nearly four years ago. I'm still driven by what I read, what I write and what I experience. I'm still blessed/cursed with my perpetual interest in everything. I still crave motion, the wind in my face, and the occasional jarring landing. In some ways I'm still outraged by injustice, willful ignorance, deliberate cruelty, and some of the nastier ways in which people promote their own interests above everybody else's.
At the same time, I'm not as lost, not as angry at everybody, including (and sometimes especially) myself. I've learned that no matter how much you don't want to admit it, sometimes you need to reach for that extended hand. Sometimes there are things that you can't (and shouldn't) deal with by yourself.
Maybe, above all else, I've learned to both like and trust myself a little bit more. You'd be surprised how much of a difference that makes.
While I likely won't be adding to this journal after this, I have no intention of deleting it. Deleting it would indicate shame at who I was when I started this. There is no shame in changing or growing, even if you look back years later and wonder "Wow, I really thought I was that hopeless and unloveable? I thought that losing that person from my life for any period of time was the end of the world?"
And sometimes, you do have to look back at yourself in wonder.
You can marvel at how much your life has changed, at how different you thought your life was going to turn out than it did. And see, quite clearly, how you arrived at point B from point A.
"The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid that you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light." -- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Moving forward isn't about forgetting where you've been, or who you were at that time. It's in how you make peace with it and with yourself.
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