Something Approaching Catharsis Perhaps
Using this site, I am inevitably reminiscing about... when I used this site. As you know, it was an important time in my life. A part of me has always wanted to go back, while knowing that that's not a thing that can happen. One of my brothers once said that nostalgia is just a trick your mind plays on you and he was right. My younger self would envy my older self in just as many ways as the latter envies the former. Being independent, trying things, seeing the big cities, feeling secure, knowing I can handle a lot, understanding the mysteries a little better, these are all things I didn't have then.
But everything gained involved some pain, and I'm older now, more so than time alone could cause. People used to tell me I looked so young. I took for granted that many people found me very attractive. Then came long term joblessness and aimlessness in my late 20s and before I knew it, neither of those things were true.
I put long term unemployment behind me in 2012 and began a slow and still unfinished climb back to sanity, but I'm still older than I've ever been, naturally. I don't know when, but some time in the past couple years I began to embrace it. I stopped feeling like a guy or dude or whatever and started feeling like a man.
In any case, now Internet trolls make fun of my hairline, my metabolism is shot to hell, I have a bad habit of picking at sores and you get the picture. But I've also settled on the perfect haircut, the perfect clothes, generally the sense of dignity that goes with entering one's prime. I remember well the sense of authority my father conveyed in his 40s, and I look forward to doing important things in those years.
But however old you get, there's still the young person inside, and the intense hormonally enhanced emotions of those years, and looking at my "LiveJournal" and those of friends who abandoned but never deleted theirs, I'm kind of going right back the past couple of nights.
Part of that is that I have come full circle in a way. I just finished a degree at ASU, the exact same degree I got at NAU, but I had my reasons for that. Now I'm looking at grad school, which is the situation I wish I had been in back in 06, and it's like a do-over, but not really, because there's no ignoring the passage of time. The younger students haven't seemed to pay much mind to my age, but I certainly have.
So here I am, wondering what it would be like to have a second chance at prolonging the magic of that time, and in a way I am having that chance.
And also pondering the ways it wasn't magical. Some of the feelings that have lingered most for me are not the friends, lovers and opportunities I had, but the ones I ALMOST had, and realizing that gives me hope that the best could be yet to come. Despite the hairline and such.
After all, the people I treasured then are all older themselves, and many have their own parallel recession stories. It's weird how we can all have so much in common and yet each feel so alone in it.
But everything gained involved some pain, and I'm older now, more so than time alone could cause. People used to tell me I looked so young. I took for granted that many people found me very attractive. Then came long term joblessness and aimlessness in my late 20s and before I knew it, neither of those things were true.
I put long term unemployment behind me in 2012 and began a slow and still unfinished climb back to sanity, but I'm still older than I've ever been, naturally. I don't know when, but some time in the past couple years I began to embrace it. I stopped feeling like a guy or dude or whatever and started feeling like a man.
In any case, now Internet trolls make fun of my hairline, my metabolism is shot to hell, I have a bad habit of picking at sores and you get the picture. But I've also settled on the perfect haircut, the perfect clothes, generally the sense of dignity that goes with entering one's prime. I remember well the sense of authority my father conveyed in his 40s, and I look forward to doing important things in those years.
But however old you get, there's still the young person inside, and the intense hormonally enhanced emotions of those years, and looking at my "LiveJournal" and those of friends who abandoned but never deleted theirs, I'm kind of going right back the past couple of nights.
Part of that is that I have come full circle in a way. I just finished a degree at ASU, the exact same degree I got at NAU, but I had my reasons for that. Now I'm looking at grad school, which is the situation I wish I had been in back in 06, and it's like a do-over, but not really, because there's no ignoring the passage of time. The younger students haven't seemed to pay much mind to my age, but I certainly have.
So here I am, wondering what it would be like to have a second chance at prolonging the magic of that time, and in a way I am having that chance.
And also pondering the ways it wasn't magical. Some of the feelings that have lingered most for me are not the friends, lovers and opportunities I had, but the ones I ALMOST had, and realizing that gives me hope that the best could be yet to come. Despite the hairline and such.
After all, the people I treasured then are all older themselves, and many have their own parallel recession stories. It's weird how we can all have so much in common and yet each feel so alone in it.