Everybody has had different lives. Who you were in high school is not who you were in college. Who you were in college changed, and then changed again, and who you are now is very likely different than anyone you have been before. For most people, it might be a little difficult to distinguish the lives. They have all run together and the lines are blurred, and you can't tell the real difference unless maybe you sit down and write it onto paper and give names to each person you have been. I wish for such ease. Nostalgia, which has become a great vice of mine, has no place in the minds of people who do not see their lives changing as they change. For those people, nostalgia is saved for photo albums and reunions. It is not a part of daily life.
And this is my latest issue (there is always something, isn't there?). I can not seem to reconcile my past reality with my current one. They do not connect. It feels like I walked through the wardrobe into Narnia, got a great tan, and turned right around. Walked back through the winter coats into the real world like the one I just stepped out of never really existed. The friends there, the pictures, the feeling of my cold shower mornings and the scent and warmth of island rain all seem like they never even happened. I had dream. And then I woke up.
Part of it is that I have no one to talk to. My sister is the only person on this Earth who gets it, and we live apart and work different hours and never get a chance to talk about how fucked up this is. How it can be the right thing to leave a place you love so much. How you spend days wondering why you left or maybe wondering if you had ever actually been there. So, since we are not in the same place, we don't talk about it. We are the weird kids at work; the new kids who won't fit in anywhere except a little Ewok village in the middle of the Caribbean nowhere which might not even stand beyond the next year. And we just go on like that. Knowing that even our closest friends have no hope of understanding what we are going through. That the adjustment is more than grocery stores and driving on the other side of the road. That we are trying to learn how to let go of the people we loved to be in a life we loved living.
And now we are in entirely different lives. I have divorced friends, and friends who went back to school after years in one career. Friends who have moved from state to state. Friends who have moved from boy to boy. From one life to another, as I did three and a half months ago. So, I have to wonder if it is this hard across the board. Do other people have an easier time dealing with things like this, or is it always difficult?
Acknowledging the past as the past isn't easy, is it? I mean, you can completely recognize the future as progress and be glad for the shift, and still be devastated at the loss.
Is this what happens at every turn? Maybe this is why I have opted for such sharp corners in my life; they limit your ability to look back.
Oh, man. I have had too much red wine.
4 comments:
I think you may have summed up many of the maho bay/SJ workers' experiences, whether they stayed one ''season'' or 7. Why did i leave? or better yet, "why could't i stay? What was it exactly that I was ''getting'' back to here in the states. Because no SJ hangover is as bad as a mainland one. Because the $7dollar Cruzan gallons weren't why we stayed (or left), it was just what we drank. Because you can't live on that small island and have it not impact you Big. Thanks Jamie V for passing this blog along.
Yes, it's this hard for the rest of us too. Anytime someone moves somewhere new, starts a new job, makes new friends, or loses a cherished relationship, it can be a kick in the crotch (or at the least, nerve-wracking). It doesn't stop happening, and living on an island only limits your exposure to such changes. But change is everywhere, all life long. Learn to roll with the punches and get back up, shake it off. Consider this decade of our lives as training for the next, and so on.
Grasp onto the past, and you unnecessarily create suffering for yourself. Nostalgia can be unhealthy in large doses. Grasp onto the future, and you get the same result - longing, desire, envy. Focus on what's right in front of you, and make sure that it's something you really believe in.
We're definitely not the same people we were when we were 18. We've come a long, long way, and really, I can only laugh at the naïve mindset I had back then. I may always be the weird kid at work, but there's a certain pride in that.
I'm myself, I'm a product of my past experiences, and I couldn't be anyone else. I'm not that coworker, or that old friend, or that new friend. I'm exactly the person I can't define, exactly the way you find me, in whatever way you see me. Leave the judgements up to somebody else (they'll always have them) and let go of nostalgia, if you ask me.
For what it's worth, leaving that island has felt more like entering the witness protection program than going through a break up or starting a new job. The complexity of nostalgia here is that virtually nothing of that life is carried into this one. We are all products of our experiences. But when the most recent of my core changing years happened in a way that no one I am around can relate to, my only option for reflection is to look backwards. This isn't as sad as I make it sound in these posts (and I know I do). What is especially unfortunate about this particular blog is that I don't post often. Only when I feel like I need to examine something. So reading the thing post for post does not provide an accurate snapshot of how I feel every day. It's how I felt that day.
I am not holding onto the past, nor am I (ever) fixated on the future. I also do not quite know how to live in the present tense. It's a struggle and a goal to do so. I do not know of a soul who lived on and left that island who does not feel the same way.
I can appreciate that everything changes. This is an obvious and over-cited fact of everyone's life. In my own life, extreme change is an addiction. This--not nostalgia--is the problem. You can never be sure, when what you fear most is boredom, that the decisions you make are based on actual needs and real thought or if they are just another product of itchy feet.
So I roll with the self-inflicted punches. But I have no interest in shaking it off. I will continue to take little souvenirs of each life lived, and once in a while they will become too heavy in my pocket and I'll have to take them out, look at them in my hand, and remember how I felt to figure out how I feel.
I lived my past life from the time I was 17 til I was 29. Sadly, it's all a foggy dream to me. Like I woke up and was back in Colorado, as if nothing had changed except for that fact that everything had changed. I can't recall facts of my past life at will, I only recall stories I remember telling over and over again (but only the words from the stories, they are no longer memories of mine). My memories are blocked from me. I see pictures from that time and wonder who those people are. Sadly, I can't truly remember my children growing up to who they are now. I see pictures of them as babies and my heart breaks because I long to remember every detail of it. I refer to my past life as my "past" life because it is as if I had been reincarnated with less-than-memories from that particular time. All this happened the moment I decided I was starting a new life. I have since merely focused on now and have realized that time passes too fast for me to try focus on anything else.
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