Dream Your Dreams
I’ve often mourned the many lost things and people who live in my memory. When my childhood came to a close, I also mourned the loss of my childhood self. But life after childhood is no monolith.
The loss of a child is particularly tragic because of all the things they didn't do, because their life was snuffed in the prologue. But the death of a me, when supplanted by another, becomes more tragic the longer that that me lasted. A room in myself I can never revisit, but only remember by it’s outline, because it no longer exists.
The me’s of my youth were planned for obsolescence. Each one a temporary arrangement with an expiration date as my brain developed and I had foundational human experiences.
When seeing a photo from my childhood, though I may reminisce or long for remembered simplicity of childhood, the feeling is mostly sweet. So many exciting things await that child! Conversely, adulthood can have such losses, even if its joys scale to match. To look at one of these photos can elicit what could be referred (I believe erroneously) as self-pity. It is precisely because that person is not me, that I pity them. Or that I think them and fool or a coward.
As I’ve grown, the nature of my photos have also changed. As a child, people take photos of us. As an adult, we take photos of the people and things around us. When seeing a photo taken now, I most often see my point of view of a specific moment of time. Everything and everyone but me. This snapshot of my own lived experience pulls me in, in a way someone else’s photo of me could not.
I know conceptually that there will be many iterations of myself, that they are in truth countless, even if I decide to categorize them in some particular fashion. Each present me a dreamer and each past, future and present me a dream.
I know conceptually that in some ways loss is prerequisite to growth. After all, try to be too many me’s at once, and I’m liable to lose my mind.
I do not think this minimizes my ability to be excited about the future, or to build my life in ways that align with my desires and values. I would not know those desires or values without the sorrows of the past. Not that there haven’t been just as many joys. But perhaps the past is a sorrow, because it is no longer here. I mean this in the same way as the future is a hope, because it has yet to come. Tangentially if not directly related to that famous quote, that though we live it forwards, life can only be understood backwards.
When I was younger I thought this sometimes sorrowful outlook as a product of some wound, but now I feel it to simply be a part of my humanity. In many ways it’s been a spring for what empathy I have and what kindness I’ve committed. But I suppose only time can tell what me I’ll dream up tomorrow.
