And then you stumble upon a picture from 10 years ago and you think about how different things are now. You think about the friends you've lost, the friends you've made, the relationships you've had, the family who've passed, the laughs, the tears, the anger, the frustration, the feeling of slamming your head repeatedly against a concrete wall, crying in your parents driveway at 3 am with your best friend about a boy, traveling across the country and waking up in a shady motel in a city whose language you can't speak, your parents' divorce and how you've never fully been able to speak to how much it did impact you and your relationships and trust regardless of how much you put on a face about it, your disdain for and fear of abandonment of your closest, the tragedy of loving and losing, the ways people have used and abused you, the views of your body that apparently determined your personality to the extent that everyone had an opinion about your sexuality, the lack of understanding, the lack of compassion, the self-destructive tendencies when people get "too close". And then.... You think. You think about how much you've changed in this relatively short amount of time. You think about the person you used to be, and how much you'd want to punch them in the face. You think about how different you've become, differences that people seem to appreciate in retrospect because these differences are facets of your personality that people gravitate towards. You think about where you are, where you've been, and wonder where you're going. Sometimes it feels like you're lost, like you have no direction, but then realize that you've always been going in some direction, regardless of how clear or unclear it's been. I'm not spiritual at all, but I do feel like I've either died or killed so many different versions of myself over the years to become this current one, whose time is probably also coming to an end. But it's necessary. I feel something different coming; I feel the culmination of years of dedication to learning and education coming to an end. I feel the other side gradually getting closer and closer. The new friendships, the new experiences, getting myself out of my comfort zone, completely changing how I have been thinking about things, I feel like the next chapter in my life is going to be bigger and better than the past. I'm ready. I'm nostalgic, I'm sad, I'm scared, but I'm ready. I'm ready for new friends and experiences, ready for more love and laughter, ready for more long nights of laughing my ass off at inside jokes, ready to build myself up into the man I can be rather than the man people wanted me to be, ready to continue down my path, ready to know more about who I am, learn more about who I am, and embrace and understand who I am not. Just pass on by, these are the rantings and scribblings of a man thinking about his life, in no uncertain terms.
