The following is an article I wrote about important moments in life, but I think it pertains a lot to the journey I'm trying to expose here. Enjoy!
Moments in Life that Matter
The significant moments in life are hard to discern, I think, when we are living them. Rarely is there is a big, flashing sign somewhere that says “pay attention; this is gonna be big,” before we walk into a bar and meet our soul mate, or walk out and get hit by a car. Sometimes the moments are so small and stack up so slowly that we might even forget when the whole bus started to turn and we began weaving unsurely off in a new direction.
For me, my significant moments are only clearly seen through hind-sight. I’ve never had any made-for-TV moments like getting a big promotion at work or accidentally bumping into Prince Harry in an elevator (and of course subsequently making him fall madly in love with me). My life’s been a normal one, of hardships, small triumphs, and a lot of digging in and pushing hard to get where I am today.
When I was younger I had a lot of health problems, chronic ones that carry through today, so I isolated myself and learned to fold myself up inside the back of my head and peek out only at what was going on right in front of me. I didn’t think about the past (too depressing) or the future (irrelevant and unwanted), just focused on getting through that particular moment without losing my mind. As I got older, into my early 20s, I learned how to manage my health better and my purview got wider, and I actually dared to take a look toward the future with curiosity. When it came to engaging the world outside my head, my thought patterns switched from “why?” to “why not?”
Looking back, that was a huge game-changer for me. And on paper it sounds like a proper epiphany. But I don’t remember the moment when it happened. It came in a bunch of tiny decisions I made, day to day. I had a supportive network of friends at the time and they just kept nudging me, offering me social situations, inviting me along on short trips, and little by little, instead of resisting their invitations, I took them. They probably didn’t know it, but every time we went to a house party, a trip to go dancing or to see a rock show, it was a big victory for me. To see them take everything in stride made me want to be able to do that too, and at some point it shifted from wanting to do it, to doing it.
With a new-found freedom I moved west and pretty much did whatever I wanted without a thought to consequences. I still made it a point (and I don’t think I had the psychological capacity) to never, ever look at my past, since it was such a downer, and could only think about my immediate future. By the time I hit my mid-twenties I was incredibly tired. I never turned down an invitation to go out, I was in a couple bands, in grad school, and worked full time, so the only thing I could cut back on was sleep. So I slept little, rocked out a lot and studied in between. I didn’t care if I died that day, as long as I was fully engaged when it happened. However, the lifestyle was completely unsustainable health-wise, which I realized when I fell asleep one afternoon and didn’t wake until 2 days later. I was suddenly forced to think of life as a long-term project instead of a minute-by-minute game of chance. I did not like this change. I fought it and made myself miserable.
After getting my Master’s, I took a break from work for a bit, took a breath, and realized that in order to make my current life tolerable, I needed to close a chapter on that first part of my life I had been drinking handles of whiskey to forget. I don’t remember a whole lot of that time, even though it was only about 10 years ago. One of the wonders of the human mind is to make terrible sicknesses go by in a haze – that fever-dream sort of reality you can remember happening, but all the details are muted. I had consciously driven a solid wedge between the younger me, when I was deathly ill, and the kinda grown-up me that had forged a life on the west coast. It was time to reconcile. So I scraped up that skinny, scared, often vacant-eyed little girl that was pre-millennial me and have her a hug, gave her some support, and I took her with me as I returned home, to the east coast.
I was only half alive for quite a while, as a person with a future but no past. So now I’m currently facing that which has always scared me the most and finding it’s not as bad as I thought. Don’t get me wrong, it can get dark sometimes. Lord, can it. But while the first part of my life was painful and brutal, it’s a big part of who I am now, good or bad. I still don’t care if I die today and I still do pretty much whatever I want (though in a more responsible way, I guess). I like those traits and I don’t know if I would have acquired them without my fairly rocky start to life. That’s a second and fairly recent epiphany for me. The moment when I realized I am truly the sum of my life experience and every bit of it is relevant to who I am now.
So shit happens. Sometimes you get buried under a load of it and it takes a long time to dig out, but all you can do is know that eventually it will be folded into your psyche, and you will step away a slightly different but more resilient person. Nietzche was right (and isn’t he always, though?): That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. Where’s my bus headed now? Not sure. I’ve learned to let go a bit and just see where the road leads. Besides, I can always turn off the path if I want, as there are all kinds of tiny miracles to be found in the dust and the dirt and the dark.
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