reposted from elsewhere
over the course of the past few weeks and culminating just right now, i've, slowly -- then, increasingly, rapidly -- built to a rather grand epiphany, both intellectually and emotionally ...
actually i'd have to say it went back further than that ... like any truly grand epiphany it's heavily reliant upon past, at the time equally-grand, realizations and understandings ... but that's not important ...
i'm at a curious new and old crossroad in my life ... "ten years ago" isn't just a play, like many entry titles of mine are, on episodes of heroes called "(months/years) ago" ... ten years ago is where, when, i first found myself at this juncture ...
sometimes i want to analogue it to having hit a reset button, but it's not quite that ... a lot has changed since then, and even being in the same place it's not like i'm the same person even with the knowledge of what's to come ... more i'm a different person with some vague idea of what's to come ...
and less like a reset button, and more like ... in a very early portion of an rpg, if your party is joined by an npc party member who is much higher level than your actual folks, specifically i'm thinking of ff7 when sephiroth is in your party and you're experienciing content you're actually not ready for ... and you do come back in the game, later, when your own talents have increased ...
i guess i can say i found myself in situations i wasn't ready for ... was given opportunities i probably didn't really deserve, was handed things i can't really say i feel i earned ... but even more importantly, when i had them, i didn't have the proper perspective to be properly appreciative of them ... and i ruined some opportunities ... some perhaps for the best, some perhaps for the worst, we'll never know ...
but now quite some time has passed and certain things are falling back into place, of course not exactly as they were before, but there are some fairly abstract but, to me at least, extremely distinct paralells at play ... some of which i'll touch on, most of which i won't get into at all ...
on just the most basic, obvious level ... physically, i'm back where i was 10 years ago (after having spent the vast majority of this time away from here). this whole trip i've been on regarding how life in many ways feels just like it did ten years ago (that i've been wanting to write about, but i think i'm glad i waited until tonight ... even if i can't quite match the exact shade of sentiment i had when i first thought of putting it this way ...) started when i was driving up to chicago in january ... on the way up, it started more as a feeling, of life just having some small taste of what it was like back then, and it was less than me thinking about the obvious-level paralells ...
such as living where i am and, like exactly ten years ago, i'm planning to leave this fall, as i did in the fall of '99, from here to begin (again) at university ... although this time, it's louisville instead of lexington.
i think '99 was the first year i'd been to chicago, and it was to see a concert then, too. then, it was soulfly and rammstein. i rode with john hampton, who i'd known since middle school and who i've been close to since then. this year, it was seabound and de/vision. i drove by myself. i stayed with allison leake, who i'd known for a few years before that senior year of highschool, but who i hadn't seen for many years after that year and only fairly recently crossed paths with again.
there's been a whole lot of that in the past ten years, people coming in and out ... a revolving door, with a revolving cast ...
before ten years ago, the overwhelming majority of the details (or not even the details, to me that implies minutiae ... perhaps, just the facts) of my father's life, after he and my mother went their separate ways, life were a complete mystery to me. it was ten years ago i learned i had younger siblings, and that was also the year i met them for the first time.
this year, eight or nine years since the last time i'd been in touch with any of them besides my dad, i've started to get into touch with them again. talking with them has been a very ... awakening, i suppose, experience. i wasn't living my life, not really living it, back then ... a lot of stuff was in some sort of auto-pilot. i mean, yeah, a lot of that is going to be like that up until a certain age, but i hadn't learned how to see things in a way that made me understand the need to do things my way -- well, that, or to have been willing to bear the consequences of doing it my way, if only i'd known what the consequences of not doing it my way would have been ...
but now, this time around, i'm making choices based on how i see everything i plan as fitting into a larger puzzle that i'm connecting, when before i just didn't know damn near enough about life to know anything at all ...
in ways i really find myself thinking i wouldn't really ever be able to do true justice to with words, earlier, the grand emotional epiphany i talked about ... i wish i could capture it better ... but, learning about and getting to know a different side of my family back then had an impact larger than i could perceive at the time, with rippling effects that seemed to have stretched out across this entire decade since then. like how i first started with saying it's been a few weeks, it's been about 7 or so weeks since i found out my older brother is expecting his first kid. and also how i started with how this is closely related to other grand realizations i've come to, but i'll try to leave out as much of that as i can and just stick with what i really want to say ... but, in my adult life, my older brother has only asked two things of me ... both relating directly to the health and wellbeing of our family. and it's just ... i know, i feel at least, that there is so much more he could, maybe even should, be asking of me, but doesn't ... and that makes me think about what must be truly the most important thing to him, family, above everything else. and thinking now of the person i want to be in his child's life, of who i want to be, thinking of who my brother has been to me and now how i have the chance to shape my life to be to my own younger siblings what i wanted to be before but couldn't because i had no real clue who i was myself ...
i've been entertaining the possibility, before i knew, that i'd be an uncle to my brother's kid(s) some day. i've been entertaining the possibility, before i started to get back in touch with them, that i'd reacquaint myself with my younger siblings. i had no idea that either would shape me the way they have. i guess i didn't even really have the slightest idea how these events would alter my perception of the picture this puzzle is forming ...
it's an almost overwhelming shift in concept. and it's not that it's ... different ... more that it's so much clearer, less vague ... not that i can say it's anywhere near complete a picture of things, but i could digress ...
i can't really say that for any overwhelming change in how i feel about or see things that i'm a particularly different person from any given day to day, but i know that for all that's stayed the same ... maybe i won't say things have changed, maybe some things have deepened -- for better or for worse -- ... but just, yeah, it's a rather curious old and new crossroad ...
i don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but i can surely say most of how i understand and feel and think about things now could be radically different ... as in, i can't just say it's a matter of maturity and naturally with the flow of time ... i feel very, very lucky, underservingly so, that, by chance, i've had certain fortunate circumstances ... like i said, that i'd been given opportunities i can't say i honestly feel i deserve ... some i screwed up, but some (maybe even some i screwed up) helped me figure things out in a way where i can be at this crossroad and feel i'm much better equipped to make my decisions than i was then, that i'm better equipped to accept the consequences and to make my plans come to fruition ... and not only that, but the potential to take every understanding i have about life, about existence, take it all together and not live so scattered, this is an opportunity i hadn't created for myself back then ...despite the obvious downsides of being ten years older, of having lost many opportunities, i have some i didn't have then ... some that were outside of my perceptual/conceptual reality as it existed then ...
i could go on and on, could probably double the length of this entry, about how deeply and how often i regret that it's taken me so long to come to these understandings about my life, of who i am ... that the first twenty-four years of my life were a wasteland, barren, compared to these last four ... that i've only really put myself into action for the last two of these past four years ... i mean, i have touched on and i will touch on those regrets ... really, i would like to share at least some of that, so that maybe i could reflect on them right now, instead of later when perhaps i might not feel just quite this way about things ... but, well ...
leave it up to me, to sleep somehow.