Hello again, hypothetical audience!
I honestly never thought I would write in this blog again. But, after going back through all my writing (even my older blog, black coffee and red eyes—peruse at your own psychological peril)... I can't lie, I feel a little proud of myself. Imagine that.
Last time I wrote here was in September 2011, a post about living in the present that still resonates with me today. I may have accidentally written a handful of navel-gazey observations and philosophical postulates that actually became productive.
To re-cap and re-organize into a loose mission statement, mostly for myself (some of this might be rephrased or cleaned up):
There's no epistemologically defensible position from which to resent another person.
Everyone makes mistakes in life, and those mistakes will sometimes burn bridges with other people. That's only because your weaknesses outweigh their patience to deal with them at any given moment, and the scenario is as much a chance for the other person to examine their impatience as it is for you to examine your weakness.
Sometimes others will point out patterns in your mistakes that you hadn't noticed, and create an identity out of it that they'll project onto you; even worse, you'll take their innocent and potentially helpful observation and turn it into a negative identity for yourself. Never accept this identity from yourself, or from other people.
Align your behavior with your values as consistently as possible, and grant yourself that your mistakes don't define who you are.
A mistake is an accident that moves from a place of impure intention—we all know what our real values and intentions are, and this is our true self. It's the true self you should seek to identify in others, looking past their weaknesses.
Find people who appreciate you, and who you appreciate. And give more love more than is reasonable or necessary.
I think I've done a relatively good job at living up to these points, even if my spirits aren't always as high as I'd like to them be. Or if my thoughts are muddier than they once were rather than just seeming that way, the infuriating irony of which being that as time passes and my brain ages, I'll never know the difference.
Anyway—it all sounds like me, like me at my most lucid. And that was one of the realizations I came to today while I was re-reading all of my old thoughts and blog entries that led me here.
As I look back, I realize that I only partially recognize the person who wrote a lot of those blogs.
Before, I often wrestled with the idea of the inner voice as opposed to the captured inner voice. If I could think faster than I could write, somehow the written voice felt inauthentic; the inner voice automatically won the battle of "who would represent me," but the point becomes more and more oblique the more it's deconstructed.
Language tends to break down at a basic pronominal level when you start to get into the really interesting parts of life.
I remember my Grandma found my older blog where I was basically chronicling my life at it's most mundane, just my inner ramblings and my disastrous nights out. Lots of self-destructive behavior and thoughts, bitterness, and so on.
I was surprised when she told me that she was really thrilled by it all. That's to be expected from your Grandma, usually, but if you knew her you'd know why it surprised me. She said that it gave her a chance to know me as her grandson, in a way that she wouldn't have been allowed to otherwise. It got me thinking more about writing, but a side note here—
I talked to my Grandma again only a week ago or so. I take that back, it was on Thanksgiving, and I'd been cooking all day while Monisha was at work. I'd been going back and forth with depression, but kind of decided at the beginning of that day to make the day about me and about celebrating for celebrating, not for whatever parameters I had preset for the holiday.
It was a blast. I had some whiskey, made stuffing, buttermilk cheddar biscuits, green bean casserole and other things—a lot of it was bachelor cooking fare, but I was still proud. Regardless, just that decision to make the day about myself opened up some space in my heart is the best way to put it. I thought about Grandma alone in Oxford, not snowed in at that point but might as well have been. She'd just lost her life partner of so many years, aside of what my feelings were about the man and what he did to my mother; hell, what he did to her, too. She was a part of him, and he'd been gone now for as many months as I'd been across the country.
So I called her. The conversation went haltingly at first, as expected, but it gradually opened up. I think I made the call mostly to verify that my Grandma had her own independent feelings, to disrupt the narrative I'd had about her and my Grandpa for so long. After we talked I knew I'd been wrong for a while. Or at least, I recognized that it was possible that I'd been wrong.
We talked about life, literature, travel. She told me about how hard the year had been for her. One of the hardest in her whole life, which really meant something. It touched me that I'd lived through a year that my Grandma described as one of the hardest ever, knowing what she's been through.
There's no changing her now, her experiences have made her who she is. We came to a couple polite impasses, but still it was a good conversation. Anyway—
To get back on track, that conversation I think made me want to retread some of my old writing and see if it was any good. I found that some of my earliest writing that I thought was the worst and most constipated was in some ways a lot better than what I'd been writing lately.
I think it's more a question of influence. I don't think I had many distinct influences when I started writing, I just felt like my life was important enough to merit keeping track of. Or maybe I just wanted to keep track of it in the hopes that something useful would come up that I could use down the line. I've never been one to keep a journal, but I found it valuable looking back through it. It's weird that you have to think of your future self to motivate your present self to keep a journal.
But anyway, I looked back through this blog too. In both cases, I found that I didn't really relate to their narrators, even though both were at different points in the past. It calls into relief the idea that who I once was is not who I am now. We are many people over our lifetimes; we are vast, we contain multitudes.
Anyway, I think I do need a place where I can keep track of my daily thoughts without explicitly advertising them anywhere. I know better now to use any googlable terms like full names of family members (which is really what derailed it, mom and Dennis either calling me about finding it or bringing it up during a fight—can't remember).
There's a lot of contemptible things in my old thoughts and writings, but there's also some redeemable qualities shining through. I recognized even four or so years ago the need for more discipline than I have, even today (though I've gotten better). So I'm going to bring it back.
I'll keep blogging. I have a more formal, presentable blog that I hope others will peruse (and that I'll more actively advertise), but I'll have a way for interested parties to find their way into the dingy basement of my mind if they so choose. That's what this blog will be.
So stay tuned, guys.
Ryan
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