I’ve heard it said many times over from different sources, mostly from some of my friends who have decided to ‘reinvent’ themselves for whatever reason. Personally, the problem with that concept is that in reality I actually used to like myself. The key word there would be ‘used’ to like myself. It’s not so much that I don’t like myself anymore as it is more along the lines of realizing that I’ve lost ‘me’ somewhere in everything that has happened in my life, more specifically over the last decade.
While I sincerely believe that the core of who we are is formed as small children, before we start going to school; it is more the things we experience throughout our lives that actually shape that core. While my family is no different than many other families, I can see how all of us are so different. In many ways it is almost as if we are not even related to each other. Each of our lives have taken a different road, filled with many twists and turns, shaping each of us from the children who grew up in the same house together into the adults we have become today.
It’s often not until we reach the bottom that we actually take the time to look up and see just how far we have fallen from the goals we only thought we were working toward. I think too that it’s not so much the ‘hitting the bottom’ in life so to speak that defines us as a failure, rather it is what you do with what you see once you actually take the time to look up, back toward the top of whatever abyss we have allowed ourselves to fall into.
While we’re standing down there, no longer so focused on ‘hanging on’ do we ask ourselves if we have the fortitude to actually make the climb back out? More importantly do we actually reach for that bottom rung and start that climb or do we sit down there drowning in all the same excuses that put us there in the first place?
This blog is part of that journey back to the top of my own abyss, because I do place a degree of the blame upon myself. For reasons that I have still yet to actually put a name to, I moved back to my home state of Ohio into a world that I did not actually feel a part of anymore. The worst part of it is that I had not felt a part of it for a very long time. It was this feeling of alienation that caused me to be silent about a great many things, which is not really a definitive part of my nature.
Over the last several weeks, with my Grandmothers illness and finally her passing, there has been much conversation between myself and those whose opinions I value greatly. These conversations have brought about some much needed soul searching, triggering various things within myself that have helped me realize just how much of a ‘robot’ I had allowed myself to become.
Throughout my life I have never had a problem speaking my mind when came to defending myself or even someone else that I thought was being wronged. However, I have been forced to actually re-evaluate a few things within myself. Historically, when it comes to family I have always been ruled by a simple concept “keep the peace at whatever cost’ and unfortunately the cost this time was me. So, while some may say that I am reinventing myself, I say I am merely rediscovering the real me.
Writing this blog is as much an exercise in focus as it is a memoir that can act as both my own personal anchor as well as perhaps an inspiration to anyone who happens to stumble onto it.
