Back to the Past

May 19, 2009

I currently belong to a Yahoo group organized by Eric Maisel who is writing a book on productive obsessions. I joined because it sounded like a good idea, to take the month of May to use my tendency to obsess about things for some kind of positive result.

So far, I've been distracted by the stuff of daily life, along with some major family stress, and I haven't done much with what I chose as the focus of my productive obsession, finding and securing meaningful work. To be honest, my enthusiasm for the process has been lacking. I have many of the group's messages in a folder to be read later. It just feels so much like an uphill climb right now.

As if it wouldn't be at some other time. Like Yoda said, "Always in motion is the future."

One of the members emailed the group this link, a column on Salon about finding your original writer's voice again. I read it and identified just a bit with the 60-year-old man who wrote in for advice about his desire to quit writing. He is twenty years older than I am, but I could definitely imagine waking up at sixty with the same feelings he has because, even twenty years younger, I have some of the same concerns.

Recently, someone from my past contacted me through Facebook, and I learned why the phrase "blast from the past" is so common. While he is no longer important to me, the seventeen-year-old girl I was when I knew him is. Hearing from someone from that era of my life brought me face-to-face with Lissa at seventeen, and it has been an emotional encounter, a blast like time-travel, coming face-to-face with a totally different me who I resemble only slightly now, in every facet of my being.

When I was seventeen, I had dreams like we all do. I wanted to be so many different things, mostly successful. I wanted to matter. I wanted to make a mark. I wanted to have my name up in lights, even while I hadn't "grown into" that name yet. My whole life was ahead of me with so many possibilities, so many paths to choose from, it was dizzying.

I was young and in excellent health, not suffering from chronic anything yet. I still believed in Jesus. I thought I was headed for college. I still believed, at least on the surface, that I could rely upon my family, no matter what. My father was still alive and in good health. I was still largely inexperienced in most arenas. I expected to have children someday.

I suppose I was a typical seventeen-year-old.

And now? Everything is different. Everything has changed so staggeringly, it's no wonder that remembering who I used to be sent me into a bit of a tailspin. In less than one month, I'll be forty-one, and twenty-four years later, there's very little of that seventeen-year-old girl and her life left.

I am not young, and I've got a whole list of health issues and challenges. I no longer believe in Jesus, nor in gods of any kind, and I know from far too much experience that simply because someone is part of my family, it doesn't mean he or she is someone I want anywhere near me. I did take some college classes, but I didn't finish. I don't have a degree, and while I would love to return to college now, I have absolutely no clue what I'd major in. My father is gone, and I miss him every single day. I have much more life experience than I ever could've imagined at seventeen, and I decided not to have children.

And that doesn't even scratch the surface of how different I am, how different my life and the world is, from when I was seventeen.

Reading the response to that sixty-year-old man's laments about writing, I was inspired, even while I've heard the advice before. Why do we human beings find it so difficult to go back and start over from the place where we had confidence and self-assurance and energy and vigor? Is it because of the culture shock of facing our own young selves again? Does going back feel too much like being blasted into regret for a future we never realized?

Or do we just forget who we were when our paths were unwinding in front of us?

I suppose the point is that the path is never finished unwinding until that last breath is drawn and released. Even at sixty, that man has choices. He has limitations, too; we all do. But we have as many opportunities, and if we can remember who we were and assimilate that person into who we are today, maybe that unwinding path is a little easier to navigate.

I hope that in twenty years, I will look back at almost forty-one-year-old Melissa and see this era of my life as a springboard for realizing all kinds of dreams and successes. And I hope I will see the ensuing twenty years as a different kind of blast.