GracefulWings

Hi guys (and dolls),

Boy has it been a while! I can't say I've been writing consistently, but I've been photographing constantly, and filling in the gaps with everything else.

Wow, I really don't know what to say. I've had some health stuff, some braces, tests and a surgery. I'm done with the high school experience and will be done with high school completely once I take the GED exam. All important things, but easy to shuffle into the 'past' category in retrospect.

All the things that I've neglected these past months and years like my old blog and this journal here almost seem to belong to someone else. Almost. I've grown a lot, and it's a good thing. I'm so much more aware of myself and who I am than I was a few years ago.

As nice as the past looks in retrospect, it hasn't all been pleasant. In a lot of ways I was blissfully ignorant where I am now painfully aware. It was incredibly hard to write during this period. A wall went up. I began dealing with new emotions, and new things psychologically. I felt that I could express myself well before, but I was only expressing as much as I understood. No, that's not right. It was like my mind and my emotions were a small box, and I could reach out to all the edges of the box, and I filled it nearly completely. For the capacity I was at, I understood myself and the world around me well. Then the box started growing, and my previously full capacity was small, and I understood very little. It was far too unfamiliar, and until I had a grasp of it, there was no way I could write about it.

Thankfully, I think I am at the point where I accept that things aren't the way they were before, and that is okay, and the emotional pain I'm dealing with is a side effect of growing up and becoming an independent-minded adult, and that is more than okay. When I was younger and wanted to grow up and get away and be an adult I had no idea how far away it was. I may have been ahead of the game in a few ways, but that moment when you look at your parents and they are...I don't know, they are no longer the parents who raised you and took care of you, or who your emotions regarding were at least centered around this 'parent' idea, but they are two people, and in some inexplicable way, something vital has changed, the umbilical cord was cut, you're seventeen and living at home but you are on your own. Only you know that isn't true. Things have just changed, as they do. A new stage of life has started, not marked by a quinceanera or sweet sixteen or an event that is supposed to be important but you hardly remember, but an accumulation of it all, little moment of revelation when you noticed that everything had shifted.When I noticed everything had shifted.

And it's all good.

When lucidflux asked me how I was feeling a few days ago, I told her I was experiencing moments of 'down', with a prevailing optimism. I'm pretty happy with that assessment.


I've always struggled with those 'About Me' things. I was changing too fast to know who I really was, and when I didn't feel like I was growing, I knew I wasn't there. The conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar came to mind:

"`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'
`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'"

I think I am beginning to become myself.