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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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The last year has been about doing the things I know I need to do. The ordinary, the semi-ordinary, and the bigger stuff. Today I'm replacing damaged license plates; a little while ago I got my eyes tested and got glasses for the nearsightedness I'd felt creeping in for years. Late last year I started therapy. The past summer I changed jobs. Knowing that I'll never be perfect, I'm trying to at least work towards towards a better version of myself.
When I was younger I desperately wanted to be clever. As I've gotten older, I've realized how much more important it is to be kind. There's a part of me that's a little embarrassed and sad about the relationships and friendships I had when I was a clearly worse and more difficult version of myself. When I was obstinate and argumentative and convinced I was right about every opinion I had. Two decades ago I fell for someone who lived a few hundred kilometres away. And after three months of sparse physical contact, I was ghosted. Messages and emails ignored, voicemails deleted unreplied.
A year and a half later, a message in my old guestbook:
i hurt you.
that's not okay.
i'm sorry.
&& love.
The importance of journalling. This isn't in the copy of my guestbook from the Wayback, its only snapshot from when we were making our sites at the turn of the millennium, two years before. No, this is something I copied and pasted into a private entry in my old LiveJournal once I got it, which I came across recently after archiving all my data, and which when I first read it jolted me in the same way as the speaker of W.D. Snodgrass' "Mementos, 1":
Sorting out letters and piles of my old
Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards
That meant something once, I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.
It's funny, but years later I think far less about the actual relationship or the way it ended than I do that apology. It wasn't required; despite what you read online from the younger crowd, in dating and relationships, nobody owes you anything. You can always get up and walk away. It's hurtful, and you'll be remembered for it always, but it's your right. That later apology didn't try to be an explanation, or a peace offering, or a way back in, or anything like that. It was just an acknowledgement. Of hurt caused. An apology for it. And for me a reminder that you don't have to be perfect, or anywhere near it; that you can work towards that later, slowly, as you become ready and as the understanding becomes clearer to you.
I've thought too about where I am now, where things are stable, where I'm happy; and how things had to necessarily end for me to get here.
For years I'd put things off. I knew I needed glasses (signs were starting to blur in the distance), but I could still see well enough. I knew I needed to change jobs, being unhappy at my old position for years (literally years!), but was paralyzed by the fear of uncertainty and change.
And some part of me knew I needed therapy, even though I kept telling myself I didn't, that I could hold it in, hold it down. That I'd forget her eventually. That I could forget that night. That entire year. Have another whisky, w. Have another beer.
So now I have glasses. They're cute! I look good. I have a job where my work is respected, and meaningful. I'm working on getting to the point where I can talk to my family about everything - actually everything - that went on when I was fourteen. I'm not there yet. Will I ever be there? I don't think that's the right question. Better to ask if I'm trying (I am). Better to ask if I'm being good, and kind. Better to ask if I've started on the way.