The past and my own future.

Saturday night, looking for something to do while watching a four-hour version of Hamlet, I set to combing through my boxes of memorabilia, shuffling through old bus passes and identification cards, sorting through pictures, stacking letters, and dipping into and quickly flipping past the pages of the journals and planners of my twenties.  I got a lot done.  The photos were shifted to a drawer, the journals and planners tucked away in a different part of the house and the letters relocated to one box.  Hamlet was good too.  I found it engrossing in places, though nowhere near as engrossing as I found my own past.

Saturday night I was astounded—though really shouldn’t have been—to discover that the same two problems that come up repeatedly for me today were front and center in the journals of my previous decade.  I also thought about a great many people that wander through my synapses only in passing, and only now and then.  After sorting my past, I retreated to the computer, where I teased out information about those same people. The information I found astounded and excited me: a previous coworker runs a successful business overseas, a sister of a former friend is a florist, a not-surprising, (but-still-incredible-to-me) number of my former classmates are ecstatic about their children, and a person I always assumed to be gay is apparently not.

On Sunday, I thought about all these people, imagining myself in some of their places.  I worked hard to stay in my own present, a skill I’ve been building for some time now, with still no mastery in sight.  But my mind zoomed around to various points in the past, to what I imagine other’s futures are, and refused to settle anywhere near my own present.

On Monday, I hit a high.  I was in a fabulous mood because I was not in my twenties any longer.  Though I still have far to go to be the person I strive to be, I had seen a massive amount of evidence of how far I had come.  The two recurring problems?  They are clearly a part of me and something to be happily integrated and not a point of weakness.  I felt ecstatic and light and liberated and happier than I had been in a long time.  Some part of my conscious nudged me that this wasn’t a good place either and I had better pull back, but I was unable and unwilling to leave that feeling.

Monday night I awoke and stayed awake for hours, thinking about connections between people, the present, the departed and the long gone and mostly forgotten.  I wanted to sleep, to be rested for my day, but sleep eluded me as people from my past wandered through my brain.

Tuesday I crashed.  Groggy from lack of sleep, I woke up to my own, ordinary life.  A life that seemed less shimmering and satisfying than the one I lived only the day before.  Thoughts of my past began to fade and my present loomed before me, the same as it ever was.  I was exhausted.  I stumbled home from work and into bed, desperate for rest and oblivion.  I didn’t sleep very long, but I awoke feeling better and unsure what to do with this episode.  Essay writing time called and so I sat down and wrote.

Over the past few months I have experienced this cycle to lesser degrees again and again.  I fixate on something for a day or two and it becomes a way to ignore my present.  I think I have engaged in this pattern for years, with the object generally being a book I can’t stop reading.  I seem to struggle with the monotony of day-to-day life.  The daily shower, the finding of food, the keeping house, the daily grind of the job.  I want to make these things rituals, but I push them away, again and again.  I chide the boyfriend for constantly living in the future or the past, but I am guilty of escaping from my own present.

I’ve come a long way from the rampant poor choices of my early adulthood.  I’ve managed to build a solid relationship, a community of people, a steady income and a home I love.  But I probably need to pay attention to the times I still seek to escape all of these things.  This is what I learned this weekend.