Recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about the places I've come from. I'm not dying or anything, but apparently Chicago has been a more significant change than I imagined, and with that change, I've been doing a lot of thinking about who I have become, and how different I am from who I used to be.
Of course, in my earliest years I was really shaped by my parents and my teachers. It wasn't until I was in middle school that I really started to discover me. And that was a very messy process that, pretty often, led to difficult friendships which dissolved. I had a lot of really close friends in middle school. I was lucky to go to a school that had a class of about 80 students, if it was that many. It was hard not to know everyone and it was hard not to at least try to get along with a lot of people. I made a lot of friends that I thought I'd keep my whole life. There's really only 1 or 2 that I still talk to today. But even the ones that didn't stick, I haven't forgotten. I wonder how they turned out, what they're doing, who they've become. Most of the time, I expect that they've gone on to be just as amazing as they seemed back then.
High school was a big shift. Again, it was a messy time. I had my heart broken a couple of times, by boyfriends and by friends that I've lost touch with. But I also had some of the best times of my life with those people. I used to think that I wouldn't make it through my junior year of high school with all the social drama and the academic demands. Now, I would love to go back in time and tell myself how easy I really had it. It's funny how that usually only becomes apparent a few years later. I lost my grandfather in high school, which was an experience that deeply changed me. Contrary to what I thought would happen, I actually became more comfortable with the idea of religion, and his death also built a bridge between me and my family when I needed it the most. In high school I started to get a little more comfortable with being myself even when my decisions weren't popular or well-liked. I'm glad I learned to do that.
It took me until my senior year of college to finally get to the point where I was no longer afraid of disappointing other people, at least not in the monumental ways I imagined. My parents know where I stand on many things, and I'm much more aware of which friends I will have for the rest of my life, and which weren't really friends at all. And I'm starting to learn how to be okay with that.
It took 10 years for me to really start to figure out who I am. I imagine I won't really know who I am until I'm 90 years old, and even then, I'm sure there will be a few more things for me to learn. But knowing how far I've come, and where I've come from, I can start to see the woman I am, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm okay with who that is.
