Changes

Every so often, I come to a turning point, as we all do, and I start to change everything around me. My life has always seemed to go in shifts of seven years or thereabouts, but I think I’m breaking that pattern now. Where am I at, four?

Several years ago, my life changed. It changed fundamentally in ways I don’t even bother trying to explain to most, so let’s just stick to it being one of the more “out with the old, in with the new” forms of changes a person could face. My life and personal history before then wasn’t entirely gone, but I essentially had to re-learn everything about myself. This also led to becoming brutally aware of who I no longer was.

Sure, we all have life changes, and we’re not all the “same person we used to be” and so on and so forth, but that’s just natural progression of life.

This was different. This was the fundamental core of my brain being changed through injury. Loss of memories, self, awareness, and all scores of internal and executive function created an entirely different person, while still somehow keeping myself the same. Enough that I’ve been told both that I’m “still the same old” me, as well as that I’m “not the same person” that people knew.

One of the benefits of having minimal to no emotional connection to your own past up to a certain point is that I am not inherently bothered by most things that have gone from my life. Sure, the awareness that certain people, memories, feelings, and parts of my own self are no longer around sometimes weighs me down, just in thinking about it… but I don’t exactly feel anything personal towards it all.

That was all a part of someone else’s life, not mine.

So around four years ago, I made the decision to change everything yet again, because everything changed for me. I didn’t have control over my situation or condition, so the control I took was in deciding to let go of everything I could that didn’t simply come with me. I began to actively construct my life around where I wanted to go, not where the previous iteration of me had been.

I feel like I am at another one of those turning points this year, where I cut the chaff from the wheat, trim off the fat, and all those other similar metaphors and cliches we all use. Nothing quite as major as four years ago, but enough that my actions feel like they have some internal sense of purpose.

And to think this was initially going to be a post about how I moved my blog.