Again, With Meaning 05/04/14

Alright, since I couldn't come up with anything of quality to write about earlier, I searched my car and found my journal and I was rereading earlier entries and one from a few weeks ago caught my attention. A lot of things I write are written specifically for someone I know or met in passing with the knowledge that they will probably never read it, so when I write ‘you’ sometimes it is about someone, but sometimes it is also about the population in general, and I use the word you to make a connection or to clarify what I am saying by forcing the reader to look at it from a different point of view.

Anyway, what stuck with me about this particular entry was that it is currently the only one in this journal that I have used ‘you’ to force not the reader, but myself to see what I was writing from a different point of view, and as I was pretty upset when I wrote this, I must have done it subconsciously, or maybe I wrote it that way because I was supposed to come back and read it again. I don’t usually reread whole entries, I just glance at it later sometimes.

The entry was as follows.
“I don’t know who I am. I have absolutely no personality traits that are just… me. I change my likes and dislikes at the snap of a finger without even thinking about it. Who would I be if I was left alone too long? I don’t know. I can easily be the person at work that everyone gets along with. Because I am good at identifying with them? No. I don’t even know any of them. Not really. And they don’t know me. Not even my friends. Not even you. The person that you know me as, that’s you. That is the part of you that I see and can reflect back to you, because I don’t know who I am, so I will turn into you. A mirror, that’s who I am. And that’s why I feel so lost right now. I don’t have anyone to mirror.”

As I wrote this, I was writing to a specific group of people, probably, but when I reread it, almost a month after writing it, I can’t think of who I would be telling this to. Now I see ‘you’ to be a future me, perhaps, which changes my entire outlook of this writing. I was telling myself that I am not currently who I am supposed to be, but I can see who I want to be and by mirroring that image, I will eventually become the person I am supposed to be.

It still stands true that I have no idea of the person I currently am. But maybe time away from my friends and the time I will be spending with my family now that I have moved, maybe that time is meant for me to figuratively ‘grow a backbone’ or ‘discover myself’ or whatever.

I can see what I wrote in a different light now, because I am currently in an ‘up arch’ of my mood line, something I will probably write more about later. Basically it means that I can see things in a mostly positive light right now. In a few days/weeks/months/however long, I may be in a down arch, and I will not see things so positively. I’m sure that as a reader, you will be able to tell the difference if I write every day. If I look at the context of the previous entry in my journal, I was definitely in a down arch when I wrote that, so maybe I was not talking to my future self as in years from now, maybe I was talking to my future self as in my self when I am in an up arch of mood.

Epiphany. The ‘you’ I write to when it isn’t to a specific person, is my other mood self. I’d like to give them names to keep them straight in my head. Dark when I am in a down arch and Light when I am in an up arch. and if I am unsure, I will call it Gray. This will probably happen most of the time, because I am generally unable to tell where I am on my mood arch line unless I am comparing my current thoughts to previous ones.

I love when I figure something out while writing because later, when I can’t remember how I got to the conclusion, I can go back and reread the thought process. Perfect.

Well, this turned out to be more productive than I had hoped for when I began writing. Thank you blog for giving me a reason to go back and reread old writing.