After the End: Time Travel

It occurred to me, just last week actually, that finally, ten years on, I'd managed to figure out what “I want to go home” meant and how to go about giving it to myself. The boy wanted out of the hallway, had wanted to be invited into the light in the center of my life again, the living room. And I'd told him that was his right forever. Integration had finally begun.

In April, I met an amazing woman. I've tried to put in words how I feel about her, describe here or sitting with others what she means to me. And I can't do it. She inspires me, certainly. She makes me feel like striving as hard as I can, and settling in, snug and safe, both at once. And I can describe why, maybe, but it wouldn't capture it, so I've lapsed into silence around it, outwardly, for the most part. What's to say?

Last year, I turned my depression around and finally clawed out of that despair that haunted much of my life. But in doing so, I didn't reach for success. I redefined what I was doing AS success. Not having a job was success. Not having a car was success. Because I couldn't manage trying to reach for them, and the only way I was going to feel good was by celebrating what I had accomplished, with no anxiety over what I was externally expected to accomplish, but had failed to achieve. Life is full of what you haven't managed to do yet. Life's fuller still of what you'll never manage. Why bother with that stuff? Better to celebrate what you are doing, here and now, that brings you joy and real, visceral contentment.

And that was me enlisting the ten year old me to assist. By undermining the expectations of success, I was on his side. And with us on the same side, I had his passion and focus at my disposal.

So, redefining success, I began to feel so good that I contemplated moving. And beyond that, I felt so good I was in a perfect place to meet S, and that's when I did. And I was ludicrously happy.

We planned a trip. A trip after months of waiting for, we'll be off on this weekend.

Moving? Relationship? Those are success. And once again I wasn't on the same team as the ten year old me anymore, we were butting heads. I felt him, sowing doubt, muttering, glaring, plotting. I grew numb with worry and felt...not so much depressed like I'd been so many years, but...off.

He'd remade himself in my father's image with me as the enemy, or maybe it was the other way around.

Whatever way it was, I realized: I'm tired of fighting. For one thing, I know if we play it by my father's rules, I'll never beat him. And what use would life be without the generative spark that ten year old carries, if I did manage to win?

That ten year old me is devious, adaptive, fiendishly tireless, exuberantly focused, unflappable, unstoppable and while I was depressed when he stepped in to run the show, that part of me that was effecting my “failing my way” plan was not itself depressed. Angry, oh yes. But never depressed. So, why would I want to crush that?

But now the relationship, that part of me is up in arms against, has me on a trip with S for the first time, in less than two days.