I was reading through the early posts on this blog today. It’s been almost nine years since I started writing here. In many ways, I’m very much the same person I was then, with many of the same faults and frailties that I had then. But in other ways, I’m very much a completely different person, in ways I would never have anticipated nine or ten years ago.
I’ve lived here for over 20 years now, longer than I’ve ever lived consecutively in one town/city in my entire life. I don’t know what that means. I always thought of myself as a transplanted Maritimer, but I’ve now lived here almost as long as I lived in Nova Scotia in total and as long as I lived in Nova Scotia after we moved back from British Columbia. I’ve been almost five years without my mother, four years without my cat, and one-and-a-half years without my father. I am a different person now than five years ago, but closer to the person I was when I was five.
I’ve spent decades telling a story of me that is not really the story I want to tell. A story of sadness, chaos, clumsiness, daydreaming, and absent focus. What is the story I want to tell? What parts of me do I really want the world to see, to know as “me”? What do I want the story of me to be during the latter (finer?) part of my life?
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 