5 Years Different
I turn 22 today.
My morning commute to my new job — my first full-time adult job — leaves me with plenty of time to reflect. Today I choose to think about progress. People invariably change through life, but in my stubborn habits it’s taken concerted efforts to evolve from… anything.
And so today I remember the steps I took to put me on this road, stuck in rush-hour traffic, singing “EARFQUAKE” with the windows down, more content than before. It took 5 years, but I’m here. And I’m trying to make my 20s better than my teens.
5 years ago, in 2014, I was one-year settled in Virginia Beach and one-year removed from Miami Beach. One year separated from a life of community and love. This was a community — a family — that I chose, comprised of humans that showed their affections for me.
I was carried away by the currents of the family I was born with. A family that habitually relocated me as soon as I acclimated to a new home. And as my father found another new job, a thousand miles away, that’s exactly what happened.
As I left my Miami home in 2013, my arrival to a colder climate foreshadowed my emotional progression over the next year. One year settled, my chosen family was gone. One year settled, I was lost in a new house where the barren walls mirrored my new life. One year settled, I was more isolated than ever before. One year settled, my previous home was only a memory that I clung to, and the peace I found with myself and my chosen family was gone.
I was alone.
During my two-year sentence in Virginia, I thought a lot about myself. My homeschooling not only fostered my isolation, but the spare time gave me ample space for self-analysis. I’d been raised with a certain degree of autonomy, but there were vestiges from my childhood that I was hopeful to remove. There were mistakes I wish I could’ve undone, but I knew I could at least do my part not to repeat them. And so I looked inward, deeper than I ever had, to interrogate my existence.
When I looked at my own values, my own identity, I found too much of other people and not enough of myself. My thoughts, my words, my morals, my actions — all too much of other people. I was a pliable boy and the people in my life, intentionally or not, molded me into a stranger.
So I analyzed, critiqued. 17-year-old me kept finding new questions the deeper I dove. And I came out of the rabbit hole without answers. Without answers, yes, but not empty-handed.
17-year-old me came out of the rabbit hole with a lost message. And 22-year-old me unearthed the message to share again:
I don’t know who I am anymore:
who am i? what makes me, me? is it the result of intrinsic knowledge paired with life experience? is there more to it? life, i mean. Nature says no — my (and all) purpose is to carry on humanity. Nurture says i should go to college because I’m smart and am afforded the opportunity to do so. but what is there beyond material, and stretching ‘material’ to include emotions and other intangible things — what is its purpose? where do i go? what do i do? what’s the best path?
i love games. i always have. my parents bought me a playstation 2 for christmas one year. i loved it and all of the games i had. i beat all of them three times over. it was the satisfaction that motivated me. knowing that i had done something correctly. it didn’t stop. checkpoints. saving your progress. beating the game. years later i still had the fascination. open world games were my favorite. the kind that let you save your progress whenever you want. i used to always save before doing something dangerous or exciting. i loved saving. i didn’t have to worry about messing something up — i could just try again and get it right. over and over. i always got it right. that’s my fantasy. getting everything right. never making mistakes. always having the answers. it doesn’t work in the real world.
i’m afraid of not knowing. i’m afraid of the consequences of actions i didn’t even know had consequences. i’m afraid of messing something up irreparably. i don’t just want answers, i need them.
but there are no answers. i prayed. then i stopped. still no answers.
nothing.
I learned an unintentional, yet essential lesson at 17 — maybe one of the most important ones so far. I don’t know things. I don’t have answers. No answers, but a starting point; a home base; a single brick to build on.
5 years ago, I asked the question, “who am I?” 5 years later, I have some semblance of an answer.
I’m the boy who was isolated for 2 years in Virginia. The cold winters might’ve damaged my psyche just as much as it exacerbated my pup’s arthritis. We both missed the tropical Floridian sunshine and the flurry of family visitors. But we pushed through the years of heavy snow; we knew the ice would melt as the spring came to pass.
On the eve of my second summer in a city I still knew nothing of, big news briskly paced into the house. My father was home at 3pm on a Wednesday, uncharacteristic of his 70-hour work weeks. And his usual tone of calm confidence was replaced by an exasperated call for attention. He was the reason we were in this foreign city, and he had just been asked to resign.
As we all know, this is what you do instead of being fired — you resign. So there he stood, in the house we’d just bought, staring at the walls I’d helped paint, terminated from the university I’d attended. I still wonder whether his termination was truly the result of higher-ed turnover, or the product of his unmanaged alcoholism. With either, though, the result was still the same; I had to start packing.
It took my father 6 months to find another job, so in that time my family, and I, had no direction. Without direction, we moved back to a city that once tortured me; a place my mom called ‘home’ but I didn’t.
Uncertainty flooded my mind as it did before, drowning every other thought in my head. But this time, unlike before, uncertainty was not a tidal wave of anxiety and isolation; no, this time when the waves came ashore they carried hope.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was finally at peace with not-knowing. There was no panic; no fear; no anxiety. I was ready.
I ended up in the city I now claim as my domain, and when I recall the uncertainty I felt 5 years ago and before, I acknowledge those feelings as valid. But I still learned from them.
It took 5 years to learn how to cope with the feeling of not-knowing, but it helped me create who I am. But who I am, and was, aren’t as important as who I needed to be to get here.
As I look forward into the future — into uncertainty’s face — I don’t think about who I was or who I am. I think about who I needed to be — who I need to be. And I become him.
I still don’t know 100% who I am. But now I realize that:
- I don’t need to completely understand who I am to move forward.
- I have a better idea of who I am than I once did, and that’s enough to move forward.
I’m not afraid of messing up or consequences or not being perfect or missed opportunities or unsaved games or uncertainty or not-knowing. I may not have all the answers, but I have more than I did. And I know more than I did.
I know where I’ll be 5 years from now: somewhere.
There’s pride in progress.
