…Into the Hurricane

I’ve started listening to Something Corporate again. I’m not sure at what point I stopped listening to them…or to any of the other rock bands that I came to love in my early 20’s. Dashboard Confessional, The Format, Acceptance, Desaparecidos, The Get Up Kids, and Taking Back Sunday have all managed to find their way back into my mp3 player. And there is this strange sense of release, a mixture of feelings like a rush of air when a door has been opened after being shut too long, like a homecoming, a deep breath, the icy air on your face. And as I brush the dust off of “North” here at the end of June in my 28th year, I find myself asking, “How did I get here?”. As the words and melodies once so familiar fill my apartment once again, I close my eyes and see another version of myself staring back through the other side of the proverbial looking glass. She’s innocent and happy, and she says “Hello” with a smile that says she’s missed me. I’ve missed me.

So how exactly did I become a stranger in my own life? Which decision was it that dropped the stone in my life pond, creating a devastating ripple effect across the surface? How did I get this wrong? Is that even possible? Can a person get life “wrong”? If we can’t turn back time to correct our mistakes, if there really is no such thing as “if I had only known then what I know now”, how does a person change? Where do you go to look for the person you lost along the way? How do you exorcise yourself of your inner demons when you are your own worst enemy? I have no idea…

Perhaps that is my next challenge. Now may be the perfect time…poised to move into a house with two of my best friends, people who knew me back “when”. Can they help me find that too-familiar girl on the other side of the mirror, waiting with expectation in her eyes? Can they help me across the threshold of my true self?

All I know is that once again, Andrew McMahon has put a melody to my very thoughts, like he’s got some kind of window into my mind. Maybe he’s waiting on the other side of that looking glass too, with countless others, anticipating my return. However, I could never say it as eloquently as he does:

Maybe this time I can follow through,
I can feel complete, stop paying dues;
Stop the rain from falling,
Keep my oceans calm;
This time I know nothings wrong…
So don’t say
“These currents are still killing me”
And you can’t explain;
But the wind went and pulled me
Into the Hurricane

Bless you Andrew McMahon. I’m on my way…

The Evolution of Me

The last five years of my life have carried me into uncharted waters and now that the fog has cleared, I can begin to paddle back to shore, seeing more clearly than I ever have before. I created this blog site as a place to post my thoughts during this journey, and I mean it to be a place of self-introspection, not a place of commentary. I’ve made it “public” out of the hopes that perhaps one other person in this vast world-wide-web may have one small grain of truth to share, a helpful anecdote from their own journey, or might take comfort in knowing they aren’t the only person frantically rowing their boat back against the push of the waves.

I think we’re all constantly changing, each of us finding our way towards a more accurate representation of who we really are, who we were created to be…I believe in Evolution in that sense. That being said, here is my offering: The Evolution of Me.