Recently, I've been in touch with a couple of guys from the past - one from 10th grade, and another from 1990. Both said the same thing about me: "One day you were there, and the next you were just...gone". In each case, I moved away and never looked back. It wasn't personal, of course. I just...moved on.
Years later, having reconnected with people on Facebook, I get to hear what friends and acquaintances thought about me. It's really interesting how we view ourselves and how others view us. Of course, everything depends on a good foundation and healthy self-esteem, and to be honest, I was so busy running away from myself that I wasn't much able to focus on anything but the trip. What people thought of me or how I affected them, it just didn't occur to me to wonder. I assumed I was expendable and forgettable, so therefore I needed to make people nonessential.
Of course I made good friends along the way, deep lifelong relationships, and ultimately managed to carve out a life for myself. But there were, as these two guys pointed out, casualties in my wake. People who genuinely thought they were having a relationship with me and who I just up and left, with no explanation. How could I do that? How does anyone do that? I know for myself it was, getting back to what I said earlier about self-esteem, all about not feeling I made an impact. I didn't matter.
Well, it's years later and I don't do that anymore. Perhaps it was having my son, someone who needed me, who grounded me. Perhaps it was caring about myself and those around me and not wanting to hurt them. Or maybe it was just the natural progression of life - you get older, people matter, life means more than something better around the corner.
This blog is nothing if it's not about learning, moving on, growing up and trying to be accountable. But growing up doesn't really have anything to do with age, as I'm learning. I have a friend who's 24 who seems more mature than some guys twice his age.
One in particular, and the one who brings me to the title of this post.
Remember the guy I blogged about a few weeks ago who convinced me to go out with him even when I tried to say no? The one I got on here and talked about his being the adult in the situation? You know, the 48-year-old skateboarder? Well, it turns out going against my instincts was not such a good thing. It turns out that "excited" feeling one gets in their stomach is actually a warning sign, a danger signal. But we know that, don't we?
We always do know better, but sometimes it takes behaving like our younger selves to find out that our experiences weren't for nothing.
And sometimes it takes someone else behaving like our younger selves as one last kick in the gut: Dude, U R 2 Old.
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