a seeming void becomes a solid ground

When I revisited my blog last week, I read my posts again.  Experiencing my thoughts backwards, remembering the nuances of time during which I was writing, I walked through the fifty posts I had created months earlier, and I was, frankly, weirded out.  So much of the stuff I reread I had simply forgotten that I'd written -- some of the insights that I had made resonated within me almost as if they were new.  Of course, there was an element of nostalgia, of familiarity, because at one point, those ideas had belonged to me as I experienced them, and yet when I read them once more, months later, I was startled by the novelty they seemed to have.

When do the thoughts and ideas we have cease to be ours? I'd like to think that because I have thought something beautiful, because at one point I felt so compelled by an idea that I wrote about it, the idea has changed the material that makes up me in some way.  But what about the moment when you realize you've forgotten about something that once moved you enough to capture it in a blog, or on paper, or to a friend? What about the moment you realize you've forgotten something only because when you encounter it once more, it feels foreign?

It's a scary feeling, realizing you've forgotten something, especially something that once made your heart skip with weight and importance.  Really, it's enough to make me feel stick to my stomach -- because ultimately, when that happens to me, what I am feeling (or at least scraping the surface of) is the sense that an idea nearly slipped away from me.  It nearly ceased to belong to me.

It is strange to feel in the pit of my stomach like I am learning something from myself.  The experience of reliving my blog one year later is, as I have realized, pretty much the closest possible way for me to experience my blog as an outsider, something whose perspective I have struggled to perceive my whole life.  But am I reading my own words, or am I reading those of the girl I was one year ago? The events described happened to me, the words on the page are all ones that my fingers typed, but do the thoughts still belong to me even if I have changed, forgotten their nuances and details?

Does it even matter, in the end, that I struggle to perceive the ideas that other people have about me? If I am not the same person I was when I wrote my blog entries all those months ago, if I can experience them almost as an outsider who is learning, remembering, something that feels new, then how can the opinion of others in general be relevant in any way? Those opinions, like the nuanced thoughts in my blog, can be forgotten.  Perhaps the perception that one person has of me is ephemeral -- not just because thoughts are ephemeral, but because I am ephemeral.

Perhaps the thoughts I wrote in my blog were "mine" because it was my brain that thought them up, but it's not them changing or being forgotten in my mind that would make them cease to be mine.  Perhaps it is simply the changing of the person who has these thoughts, the person I am.  This blog can capture, take a snapshot of more than just my thoughts and ideas.  It can take a snapshot of the person -- the precious, ephemeral, tumultuous person I am at one given moment in time.

Thinking like that, going through my old posts seems less like a scary, surreal experience of remembering how much I've forgotten, and more like a trip through a museum filled with precious, lovely, one-of-a-kind versions of my ever-changing self.

Suddenly, the experience feels so much more beautiful.