I wonder if I'll ever do this again?
I took a nice long walk this afternoon, as I'm wont to do when I have the free time. This week's the first in months that the weather has been nice enough for me to do that, and I hadn't forgotten how much I missed it.
Taking a walk through the residential areas, with only the noise of the wind and the birds and the occasional distant car and conversation to break it. White noise, the best kind. Very constructive when you're trying to clear the other kind of noise out of your head.
I don't tell any of my family this, because it wouldn't help and anyways, the ones who care can probably figure it out from my attitude, but I'm going a little nuts here. Not literally, duh, but just... stressing out. I'm never comfortable in places where there's a lot of talking and moving and doing things that I'm not into. Suddenly I'm living in a house where four other people are constantly doing just that.
It might not be so bad if I had a room to retreat to, all by myself. I used to do just that, and it worked just fine most of the time. Now I'm married and there are three teenagers and a wife sharing my house, so I no longer have an office or even a bedroom all to myself.
I'm not used to this. It occurred to me, in the brief philosophical minute I always have on my long walks, that getting married is like getting exiled. You permanently change your entire life in such a way that you can no longer be who you once were, ever again. For brief afternoons I try to be -- by listening to my old CDs, reading my favorite kinds of books, taking long walks by myself. But I keep having to come back to this house; it doesn't last.
And I know, suddenly, today, that I'll never be a real part of this family until I'm content to let that old life die. But nobody likes to change that much, do they? It's who you are, for your entire life it defines you and makes you the person you're comfortable with. Moreso than most people, I think, I decided who I would be, because I was never that comfortable in the company of others and consequently they had a lot less to do with shaping the person I now am than (I imagine) is the case for most.
So I'm now awake to the realization that I have to let my old self die, everything I ever knew I was and liked and did, so that I can become the person I need to be, that my family needs me to be.
I don't know if I can do that. I honestly don't know how I'll do it. I know myself well enough to know that I will do it, eventually, because I'm persistent enough to make it happen. But I'm also a procrastinator, especially (big surprise) when it comes to things I don't really want to do.
So this will take longer, and hurt more, than it probably needs to. But at the same time, I'm sure that's the way it needs to be.
Almost nobody starts a journal in the middle of a story, because that runs against the grain of how a story ought to be. It needs to have a beginning, every story does. I've always resisted keeping any journal for myself because of precisely this reason.
It occurred to me as I wrote the last paragraphs above that this may be just the reason I'm writing this as a daylog, now, under a new and distinct nick so that I can stay a little hidden from myself. I realized today (well, yesterday; it's just after midnight on Saturday/Sunday as I type this) that my old "me" needs to die so the new "me" can... what? Be born? Begin? Live? Take over? It doesn't matter, the idea of my personality, my mind, my self dying and being replaced is appalling no matter what kind of words I wrap it in.
The point is that because I realized this today, my old "me" began to die today. The new "me" began to live. And that's as close to a beginning as I'm probably going to get.
Shit, I'm scared.
No one ever said marriage was easy. But nowhere in the entire library of humanity was I given the indication it would be like this.
I'm going to... no. I started dying today. Someone I don't even know yet is going to replace me.
Very well, then. Let the funeral arrangements begin.
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