Family, Home.

I always feel something inexplicable snap. It may be just leaving the city, but going to meet my family, something changes. My internal monologue shifts, and I suddenly race to justify myself to myself, anticipating some future. The result is almost always silence. I've come to expect a kind of quiet reflection when I visit my family, my parents in particular. Meeting them provides a kind of baseline, a way to judge where I've been and where I'm going.

Part of the silence comes from my several selves, each with their own ineffable and inexplicable mythologies. I exist in several different places, and even more moods, and I have trouble merging. I even wonder if it would do me any good. Inevitably, things come together - when I changed schools I needed to explain my college and debate self to my Austin life to defend the move, and to take stock of how far I had come. Part of my self-aware maturity (see previous post) involves introducing my several selves to each other, of bringing them together to shake hands. I miss the sense of growth, of dynamism that comes from reinvention. At each juncture that offers me the opportunity to explain one life to another, I'm tempted to lie, to avoid committing one living, growing self into the voice of my old, permanent roots. And really, that's what family means: your anchor, the unchanging foundations which make a compelling claim on your identity, no matter how you change.

Being around my family, my habits change. I become meticulous and clean, washing myself and dishes regularly, following up everything with practiced good manners. I acquire a kind of deliberateness that I lack when caught in the moments of my other spheres of life. My body reacts in strange, contradicted ways. Without fail, I go to bed early, and not merely out of boredom. Somehow, I become tired, as if all the stored tension from my day-to-day is released and floods my body. I can never tie down if I'm hungry or not, going from an empty stomach to a bloated hugeness without warning. I feel myself suddenly susceptible to illness, a variety of bodily discomforts spring up to greet me.

I sometimes wonder if they feel a sense of betrayal. "Look at all we've done for you yet you never call..." I expect the recriminations, but they never quite come. Maybe this is one step towards an answer to those pointed, unasked, nagging questions.

A revival?

I knew I had grown up when I began to justify my prejudices as the dispositions of someone with the inherent right to be disposed; when I began to think of myself as a creature of habit, reflecting dimly on my past lives and weaving them into a tapestry I call my ‘formative years.’ I suddenly am someone with a ‘voice,’ someone able to write in ‘I’ sentences. I began to recognize which social situations I worked well in, and which I didn’t, and so scrupulously avoided those that made me ill at ease, and built relationships around those that worked. For the first time, I remember having feelings I no longer feel myself. It’s the art of management, holding carefully to the assurances built on my self analysis.

Maturity includes a regular fascination with the petty, and a self-satisfaction at having accomplished the mundane. my sudden responsibility for coping with forces unseen, larger than myself forces me to consider them as tiny battles, each with a single-serving victory. I begin to delight in making sensible decisions, ones that I could tell my parents and have them give reassuring, approving smiles. If art is the appreciation of the intrinsic, and politics the appreciation of ends and means, my maturity is the collapse of both into each other – the unerring satisfaction in being made into an ends-means, the fascination with life as it has been laid out.

The people that impress me most were those who did the most self-work, who don’t seem to remake them selves with every sentence, but rather read from a script they write and re-write in their tortured privacy. They sought answers and found conclusions, or at least ground firm enough to stand on so that they could launch their next self. I struggle for a point to think from.

I began to think about myself as myself when I left for college, found myself in a world that seemed to function without me, grating up against the easygoing indiscreetness I fostered in the years before. For the first time, I had time to kill, to spend exclusively on thinking about me, and I look back on it now as an awakening, when I found myself, or at least the self I know now. of course, all of this remains shrouded in damp mystery – no matter how much I think and rethink myself, my recollections of my past recollections are irritated by an uncertainty about the way things were, my constant forgetfulness that drives me to write in the first place.

Re-reading what has been written here, I recognize conclusions I still find dear, others since discarded. But many of the foundations remain in place, the trails remained blazed in my mind. I see myself being laid out, and I wonder what went before. Entering a new phase of myself, I wonder what I will remember, years from now. The words I wrote reflected enough of myself back to recognize the impending changes to the point of being able to resist them.

These words, stretching back almost 3 years, armored me to the changes that nearly molded me into the person I am not today, and I have unending appreciation for the path they set me on. For that reason, I want to revive this space.