Here is a tweet from a writer I respect as much as any other, Chris Onstad (creator of Achewood):
Why does man need to invent Hell when he already has the past?
— achewood (@achewood) August 19, 2014
The past haunts everyone. Unbidden, little nuggets of shame worm their way up through the bedrock of memory to flail distractingly at the conscious mind. Rather than resign myself to this pain, I've long sought to confront it directly, hoping thereby to gain some measure of control over, and resistance to, these demons of recall.
How do you begin to confront your past, though? A distant enough memory seems as though it happened to somebody else. You laugh about it, no matter how embarrassed or miserable you were at the time, because you recognize that it was an unavoidable consequence of your life up to that point. You're glad that isn't you anymore, because the current you would never make such a mortifying error. It isn't close, so it isn't painful. But then, where's the value in confronting it? Is it even possible?
I don't think so. I think that there's no point in looking back at things so remote in our experiences that we're dissociated from our old selves. Whatever lesson it may have taught has already been thoroughly baked into our personas. All that's left is to look closer, at things that still cause us pain. It's difficult to do; that's why the word "confront" is so appropriate. Because our selves from those recent memories are present enough to look back at us, and argue their cases.
Recently, I loaded up the blog that I kept in high school and most of college. Even though I started it over twelve years ago, much of the pain is still fresh. Maybe that means I haven't moved forward enough; I don't know. But it was very difficult to read through. Even though I provided the link above, that's just for the sake of completeness; I actually want to discourage you from reading it. It's often excruciating, rarely interesting, and primarily a catalogue of minor irritation and deliberate obtuseness. It's littered with references to people I've lost touch with; it doesn't make sense, and it's mostly annoying. It improves a little as it goes on (the maturing process in action), but that's the best that can be said for it.
The author of those posts was, in almost every meaningful way, a child. I have almost no common ground with him. But I remember, vividly, every detail that motivated him into writing the way he did. I recognize that, as I grew from the seed he represented, the basic form of what he was lies dormant within me. I need to be careful, I need to be smart, and I need to be honest to avoid letting out into the world more of what he was.
Early on in the old blog, I graduated from high school. At that time in my life, I had a girlfriend. I worked full-time (for that summer, at least). I drove, I planned for my future, and I tried to write to make sense of it all. The superficial structure of my life then was nearly identical to it now, and yet the person inside seems almost unrecognizable. It's not that I don't relate to him, it's that I don't want to. He personifies and apologizes for a variety of traits that are, to the current me, indefensible. Because he is, at his core, something I describe as childish, and I believe (as he did!) that the current me is not.
I've been thinking hard about childhood and adulthood lately; what each of them represent, where to draw the line between the two, and what (if anything) in either is worth aspiring to. I expect to have a child of my own within the next couple of years, and this expectation raises immediate and serious questions about my own nature and identity.
At what point can we really consider somebody an adult? It can't be anything represented by my 18-year-old self, because that guy is clearly a child. But I don't really believe it's marriage, parenthood, or any sort of major life milestone, either, because there are plenty of people who've bypassed those who still manage to shoulder the burden of maturity and act like adults.
The thing that bugs me the most about my past self is how evasive he is. He seems to believe he's opening his heart in that blog, when he's really doing nothing more but telling everybody that he has a bunch of secrets. There's no hint given what those secrets might be, and it's obnoxious. It's incomplete and, at its core, it's dishonest. There's no greater crime for a writer.
But honesty can't be what makes you an adult, can it? Unless the entire notion of "adulthood" is an intellectually bankrupt exercise, which I reject. Everyone, everywhere is dishonest somehow.
Maybe adults just wish they didn't have to be.
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