Hello Metaphor, Goodbye 2010

Tonight was my yearly night where it clicked that the year was nearly over. Quite honestly, 2010 was fucking horrible. I remember being a distinctly positive person and 2010 drove it out of me like an army into an unguarded city. I’ve come out on the other end feeling somewhat bitter and often stuck with a negative attitude that I simply can’t seem to shake.

Now, it would be some kind reverse hubris for me to say nothing good happened because there were certainly positives. Hell, I even recognize that my life is still really pretty good by most standards but I think that ignores a major piece of the human condition. My life may be fantastic by comparison to someone who experienced the true loss of a loved one or battled with disease but that’s not where our feelings and emotions come from. We build from our own experiences, not comparison with someone else’s. 2010 is a year where I lost the person who I loved most dearly and who was also my best friend. Not lost in the sense of death but lost in the sense that changed occurred and now what we had was irreversibly dissolved. The person who I saw as my best friend I will, in all likelihood, never speak with again. Within the context of my own personal experiences, this is the most tragic thing I’ve ever experienced. It couldn’t be more relevant in my feeling that I lost a year.

Time isn’t priceless. We put a value on it every time we work. I think we do this out of a sense of requirement though, or at least I do. It gives that time I do feel control over way more value. It’s not something to be wasted. That’s how I found myself stuck thinking, I had wasted a year of my life. Occasionally, it even bled into, “Carlene stole a year of my life” but the level of melodrama I needed to maintain to feel that way just wouldn’t stick. It locked me into this mindset where I could only see what I’d lost and made me feel desperate to take it all back. As you can imagine, not an overly mentally healthy place to be. Desperation isn’t one of those emotions that spurs you to make good emotional decisions or feel even remotely positive.

Books and movies love the New Year. It’s opportunity and shows up every 365 days. Clockwork. It almost feels like it was created purely for use by storytellers so they could have an opportunity to give main characters a chance a rebirth and recovery after dealing with the challenging part of the story. Metaphor was a concept I struggled with in high school but I find it pretty soothing right now. I like the idea of a semi-literal opportunity to put loss behind me and move onto something new. A clock can roll over to a new day just like it does every day but this time it means something more. Let go of mistakes and frustration and let yourself be what you want. Find a new path. Opportunity washes over your feet like water at the ocean but only if you let it.

A Point of Reference

I just finished a unit in my Psychology classes about biology. One of the things we talked about was the eyes and how they worked and play a major part in perception. The weird thing about vision is you can’t really tell that it’s getting worse. It’s not one of those things where you wake up and it’s suddenly completely terrible compared to the day before. For me, it took a teacher saying, “You realize you squint to the see the board?” for me to go get an eye exam and discover that world was not as blurry as I was perceiving it to be. It was a gradual failure that without a little help, I might have not have noticed for some time and continued to struggle to see without even realizing it. The trick is, there really isn’t a point of reference with your eyes. There isn’t that big jump where you can tell that day A was different from day B. It changes, that’s for sure, but you don’t get to tell.

Last night I was watching this movie called The Ice Harvest. I had seen it in the theaters back in 2005 and remembered getting a pretty good laugh at it so I popped it in when I got home last night. I get about 80% of the way through the movie when I realize I hadn’t laughed. At all. I start thinking back and wondering if maybe I made a mistake about which movie it was but I’m sure I didn’t. I know I laughed a lot the first time I watched it… this time it just wasn’t funny. It suddenly became a point of reference. It would seem my sense of humor changed a fair amount between 23 and 28. I found myself wondering what else had changed. Is there some other point of reference I could look to and figure out who I was back then? What’s different between then and now? Is my perception at all clearer than it was back then? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way though. You don’t get to manifest epiphany. You get it through some combination of readiness, willingness and well… dumb luck. It wouldn’t be an epiphany it came any other way, now would it?