It's October of the Year Which Shall Not Be Named, we've just gotten an early season snowfall, wind is breaking the seals around the windows, and Signe is crying in the next room, asking for a hug while Merry gives her a time out. My door is closed, I'm supposed to be working, but for the past few days I've found myself fixated on a particular corner of my memories, the time period after graduation in 1999 until I moved into the Dewey house at the end of 2003. I spent most of this time on antidepressant medication, in and out of therapy. I remember it as a painful time, I've long glossed over it, generalizing it to myself as "the years I spent depressed", much of it spent alone in my room, during which I made little progress on anything that mattered.
Where did this sudden curiosity begin? I suppose it was reading Knausgaard's autobiography, which is well-calibrated in observing distant topics, and engaging even about the banal. The "anxiety of influence" inspired me to write about my 20s, though I first intended to focus on the later years, when I lived at Dewey. I wrote about finding the house, what it was like those first few months, and what changed when I met my ex-girlfriend. But an energy kept pulling me backwards. Perhaps it was simply the narrative impulse to explain why. Why was _____ the way it was, why had _____ happened, why did I feel _____? All of these answers lay in the past, so I went searching for evidence - primarily pictures, but what I found were my old digital journals, which I had kept from the beginning of 2000 to mid-2004. What I've read in them over the past few days has re-awoken a world I had largely forgotten.
The events of those years have been weathering and congealing in my brain for over fifteen years, so of course I had forgotten plenty that occurred. And not just certain events, but the reasons for them, their sequence, how I felt about them and made decisions. And of course, most of my memories have proven vastly simpler than what I wrote in my journals. For example, did I spend a lot of time alone in my room? Well, yes, though mostly sleeping or journaling. I spent the rest of my time doing what most people do at the same age - working, in classes or doing homework, and seeing friends.
Harder to quantify, though qualitatively true: I despaired for joys past and to watch the days of my early adulthood burning away in the stasis of a life I didn't know how to live. I struggled with questions of meaning and often got hung up on the "meta" layers of decisions. Meanwhile, my tactical, day-to-day decision-making was atrocious, I didn't yet understand that success is usually a long series of small victories. I was discovering the world and was passionate about many things I was finding - music, writing, people. My writing lacked nuance, swimming in hyperbole. But I was sincere, I had real feelings, in getting excited over new possibilities I often went too far. More than anything, I was prone to magical thinking, often convincing myself of the impossible. I would do anything to shield my ego from the truth, that I was a novice at most things, and couldn’t avoid the hard work required to find my way. Instead I told myself that my misery must be other people's faults, or fate, the plight of the universe, or whatever steered its course.
It hasn't bothered me to be reminded that I was full of delusions. I already knew that, it was only a matter of degree, and the particulars I had forgotten, or repressed. And it reminds me that somewhere along the way, I did manage to climb out of the hole I was in - after all, I ended up where I am today. Things are not perfect in my life, but they are better than 21-year old me had any right to believe in. And indeed, there was a real magic in my thinking then, because imagination is a double-edged sword: engaging with the fantastic has its own capacity to enrich us. Maybe it's the imaginative potency of those years that my mind has latched onto the last few days, as the pendulum of my life may have since swung too far to the other end of the spectrum, where every minute is grounded in practicality (the constancy is, itself, practical). It's not too late to think magically again, though moderation this time might go a long way.
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