I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my life during the pandemic. I haven’t thought of this website in forever but every couple months I find myself back on here, writing. All the content on this site falls into mental categories for me now.
The first category I will call “pretentious and naive perspective on my life.” I thought I had it all figured out. I look back and cringe over some of my sentences but I acknowledge the stepping stones towards progression aren’t a paved road.
The second category is childhood, the earliest posts on the site. Nonsensical posts which were the rambling of a 4th grade child. My take away is the happiness I used to derive from the simplest things. I could find entertainment in a train of thoughts. I remember being a kid, and liking to trace my train of thought and see where it would end up, a source of happiness fished from my brain. My thoughts were fun to explore. Now a thought, the one which contemplates confronting its mental peers, is a source of stress one which
The last category is accurate, things that still resonate with me, most of what goes into this category is a sentence or two pulled from a couple of my posts.
Now to the original thing I meant to write. I found an old journal of mine, my plan is to go back and pull words from my past into my present. As with the content on this site, everything in the journal falls into the aforementioned categories. The subject of the journal entry was a drawing, linking the past, present, and future with directional arrows and short phrases.
I’ll start in the present.
In the present, I look to the future as it is more hopeful than the past. Nostalgia from the past stains the present and future. The pain of the past lives on in the present and is alleiviated by the future. Looking to both the past and future is easier than examining the present. The existence of the unknown, the simplest fear, connects the past to the future, but not the present to the future? “Trying to escape comparisons” connects the the past to the present and the present to the future.
Looking at the drawing, I see no positive ideas moving into to the graphical representation of the present.
A friend once told me “depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future, happiness is living in the present.