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Do you feel like you’ve had many lives so far? Why, why not? Which?
I’ve been mulling over this for the past few weeks.
Even though I haven’t drastically changed lives over the course of my lifetime, I still feel like I’ve had eras:
- As a young adult in the UK and around the world, figuring things out
- As a student in Canada
- As an employee in another province
- And now as an independent consultant in Switzerland and France
Although I still live a comfortable western lifestyle, I do feel these different eras are akin to different lives. 18 year old me wouldn’t guess what 30 or 40 year old me became. Not only professionally but also emotionally and day to day.
To delineate my eras, I consider career/professional matters but also outlook on life, lessons learnt, relationships, country/city of résidence (or lack thereof).
Do you have a similar feeling? Why or why not? And what do you consider you life or lives to have been so far?
So many lives and so many deaths, rebirths, growing pains, deaths.
There could be an argument that my first life was childhood to 18, then drinking for almost 20 years straight and now sobriety…
Another group of lives could be career, from college, studying music in advertising, being in a band, becoming a sincere piano tech, then a bartender yoga bum, and then sincerely a piano tech again…
Or maybe the four significant others I’ve loved and almost married, from the two year college love, to the band girlfriend, to the piano tech/composer girlfriend, to the actress/writer fiancé, to being single and lonely again.
My musician lives too? Is this thing on… piano as a child, concert and jazz band as a student, indie rock band as a young adult, classical piano and an r&b electronic album as an adult, and now all of the above?
What about my lives in different states and countries?
What about the life I lived as hiker trash SOBO solo on the AT? It was only six months but it was a lifetime…
That’s too many lives, man.
I also believe in past lives.
Congrats on getting sober. I'll never pass up a chance to give folks props for that.
Pursuits of love, passion and change - more than many could ever hope for ;)
Man. Given how I've essentially lived a life trying to act someone who I wasn't for the first 3 decades of my life? Yes.
It's like I've only recently truly began to live for myself. Of course, not all experiences I had in the past were shaped like that, but it's only after I truly got self-love last summer that I'm experiencing being me, and enjoying my own presence.
My life has also been very complicated academically and socially so I've moved a lot of classes, majors, universities and lived abroad briefly. Strangely enough, despite most of that not being 100% my own life, I appreciate many of the experiences I've gained. As well as experiencing deep sadness over the many trauma's I've had to endure.
I've recently slowly begun to share my life story to someone new in my life and it has been a good reminder of how far I've come.
I'm still shedding the parts of me that I accumulated in order to impress other people, it's crazy how many things I've been just carrying around entirely for other people.
It's weird really asking myself if I even like a certain band that I listen to all the time, or if I just listened to them a lot so that I could related to other people who liked them.
I had such a hard time relating to people when I was young, I gave myself away without a second thought. Finding myself again as definitely been worth it.
How has that impacted your relationship with others? I've found that as I become more true to myself, people who have known me for some time have a hard time accepting the change - - especially my wife.
I fear that some may think "midlife crisis", but the reality is that I'm mostly just learning to do what * I * want, rather than what others want from me.... Clothing, hair, activities, etc...it's my life, it's finite, and it's more than half way over, so it's my turn to live.
Honestly no one has even noticed.
For me, this change was coupled with a change in my mind that allowed me to better see/understand people, and my friends and family have noticed that, and the change has been positive for everyone
I do believe our personality and identity are far more fluid than often assumed, and this is certainly aided by living in a time where there's more freedom of expression and ability to develop oneself. I quite like how the Germans express this kind of concept of self-development: "entfalten", literally to "un-fold" yourself.
I struggled with a significant mental health disorder for much of my teenage and young adult life, so I certainly see a caesura between who I was before and after recovery of it. I have dabbled in many different things over my life, in terms of work, education, and hobbies, and I suppose people may count some of those as 'different lives'.
I think, however, I still hold the belief that these are just different facets of a core being. It has been wonderful to explore and discover alleyways of my personality previously unknown.
I would like to know more about the quoted verses! A quick google search points to a longer poem, but the particular passage was also quoted in another book?
I also believe in core being myself. I'm going to live forever, and I will be myself throughout time and beyond: I am embryo, acorn, sapling, nuisance shrub week, oak, firewood, and charcoal. (Hopefully furniture or decor at some point in between as well)
In the Bible there's a story of a powerful king who temporarily became insane,
Not to say at all that mental health has anything supernatural about it, but just making the point that I believe someone is still "themselves" in a different capacity, whatever happens to them. Even if they are in poor health, in lost mental capacity, if severely handicapped, in a coma, etc. Its a different and temporary phase of their overall existence.
Yeah, I encountered it in the book you found - To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Amongst other themes, the passing of time and the inner lives of others are particularly prominent in this book. Quite worth the read, beautifully written. The poem comes to the mind of one of the main characters during a dinner scene, where it's suggested all the guests can hear the reciting of it in their minds, a form of collective epiphany almost. I won't spoil too much of the book as it's worth reading it to experience it first-hand.
If I recall correctly, Virginia had heard the poem from an acquaintance. I believe two or three different versions exist, with mainly the final verse varying. It's definitely not a well-known poem :).
And your way of thinking is also quite beautiful as is that biblical story. Eternal persistence also makes terrific sense even from a physical perspective - all our atoms will ultimately become something else, then something else, and so on. All of us are surrounded by the remnants of our fellow-kind.
I think most people divide their lives into eras, and for the majority of people those eras are marked by shifts in their material living situation. I know for me, the three big categories are geography, relationships, and school/career. I can divide my life into my early childhood in the northeast, my late childhood, early adulthood in the south, my military career and first marriage, my divorce and career change and first taste of actually being single as an adult, and finally, meeting my wife and getting married again.
Some people probably divide their lives according to a slightly different set of categories, but I imagine for most, those are the big three markers.
I went on a deployment with the military which was very long, very stressful, and coincided with my divorce and the end of a very long marriage and relationship, so that's a huge marker in my life, sort of like the BCE/AD period in history. I tend to count years since then when I'm judging the passage of time.
I really love this concept! We have a really strong community in our neighborhood with most of our group being 35-45. It's wild when you learn about people's "past lives". We have one friend who is a whale biologist, but before that he was a ski bum/lifty for 5 years, a boat captain on the SF Bay for a decade, a farmer in New Zealand, a bike mechanic... the list goes on and on. It's wild when we'd be doing something, like talking about backcountry skiing, and he'd just follow up with a "well yeah bud, I lived on the mountain for like 5 years..."
I think for myself, there have been a few distinct eras, mostly centered around work.
Right out of college I worked for a NGO that did heritage preservation with remote sensing tech. Early on there a project in Somalia popped up and no one would take it, so I volunteered. It was great! And the organization learned I was ok with sketchy trips. Cue the emergence of ISIS and the blossoming of my career in conflict zones. It was a really fun/wild era where I'd get to support and work with teams in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine, Myanmar... Anywhere there was active conflict. It also got the attention of National Geographic and I began to do things on behalf or with the support of them as well. It was a big learning for me that regardless of what is happening geopolitically or what a government is doing, the vast majority of people in a country are just trying to do the best they can. I met some just unbelievably amazing people. Folks who would leave my workshops and head straight into active fighting areas. Women who were some of the strongest, boldest people I've ever met, trapped in some pretty regressive situations. People just making sure that their heritage and culture could make it through terrible times and conflicts. I loved working with them but got reeeeeaaally burnt out on how the US and our funding systems do very little to actually support the people I worked with. There were few sustained, beneficial projects in the end. So I got disenchanted and took a little time off.
My partner and I moved to Europe, lived on our bikes for half a year and then settled in Madrid - where I had found work - and eventually moved to Amsterdam when she did. In total we were only there for 2 years, but it felt as long as any other era. I learned so much about how easy it is to move - physically, not the bureaucratic part - and how resilient I can be. I got to start working as a climbing gym route setter, a long time dream at that point. I got to live flexibly. I got to indulge in new hobbies and crafts. I had time to grow. It gave me room to breath and I decided to pivot my career in a new direction where I could make a more sustained impact - climate science and ecology.
This era was my ecology and climate science era. I took the tools I knew how to work with and started applying them to ecosystem management. I joined a grad program that focused on developing climate solutions and just immersed myself in the burgeoning field. I got to support kelp restoration projects, create policy briefs for green/grey infrastructure projects, help plan and prepare for prescribed burns, and tromp through an unbelievable amount of streams/marshes/estuaries to measure algae. (Algae was a weirdly hot topic at the time). I loved it. People were laid back but passionate. The projects we worked on had significant real world impacts. I felt like I had found "my people". And so I started a company and entered my next life.
As much as I hate the term, the last 6 years have been my "entrepreneur" era. My best friend and I got funding from the federal government to build out a team and build out new technology. It was a fun hybrid of the tech from my first life and the issue of my second life. We built a great team, worked with awesome partners, and built a really cool product. Trump era is now bringing this era to a close as the entire ecosystem around nature monitoring is collapsing with the gutting of the forest service. But I happy to have gotten to spend the time I did working on the company and learning an incredible amount.
The prospect of the next era is exciting. There are about 3 opportunities I'm choosing between and that will be mixed up with the baby on the way. So here is to a new era!
I've had a few. Some highlights:
Despite all of that, I've never really felt like I've changed much as a person. My interests and personality have stayed pretty steady, all in all.
What did you love about growing up in the Buford Highway Corridor?
It was a very welcoming environment to grow up in. At that time, there was a huge diversity of immigrants (it still has a lot of immigrants, but not from nearly as many different countries today as back then), and there was no one dominant culture or ethnicity. Everyone was a fish out of water, and it made everyone generally very tolerant and welcoming. I found it easy to make friends in school because no one really cares about your weird personality, your religion (or in my case, lack of religion), your family income, your accent, etc., when they all stick out just as much as you do.
Despite the poverty and the high crime rate (or possibly because of them), it was the sort of place where all parents collectively kept an eye on all kids. It felt almost like living with an (extremely) extended family. I could walk down the street to various apartment buildings, and if there were kids outside playing (even if I didn't know those kids), the assorted mothers watching them would make sure I was fed and that I got home safely. When I walked home from school, I'd pass by the same houses and apartments every day, and if I was sick and missed a day, strangers I'd never exchanged a word with would come out to ask (usually in very limited English I could barely understand) where I'd been and if I was okay.
Culturally, it was a really fun area to grow up. All the signs were in different languages, I grew up eating so many different exotic foods that I really miss now, I got to see and participate in so many different holidays and traditions, etc. It was just really vibrant without being pretentious or gatekeepery in any way. (The area has since gentrified and the culture feels really forced/performative now, but in the 90s, it was wasn't trying to be cool; it just was cool all by itself.)
I was a really outdoorsy kind of kid, and it was fantastic for that, too. There were tons of abandoned lots and buildings to explore (including a farm with barns/sheds and an abandoned mall, which today is the extremely popular Plaza Fiesta). It's a warm, rainy climate where trees and shrubs grow explosively, so it was like a jungle — and because it was so thoroughly neglected by local government, there were endless alien kudzu landscapes to explore. I often spent all day getting lost in the woods, catching minnows in creeks, playing on abandoned playgrounds covered in vines and big threes growing through the monkey bars, etc. — all while see skyscrapers through the breaks in the canopy. To a kid like me, it was magical.
That sounds amazing. Thanks for sharing!
I don't think I feel like my life is any different, really. I mean, it is different and I'm different, but I don't feel fundamentally different from the little kid I used to be, the teenager I was, the young adult and now the middle-aged man.
I still an pretty obsessed with video games and computers
still love cars
still love the same type of music
still live in the State I grew-up in, if 30-miles away from my original hometown
I suppose I had eras, but they still seem like me. There was the era in early childhood/teen when I was a hypernerd; later in my teens when I was still nerdy, but got more comfortable with myself and became slightly cooler; my Metal tee-shirt years during college, living in the city years; But again, none of those feel terribly different.
I guess I just haven't had drastic changes in my life. I never moved far away, dated the same girl for 4-years before that break-up and then have been with my wife for going on 19-years now. We own a house, some cars, have a dog, cat, two kids, I still mostly have the same friends I've had since I was a kid/teen, with some new additions. But I never really imagined my life being any different.
Maybe I lack vision or ambition, but I kind of always just viewed myself living basically the same life my parents did. Never cared to make drastic changes and just wanted a simple domestic life.
I guess if I had to split it into eras/lives:
But I also don't feel like I've changed much. Some people from HS reached out the other day about doing a 20 year reunion next spring and I'm tempted to go. But it's got me wondering if I'm really all that different now? I have different responsibilities, I'm more responsible than I used to be, but I'm still largely the same person, I think? I'm dreading hearing "you haven't changed a bit!" because that's not a good thing, right? But then I'm like...who even cares? I haven't talked to these people in 20 years in some cases. And I probably won't talk to them again after the reunion. So they're effectively just strangers who have vague memories of me and I of them.
Why is not changing a bit a bad thing? I'd view it as a positive - that you've always had a strong sense of self and the opportunities to follow a life path true to that self.
Changes are not always bad, but they are not always good. So no change seems just fine, so long as you weren't a terrible person, in a terrible state or faking who you truly are.
That said, it sounds to me like you changed plenty, they don't have to be big to make you different than HS you. It might be that to you nothing changed, but it's possible you've just changed too slow to notice. Surely you've matured, but getting married and having kids both change people. Then it sounds like you take less risks and learned to make better choices, that stuff affects who your are.
Think of the way someone who last saw your kids years ago might say "they've grown so much". That statement might seem odd to your kids because to them the changes happened so slowly that they don't see they've grown 2 feet since that person last saw them.
Yeah honestly as I was typing what I felt had changed I realized those were actually huge changes. But I kept writing because despite that, it still feels like minimal changes have occurred. But you're right it is kind of relative and it's hard to see growth in one's self sometimes.
Ive lived two completely different lives. My second life started when I was around 25.
Its not a switch that flipped but gradual growth as a person. It wasn’t really noticeable at first, the first changes I made were deciding to invest in my own future, I decided to go finish a degree, start a career, buy a house, and the other changes happened even more slowly as I find myself more and more aware, forgiving and patient to everyone around me. I know this happens to everyone as they get older but its really night and day from who I used to be.
I think the biggest difference is I don’t think I really used to see or understand other people, I always tried but my brain just didn’t have the capacity. I literally couldn’t even see outside of my own self when I was younger and so things other people did often confused me. So many things I used to be confused over are so clear to me now.
I’m in my mid 30s now and I’m still a bit behind on the social skills but I really feel like that gap is closing. I just kinda wish I didn’t waste my 20s, I could have had so many friends and relationships if I wasn’t so stuck inside my own head. I like my life now though, so no real regrets.
I often refer to my life in stages, and use the phrase, "lifetime's ago" in a semi-joking manner. I have kids, going on 9, and 7. So the phrase, generally to me, means before their time in my life.
I also refer to last/previous jobs in current ones as previous lives. I find it a fun turn of phrase for that.
My life had shifted a lot throughout time and believe it or not, it was all thanks to neopets lol
From 0-18 I grew up in borderline poverty/lower class and lived a tough life with my parents both physically and mentally abusive and around a lot of meth. Part of my childhood we experienced houselessness. I had been drinking/smoking/experimenting with drugs since 12 (NEVER meth/heroin though). Part of me misses how carefree I was- to cope I basically just had the mindset I couldn’t control anything and just took life as it came. I used positivity to a maladaptive extreme to try and think of the best of everything and every person I met. That lead to a lot of people to try and take advantage of me, but thankfully I never got kidnapped or sexually abused. I have no idea how I got so lucky.
Now that I’m older I realized creeps can identify the people who are vulnerable, because now that I carry myself confidently I never get approached by weirdos like I used to.
When I was approached by weirdos as a kid I would party with them and oftentimes they were in their 40s+. I would meet these strangers in the wild and would to go to their houses just so I could get fucked up. At least I always brought a friend with me, that probably offered me a bit of protection.
My good friend has a 12 year old right now, and the idea of an adult giving someone who looks so small and innocent alcohol and cigarettes makes me sick. But that was the life I lived.
Speaking of 12, I also made a good friend on neopets around that time and we talked all day everyday. Texting at school, MSN after school, texting all night if I went out, and then phone calls when I got home.
Around 17 we finally admitted we loved each other and we should just make it happen. I mean we were basically obsessed with each other for 5 years and didn’t realize we felt that way about each other. Typical lesbian behavior.
18-23 I moved straight to California 10 days after turning 18 to U-Haul it with my neopets gf and her family. I was suddenly propelled into upper class and while things were much better I very quickly learned that I did not fit in. People with money and have grown up with money act very differently. The sense of community is…very different. It took me forever to learn that upper class friends don’t open up emotionally to each other.
You don’t tell people about hardships in your life, you keep that shit private and go to therapy because you have the money to do so. Down on your luck? You don’t ask your friends for help you hire someone to fix it for you. Friends exist mostly to network and they want you to have some sort of status. I was never taken seriously, people disregard my life views and anything I had to say really, because I was so different. I also was a high school dropout and all of these people were starting college. High class people do not respect you without an education. I realized that I shouldn’t say that I didn’t finish high school.
Pretty sure the only reason people kept me around was because of my gf, and luckily I can make people laugh. Upper class folk are inhibited- it’s rare to find humorous people since it requires at least a little vulnerability to be funny.
Hell, one time I was smoking a cigarette on a bench outside of a grocery store and someone offered me a few bucks and told me to find a safe place to stay for the night…I realized this stranger thought I was fucking homeless just because of the way I dressed in this affluent neighborhood and because I had a cigarette in my hand sitting down on a bench. At the time I was like “damn lol what a sucker” and bought a beer with the change. When I talked about it, people were offended and said they’d refuse the money. I was like why would I be offended? I benefitted from that situation? And THAT is the exact type of thing that really makes you stand out when you move from low class to upper class.
I’m just lucky my girl loved me for who I was on the inside, she was very patient even when I embarrassed her, lol <3
On a last note: I was absolutely shook at how beautiful the people in this area of California are. Even people considered ugly were hot. You just don’t see people walking around at Walmart with a tweetybird shirt and pajama pants. Everyone looks nice.
23-now gf and I moved to Oregon to start to build our lives. Since we lived with her family we were both able to save a good chunk of change and we had a good start. We didn’t have family money anymore, so we dropped to middle class. I had gotten my EMT right before I moved since you can take an accelerated class and be done in 2 months. Life felt hard again, that job is tough as fuck. I’d work 60-70+ hour weeks against my will. Gf was a nurse so we made decent money together.
Before when I had lived in California life was so easy except for the fact that I was an outcast. That drop in class felt brutal initially and here I was trying to fit in with a different type of people again. But, it’s a good balance and I feel more comfortable here. I don’t have to give my last 10$ to help my neighbor make rent, nor do I have to try and peacock my nonexistent status all the time.
We were eventually able to buy a house big enough to move my much younger siblings away from my parents. I felt very proud of that, I carried a lot of guilt leaving them every day I was gone. I was a pseudo mother to them and I know it messed them up for me to suddenly up and leave.
I was not prepared for how living with them would rip my own trauma that I never dealt with right open. I thought I just came out of it scott free- but it was just deeply compartmentalized and I couldn’t hold it in anymore and I was pretty messed up and still am a little. + I have my new trauma from working in emergency medicine.
We now have a family therapist, our own therapists, and we’re all on hella SSRIs. It’s getting better. Meds certainly help.
Oh, and my best childhood friends moved up here too and they’re going through a similar path of healing. It’s comforting that I don’t have to feel so alone anymore.
I don’t party anymore really, I mean the spirit is willing but the flesh is spongy and weak. If I drink I feel like my week is ruined from a hangover. I don’t enjoy weed anymore. Psychedelics I’m ok with, rarely. Other drugs, nah. I got my prescription adderall but that feels more like a buzzkill since ADHD takes the fun out of stims.
I went to college finally, became a nurse and married my girlfriend after 13 years. I made her wait so long because it was important for me to feel like I was her equal, I’m so grateful that she was willing to wait.
Love is 100% different after marriage. I never really believed the concept was that important, but I get it now. Our relationship was always good, but now it’s even better. 10/10 would marry again. We’re coming up on year 15 now not including the years we just spent talking.
So uh, thanks neopets.com for changing my life forever 😅
Thank you!! I was worried it would go unseen since I was a little late in the thread.
I would absolutely love your tips for where to visit. We travel a bit but we neglect our beautiful state and haven’t seen too much except for Mt hood, Astoria, and a little bit of Sisters. I will totally go check out Cape Perpetua and the surrounding areas. Oregon is by far my favorite of the three states I’ve lived in.
I’m sure more stories of my younger years will come out if I stumble upon more conversations that allow for it :) I used to talk about it a lot irl but seeing people react in horror have made me a bit more conservative with what I share. The anonymity helps!
I've felt recently that roughly each decade of my life has been a different version of me.
My early childhood was (I think) fairly unremarkable by western standards, my tween/teen years were when I became a theatre kid, my 20s were marked by depression and leaving the theatre (I consider these to be my "lost years"), but also by my friendship and rediscovery of nerdy gaming stuff, and my 30s have marked the true establishment of my adult life with marriage, buying a house, and having a child.
Having turned 40 this year, I've been really feeling the need to make another major shift, but I've got some pretty deeply ingrained habits at this point and I don't know how easy it will be for me to change them. I think that's the major challenge ahead of me for the next 10 years; to set myself up for a good experience as I get older rather than let myself just continue to degenerate and die early.
All in all, yes, I'd say that I've noticed that my life has had eras, though I'm not sure I could pinpoint an exact moment at which each shift changed, just that it's been around every 10 years.
Yes, probably more than most. 50? Perhaps more? Thank you bipolar disorder! :P
Lives, no, but I can probably look back at pretty well-defined eras. I've pretty much always had a strong sense of self, and rather than changing as a person over the years, I'd say I've grown as a person. I think of it like this:
Some projection for the last few sections there.
The details of each stage are likely not that interesting unless you know me personally, and even that might mainly be because I don't advertise to friends and family how many layers there are to the onion. As this thread itself bears out, everyone has their story. One of my favorite quotes is that life is about taking the message you hold as a young child to the old person you will become, being sure not to lose the message along the way. I think (hope) I'm doing alright.
I quite like this. It opens up a lot of questions to ask about yourself and others.
I have been thinking about this lately. I have lived what I feel are 5 different lives. This most recent one however has been spent in great proximity to my childhood home and my parents. Prior to this I had not lived near by for over 30 years.
The family I grew up with still views me as I was over 3 lives ago and it is hard for them to reconcile that I have changed. I have spent a large part of this most recent move trying to figure out if I am, at my core, essentially the same or if I have actually changed.
Definitely feel like my life is marked by eras. Some longer than others, some I'd consider "micro-eras"--my life and the kind of person I was were significantly different at the ages of 17-18 than any of the 5 years before or after that 2-year period. My one summer spent living in Vermont, maybe 4 months, was an era unto itself. Same with the following summer I spent in Detroit.
The easiest way to split them is by geographic changes, as they usually coincide--or, arguably the cause of, though I'd say that's not strictly accurate--with my personal changes in everything from how I looked, how I dressed, what kind of jobs I worked, the kinds of people I associated with, and even my modes of speech (I have that thing where I subconsciously absorb accents very quickly).
0-16 was all basically the same despite the usual upheavals that come with your parents divorcing, getting moved around, and generally growing through and out of a childhood spent in extreme poverty. It wasn't a happy time. I only have maybe 3 pictures of that entire period and I never look at them. The more about it that I forget, the better off I am.
17-18 was an insanely chaotic time unique to itself. I hit my growth spurt just ahead of it, got in incredible physical shape (ah, the ease of youth), had my first relationship and felt "true love" for the first time, watched it burn out, dated around a lot after that, learned pottery and painting, read the classics voraciously as I pretentiously fancied myself an intellectual. Gained a love of specialty coffee which is relevant later and hung out constantly in the 90s cafe culture that seems like such an artifact out of time now. I still miss it. I was someone I probably would not like at all now if I'm being honest, and I cannot honestly say those were halcyon days at all, but there was that exciting vibrancy of finally starting to feel comfortable in your own skin at the same time as everything you "seek out in love and art" is brand new to you and therefore thrillingly novel. Because you're still young and dumb and don't know anything, heh. This was not at all the best or most important period of my life but I realized as I was typing that I just felt like saying something about it I guess...these days in my old age I don't have any reason to discuss it or think about it much in other contexts, but it was the first time in my life that I truly started to feel a distinct sense of self, rough and ephemeral though it was.
That said, I just realized I'm going to bore all of you and myself if I try going through every period, so I'll quickly say:
My college years were punctuated by the periods in Vermont and Detroit but both summers actually had little impact on anything before or after them. They were "pocket lives" in both cases and although plenty of interesting stuff happened that are stories for another day, they were essentially bottle episodes.
Otherwise college years were defined by a lot of struggling emotionally and financially but also meeting my best friend and my wife, learning to roast coffee professionally, and starting my still-going love affair with martial arts which literally turned me into a completely different person. Grad school cost me a fortune in student loans but it was a great experience and I'd do nothing differently there. But still, in those days I was mostly discontent and restless and anxious about my future, overworked and underpaid and desperately wanting out of my hometown, so 25-year-old me would be very surprised and not a little annoyed that 50-year-old me now looks back on that period with a lot of fondness.
In 2006 I graduated with my Master's degree, got married, moved to Seattle, and got hired into the first job of my now-career all within a 6-month period. '06 to '12 was absolutely what I'd consider the halcyon days, easily the happiest period of my life before or since. I was getting established in my career that I turned out to be quite good at, I separately (side business) finally realized my dream of owning and running a popular coffeehouse and roastery, I advanced enough in martial arts that I ran my own school next door to the cafe for several years, my wife's creative career took off. We had plenty of money (not rich, just my first-ever taste of financial security), interesting work, fulfilling hobbies, a great circle of friends. I have more bar stories of that period of time than of any other stage of my life, to the point that more than once I've been told I was suspected of making it up. But it was the one era of my life in which I frequently felt joy, was present for it and aware of it, and grateful to be aware.
So of course there was going to be a downfall. We ended up deciding to move back to my hometown because we finally had enough money to afford buying a house, but Seattle property values were already getting out of reach. This kills the cat. It was an awful mistake for my mental and physical health that in some ways I'm still paying for, despite the fact that we moved back to Seattle five years later because I hated living in the South so much even though our material conditions were significantly better than when we first left. It was a very dark time for me personally. That was definitely its own era, and easily the worst one, to the point that I don't even really want to talk about it this much. A period of severe alcoholism was a result, now resolved. A smoking habit was also a result, not at all resolved. I absolutely hate the person I was then and I would love to forget it all but I must force myself not to, to carry the picture of it in my mind, to remind myself how bad things can get and the importance of choosing and actively pursuing joy in what time remains to me.
Which brings us to the current era, thrown off a bit by the pandemic, but broadly consistent. Well-established in my career but out of the coffee business now probably forever. Materially very comfortable as a result of that career, but with still a lot of anxiety about the future due to gestures around at everything. Still studying martial arts but at nowhere near the same intensity as when I was 25, because I simply can't anymore, my fighting days are over although I'm largely okay with that. Good friends around me but I also don't go out as much. Basically settling into middle age.
The life I'm living now is much calmer, more quiet, slightly wiser, and with people and personal habits both good and bad lost along the way. To the point of the OP, I do feel like the person that lived through each of the above paragraphs was a different version of myself, for better or worse. However, I strongly doubt that this is the final phase, despite my (very intentional) username. As the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote in his 70s in "The Layers", which is a poem pretty much about this entire post concept: "I am not done with my changes."
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.