I came, I saw, I lost

         I am student and it took me so long to get here. A long time ago, when I was a monster, I worked for a large corporation, an analyst and I was broken. Maybe I didn’t realize it at the time but when I took the job I was trying to find myself and somehow I ended up loosing everything.


           I lost myself, who I was almost completely disappeared, and I was a stranger in my own life. Sitting here looking back at that time I remember that person and I realize how taking on something larger than life means giving up a piece of your self or at the very least suppressing it for a time. Not just your hopes and dreams but who you are as a person, who you spent your whole life cultivating, editing and revising. I realize how dangerous that is because you can end up lost forever in this new person that you have become. I am surprised at how during those years I felt aware of what was going on around me and yet I wasn’t. I didn’t really know to what depth I had abandoned myself and become involved in something too monstrous to describe until I came out of it and joined the world once again as a civilian. As I saw this change happening to others, I felt angry about how they gave in and became monsters. I remember feeling a small tremor in my soul when they rejoiced everytime our orginization prevailed and our "enemy" did not. Sometimes you can want something so bad you create it. During those years fantasizing about my life as a civilian and what it could be, was almost intoxicating.
     
             Regret and anger plague me.  These years of my life tortured me and continue to follow me everywhere I go. These are my memories and they exist. They hide in the shadows of my footsteps and in the crease of my elbow. They lurk in the spaces between my fingers and when you shake my hand you are shaking hands with death, dreams, despair and determination. I know that they are forever a part of me and they are not going anywhere but I can use them to remind myself of who I was then, who I am now and who I want to become. It will remind me of the time I came so close to losing myself, the only thing we really have that’s ours. Those times and the times that followed, helped mold the person belonging to the fingers typing this essay.
             I long to understand myself and people better, to gain knowledge about the parts of people that seem so small and meaningless to others and seem gargantuan to me. I long to know more about those threads of our personality that make up who we are and guide our decision making. I have a need to understand how good and evil exists in the same person and how we come to except it, even love it, because it exists in all of us.

             I may not know exactly who I want to be, but I have an idea and I certainly have more than a few examples of who I don’t want to be. I lived a whole life in six years and there’s so much more to be had and I have to make it good not only for my self but for others. I have to bring sympathy, compassion, honor and dignity to the world and personally deliver it to anyone that is dying inside from a lack of those things. I would very much like to give people second chances to live their lives. I would take great relief in helping to mend peoples minds, hearts and bodies. Until I can become that person, I take rest in the knowledge that I am a student. It took me a long time to get here and I’ll spend every second striving to become something better than yesterday.

 "The way to Love anything is to realize it might be lost." - G.K. Chesterton