Reinvention

A lot can happen in 5 months.
I spent the summer in New Mexico trying to find myself. I don't know if I did. I don't really like the image the phrase evokes, honestly. Trying to find yourself by looking outward is sort of silly. It's like when you're trying to do a headcount of a group and you keep coming up one short and finally you realize you're not counting yourself, because you can't see yourself. You can look and look and finally realize you're not finding yourself, because you're on the other side of your eyes.
What I really was working on was finding everything else, and then figuring out how I fit into it, and how I wanted to fit into it, and how I could fit into it differently.
I did a lot of crazy things and I did a lot of thinking. I met a lot of people and learned about their lives and experiences. I had some experiences of my own that were eye-opening or spiritual in different ways. I really should have been blogging.
I guess it's obvious that all of this soul-searching was spurred by Saralyn. Like it or not, she sort of shattered my world, and I realized I had an opportunity to put it back together again however I wanted. So I've been tinkering.
I realized if I wanted to seize the moment to reinvent myself, the beginning of the year, of Senior Year, was the time. I shaved my head and got a new and fairly different pair of glasses, and conciously decided to reinvent myself: bolder, more confident, more unapologetic.
I know what you're thinking
"He never had a problem with confidence before. If anything he was kind of an egotistical bastard."
But anyone who is an egotistical bastard knows the secret: that it betrays a lack of confidence as sure as stuttering and hiding from cameras does. I've been substituting faux confidence for the real deal for years.
This was about shedding the faux-confidence. And it was about shedding some of the ridiculousness, too. Years ago, when I started wearing silly clothes and putting a spoon behind my ear (Some of y'all remember) it was about telling the world "I'm me; deal with it!" But just like the faux-confidence, it was a mask. The real message was "This, these clothes and quirks and oddities, this is me. Deal with that and leave me alone."
This time I'm doing the same thing, but I'm doing it right. It's not even "This is me, deal with it." It's just "This is me."
This is me, Jonah Comstock.
Because this is the beginning of the end of trial runs.
Because next year we're headed to the real world.
Because, though I don't know what I'm going to do or what my life is going to look like,
though I don't have a plan and I don't have a safety net,
I at least know who I'm going to be.
I'm going to be myself, trust my instincts, be confident without being arrogant, and let the world take me as I am.
This is me.
World, look out.