I Miss Who I Was

Sometimes I get hit with nostalgia. Sometimes it's fun. Other times, it's a bit painful. Like a scab you can't stop picking at, even when it hurts more with each flick of the nail and you know it's doing you know good, but hey, scabs gotta be picked.

Tonight's one of those nights. It's midnight, or near enough to, and I'm remembering all the late-nighters I had when I was younger, all the cool stuff I used to do, the obsessions I had that would occupy me for hours, days, sometimes longer.

I miss that passion.

I don't know where it went.

And I feel it a lot on rainy nights like tonight.

It's like I've misplaced pieces of myself and I can't even think of where to start looking. Somewhere out there, in a closet or drawer or hanging by a nail in an apartment I no longer live in, there's a younger me who's annoyed that I stopped learning Punjabi, who forgot the frustrating joy of trying to draw properly with a ball-point pen, who wrote wistful letters to a hypothetical future lover, who stayed up until 4 AM playing videos games because goddamn, the game is too good to put down for something as piddly and inconsequential as sleep.

The me who can't decide whether Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy X is the pinnacle of JRPGS, the me who had a few hundred dollars a month of disposable income, the me who exclaimed in geekish glee upon finding anime action figures in the comic book store. The me who would deliberately rent terrible horror movies in order to have a good laugh...

That me isn't really this me.

Don't get me wrong. That me has never had entire conversations with published authors. That me hasn't experienced the musical genius of Adam Lambert. That me that... Okay, I still watch bad horror movies to have a good laugh.

 I guess some things will never change.

And there's nothing stopping me from drawing again, gaming like a fiend, learning Punjabi just because hey look, free online lessons! But it's not the same. In my memories, there's this carefree feel to the whole thing, a surety that I can goof off and not do things seriously because it'll all come out in the end, I'll get through, and along the way, I'll have learned a couple of nifty skills.

(Yes, this positivity came alongside clinical depression. Mood swings are fun. [/sarcastic font])

The me now? The me now is, well, more mature. 20s me is gone. 30s me is here. And 30s me has spent years prioritizing important stuff over fun stuff because fun stuff doesn't pay the bills. 30s me has experiences poverty and lousy living situations and the depression that never ends. (Yes, it goes on and on, my friends.) And 30s me wishes so hard that I could go back in time and spend even a month as that old carefree me, and do all the stuff that I don't think I can do anymore.

And you know the real pisser? If that actually happened, all I'd probably spend that month doing is setting up the long-term things I know will work out well in the end, like reviewing books, so I could get a jump on myself and maybe be successful sooner.

30s me is a bit of a buzzkill, sometimes.