older and further away

Earlier, someone was talking about the plans you have in highschool, what you want to do, who you want to be, and I realized that while there were definitely threads there of the person I ultimately ended up becoming (in terms of interests, distractions, personality quirks) that even still high school feels very far away, like I couldn't even begin to imagine or bear having to figure everything out all over again. So often, it's a "if I knew then what I know now" thing, but even still, those years were sort of exhausting, and probably would still be so. It was much easier after I figured out what I wanted in life and how to get it, how to be happy, how to make choices, but there was alot of running in circles and things I might be able to sidestep second time around. I always say there is very little I would do differently, but so much that might have just made things easier on me (and everyone around me).

Next year marks another big reunion, and it's hard for me, even though I still interact with a few friends from HS on facebook, to imagine myself as the person I used to be then. It was a weird place to be, so uncertain in everything and terrified yet at the same time, but somehow more fearless, more brave. I am still pretty brave, but less and less fearless as the years go on. A good example: the last time I was on an airlplane was 1992, heading home from NC for Thanksgiving and it barely even occured to me it could crash. I was actually more afraid of not getting lost in the airport or missing a flight. Five years later, I would have been worried intensely it would crash but might have flown anyway. Ten years, and I'd be CERTAIN it would crash and wouldn't get on it(apparently I get more neurotic as I get older).

Sometimes, I feel sort of far away even from later points in my life, college, grad school (1st time around anyway, maybe even 2nd). The person who moved back here 10 years ago and started this very same job at this very same circ deskI am sitting at tonight even seems a little foggy and far away. And yet, at the same time, I always feel a little like I never change, that so much is the same, that you blink and ten years have passed without barely a whimper. That the details of my life, the dailyness, is very much the same--my work, my writing, my leisure time (what I have of it--have been pretty much a routine (with minor alterations) forever. How is it possible to be the same and yet so impossibly changed?