Words are too small

It's been 8 months since I started writing down the experiences of the past year. Though there are sporadic readers from places as far flung and random as Utah, China or even Africa, this was never meant to be something that anyone other than myself was meant to read. A place to put down some of my most intimate, darkest thoughts as a way of both purging and understanding them. It's been immensely valuable too, both as means of coping, but also as a sort of marker. A gravestone of sorts, marking the before and after moments of my life. 

My life doesn't seem remotely the same as it was a year ago. There are throughlines, of course. My son, the company I work for, certain friendships, etc. Yet, I am not the same that I was a year ago. It's possible that fundamentally people don't change. However, maybe what changes are the fundamental aspects of our nature that we elevate or suppress based on our experiences, our interactions, or fears, our hopes. Maybe it's all deep down inside us, but we selectively choose what comes out, and what doesn't. And then, at a certain point, we seem to lose control over those choices; our bodies, our minds, our experiences start to make the decisions for us, and this becomes who we "are". But there are other sides of us still hidden there deep in the weeds.

I feel those parts of myself emerging again, that I may have suppressed along the way. Hope, belief, optimism, beauty, connectedness, peace. These are things that I always saw as fundamental parts of me, but somewhere along the way got pushed aside. I'm not blaming anyone for that, and ultimately, I'm responsible for letting that happen. I let the stress of life overtake those things that I was, and wanted to be. 

And now I find myself shown things in myself that I may have never even known were there, or if they were, they were long forgotten. But those are things that feel so utterly natural, or right, or... perfect, that it makes you realize that we all have Mozart in us, even if we're battling his and Salieri's demons along the way. 

And those things are emerging - and being brought out - in the most beautiful ways, that I don't feel like I've changed or that I'm a different person. I am becoming the person I originally saw myself as, and feeling myself connected in a way that I never saw coming, and may have never thought possible. I feel that certain words, like peace, or calm, make sense to me in a way they never did before. Peace is a really, truly beautiful word.

These are ramblings that likely make little sense. Sometimes words are too small to capture the feeling.