Last weekend, I found my past in a dozen notebooks, covered in dust, in the back of a storage closet. There are many things that I hold onto for too long in life, literally and metaphorically, but I could never bear to throw out my old spiral notebooks and journals, full of half-written songs and late night musings that seemed important at the time. The deeper I dug into those cardboard boxes, the farther back in time I seemed to go. Before I knew it, I was gazing upon the writings of an optimistic 20 year old, whose every new thought seemed revolutionary and life-changing. Mixed within the poems, song lyrics, and random realizations, I began to see a pattern, almost as if I could trace my life backwards from 2019 to 1990, and make sense of it all with a new clarity and hindsight. I could almost touch the feeling that I had back in those days, when "finding myself" was as important as putting food in my belly.
The somewhat surprising observation that I had, while trying to decipher the maze of my own creations, was that at my core I had not changed much at all. Perhaps over the last thirty or so years, I had grown a thicker skin and become more of a realist, or maybe learned to not take myself so damn seriously. But at the root of those soul searching midnight ramblings was the same consistent craving for a deeper truth that I hold today, and a sincere motivation to be the best version of me that I can be. In a sense, those notebooks were filled with a time bomb of inspiration. Who knew that one day I would unearth them, down on my knees in a dark closet with an aching back, trying to loose them from underneath a pile of old video tapes, only to find out that I am actually still on the right path after all?