Disremembrance

There's a song I used to listen to in college called Disremembrance by Dannii Minogue.  Putting aside whether you think she's a good singer or not, the song had lyrics that resonated with me at the time.  The word itself isn't widely used and hasn't made it into most dictionaries, it is the compliment to disremember as remembrance is to remember.  To disremember is to fail to remember, or to forget.  Disremembrance is the act or process of forgetting.

Part of the lyrics read "You gave me the time, To change the memories, But if I forget myself, Will you remember me?" - the reason this resonated with me so much at the time was because college for me was really a period of transition from an old mentality to a new one.  I became a different person through the years I spent in college.  Something happened to me when I was much younger which I won't go into details here.  It left me distrusting of others, cold and closed to the world, and for the most part it was the reason I became an introvert, having previously been an extrovert and wildly so.  My time spent in college was marked by many changes, least of all the fact that I was surrounded by people for the first time who were there by choice.  Up until then I had only been through compulsory education, surrounded by people who had no choice but to be there and for many of whom this was made no secret.

Studying in a very different atmosphere I became more sociable.  I opened up just a little bit more and I met people who would leave a profound impact on my life.  I spoke for the first time to others about what happened and for the first time I felt like I was able to inch myself back towards being myself.  While I could never change what happened to me because the past is done and can't be undone, the present was still a choice.  I had a life I was living and the choices I made determined my future.  The present would become the past and that made me attempt to rebuild.  I knew that the present I shaped would eventually become my past and by virtue to shape my present would be to shape my past in the image I wanted.  With the help of others I was able to find some happiness and joy in my life and created lasting memories.

At the time the lyrics resonated with me because they were the life I was living.  The people around me gave me the time to change my memories.  They gave me the hope and the opportunity to create a better future for myself.  Through it all that question lingered though, if I ever forgot who I was and abandoned the path I was creating, would they remember me?  Would they remember the person I wanted to be and keep me on that path?  Would they remember me at all if we parted ways, would they ever look back on the time we shared together and think of me or would I be missing from their memories.

The idea of being forgotten is something that I struggle with.  While I am still an introvert, that isn't my true nature.  When I am comfortable and you observe me at my best you'd say I was an extrovert.  At times when I push myself I can still play that role quite convincingly.  The trouble is I still don't feel myself again even after all these years.  I opened up a lot more through my years at university and met yet more people that made me feel much more confident about being myself and to an extent I have been able to hold onto that at least.  I have interest and I have passions and I have things that are geeky or nerdy and I do explore them without worrying what others think.  The fact this blog exists is testament to the fact I am comfortable with complete strangers reading it and forming opinions of me without worrying what they are.  I know some people will find an affinity with my writing and I know others will find it pretentious or find fault or flaw with it and dismiss it. 

I don't concern myself with those opinions however because without sounding arrogant the only opinion that matters is my own.  You might say that is arrogant but at the end of the day I am sharing my life on this blog and as such having an opinion on it is to have an opinion on my life, and while you are free to form opinions of other peoples' lives, you have no right to tell anyone how to live their life.  So as far as my life is concerned, and yours for that matter, the only opinion that matters is our own. 

When it comes to looking at the future however it's worth remembering that the future is yet to come, and the past is long since passed.  The person you are today is not the person you were, and while in many cases you might be the person you wanted to become, and in some cases you won't all that matters is who you want to be now, not who you wanted to be then.  We change as we grow and our experience shapes our growth.  The things we once wanted, as we grow can become completely opposing to what we want now.  We can dream of being a certain person and grow and realise the reality is the worst thing we'd ever want for ourselves.  It is in that moment you have to realise you always have the freedom to change your mind.

There's another song called Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann with the lyric "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what to do with your life, The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't" - that last part as I have grown older has made me of the opinion that perhaps we're not meant to know what we want to do with our lives at all?  Maybe that's the point.  Maybe life is meant to be about figuring it out, and that the only universal truth is that you never do, no matter how close you think you are there's always another day to live and when it eventually ends no matter how full your life was there will always be a thought of "I wish I had..." because we can at least agree that it's not possible to do everything, no matter how hard we try, so we shouldn't beat ourselves up when we can't.