Reflection

This year, as in all of the past 3, I have been amazingly lucky. Through my friends and coworkers I have been affoarded inumerable opportunities for enjoyment and self improvement. I realize that I may not always show how greatful I am that I have so much. At times it is hard for even the best of us to keep smiling. I don't meet all my challenges with grace (yet) but I hold them dear to my heart. Once conquered we look fondly on all obsticals.

I have so many new ways to look at myself this year. I am a Judo black belt. I enjoy Lolita fashion. I am a student of Japanese. I am the social organizer of my little group here. I am a peer leader. I am a member of the JET Steering Committe. I was the expert on youth culture at the midyear seminar. I am friend, companion, and lover. I am a fed up teacher. I am finally becomming the kind of adult I want to be. The road to self discovery is a hard one. Mine has been relatively easy up until now and the knowledge that it will get a lot harder here on out scares me. But I have yet to meet a mountain I cannot climb. Even if I need to take baby steps sometimes.



How much of ourselves do we really own? How many of my acomplishments are mine and how many of them are only the result of my interactions with others? Does any of it really matter? Some of these questions seemed so important three years ago. It used to be all about me me me. But I realized the other day that it no longer had to be that way- and contrary to what I thought that was pretty liberating. I thought that to correct my deficiencies I would have to focus on my problems all the time. To obsess is to succeed. But most of what I got out of obsessing was an embarassing sense that I thought too much about myself. I'm not an altruist, but I don't want to soley be an Amberist either. I'll leave stuff like that to L. Ron Hubbard. And Tom Cruise. And Al Frankin.

When I was in high school I felt like I lost myself. I've felt foolish all along for my stupid tempers, my idiotic self deprication, for the foolish vanity I possess and the abysmal way I dismissed my own power and strengths, and for all the floundering and self pity I didn't really want but simply could not avoid. I have never been unhappy with my surroundings or my people, the key to all the greif I have endured and caused these past few years lies in feeling lost. It lies in feeling that someone else always has the bigger slice of cake, the better opinion, the more rational idea, a more deserving situation or anything else that could fall in that vein.

I knew it was foolish-I did! But for people like me, strong, creative, idealistic, intelligent and passionate- people like that will fall into ourselves and drown sometimes. We eat ourselves alive from the inside and that is why nothing from the outside can save us. It's not depression, or at least, not all of it. It's that when people like me question reality, and the importance of everything we held sacred- and when we find no answer in ourselves that satisfies- our world collapses like a black hole and nothing can save us until we work our way out of it.



These years on JET have been amazingly good to me. I've had the time and space I needed to work things out for myself. Any greif in this time has come from feeling like I should already have healed and moved on. Unfortunately thoughts like this are counter productive and any stress would mutiply them. Often stress would come from the people around me as we asserted our personalities. Feeling like I lost out (which was a phantom feeling caused by low self worth) kiled any chances I had of getting better. But I feel ok now. I'm done with this period in my life. I'm going to be a little bit more like the stronger personalities I know (and they are more obsinate than me-ha ha!).

I'm going to trust in myself and take my risks-and take them like a man, if you will. I'm going to keep on making mistakes but I'm not going to dwell on those. Not being miserable anymore, though, makes me feel like my whole life now is a mistake. This mind and body have lived so long with a negative self image that I don't really know what a normal life feels like. But there's nothing to worry about. Smart people catch on quickly. And ambitious people work hard to make things work to their advantage.

Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" has come to mean a lot to me in the past few years. Especially the line where he talks about losing everything you'd built in a single wrong move, and building it all up again without a single wimper. I'm paraphrasing but you get the point. I don't want to lose everything I've built. But I know that if you want more than you seem to be alloted in life you are going to have a few crushing defeats. I feel like I've paid enough in 7 years to more than make up for a few (or more) years of unparalled sucess. Hopefully fate will agree with me. According to many people we make our own fate so if they are correct than I am in the clear.



So what ho! I'm Scarlett O'Hara now going forward and not looking back (too much). The future is bright and I'm prepared to accept the consequences of shaping my own destiny. I can only hope that there will be as much kindness and fortuen in my next 25 years as there were in my first. There may be faries and there may be elves, but as my daddy says and as I am comming to believe, God seems to help those who help themselves. This is Riply, last survivor of the Nostromo-signing off.