Ooooooooooooh! So that's what that me...

It is disturbing how much I can realize on my own but not actually process fully without external intervention. I'm sure it's a horrifying defect on my part. For years I was aware that having returned to the US as a child to a set of family that was not entirely impressed with my five year old self had an effect on me. As a child there are some things that are a given, one of them being that your family loves you completely. So if your grandmother, ever so subtly, finds you tedious and unattractive, clearly taking after the wrong side of the family and ascribing malice to accident, instead of dismissing it as one would as an adult you try harder. And when that doesn't work perhaps you wind up taking it on in a larger way than is entirely appropriate, because if your grandmother doesn't think you're pretty or smart and you get the sense that you're only there on sufferance well perhaps that's true. True enough so that when meeting relatives of the same generation on the other side of the family who tell you you're beautiful and delightful, you kind of wonder why they're lying to you. As an adult you can have the realization that, huh, yeah that did have an influence on my view of myself and the world and you might think that this would start shifting the view, but not so much.

Oddly I've often learned best from other people’s experiences. Watching something happen involves a level of perspective that actually experiencing things lacks. Experience personalizes things that often shouldn't be personalized. Which is why watching my lovely and precocious niece as she tried harder and harder to engage my grandmother and gain her approval (a situation she will never have to find herself in again) something started to come together that had never managed to surface before; something that required perspective rather than personalization. Gradually as the weeks passed I'd look in the mirror and not dislike what I saw. It began to have broader implications. Suddenly things that had previously been confusing started to make sense. More I began to recognize meaning in things that had previously been meaningless. Specifically interest that would previously have been dismissed without conscious recognition.

The problem with this kind of realization is that if you think about it too much it becomes retroactive and conversations past suddenly have an entirely new meaning. One that leaves you feeling shockingly naive. But really it's something best not thought of. Realizing just how differently you'd have spent your summer holiday when you were 24 had you but known isn't actually worth thinking about... no matter how much you wish you had figured it out then.