Last week, I cut a major tie from a part of my past. To be honest, it was just deleting an account and all of the media that was tied to it from my devices. And to be frank, I didn’t particularly want to - I have a tendency to keep the past close to me. I guess I’ve internalized this practice as an important part of recognizing my identity as a person. But I think there’s more benefit in leaving that part of time to be fossilized than trying to keep it alive by housing it in my here and now brain. I would think otherwise, especially if there was less uncertainty and waiting involved in it. But as it stands now, well, there’s a lot of wondering.

	But after I did that, some regret hit me. There were a lot of memories with that account. And all of those audio and visual files. Never to be accessed and reviewed, only vaguely remembered. It was almost as if I betrayed myself and things that I’ve stood for. Because I love the idea of being remembered in detail. 

        In college, I took a religious studies class called “death” and one of the only things that I retained from that class is that humans are constantly seeking immortality in three ways: through literal immortality, through the passing of genes to offspring, and through memory. And maybe deleting that account and everything that came with it was a betrayal of my journey to seek that immortality. The possibility of that came across my mind. But in the long run, I think that what I did better served that purpose of immortality. On a graph, I imagine one line would be a dip down, then exponential increase vs. the other slowly crawling up a little bit.

        Either way, what’s done is done. I feel like this applies to my jaw as well, since I’ve been feeling the effects of not being able to go about my days in a fashion that I used to. Eating food regularly, exercising, even having to monitor how much I twist and bend when doing chores. It’s sort of a bummer. But when it comes down to it, I know it’ll be better. Less medical issues as well anxieties about medical issues regarding my jaw. But, again, the graph thing comes to mind. Except that this graph would be a slow decline downward, rather than both lines going up. 

        Anyway, all this nonsense to say that things will be better. I mean, they might not be. But perspective is important. I think it’s important to at least acknowledge that things aren’t good if they aren’t. 

        On a long, probably unnecessary side note, I just want to say that I’m not really a believer in that saying “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. The origins of it may be meant in good faith, but I find that most times that people have used it with me, they mean “suck it up because no one is going to help you” or “I’m doing it so you and other people should have to as well”, which I find is dismissive of issues that are being faced and/or a redirection of the focus to the person saying it rather than the person who is having problems. 

        So, to comply with this I practice either two things: attempting to understand a person’s situation and mentality they have toward said situation to gain better empathy or simply saying that their situation sounds difficult and then shutting my face hole. And I’m a believer that option two should only be utilized when I’ve attempted to see it from their perspective and have difficulty or have outright failed to see their point of view, which means that they probably wouldn’t want to hear anything from me anyway.

        It’s a lot of fun, actually.