Freedom from me!

I was cleaning out the ol' desk at home, a little task that's been, oh, maybe... 15 years in the making.

Hey, it takes me a long time to accumulate that much junk.

The proximate cause of this week's action was that I couldn't find my thumb drive backup, so I just dumped the three drawers on the floor.

I did find the object of my quest. Then I had to do something about the mess on the office floor. A mess that included old floppy disks, a billion paper clips, zombie ballpoint pens, and notebooks. Pounds and pounds of notebooks.

It's stuff I wrote ten or closer to twenty years ago. Oooh, maybe that short story I couldn't find is in there! Let's have a look!

Ugh.

After reading through them for a few minutes, I found a blank page and summed up what I'd seen:

Sometimes I forget the turmoil I've gone through, which hardly makes sense -- you don't forget the hurricane that ripped off the roof just because you had it fixed. These notebooks were part of my attempt to work through a lot of the doubt, terror, resentments, and self-pity -- OOOH the self-pity -- that I probably should have gotten past in my teenage years. I'm usually not this bad anymore.

I'm glad to say most of the issues that plagued me as regards personal relationships have been resolved. Some, not much I can do. But it's not so painful these days. As I've gotten older I've realized that people can only do what they can do, and even with the best will they can muster, sometimes they fall short, sometimes they can't change. Anyway, I've learned not to fight with dead people anymore. You can't win. You can't lose, but you can't win.

I guess it's good to know I've made progress, but bad to know how annoying I can be.

So, I decided to pack up all of the books and throw them all away. I hope I'm not that man anymore, and I don't want to drag his notebooks around like Jacob Marley and his chained ledgers.

I once put a question to a Catholic group like this: If you died and went to Purgatory, and part of your rehab involved watching a movie of your life -- every minute of it, everything you did and said, all of it (it's Purgatory; you have all the time there is) (maybe you could fast-forward through sleeping and bathroom breaks) -- how would you feel about it?

I think you can tell a lot about someone by their answer to that question. Some people were all gung-ho. Yes! I'll bring an eternal bucket of popcorn! It's showtime! Others were more pragmatic. There will be painful memories but if that's the cost of heaven, I will pay it. And then there were those like me. No thank you very much and could I spend a thousand years scrubbing toilets instead?