Bittersweet Memories

Beginning the journey to rediscovery starts with returning to one’s earliest memories and thinking of the things you loved to do. All those hobbies which ate away the hours and left you feeling content even if there was nothing to show for it.

For me it was drawing, writing poetry or fiction, and reading books. Thinking back though brought back more than this… I remember the countless hours I spent alone, sometimes at home, others in the local park or even riding my bike on back roads surrounded by corn or soybean fields covered by a silence broken only by the wind of my passage rushing through my ears. Hours which often found me imagining life as I dreamed I could be if only God would answer my nightly prayers.

A life with long hair streaming in the summer sun, the flutter of my dress around my ankles and a truly carefree smile curving my lips, a lightness to my heart, knowing this was who I suppose to be.

I spent entire afternoons in the local library searching for information for why I felt what I did, why I saw myself one way when I dreamed. Why I was obsessed with understanding the ways my thoughts were so different, maybe even alien to the ways the other children would talk about themselves, in the ways they conducted themselves alone and in their social groups.

Why I felt like an outsider, always watching but never accepted.

Bittersweet memories indeed.