Unsettled

The grad school experiment continues to go well. Work for me should begin next week, if only part time. Life as I know it now seems to be going in a good direction. Still, like most, I am haunted by the past.

There are times when I close my eyes to sleep at night, and I can't. The strangest memories will come to haunt me just before I fall asleep. They come from all time periods in the past and vary in strength, but they are there. Sometimes, it is a memory from middle school. A mean face, a joke at my expense, laughter from spoiled twelve-year-olds. Many times, they're memories from my past job: the potential I showed fading throughout the year as I got less and less support from peers and superiors alike. Phone calls to homes that never answered, phone calls to parents who literally didn't care. The idea of feeling truly helpless for the first time since I was a child.

Many times, the memories are about relationships I have lost. Those are the clearest ones, and the most painful. I'm taken to moments in time I cannot change, no matter how much I wish to. I see the complications in those times that I had not before, re-listen to conversations I'd rather forget but can't. In the worst cases, those people are gone. They've passed from this world and there isn't an opportunity for me to rekindle our relationship. Other times, they're people who I admit, I don't want anything to do with, but feel I have to for people other than myself. In all cases, these memories take me back to a place where I feel I can only witness the past as it is but still feel those emotions as strongly as I did then.

I'm not sure why these memories like to pop up before I sleep, but they've been haunting me more than they should. They've caused me to become unsettled in my daily tasks (and yawning a lot more during the day). Perhaps some entries in the future will be dedicated to writing about these memories and figuring out why they come back to me. Part of my whole rebooting experiment is to move forward, and while memories are good to have, I can do without the haunting ones visiting me before I sleep.

Let's see what visits me tonight or tomorrow, if anything.