Half a Year of Rebooting (or Reflections on a Facebook Meme)

The project I started in September is surprisingly very much alive now. This is a pretty big deal for me because a pattern I have repeated often in my life has been to start something new only to forget about it shortly after. Perhaps that aspect of me is being rewritten and recoded a bit faster than most other things in this process. I like that.

Rebooting has opened my eyes to a lot of things this year. It has opened my eyes to positive self-criticism instead of self-deprecation. I've learned a lot about myself this year. That I can be grateful without being a fool. That I can be distant without being cold. That it is a very good thing to examine myself from time to time so I don't grow stagnant.

My fiance (still not used to that word, btw) mentioned something funny to me yesterday. On a 30-day-challenge Facebook meme I've been following, I posted an old picture of myself to represent who I was. My fiance did not recognize me at first. He asked me who that girl in my photo was and did not believe that it was me. it took a bit of time and analysis, but he did recognize me as I was then. He felt silly for not realizing it was me. I told him that was perfectly ok.

I explained to him that I'm the kind of girl who recreates herself from time to time. To the point where looking at photos of me from even as recently as college and looking at me now gives a viewer two completely different people. The girl in the photo was in a sunny lawn enjoying the spring day. She has a mixed look of calm and nervousness in her eyes (she hates being in pictures). Her flip-flopped feet are up in the air as she lied on her belly. She smiles with closed lips because she is embarrassed of her crooked teeth. The girl my fiance knows now is VERY different from that girl, even if these two entities share the same consciousness and body.

The girl my fiance knows now, the one he is marrying, isn't truly a girl. She is a woman. Unlike the girl in the picture, this woman hides from pictures to the point where it is very rare to see what she looks like. She might like being photographed again one day. When this woman smiles, she smiles widely with her now-straightened teeth and with her head held high. her hair is no longer long but bobbed, and cute that way. She stands up instead of lies down, she works instead of lounges. She is who I am now, but not necessarily who I will always be.

I suppose it is impossible to slack off in rebooting. I've been doing it all my life. This is just the first time I've ever written about it.

RG