How Will People Understand That's Who I Was Not Who I Am

I think that simple set of lyrics sums up entirely why I am where I am. I wonder if people can ever let go of the visions they imagined for us or of our past. I understand the entirety of forgiveness but that isnt what this is. This is just a pure desire to break away from the past and the trails trampled out in growth. Perhaps it is because the past is a cumulation of so many errors and so much naivety and those beliefs that I was invincible. Oh how little I knew.

I definitely was unaware of how much the past is never the past. I mean it isnt happening now exactly but it kinda is. Let me paint a picture to better describe this. I moved when I was 8, and that was devastating. I mean I had been friends with my two best friends since Kindergarten, we used to take our snack time together. The next move was at 18 when I left for the states and then again at 22 when I came to Australia. Each move made keeping in touch harder but they all allowed for possible escapes. They were fresh starts. I could be anyone. Anything. And sometimes leaving left me feeling like I had a clean slate that would never show through the previous writings. If only I had known then what I know now.

Flash forward to today. My past is so close it feels like it could be an eagle preparing to swoop down yet that sounds threatening and that isnt how it is. It just is incomprehensibly present. Today I learned that my best friend from kindergarten, the boy I used to sit and read Archie comics with for hours, is now in med school currently in the same department at the hospital as my mother. My little sister has now worked in two departments I used to at the hospital and those people all remember me and ask her about me. Then a few weeks ago an acquaintance from home whom I carpooled with in grade 3 appeared over here engaged to a girl from here. It just has been amazing how much it seems that no matter how far I think I move I cant escape it all and how everything seems to just flow together as if there was never any question about how it all fit.

And here I am. Recognizing that there is no escape. You are created in a sense from  your past. I really thought that coming here would be that new identity that you can only dream of. But it isnt. And I cant say I am disappointed by that. I need the grounding of the past to keep me on the right path I suppose. I just get anxious thinking about the day when I decide to go back and wondering if all of those people I left behind will be able to see me for who I am now and not as all of the other things. But maybe the truth is that it isnt what other people see, it is the fact that those faces and all those places make me see how things were before and I want to move past those days when I was sad or broken or when you were part of our life because that isnt who I am now. I want to be able to just go back all confident and creating a life of my own that is brilliant enough to overshadow all that I left behind.