Christoflurp's Personal History

Almost in spite of myself, I found myself looking at videos over the last couple of days that highlight personal growth and change. Probably because my YouTube algorithm skews that way, and probably because it's the time of year that inevitably happens, but regardless, I couldn't help but ponder what I might seek out to try and accomplish this year. In 2023, I had a lot of ups and downs, and feel like I made some significant improvements to some perspectives I had built over the years. Things like how I represent my own beliefs, my motivations and capacity for resiliency, and even having to deal with loss in a variety of ways were tested. I'm still here, so despite feeling like a bag of shit as often as not, I can decidedly say I was successful at finishing out the year.

(Semi-relevant detour) I've mentioned this perspective of mine elsewhere, but for the sake of posterity, let's capture it here…

I keep this perspective pretty close to the forefront of my mind. It's the notion that I'm currently a version of myself that is fixed to this point in time. Throughout my life many different versions of me have existed. In most ways they're an accumulation of experiences and beliefs, and in others they're a representation of circumstances and environmental states. But importantly, despite their persistence along my historical timeline, they are ephemeral; beyond memory they disappear almost as soon as they appear. This may seem a bit abstract, but for me this belief has been a helpful way of extending compassion to the things about myself I will always regret. Explicitly stating it to myself has helped me reclaim and recognize a lot of my own self worth over the last few years. In general, I consider this a useful way of viewing myself over time.

Back to the point -- I was watching the most recent Mark Manson podcast video and he dropped a casual mention of the fact that he has some previous years' worth of documents with his resolutions that he can look back on, and it got me really considering the idea of a personal history, and, more significantly, keeping record of it for the versions of us we'll wake up as years or decades from now.

Off the hop, I was hit with a kind of sadness about not having something similar that I can look back at. It's a pretty disheartening realization that Facebook is about the most reliable place I can turn to for insights into who I was and what I projected into the world in my 20's. I signed up for Facebook in August of 2007 at the ripe old age of 23. If you were around it at that time you'll remember a very different version than is currently available. The content we posted was prompted differently, there weren't ads, and it wasn't a tool used for cultural subversion on a global scale. That doesn't mean it was any better, of course, nor was it something I used in any meaningful way.

I'm not entirely sure why I was so exhausted. I think this might've been around the time I did some visits with friends, but I'd need to tune into my Memories page tomorrow and other days to get hints at stuff like that.

I don't have any idea what 26 year old me was so bothered by, and the comments don't provide any specific context or clarity for me to go off of. All I know now is that the version of me in control at that time deemed it worthy of putting it into the world. Now, both of these demonstrate the personality of me in my mid-twenties, but alas, don't quite capture much else. I was pretty quick to toss out a swear word, and pop culture confused and angered me, but I know enough about myself to know I probably had a bit more than that going on upstairs. I'm still first to drop a casual ‘fuck' in conversation, and I do still disdain pop culture (although my vitriol has been replaced with general contentment at peoples enjoyment), but a lot has changed in my perspectives and how I think between then and now -- and that's what I wish I had more of.

It's a non-trivial challenge to preserve enough of our current thought processes and perspectives in a way that adds value for others or our future selves. I've been sitting here writing this for the last 2 hours and have put thought into some of the smallest pieces of it that I'll never have a way of capturing. In a week I might remember struggling to come up with an analogy that I've now scraped (it's a tree, future Chris), but in a year I won't remember the heavy feeling of existential dread that came with it. In 15 years this piece of writing may be lost to me entirely.

So what do we do?

That's one hell of a million dollar question, my friend.

I think the reality is that there is no firm answer. As conscious creatures in possession of a memory we can look at this in a couple of ways. If it's important to know where the current state of our consciousness came from we should work to capture more than the big plot points. We should share more of ourselves and our perspectives, writing them down in journals (or whatever the hell this even is), sharing them with friends and family (and yes, our therapists), or even recording ourselves expressing the process behind the thought.

I realize this is an underwhelming way to wrap this up. That's partly due to the hazy grasp I have on an answer to a question no one asked, and partly because it's a self serving way for me to capture exactly what I wish I had more of. It's a walk through my jagged thought process and the way I've been thinking about this for the last couple of days. I've got some goals this year, a couple of which involve writing a lot more, and exploring a lot more of myself through writing. Maybe this is a reasonable angle to pursue throughout.

You'd be forgiven for being annoyed if this feels anticlimactic. If you're up for it, tell me how and why you feel that way, and I'll do my best to help you remember it in a few years from now.

<3 flurp

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