photo via ohmyvancouver, taken by TOTORORO.RORO. so beautiful!
another spring, another bout of homesickness for vancouver.
as i said to sean - partially to explain the vancouver-heavy stream of content on my tumblr lately - i think it's because at this time seven years ago, i was preparing to leave. for the month of april in 2008, i was committing all of my vancouver experiences to memory, and maybe getting a little bit misty-eyed over leaving. (i moved back to toronto on may 1st.) so, springtime has become a very evocative time to me, and i inevitably start to go over a lot of my old blog posts and scribbled bits of writing on my hard drive, just to recall a sense of where my head was at in that point in time. (well, it's the nostalgia and the pms. either/or.)
this is kind of a weird, melancholy process.
see, i used to write a lot -- and i mean a lot. at one point, i was writing in a public blog as well as a private blog as well as separate stuff written just for me in notepad files on my hard drive. i've got a lot of material to go through. but right now, i've mostly been looking over scribbles and posts from 2007-08 -- specifically, the part where i decided to completely upend my life and flee to the west coast. honestly, i've never done something that foolhardy or insane or brave since, and that's starting to weigh on me, i think.
i was out for coffee with my friend katy last week, and i mused that moving to vancouver had meant so much to me because it was the first time in memory that i'd done something for myself -- not for my family, not for a boy, not for anybody else. plus, it was an extra accomplishment because it was a whim that i'd put my mind to and succeeded at, all by myself. i decided pretty much out of the blue that i was going to move to vancouver, and i did it. i fucking did it. i had nothing holding me in place, so i figured it was the best time to escape to a place where i barely knew anyone, so i could get a better perspective on myself - i was just turning 24 at the time - and what i was doing with my life. and hell yeah, did i ever. (as the story goes, i struggled for the first few months - even with a decent job and a roof over my head - but then visited toronto that christmas, fell for a guy, and moved back to toronto four months later.)
so lately i've been thinking a lot about that, and how i really seemed to have it together out there -- i was in my mid-twenties, i had a 9-to-5 cafe job that i could hang up at the end of the day, i had a cute little apartment in a nice part of town, and i had plenty of free time that i spent walking and exploring and listening to music. i don't remember struggling; at least, not that much.
yet i read a quote somewhere that said something like "your memories will lie to you" and it's always a good thing to keep in mind. i don't know if it's so much your memories, though, as it is the emotions that colour them. while you're in the moment, you may be struggling and stressed out and wanting to be anywhere else, but when you think back on it, you tend to block out the bad parts in the haze of nostalgia. everything's rose-tinted and life was just easier back in the day, right? it's always easier than it is right now. so it's simple to romanticize the past when you don't think about - or don't remember - the tougher stuff.
but if i think about it too much, i do miss who i was and where i was at that point in my life. i was still relatively young, i had plenty of freedom, i had the space to try and figure myself out. i had more stamina, more self-discipline, more drive. i looked a hell of a lot better in my wardrobe than i do now. i was still close enough to my glory days that they were recent happy memories that fed my future ambitions, and not something that i look back on in fear that i'll never reach them again. ultimately, i just had a lot more hope for my future -- even though i had no idea what it would look like, i felt like i had infinite possibilities, and best of all, that i didn't have to worry about them right then. they'd get here on their own time and their own terms. all i had to do in the moment was enjoy the dumb freedoms of my youth, its minor responsibilities and its major good times.
i guess my ultimate struggle now is what it has been for years: to learn how to stop living in the past.
[ music | the xx, "together" ]