Change of Character

Have you ever taken a long hard look at yourself and realised in one profound moment that you are not at all who you thought that you were?

I enjoyed (and I use the term loosely) this hilarious moment of clarity recently. There I was, not in the mirror, but at a bus stop, deprived of background music in my ears and with only the sound of the morning traffic to accompany my thoughts.

This weekend, and come to think of it, quite a few before it, had been, what I was choosing to refer to as “out of character” to friends of old and new, when speaking of the those 48 hours that had once again become an exciting part of life.

I was without doubt a shy child, but had become not so much rebellious as innovative in my early teenage years. I was sure of what it was that I stood for, but at the same time did not promote what it was that I stood for in the public arena, at that time, school. I just revelled in private at the fact--or rather the personal opinion--that I was my own person and not part of a flock, even if that did mean being shunned by the mainstream. I was laughing on the inside, perhaps prematurely.

My early teens had given way to a sort of tunnel-vision, overly-ambitious creature that understood rules, accepted them, and then decided those that one would follow, and those that one would break. Was I trying to be controversial? No, there was nothing to be gained in this. Was I just a narcissist? It’s possible, but there was definitely more to it than that.

It was at this point that I decided my beliefs and my values. It was at this point also, that I validated my ambitions and decided to simply go about them. It was at this point that I was sure I knew everything there was to know about myself. I realise today that it was just the beginning of life becoming an adult. I had become acutely aware of desire and also of pain. There I sat on my bedroom floor thinking of what might be, in the short and in the long-term, whilst listening to Dido’s No Angel, the “soundtrack to my life”.

Relationships with family and friends, and those that I was surrounded by in life, were passionate on both ends of the scale. This is still the case, at the age of 21, now officially an adult. I have met more people in the real world that I can relate to than was feasible within the constraints of school and a local suburban community. Relationships now too, had become easier and still more difficult than before.

Those that encouraged growth as a person, who made me feel optimistic and who made me think, were easy. They made me realise that I was right a few years ago when I had privately held the belief that there were other similar-minded individuals in the county that I would connect with, and not simply have surface conversations with.

Then there were the relationships that made me feel once again, slightly as if I could privately commentate on life, hold beliefs and thoughts, and yet not truly share them due to the knowledge that they would be met with one of two things: deemed outlandish, somewhat eccentric, or worse again, discarded without feeling.

But it didn’t matter. There would always be double-edged swords in life. And there would always be toxins, that was my belief at least. What really mattered was that here, in November, I was not behaving out of character, I was developing it.

The things that I thought I would never do--positive and negative--I was doing. And I was loving every minute of it.

There I sat on my bedroom floor thinking about what had been, in the near and distant past, whilst listening to Dido’s No Angel. A friend who I had known the first time I’d heard the record in my teens and still know today recently told me that I had changed. Maybe she was right. Maybe she had seen it before I was able to see it myself.