A person may lose their voice, they may lose their way, but they cannot lose themselves. They travel with them always.
A funny thing happened on my way towards re:re:re-self discovery. I took a peak into this original blog of mine. With a caricature formed in my head regarding this blog (my own blog!) during an incredibly critical transitional period of my life over the past 2 years, I only took a peak at a couple blog entries now and then. Some of the absolute last ones posted on here. But no further.
In the interim, for extremely specific reasons, I decided to launch an entirely different blog. It's too much to lay out here and is besides the point, but the new blog was rooted in describing how much my focus on several critical issues had changed and the need to play catch up on a radically different life I had formed.
When I would think about blogging in general over the past 2 years, I of course laughed with a 'that's so 00's' sentiment. There are already 2000's recap TV series, entire books written on the decade, and the rise of tumblr, wordpress, and self-branding marketing agents teaching you how to monetize your personal brand in 20 steps so you can write your blog from your cheap Belize apartment due to currency exchange rates. Blogging. In 2017?
Yet I did because I had to. Why did I have to? I had to. There was something lost, found, gutted, given back, and torn to shreds somewhere in the middle of all that.
Perhaps the thing I was most afraid of was coming into contact with 19 year old David. I had a lot of time trying to undo damages sustained over the previous 6 years of my life. I only wanted to forensically study those, at the prodding of several close friends who kept asking how I overcame this or that. The caricature of older posts (which again, I had not read!) stayed in the background of my mind as if they were equivalent to bad prom photos or embarrassing family get together stories.
Blogs from a 19 year old college student writing about his observations in finding God in the nooks and crannies of everyday life occurrences? Nah, I'll skip the embarrassment.
And then of course I started reading those old original posts yesterday.
As I read my 19 year old voice express an intimacy between God and the everyday occurrence, I caught myself in moments of jealous, happy, and sad emotions. College Dave doesn't know what's coming. Yet, here he is digging his heals in during a formative time period. Not heavy stubborn heals but light, weightless and free in tone and observance. The observations alone breath life back into me right now! The writing cadence is clearly free of pains, free of second, triple, quadruple guesses.
This 19 year old Dave speaks of Jesus as if He is in the room. Funny, because it's a sentiment I have wished for myself in the course of the past 8 years.
Which is why I am writing at re-introductory length here to say I am blown away with this Jesus cultural observer of mid-aughts past. Like an unintended time capsule, these posts encapsulate something I sensed I lost or became blurry visioned.
Simply writing a blog in the first place is so me. I am a writer. At heart, I have things to write and I have things I want to convey for the sake of conveying. I realize being less myself meant not writing.
What I see clearly now is I had to write elsewhere in a different voice because the voice I had was truly lost from so long ago. My voice needed restoration, my heart to be given permission to beat lively again, my observations to become uncovered from muck and confusion.
My purposes for coming back here and dusting off the Internet cobwebs is simple. The voice I found resting here on this site all along, the way this young writer wrote about seeing God in the mundane, is closely their true self.
I will never escape myself again. Jesus loves that person too much.
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