Pish posh. I'm not at all surprised at who I am. In 1992 I painted a Skinny Puppy logo on my leather jacket. In 2002 I put a Skinny Puppy logo on my car. In 2012 I thought about putting a Skinny Puppy logo on my helmet until I realized I still had a Skinny Puppy logo on my jacket because I was still wearing it. If you're surprised by who you are and look back on who you were with chagrin you're doing something wrong. The only thing that upsets me is that I've spent two years in the place I truly love and over 20 trying to get back there. On a related note, it appears that my tribe is one of the few that gets it.
So you're saying that you're the same person now as you were at 15?
I think that might not be a fair question, considering the large amount of maturing everyone does in their teenage years. I tend to agree with the article, though. I'd say a certain amount of chagrin for one's past opinions & perspectives is a natural consequence of, well, growth. I certainly hope that I remain somewhat malleable as I age. A counterpoint, in the form of a passage from The Great Gatsby, comes to mind, however: I take from this a sense that too much shifting between opinions, too much effort spent on being fully "open" to new perspectives is, in the end, a fruitless endeavor. I think, as in most things in life, there's a balance to be struck between malleability in one's opinions and the time-cultivated inertia one has to resist great changes.I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
So you'd say that there is an end to our own growing?
Yes! This is how I feel! I am exactly the same person I was at 14, I like to say. I'm just more that person. For me, age hasn't been a morphing of one identity to another. It has, rather, been the peeling off of layers, a distillation. I am a fine aged whiskey, or cheese (my kids would say, snort!). I am the exact person I remember when I think of chasing fireflies and sleeping under a blanket fort when I was a kid. I still have dreams of traveling into space, still love nature as much as my fellow humans, still sneak chocolate into bed. I'm the Same Me, just aged, refined, forged in the fire of experience and dispair. I just keep getting better. But I'm still Me, and exactly, 100 percent, the person I thought I would be. I may not have the career I thought I would have, or be married to a Star Trek prince. But I'm that same weird kid with pigtails and a sense of crazy wonder. Yeah.