Past and present

 After having a family and kids, it feels like the past doesn’t make any sense anymore. Or I should say, the past exists, but it’s not the reference point anymore. My decisions, fears, even time itself start orienting around other people. So when I pause and reflect back, I wonder if that version of myself even existed. And if it did exist, why did it matter so much for things I wouldn’t even care about right now?

It feels very distant, or just flat. The funny thing is, the past doesn’t explain my present at all. It used to feel like a straight, linear line. But after having a family, it feels different. The life I had feels like something that happened to someone who had the same name.

Now I think my current life doesn’t rely on memory anymore. It is mostly future-oriented, and I think that makes me less of a memory-based identity. I feel like my identity now is more duty-based, or performative—I don’t know. It feels more like, what is the right thing I should be doing, versus how I used to feel back in the day: who did I know, what did I value, who was I. All these things mattered.

Somewhere in this, I think it’s confusing and also sad sometimes. But I think it is how it is. The sadness comes from the feeling that all those things seem unjustified or unreal now, even though it was a real life—it was there. It’s not that it was pointless or that I didn’t learn anything. It’s just that that life feels inaccessible right now.

Maybe I just outgrew it, like how a butterfly comes out of a caterpillar and might not even remember that it existed in a different form. Life is very strange.

Person lost

 Is it common to feel that the life you existed in 20 years ago doesn’t exist anymore in any way? You don’t know the people from 20 years ago. You don’t know your school friends. You don’t know the movies. The movies have changed. The music has changed. Nothing is the same. There is no connection.

What happened 20 years ago? If human life is made of memories, every single memory exists only within you, but it cannot be shared with any other person. All you have are new memories with your partner, or with the people who are currently with you. All I can say is that they may carry wisdom from my past, but that person is lost, that time is lost, and the connections are lost.

Is this what reincarnation feels like? Maybe our older generations told us about reincarnation, and we understood it incorrectly. Maybe we slightly reincarnate every 10 or 20 years.