Monday, September 12, 2011

An old "first" gets BOLD.

I have never done anything like this before...well, actually that's a lie. Let me rephrase: I have never done anything like this before, publicly. Truth is, I have been "blogging" since about the first time my tiny fist wrapped around a pen and my thoughts commenced in their first attempts to wrap around what I've come to call, LIFE.
Introverted by nature and by circumstance (my brother being 4 years my senior, the friend you never knew you had, and extroverted to the utmost), I have learned to mask this sometimes inconvenient truth about myself as life has gone on. All those nights growing up that I crept out of my bed and through the kitchen to talk with my mother about some issue or feeling that I was questioning, wondering, or even just looking to discuss with, I would find myself standing there alone, hidden in the darkness of the kitchen, with the faint light of the adjoining living room tempting my feet to tread further...However, rarely, I gave into that temptation. I would hear the typical loving motherly advice from mother to troubled angsty teenage son (my brother) and would stop short, sigh, and then sink back into the darkness back to my bed. I would then spend the hour or hours following lying in bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that I had placed on the ceiling, and ponder these emotions, feelings, thoughts until I slowly slipped into slumber. Little did I know that these twilight ponderings would soon shape my mind, and create the very foundation of my innermost being.
You could say that this was the beginnings of my understanding and application of the ancient Greek aphorism, "Know thyself."  This phrase, as it were, has many different meanings. From the information that I have gathered form my mini-research, my understanding is that the phrase "Know thyself," can be found in the Suda with adequate explanation.  The Suda (or Souda) is a massive 10th Century Byzantine "encyclopedia" of the ancient Mediteranean world with over 30,000 entries, many of which draw from ancient sources that have since been lost. The suda says that to "Know thyself," is a "proverb that is applied to those whose boasts exceeds what they are" and that " 'know thyself' is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitude (Cited from Wikipedia, don't judge me, you know you use Wikipedia whenever you research something)."
Without even knownig the history behind this phrase, it seemed as though I was already taking the steps to whence I should become the direct embodiment of the idea behind it. And so began my tumultuous journey from Ryan's little sister, to finally having him leave to go off to college when I was a freshman in highschool, to realizng that I have the means to take on my own personality, to withstanding highschool drama and the relationships (and heartaches) that would come along with that, to graduating highschool, to figuring out who it was that I wanted to be and what it was that I wanted to be about, to the shocking truth that life doesn't get easier with age and experience and that it still hurts when you get cut...and finally to the work in progress (forever in progress) that sits before this laptop, transferring these thoughts bottled up in this head, and allowing those thoughts to spill out before you, whoever you may be that is unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon these seemingly meaningless scruples.

Until next time....

-A Walking Contradiction