Leaving, Again

My bags are on their way to being packed, and my dad and I are hitting the road in about an hour. This is the last time I'll bid farewell to Pennsylvania before I come back to the States for good.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it's been quite difficult for me to go through the mental process of saying goodbye today. The last two times, while they included their share of difficulties, were different, I think partly because my sentimentality at leaving was tempered with the excitement of going. I'll attribute the challenges of doing so this time around to the emotional content of this trip. My brother's wedding on Saturday was beautiful, and it made me happier than I ever would have anticipated to watch him take this leap with his wife, Jenna, and to welcome her into the family.

I suppose what it did was to throw into relief everything that my life has been over the last 6 years. And, to be quite honest, I wasn't expecting that. I hadn't anticipated just how much this would affect me. But: Here I am--a somewhat new man thanks to a dose of new perspective--and things look, from this vantage point, both a bit clearer and a bit more muddled.

Over the last 36 hours or so, I've had to take in a large part of the contents of my life and reassess where I really am. The most immediately direct and powerful result of that process has been my assessment of the relationships I've built over the last 10 years of my life, and how I've prioritized and valued them.

I certainly haven't done so in any kind of egalitarian fashion - nor could I--or should I--have. A part of being human, something I've learned as I've grown up, is that some relationships are, necessarily, more fulfilling, and some more fun, and some more important, and some more difficult, and some more instructional, and some more complex, and some more organic, and some more trying, and some more stable than others. And as we develop them and grow through them, the only healthy thing we can do is to prioritize those that are better for us over those that are less so based on what we feel and what we know at the time. We can do no better than that.

So I've been doing that, and as I've gotten better and better at it, the overall quality of the  relationships that I've cultivated and maintained has--surprise!--risen, and dramatically so.

But what this weekend--and, really, this entire week back at home--has done has been to make me reexamine some of those relationships and to really think about their places in my life. And what I've realized is that I haven't given some of them the energy and time they deserve.

I had an OK life in Pennsylvania before I went off to university. Every adolescent's existence is fraught with self-esteem issues and heartbreak, melodrama, frustration, and tough, painful lessons, and I certainly experienced more than my fair share of those. Overall, though, it could have been a lot worse, and what it did, at the end of the day, was force me to grow. But the time I had after I moved to LA and started my new life was so overwhelmingly positive and happiness-inducing (Though it was, by no means, idyllic or perfect - there was just as much drama in my life during those four years as during my previous four) that I unconsciously tore down and devalued various aspects of my life back in Pennsylvania. In short, my time in LA was so much fun that my former life seemed negative and incomplete by comparison.

And while I can now, with the benefit of hindsight and psychological insight, understand why I mentally denigrated the memories of the first 18 years of my life, I can also now see that it wasn't the healthiest or most judicious thing to do. I had a few relationships back on the East Coast that I, instead of tearing down, should have been building up.

Many of them were with members of my own family. To be sure, some of those relationships were actually served by the introduction of space into them, and have since regrown, stronger and better-adjusted. But at some point during my college years, I think I realized, luckily, that I really missed not having them close by, and this imbued me with something for them--appreciation--that I don't think I had had enough of prior to that. And so the time I spent away from them actually strengthened our relationships in the end.

This happened with my brother. He and I, separated in age by 8 ½ years, were never particularly close, and the fact that we were two totally dissimilar people didn't do anything to mitigate that. But the last 6 years, having thrown my growth process into hyperdrive, have closed the gap between us, and we've also grown more similar to each other as people. Having begun to develop a relationship with him in the past couple of years has been more fulfilling than I had ever thought possible.

I think that's part of the reason why I've been so affected by his getting married. I'm incredibly happy to see him begin his life with Jenna, who is pretty damned excellent herself, and I'm excited, as their family, to share in their household.

I have a lot to think about, coming back to the East Coast in the Fall; in particular, about what I'm going to take with me from LA and what I'll have to leave behind. And in my emotional state this weekend, I remembered something important that I had forgotten: That I have some truly precious things, things from my former life that have endured through all the changes and situations and lessons of the past few years, that I'll be coming back to. And, despite the emotional maelstrom of the last month, that makes me, at my core, happy.

And they lived happily ever after.