How long have you known me? A week? A year? All your life?

I feel like the timeline of my life has taken the form of a book – the kind that is broken up in to Parts which are themselves divided into chapters, each of which describes a specific period of personal development or lack thereof. From inside the perspective-bubble in which I reside, it seems inevitable that the people with whom I’m most closely associated with during any of these chapters would have a noticably different perception of me and my life that those found in other chapters.

Accordingly, I have to imagine that those people whose association with me span the entirety of a Parts would not even recognize the “me” from any of the other Parts. And there would be a reason for that – any person committed to personal growth and development is destined to reach various milestones where the modification of their identity is so complete that there is effectively nothing left of the person they were.

If this sounds odd or hyperbolic, think of it as an analog to the regeneration of cells within the human body. With one or two minor exceptions, none of the cells if your body existed 15 years ago. If you look at a picture of yourself 20 years ago, literally none of what you see still exists.¹ It has all been replaced by exact replicas² that look very much like you… but that’s all they are. Replicas. The you that existed then isn’t around anymore; it has been fully replaced by new building blocks. But the new you is the only you that exists now. The old one is gone.

I’ve actually seen this play out in the way friends from one part of my life interact with frinds from other parts. They are frequently perplexed by the way I interact with friends from parts they aren’t familiar with, and usually amused by the perception those other friends have of me, or the perception I have of myself. For example, those friends I cultivated during my time as a waiter/bartender/rock-and-roller have a difficult time relating to the person I’ve become. Indeed, I’ve had to break contact with a number of them because the mannerisms that were normalized for me back when I was close to them are no longer congruous with my character, and some of them have had a tough time accepting this new version of myself. (e.g. One friend from 1995 had a difficult time wrapping his mind around the idea that playfully telling me to “fuck off” was no longer acceptable. Several attempts were made to explain this to him before I had to break contact.)

Friends I made from the part of my life spanning the 90’s have gotten in virtual shouting matches with friends I made in the 2010’s, because they could not agree on how friends treat friends.

The “chapter breaks” and new parts do, however, all seem to spring from a common catalyst – pain. Painful events in my life almost always lead into a new chapter, a version of myself that has changed slightly from the previous version, irreversably and generally for the better. Pain seems to be the spark that lights the fuze that kills off the weaker “cells” of my character, replacing them with more durable replicas that look a hell of a lot like the old ones… but are simply not the same. They’re stronger. They’re more resilient. They display scars of the past, and subsequent growth. They are the trophies of life, the reward for making it through this chapter and moving on to the next one.

I recently found myself experiencing pain that I haven’t experienced in many years. I still feel it now, and I’m pulling myself out of it slowly. But my response to the crisis of this chapter is noticably different my response to the same sort of crises found in previous chapters; I find myself able to simply examine my experiences as appearences in my story rather than being helplessly swept away by them. The pain still hurts, but the nature of “hurting” is not the same. Years ago, to be hurt was to be crippled. Now, it is only one among a vast spectrum of feelings and events that compose my identity. Years ago I would have been certain that the pain of the moment was a chronic condition that I would have to either live with or check out early. Now, I recognize it as merely one wound in a life that experiences peaks and valleys, victories and defeats, love and fear.

I write this now because one of the by-products of pain is change, and the change I’m experiencing is the jarring sense that I’ve become complacent in my relationships, particularly where staying in touch with people in my life is concerned. I’ve isolated myself; I remained distant from everyone that matters to me and cut myself off entirely to everyone else. The need to re-emerge from this self-imposed exile has become inescapable, like that invasive feeling of a cold steel needle in your arm, delivering a vaccine that will innoculate you against maladies you won’t even be aware you’ve narrowly avoided contracting.

I once told a friend about how getting punched square in the face for the first time was supremely liberating. I was in USMC MCMAP training (martial arts) and was sparring against a very large Marine. The guy outweighed me by at least 50-70 pounds. He delivered a straight right to my face, applying a generous portion of pressure to my jaw in a single moment, the foot-pounds of force being sufficient to prevent it from seating correctly for the next several days. I had tried most of my life to avoid such a collision between my jaw and someone else’s fist, but once I experienced it, and realized that I was still on my feet, I felt a surge of confidence I had never experienced before and would not have anticipated. Not only did the fear of getting punched suddenly vanish, but I was in some ways hoping he would get me again. I became genuinely curious how many of those I could take now that I knew the answer was greater than “one”. I never found out though… he eventually conceded the fight when I came to life after the face-shot.

So a rather interesting thing happens when you are forced to absorb a blow you’ve spent so much time avoiding – you learn that you are stronger than you thought. You learn that pain is survivable, managable, and even growth-enabling. You stop fearing that particular version of it. You become empowered. You grow. Your confidence increases. And you begin the next chapter.

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¹_{The exceptions are your teeth, the inner lenses of your eyes, and parts of your brain stem.}
²_{I’m using the word “exact” loosely. DNA replication is a physical and therefore fallible and inherently inexact process.}