Hi, I'm Sam,
I think it’s safe to say now that I’ve spent my late twenties having realizations and somehow finding summaries to my lifestyle growing up. To some degree I can describe in one or few words the kind of son, brother, cousin or friend I’ve been from a toddler till this point in my life. I’ve had the honor of having different people occupying different positions in my life tell me about me from their point of view of from the view of someone else close to me that they’ve paid rapt attention to. Sometimes I find it easy to agree to the description of me and sometimes I’m intrigued in both good and bad ways and sometimes I fight and argue their summarization. But one thing that has never changed and even though I never realized this then was that all of them were very correct to a certain degree and more than fifty percent correct, I was just blind to the parts I didn’t see and agree with and the parts I agreed to didn’t really make up a very large percentage of me like I thought.
There’s an accepted template to live that irrespective of how free and wild anyone wants to live, at some point you’re expected to live by that template. The expectation doesn’t only come from others but also from oneself no matter how high the walls you put up and want to live as you please. No matter what you do in your twenties, stability is expected. If the stability was not there in your younger year, it will be expected when you get older. It was very easy for outsiders to point out that I lacked stability than it was for me. I didn’t even accept that I was unstable untold few months ago. For very long I’ve seen my instability as a flex. A flex that I didn’t have any shame at all flexing. You just need to know me for an hour to figure out that I was very unstable. Thinking about it now, I think what probably confused or scared people more was how excited I was when I gave instances of my instability but for some reason couldn’t see it myself. Because we’re technically still stranger and they’ve only know me for a whole hour, they’d think it rude calling me out on that or maybe they just thought I was saying anything to sound interesting and really the things I was saying were true life stories but I told them to sound interesting and adventurous and free willing.
I derived some kind of joy in the past telling people that I went to multiple schools. I think I thought it made me sound exposed of some sort. I cannot recall so many of my school mates, not because I have short term memory but because there was always something stemmed from instability that was taking up space and because I didn’t really spend so much time with them, there wasn’t enough mark to keep any space for them in my mind. Whenever I see someone of my age who looks familiar, I query myself to figure out what school I know them from. Most time I fail to figure out which one and I don’t bother enough to ask question to know which one because I felt like asking will make the other person feel as though they were not important enough for me to have any kind of memory of them just that they had a familiar face.
Instability contributed to my loss of memory for life and events. I found it really difficult to keep track of life events and patterns. My memory of certain things that happened in my life was always scattered and I just can seem to remember them a step after the other. Most times it takes someone who was aware of what had happened to help make everything clear and after that I remember those things based on what someone said it was and not because I lived despite the fact that I actually lived it. At some point I blamed my instability on being bored easily and the inquisitive nature of trying out things not because I found them interesting but because it was different from what I was doing in that period of my life. Sticking through things whether it got hard or not was not something I ever did. A lot of people do different things but at their core there is always something constant about all those other things they do but in my case the constant has always been instability.
Now that I’ve moved from instability to stability, life looks more colorful and feels peaceful. I can do certain things knowing that I have something tangible at my core and learning to think and live inside a box but feels like living and thinking outside the box feels new and interesting. When the urge to move along and find something else that I will also dump and move on from at some point, I find the strength to query the feeling to figure out what is being such feelings to the surface and I’m able to deal with it without causing chaos in my current situation. When the authentic feeling comes for a switch, I hope I’m able to identify it for what it is and take the right steps while staying genuine with myself in every aspect of my stable life now.
