color and My Old Self

I'm visiting my friend at his house and experiencing periods of feeling Like My Old Self. By My Old Self I mean the person I was in my sophomore year of college, which ended more than a year ago. I was learning to do all these things, like travel by myself, and I guess my mind was full of color. It's sort of rare for me to experience that sense of excitement and competence and shivery sensitivity to sound and religion and ideas. I remember that I loved everything I was studying in school, and I kept writing songs about the books I was reading and the things I was learning. I remember crying over things I learned in class.

I was also sort of enraged all the time because I thought that things were screwed up for same-sex-attracted and trans people but I felt like the community was focused on completely stupid things that didn't relate to what most people actually needed. And that kind of feeling, along with any general sense of lack of purpose, is pretty much gone because I now heavily identify as disabled and I guess I feel much more hopeful and proud and excited about what disabled people do. And to the extent that I have social justice energy it is about disability which is an area where I think I can actually do things people appreciate.

But this has also made me feel really different because there's no acknowledgement of disability rights at my school. So I think the past year's lack of color was probably first the result of my failure at studying abroad, which caused me to have impairments and emotional problems I hadn't had since high school or earlier, and then the result of coming back to school and starting to hang out with my friends again while completely boiling over with disability and feeling like it wasn't something I could express. My blog started to feel like it was being written by another person, or vice versa, and I think that's why I was having so many disassociative experiences (which often took the form of feeling like the previous year wasn't real).

So why I feel Like My Old Self right now, I don't know. Maybe because going on a trip to visit a friend is something I associate with MOS who was very social and could do a lot of things, but my friend is also someone I wouldn't know if I didn't have the identity and interests that I've developed since MOS went away. I would like to think that color and purpose could come back together for me but time will tell.