Nostalgia.

I was doing maintenence on my blog recently and flipped back to my earliest posts back in the good ol' days of '08. Actually, they were pretty shit days. But never mind.

It shocked me how much I've grown up in these last few years of blogging - I started out as a little kid of twelve and now I'm fifteen and nearly going to university. Some things haven't changed; the anger, the ambition, the passion, the power-struggle - but some things have. I'm older, wiser, stronger - I feel more like me. I was stunted and suffocated back then, and I've only just begun to realize just how wide my wings can spread.

I was young and silly and exuberant and immature, but it's part of what I was and it's still part of who I am, which is why I can't bear to delete any of those old and ridiculously inane posts. Because I wanna look back and laugh at my terror of big red-eyed fish in the lake. I wanna look back and think of how many times Asian sensibility has very nearly killed me. I wanna look back and laugh at all the boys that used to make me cry. I want this blog to be a time capsule as much as it is a diary.

I'm proud of how far I've come, but I'm proud of how I was back then, too. I was a fighter. I had to break away from everything people take as a given - acceptance, friends, love - just to have a shot, one tiny chance, at aiming high. My early teens were a tough time, but I'm a better person because I put my hand in the fire. And even though I was depressed, bullied, dumped, rejected and bored to tears, I don't regret any of it. I'm where I wanted to be now, and I know where I want to be in the future. When one is young and as humble as I am, that's a good place to be. At the age of fifteen, I've experienced how rewarding sacrifice and resilience can be.

But I'm a little nostalgic about it all - sometimes I kinda wish I was my pre-teen gung-ho self. As I get older the things I break away from are harder, the risks are bigger and the stakes are higher. Little seeds of insecurity somehow manage to sneak through the cracks. I'm not the twelve year old martyr I used to be - it's amazing how just three years of age can really weary you. Sometimes when I'm tired and sad I remember how happy I was when I was five sitting in the little tree house at school and staring at the sky, wondering whether I could eat a cloud and what it would taste like. And one day I'll flip back to the good ol' days of 2011 and remember sitting here, with the dogs passed out on the sofa, pretending to do homework.

Life and death is but a dream, and all the men and women merely figments of one's imagination.