Starting Over, Repeatedly

Looking through an old Facebook account, I expected outdated opinions, awkward jokes, and evidence that I had once known considerably less than I do now. What surprised me was the familiarity of certain concerns. Posts from twelve to fourteen years ago kept approaching questions I still ask, even though the language, circumstances and ways of understanding myself had changed.

Growing up had often felt like starting over. A different way of operating would become available, and the previous one would cease to organise my life. At the time, I did not necessarily experience this as a loss. There was something efficient about it: if an approach no longer worked, I stopped referring to it. I could move forward without having to resolve everything it left behind. The cost was that earlier periods became harder to connect to the person I currently understood myself to be.

Each phase could feel coherent from within while remaining weakly connected to the others. Looking back, fragmentation is a useful word for that experience of discontinuity: the repeated feeling of replacement, and a tendency to leave the past aside instead of working out how it belonged to the present.

Learning happened in phases too. I could become immersed in a domain or a way of thinking without immediately reconciling it with the framework I had used before. That gave the new material room to make sense on its own terms. It also deferred a task. Understanding several accounts separately does not settle what happens when their claims conflict, and the comparison eventually requires returning to assumptions that may no longer feel like mine.

I suspect there is a connection between that history and my willingness to hold competing views without resolving them immediately. Entering a framework for a time made it possible to understand why it was convincing, then compare it with another once I was less invested in defending it. I cannot separate the contribution of discontinuity from the contribution of sustained learning itself. I can recognise that both belong to my history, without making the gaps necessary to what I learned or treating tolerance of contradiction as proof that I had reconciled anything.

The humour in the old account reads differently against that history. ‘I used to have superpowers, until my therapist took them away.’ ‘I’m very polite by nature, even the voices in my head let each other finish their sentences.’ I read these as attempts to register experiences I did not yet have much language for. Irony allowed something to be said without requiring a full account of it. The joke remains a joke, but it also records what I was trying to put into words.

Other posts were more direct. Some attributed hallucinations to medication. Others asked about waking somewhere unfamiliar or not feeling fully continuous with who I had been before. These are things the posts reported, including the explanations I offered at the time. Reading them now gives me a record of those concerns; it does not let me reconstruct every event or confirm what caused it. I want to keep that difference visible because a present explanation can become very persuasive when it seems to organise an unclear past.

Across the changes in tone, I can recognise a concern with identity and continuity: what allows a person to remain recognisable to themselves across time? One post consists of a single word: ‘Why?’ There is no object, no developed argument, and no way to recover the whole question from that word. Still, I recognise the impulse to examine experience before having a satisfactory account of it.

The recurring questions give me a connection I had not fully appreciated. Periods I experienced as separate beginnings sometimes contained the same concerns. My sense of starting again had given more attention to what changed than to what continued, and the posts make some of that continuity easier to recognise.

The work now is to remain connected while changing. I am trying to understand earlier ways of operating well enough that a new capacity does not require putting the previous period out of reach. Those earlier versions of me can become more intelligible, including the limits of what they understood and the questions they were already asking. Integration, as I am using the word here, involves carrying more of that history into the present without making every difference another reason to start over.

I can hold more of that history together now. There are still things I do not understand, and an old post cannot answer for the whole person who wrote it. But I can read those questions with more recognition than distance. They belong to the same life as the questions I ask today, even when I would answer them differently, and I am getting better at leaving that connection intact.