Looking to the Past to Examine the Future

I’ve followed the bloggings of my college buddy Christian for a long time (alwaysandnever.wordpress.com). A little history: Christian and I met back in the winter of 2003, when I was a young, naïve 19-year old who happened to move in with a couple of buddies of his from high school. We shared the same major, shared the same interest in drinking til we puked and I immediately became one inside the ‘circle’ of about 10-12 close friends from UConn who are now spread from Los Angeles to Boston…Syracuse to Tampa and everywhere in between. Out of everyone, he is probably one of two or three who knew how truly destructive and bizarre I could get in college, but he is also one of the people who I’ve never had a bad time with.

In his last post, he examined how his 22-year old self would punch the current 26-year old version right in the mouth. How different of people they really became. It got me to thinking about myself: was I really that different? Have I changed all that much?

There are some areas where I’ve made huge leaps and strides in. Responsibility. Maturity. Never having to left paycheck-to-paycheckity. All these ‘itys’ add up to what I think has turned out to be a pretty solid guy. I still have a ton of shortcomings, to include my sometimes-short fuse (which, as all of my friends know, used to be a LOT worse), my world-class ability to procrastinate and my inability to enjoy the present, instead of worrying about the future all the time.

However, bouncing between Las Vegas, Los Angeles and now Kuwait for the last three years has taught me that it really isn’t all about me anymore! There’s more out there than what’s going on right in front of my face, and it is important of me to be aware of that fact. I think it is a heavy reason why I was never able to really trust in a relationship before: because I was always worried that I was the one doing something wrong, or I was the one who was screwing things up. Now, I find myself being able to trust and open up a lot more to my family and friends. What a great feeling.

The whole purpose of me deploying to Kuwait was to find myself and what I was capable of handling under extreme amounts of pressure and stress. That, and once 30-35 of my guys started signing up to take on this task, I couldn’t let them do it alone. It just isn’t in my nature anymore. They expect a lot out of me. It is up to me to give them someone to follow. Yeah, I go ballistic every so often and yeah they get on my every last nerve, fighting about the dumbest thing., but they know I’m here for them…and the fact that I can recognize that in myself is a damn good feeling.

On the personal side of my life, I couldn’t be more excited or happy in anticipation of my great return to the east coast. Between what I hope is a new and exciting relationship and being able to reconnect my family and friends that I have been away from for almost three years, things are going to be different solely because I intend on making them that way. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 2010 is MY year. And I’m going to make it my year with only eight months remaining.

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