much overdue, and rather long, but you asked for it.

I wish you didn’t delete your post. Because a snippet of it appeared on my dash, and I wish you didn’t feel the need to edit. But if you removed it for other reasons, that’s okay. But you can talk to us, you know, if you ever feel down.

I went back to A+ today. And I was surprised by how everything has changed. And by how much I hadn’t expected it to. It’s cut off from the bustle of the city, of rigorous change, which gives the illusion of seclusion. But it has changed in increments underneath the fresh paint.  It’s been two years and a half since I graduated, a year since my last visit. And one of the younger boys, I suppose he must be 8 or 9 by now, came up to me and asked, “Why have you been gone for so long? Have you been sick?”

The walls are vermillion. Sand wood partitions divide what was once the play room when I first joined, into three separate classes.  Student posters on atoms and the digestive system decorate the whiteboard. The kids are taller. Some familiar faces are gone. But beside all this visible, physical changes to my previous home school, there are other less visible changes too. By next year, all the students of the original class I was from will have graduated. A new batch is already prepping for their O levels. And I have missed so much.

And I suppose I have changed.  I was going through the Bible Knowledge Lifepac with two of the girls, and it all felt rather absurd. When did I suddenly become so critical? I could see where premises made leaps in assumptions, I could pick out the fallacies, and yet I had to make the text understandable when I felt like laughing at it? I felt like saying, “just because a book says something, it doesn’t make it true.”  Because I was worried it would confuse them all the more if I contradicted their book. While I am not someone who favours the evolution theory, I felt like the book was making evolutionist sound like simpletons who believed the world was still flat contrary to the evidence. It kept going on and on about how the evolutionary theory was false because God made us. According to the book, all evolutionists believe that the atmosphere has been the same as it was in the beginning of time, that life started from an unknown organism, that life started from the ocean, and that life evolved from simple organisms into complex organism. And while those are the most common premises of evolution, how exactly is it false? There’s no proof that is true or false. Saying that the theory is false because God made us is a very narrow minded, circular argument. I have always known that the books were rather biased, but I think I didn’t recognize how much or otherwise I would have spent my years there rolling my eyes.

Working on my personality paper has me thinking again about each event in my life has changed me. The crises [such a dramatic word] I have gone through indirectly, I suppose. And I wonder how it would be different if my mother hadn’t suffered a stoke; what would it be like not to be familiar with the routines of a hospital; what it would like not to be conscious of the frailty and the strength of the human body and will. How many have tended and bathe their grandmother and mother, or worked out a crutch system with their brother? How many keep track, purely out of habit, for disable signs? I wonder if it’s normal to be on your toes for little changes in patterns of behaviour? What would I be like if I had a totally different set of friends than the ones I grew up with? Because these friends were great influences in my life. What would I be like if I hadn’t switch schools systems? I’m not bitter, I’m not grumbling. Merely wondering rather curiously if I would have been a different person and how I would have been different. How would my family dynamics be different? How would each of us and our relationships with each other be different? I have to wonder how different a person I would be if I grew up in an averagely healthy family, continued government school, or lived closer to the city? I certainly don’t wish things were different. I am who I am, and am quite alright with who I am. I am the sum of the events in my life and my every interpretation of it; but I must wonder if a variation might produce a different outcome, a different personality.

It is interesting to look at my life thus far from an objective, outsider’s point of view. To separate myself into categories and compare it against the framework of my experiences. I can rather confidently say that if it weren’t for my mother’s stroke, I wouldn’t have developed such a strong drive for independence. That if it weren’t for my grandmother’s and Auntie V’s, I wouldn’t have developed such a strong drive against dependence. Erikson would say those events had hit me round the stages of industry vs. inferiority, and identity vs. role confusion. And I can rather objectively admit that I am Catholic because that was what I was raised in. I suppose that if I had been raised in a family of a different denomination, then my inclinations would lean towards that, because some might disagree, but to me the underlining principle of Christianity regardless of denomination is the same. More so, if my father and mother had forced me into any faith, I would have rebelled. But I also know that if either were so, I would be a different person today. In a weird way, I have a deep appreciation for tradition, rituals, and symbolism that I can’t explain. A need for deeper, solemn meanings behind things. A knowledge of order and system, even with all the abstraction floating around. All this I learnt to appreciate chiefly from my catholic upbringing; yet it has become so core to how I form my perception of the world now.  I have never been able to accurately explain my fascination with cultures and their belief systems. But I do know that if I had been raised in a different belief, I would believe those core principles because those would be the founding principles that my perception of the world would be based on. In the same what that my catholicism and the obstacles I have had to push through to confirm my faith has influenced my perception of the world today. In a sense, I would be a different me because of what I have been exposed to.

It’s really rather bizarre to stand outside your own life and look into it.