Remnant of my Former Self
Time is a funny thing… take a walk on the nerdy side with me for a second. My husband and I love time travel shows and the two we are watching right now have the concept of making remnants (a trace, fragment or a scrap) of one’s self. Basically duplicating yourself to throw away later. One show discards the “extra self” and the other at least acknowledges their remnant by thanking them for their sacrifice. What is this need to go back and change things? Why is “the grass is always greener” something we believe is true? Is there a remnant of myself where I would choose that life and discard my own?
As I thought about this I did think of a point in time that I would be interested in going back to and change the outcome. If you read my last post (which you can click on right next to this paragraph) you may think it would be going back to right before I got my parasites and was sick for a year and a half, but that is not the event that came to mind.
The Reason why
I went to public school until my junior year and then switched to a private school. I played softball for Reagan High School freshman year JV and moved up to Varsity at the end of that season. I love softball and truly wanted to make a career out of it or at least play in college. The summer before my sophomore year I dated this guy and a friend of mine, lets call her Lynn, from the softball team started dating his friend. So we hung out more during that first part of the year. That boyfriend ended up breaking up with me and the other couple seemed to be on again off again. The guy from the other couple ended up calling me multiple times and I thought I was being a friend to him and helping him work through things. Little did I know he was going to the girl he used to date (my friend) and telling her we were “hooking up” and got her to believe that by showing her all the times we talked on the phone. She ended up believing him and turned almost the entire softball team against me. She never confronted me, just started being mean and once I found out why she was upset, I never confronted her. We both took the route of talking behind each other’s back and saying really mean things about each other. It ended up that the whole team ended up believing her side of things and I was alone, I cried every night and my parents decided that the next year I would go to SACS, a Christian private school. I loved SACS and I ended up being able to coach middle school softball there for 9 years after I graduated.
Although this sounds like a happy end to this story, and I am grateful for it, I also learned from this experience to shut off my emotions very quickly when someone hurts me, I can become very cold. Also, I tend to be abrupt with people when I know they are upset with me so that they will tell me why they are mad instead of going behind my back and vise versa. So, lets be like the flash and run back in time to 2005 when I found out the rumors being spread about me.
Artwork by RSIV
I walk into the locker room and see my old self being told by someone that they know why Lynn is mad at me. It has worked; I am a remnant of my past self! I decide to wait until my old self goes to class, I go right up to Lynn and tell her I heard why she is upset and I explain that I never hooked up with her ex and that he was calling me for advice, that I truly thought I was helping and I hope she believes me and we can move on from this event. After that I left a note behind from Lynn saying she was sorry and that we should just move on and ran back to the present to see how I was now that that time in history should be different.
Flashpoint
Back in 2017, I went straight to my parent’s house, feeling, as if their timeline wouldn’t have changed much from what I did. I walk in and say hello and they are surprised but excited to see me and asked what brought me to town. In my old timeline my husband, son and I lived in the same town as my parents so this was odd. Apparently I now live in Abilene because I went to college there and ended up getting a job and staying there… I thought for sure I would have met my husband still since we went to the same high school and were only one year apart and figured since I got Lynn and myself to make up I would have stayed at Reagan. I wasn’t married and I did not have my son anymore, I did however play softball in college and never ended up getting sick with parasites. I went on to being a P.E. teacher but wasn’t coaching any specific sport and I was a long way from my family. Another thing that really upset me was my sister, Lauren, and I were not close. At Reagan, she became my protector when she was a senior and I was a sophomore, and we ended up getting really close because of that, but that never happened. I was a shell of my self, I disregarded that the event I was changing to make myself a better person would make my other selves story not important, not of any value. I didn’t see that just because I have these certain flaws from my past experiences that going back in time isn’t what was needed to change them, I threw away the life I had like it was trash. Like somehow going back and changing this was the easy way instead of trying to work on myself. I needed to step up and work on making my life experiences matter. Thinking this nerdy way made me realize that we all do make remnants of ourselves, we do change and adapt, but not because we can go back and change what was but because we look to the future and look to see how we can make ourselves better.
Time is a funny thing, one event altered can change so much, so looking at myself today, I can see I need to work on allowing myself to feel emotions and not be so closed off, not disregarding my past remnants but using them to better my future self.
