Dear self: we are who we are.

Pop, by Carlee 2013

My father inherited his paper collecting / memory hoarding from my grandmother, and I have, in turn, inherited it from him.  Memory hoarding is a McManus legacy.   One major component to memory hoarding is the keeping of papers.  Many kinds of papers.  School papers, news articles, cartoons, bills, and most importantly, letters.  Saving letters is something that a lot of people do, including my father and I.  If ever anyone wants to publish the notes passed back and forth in my high school years, I have them all.  It would likely make a boring and hard to understand book.

Anyway, the point is that when my father comes to stay with me he brings some of his boxes of papers, and occasionally sifts through them, like he did this morning.  What he found was a four page letter I typed to him in the spring of 2006, when I was 22 and still in college.  Attached to it was his hand written response, which neither of us is sure he ever sent to me.  He brought this finding up to me during lunch while we were eating cheeseburgers (if I was concerned about judgments on our health I would say this is a rare occurrence, but the truth is that the cheeseburger thing happens all the time).  He told me he re-read them and laughed and it made him feel happy.  He told me it was interesting the things that we talked about in that correspondence, and how we are still talking about many of those things today.  Before he went to go buy stamps he brought the letters to me and told me I should read them.

Because I'm mostly interested in how great slash terrible of a writer I was, I started with my letter.  I read about three sentences, started to cry, scanned the rest of the letter and cried some more.  Likely this fact surprises no one. I cry often.  We all get it: I have feelings.  But what made me cry on this occasion was the surprise I felt over what was said.  My father was right.  We have the same conversations today that we were having eight years ago.

Not only are we discussing the same things, but my revelations/feelings/struggles/social commentary is almost to-the-letter the same.  The EXACT same, you guys.

--I love Bruce Hornsby and that maybe isn't very cool, but I don't care who knows it.  Bruce Hornsby is great!
--Tried exercising a couple of times.  Maybe I finally like it now.  I think I will start being a person who exercises!
--I don't understand what kind of performer I am, what kind I'm supposed to be, or what kind I want to be.
--Discovering your parents are just regular people who don't have the answers to everything is hard.
--Adulthood is mysterious and weird and hard.
--Death is terrifying and grieving the loss of people you love is hard.
--I can never fall asleep.  Sleeping is hard.
--Trying to spend time by myself and enjoy it. I feel like I'm missing out on things, so it's hard.
--Change is hard, even when it's right.
--Fleetwood Mac and Ryan Adams blah blah blah.
--Dogs.

It's been almost a decade and I am STILL making declarations about how I love Bruce Hornsby.  Still.  Time to put that one to bed.

What was surprising was not only that the subject matter is still relevant, but that the "discoveries" I seem to have as the years go by are essentially the same discovery over and over again.  I am STILL trying to figure out how to enjoy exercising and every time I do it once or twice I'm like "maybe now is the time!".  I am STILL processing that parents are flawed humans just like everyone else and there is no such thing as "having all the answers".  I am still blown away, everyday, by something about growing up.  I am still battling with sleep and hoping for change.  I am still working through the labyrinth of death and loss and mortality and will likely be forever. And on and on and on.  You get it.  I am still obsessed with dogs, y'all.

I suppose I could feel disappointed that I have continued to learn about the same things in new ways over the last decade.  I could feel like my life is a boring mass of the same issues I just can't figure out and NOBODY LIKES RYAN ADAMS ANYMORE, CARLEE.  I could feel like a loser for not moving on yet.

But in fact, I feel a little impressed.  That after all this time I have been on a more focused journey than I realized.  That I have questions and obstacles and passions, and those things are parts of who I am, not just something I invented last week.  That I have changed so much but am still so much the same.  I am who I am but I am different.  That I guess there is a story I am telling with my life, and the memory hoarding proves it.  Also, ancillary bonus, I am a better writer--less enthusiastic but better.

In my father's response was the reflection of the man he is today.  The same passions, questions, obstacles, declarations of purpose, votes of confidence in his daughter.  The same use of exclamation points.  The same genuine expression of who he is that I have never witnessed anywhere else.  Two people being honest with each other and saving it for later, not because it will matter to anyone else but because it's who we are.

And maybe all of this is just to say I guess we are who we are.  We are just in ourselves, whether we realize it or not.  Odds are I came to this conclusion last month, last year, three years ago, and so on.  Which only proves the point that we are always who we are, doing what we do, learning what we need to learn, telling the story we are here to tell, eating cheeseburgers with our fathers.

**Update: when my dad came back from his journey to buy stamps he asked "did you get a chance to look at these?".  "Yes," I said, "It's crazy.  I'm writing about it right now." "Isn't that something?" he remarked, "Having the same conversations after all these years? It's like, we are who we are." "That's what my post is called!" "No WAY!!!" he exclaimed.  And then we both laughed, because, well, there it is.

Carlee, by Pop 2013