A peculiar characteristic of a lot of my dreams is that I am often out of my body, looking at myself from afar. It's an out of body experience that I can't explain. Now that I put it in words, it almost seems to be, that my dreams have an imposter in my flesh, who's trying to steal my life. But it wasn't so. I felt and thought everything that was happening, I could just see it from the outside.
A lot of us imagine what we look like from the outside....I do too. But how we're seen by society isn't the topic of this article today...it's about how you see your own life.
I grew up seeing and imitating a lot of thing I saw in shows and movies. I tried to fit into characters I liked and thought were cool. (Are we all imposters? Or is this just the imposter syndrome?)
And one of these imitations as a kid, happened to be journaling. It started out on an incident of rejection but turned out to be something that helped me gain a great awareness of myself. It has been 9 years since I first started.
It’s great to have a way to rediscover who you used to be in the past. I often come back to my old diaries whenever I go through identity crises, which, due to life-changing decisions and my questioning, happens often. It’s a way to peep into your past mind…it’s all the information about you that you can’t memorialize into photographs. Though I’ve heard of another method of using photos in diaries. (I also want try video diaries in the future.)
When you begin writing all about your day, you begin to learn how to capture every nuance of your living experience and convert it into words. It isn’t that other people can’t feel as much as you do or live boring lives. It’s only that they don’t romanticize their lives the way I do.
They don’t understand how romantically exhilarating it is, to read one’s old diary entries and feel the fondness of self-love swell in your heart. A certain pride from looking back and ruminating over life and thinking, “Her, I knew her, I was her, I am her.”
Maybe this is how my strange dream viewing from afar began to conceptualize in my mind. I relive moments of my life by reading diaries and dreaming about them. (I also dream of the future and fictional stuff like any other person.)
Sometimes I wonder if I could live like that, peering at myself from the outside….in romance of how much I’m in love with the person I’m becoming. Then I realize I’m already doing that, in a way, when I look at the life of the one I love. I capture every moment and keep it in my heart fondly.
I see and I like what I see.
