Since I've been at this blogging thing for ten years now, there are two things I'd like to do. This will probably be Part I.
First, given that in my last entry I linked to my first post, in which I, seventeen years old at the time, introduced myself, I should reintroduce myself a decade later.
My name is not Laurel, of course, and all three of my regular readers know it. (By the way, I believe I also started with three regular readers. Those were, of course, Zinni, 'Nanda, and Daf, none of whom read now.) There's no reason I couldn't use my real name, especially as I tend to use my friends' real names when I refer to them here. But somehow it just doesn't feel right. Call it an alter ego, I suppose - or, as I thought of it when younger, an imaginary twin.
I still look back on my high-school self with some admiration and fondness, even as I also giggle a bit over how sometimes I'm so good with language and sometimes I use the same slang word a gazillion times with no trace of irony. I still have some of the e-mails I wrote back then, especially to Zinni and 'Nanda - how I had such a memory for details of events and conversations then, I don't know, except to say that I was way better at getting enough sleep, and usually better about writing things up fewer than twenty-four hours after the fact. Also, of course, adolescence just feels so different - everything's in more intense focus.
As for the ensuing years, I think my biggest change has been with my relationship to God. I mean, I've been a Christian since sometime in the fourth grade, but that wasn't really challenged in any significant way until, say, college, when I found through trial and error that there really is no doing Christianity halfway. Among other things, I was dumb enough to date two boys who weren't really Christian (which, honestly, almost surprises me, because I knew, I knew better...but sometimes I am the kind of person who's too afraid to do the hard thing, tries to get around it, and makes things worse that way), and blessed enough that those boys were really honorable and that they and I continued to be friendly after the eventual breakups, which, essentially, were my fault because they proceeded directly from my eventually being unable to deny that the religious differences between us were too great. (Sometimes, even with boys whom I didn't go out with, they got greater: whereas some girls worry that they've turned boys gay, I have to worry that I contribute to turning boys atheist.)
I also, sophomore year, had to do more extensive reading up on apologetics and suchlike (and not for the last time, mark my words: it happened again, to a still greater degree, in grad school), and discovered to my delight that, while Christian doctrine may sometimes have to settle for a tie in an intellectual argument, it never loses (and really, most of the time I think it flat-out wins).
I also went through a long space of time in which a lot of things happened (not even psychological, really - emotional, though, certainly, and to some extent physically), and the biggest thing I learned was that God really will rescue His people, as many times as necessary.
But on another note, I've also found that, while I can make better rhetorical cases than before, I've become typically too cautious to risk backlash about them. Everything political and religious is so polarized right now that I'm so tired of debate, so tired of arguments, so reluctant to be (inevitably) misunderstood and judged accordingly, and so hyper-aware of how easy it is to sound like that Christian (both to Christians and to non-Christians), even when risking my sounding like that Christian would be the most genuine and loving thing for me to do. I'm actually more conflict-averse than it looks like (for all I can get lecturey, I tend to only do it with people with whom I feel safe, and with the expectation that the person will take it either silently or without open scorn). One thing it's done, to be honest, is that it's made this blog pretty watered-down. I should probably think hard about fixing that.
There's been another big change over the past decade, too: having to transition from being someone whose life is largely organized around school to being someone whose life is largely organized around a career...although clearly, to this point, to call my jobs a "career" overstates the matter. In plain truth, for all college's virtues, it did not help me (though some amount of that was certainly my own fault) to figure out what I wanted to do, or even what could be done by an overscrupulous bookworm who'd spent all her school years with fairly unrealistic ideas about what the non-student world was like. So I went into teaching college English because that sounded at least potentially pretty decent, and then found that it wasn't; despite being academically successful, I'm extremely bad at the simple practical task of making myself do the hard thing on my own time and self-imposed deadlines. In other words, the actual experience of having to teach classes of students scared me too badly, and I didn't have enough help in it (though, thank God, Drs. Kinney and Strong did everything they could for me); though I learned things (some of them academically, many more in other ways), I wasn't willing to do what it took to really be successful. Besides, the compensation and prospects are terrible, and I'd prefer not to live off my parents' money for the rest of my life.
I'm not a career-oriented person, the way my father is. Like my mom, interpersonal relationships are just more important to me. And I need a starting point that doesn't involve more schooling. So right now I'm working a job I don't love, though it's certainly interesting, and I'm looking, in this terrible economy, for an ethical job I can see myself working, and I'm trying to be realistic. The trouble is, it's hard to be realistic when your carrying a Master's in English overqualifies you for a lot of things and your lack of experience underqualifies you for a lot of other things. (Seriously, people: don't ever get a graduate degree unless you mean it. If you're not committed to that career field for life, please think twice, and then think a third time, because gone are the days, assuming they were ever here, when one degree too many might be a good thing.) So I guess I'm trying to mix realism with the sense of this-is-who-I-am-and-I'll-wait-for-someone-to-take-a-chance-on-me that one can feel more genuinely when, like me, you're afraid to feel constant dread again about your job (seriously, it's so much better for the world that I'm not a teacher anymore), and when one has the luxury of generous upper-middle-class parents.
And just because I haven't brought up Albert doesn't mean I haven't wanted to. It's just that some places are places to get sincere and gushy about someone, and then some places are the blog of which your boyfriend is one of only three readers. But yes, for the record, well over half of the past decade has also been shaped by him, as Lewis-style First Friend and then as half of our couple. The most telling thing I can offer is this: I'm working to put Rochester, Alfred, and Binghamton about six hours away from myself, and I'm doing it by choice.
Next time I'll close out the celebration. For now, echoing so many of the past thousand-plus entries here, I ought to go to bed.