2009-07-16 - 8:48 p.m. I'm heading back to TN, and as always I come by conflicted feelings. I love TN in the sense that it will always be home. And I miss my family and my friends who are still in those parts. But there are other TN associations for me that aren't as pleasant and exciting, and those are the ones that make me say things like, "I'll always go back, but I'll never live there again."I'm exaggerating, but not by much, when I say that every bad thing that has ever happened to me happened in Tennessee. I don't think I'm exaggerating at all when I say that the worst things that ever happened to me happened in Tennessee. I got nervous, briefly, yesterday to the point that I called upon a friend for sage words of reassurance, etc. He said to remember how much stronger I am now, how much more sure of myself, how much older and wiser and how much less naive. He said, those things that hurt you back then couldn't touch you now because you're not vulnerable like you used to be. I said, yes, that was exactly what I needed, give me more of that. I know that the longer I stay away from Tennessee the happier I am and the better my life gets. But a correlated truth is that the older I get, the more independent I get, the more time I spend with my own personal sovereignty, the happier I am and the better my life gets. And it just happens to be true that almost as soon as I was old enough to choose to move away, I became old enough to start cutting out the bad things from my life. A lot of it is the coincidence of timing. Terrible things still happened in Murfreesboro, after I was 18 and on my own, but I hadn't yet gotten a hold on being able to make my own decisions, on making bad people leave me the fuck alone. By the time I hit Chicago (age 24... I mean, 27) I was well on my way to figuring those things out. And here in Honolulu, well hell, I'm choosing my own destiny now, aren't I? I guess I would be fine even if I did ever move back to Tennessee. And I know this and I believe this, and I'm thankful to my friend for pointing it out so that I can think about this. But the Pavlovian response remains. TN=bad things happening to me. How much power does one have over such long-held associations? Can I change that too? I'll be thinking on this while I travel through my past during the next three weeks. But you know, either way I'm good.
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