Feeling strong

Okay, I'm here learning, right? And I'm getting into the, like, academic groove, and I'm like figuring stuff out that I didn't even figure out when I was at school the first time (maybe because it wasn't there, then, to be figured out) and I'm sitting here, growing each day stronger and stronger, remembering the old academic muscle and bringing my hence-learned talents for time management and organization to bear on my erstwhile verbosity, and I'm thinking: "I'm feeling more confident than I did a month ago, and certainly more confident than I did six months ago."

So this begs the question: what is doing this? What on earth is making it so? And how is this newly-amplified confidence playing out in my personal empirical reality?

Question A: what is doing this? Is it my age? Perhaps because the juniors are no longer looking at me like I have two heads I'm feeling more like I fit in - in a Frankenstein-meets-Godzilla kind of way. Is the "maturity" I have had to demonstrate in tutorials (relative again to the juniors) - along with my patent inability to sit in pregnant silence with eyes averted as if to say "don't call on me!" causing me to assume a more responsible first-person? Is my absolutely ability, if not unequivocal determination to lay myself out as a total idiot in any given circumstance finally paying off in links to the collective subconscious of the surrounding junior literati? Are all these things and more finally forcing me to think of myself as an adult? Possibly.

Question 2: What on earth is making it so? Perhaps my Maker has decided at last that I - at 46 freaking years old - ought finally to think of myself as more than a child. Is He (although we all know that God is a woman) nodding with approval at my perspicacity and determination, and finally saying that I deserve a break? Perhaps there's a little payback in my being here - a do-over, a chance if not exactly to be a kid again, at least to feel younger because of them, and to at least feel equal by virtue of the greater store of life experience I already have. Perhaps the cosmos (also a woman) is bored with the direction it was going and now wants to do something else altogether, making the path I was on superfluous and therefore leaving me free to explore new avenues and potentials. I don't know.

Question R: How is this newly-amplified confidence playing out in my personal empirical reality? (Newly-amplified because I've always had it - I just never bothered pushing it before). Perhaps my life's experiences have finally combined, or are finally combining to add up to a present worth waking up for? Perhaps the hope of a second half worth enjoying is over-ruling the distresses that seemed always to come from a first half unequivocally wasted. Perhaps this not mis-placed confidence is what's letting me find the discipline to do what I have to do, and the courage to engage where even just a year ago I would have stayed aloof, or run like hell. Not sure.

What I do know is that I'm a month into this ride and I'm already more free to think positively about life, the universe and everything than I think I have ever been. I'm only just starting, but I'm already figuring things out about myself that I either didn't know before, or that I knew but didn't believe, or that I knew but suppressed because they didn't quite fit with my assigned self-image. In being able to put past pains behind me I've been able to focus on the now and aim for the future. It's almost cliche, but it's true.

I knew it would happen, and that's why I was in such a hurry to get started back in August, quite possibly the longest month of my life. I knew that I wanted to look only forward - whatever purifications were required to make it happen.

There's a lot of satisfaction in being determined.

J