Maturity

Do you know what I love about re-organizing my belongings? I have an excuse to look through my old yearbook, my old photo albums, my old shoe box filled with letters, with notes, with pictures, with memories of the last few years. I realized how much I have grown. Not only physically, but have matured and aged in every aspect. I am no longer that naive little boy. The boy who did not value the importance of friendship. The boy who used to whisper sweet nothings, sweet talking, and sweet… everything to make a girl fall for him. The boy who took relationships for granted. The boy who always complained he never gets what he wanted so he bitches about it, bitches to people who never gave it. The “it”, was everything he wanted. The boy who used to be superficial and clueless and impractical. Naive. The boy who never understood his parents wanting only the best for him. Who never failed to hurt them, every single day he walked in and out of their front door. The selfish one, the rebellious, hard headed, and impatient. The boy who had excuses for almost everything, the one who could never admit his mistakes, his faults, his imperfections and weaknesses. The boy that thinks very highly of himself and thinks he knows everything. Yes, I used to be that boy.

But that was then. Now, I am a man, a young but I can honestly and confidently say I am a maturing young man. But without my past, I really would not be the person that I am today. I honestly believe that the past identifies who I am, whether it was the good or the bad. It is the sole definition of me. Everything I have been through, implanted and rooted, the only thing that is set on stone, my past. We can never escape it or run from it, or hell, hide it. We can only add better and bigger and brighter things to it. My past is where I learned the most from. It is the place I look back at my mistakes so I do my best not make the same ones over and over again. I will not let my past dictate my future, but I will not forget what I have become because of it. It is my past that worked all together to shape me up into this person at this very moment, no matter what happened. I wrote a complex, difficult past, but one that was filled with both great and bad memories, filled with much love and resentment, with lessons, with realizations. And now, I write my present… one day at a time.