A teenage kid with Jersey hair and 80s clothes, part of a gang of Jersey kids driving far too recklessly than anyone ever should, laughing our asses off at everything and nothing
A college student, transplanted from Boston to the U.K., studying Woolf at Oxford and thinking every moment I was there: I cannot ever leave this place
A Gen X college grad cut adrift in the middle of a lousy economy, begging every mediocre newspaper on the East Coast to give me a job
An extremely poorly paid reporter for some of North Jersey's most craptactular newspapers
A somewhat less poorly paid reporter for a reasonably-not-crappy newspaper, where I dashed off to fires and car crash scenes and, one memorable time, a gunpowder plant explosion (Headline: "KABOOM!")
A person who thought: I will never have children. I cannot abide the idea of giving birth. I can't imagine being a mother
A person who thought: Holy shit, I'm pregnant
2 comments:
and now?
This was a great perspective. I have thought of pasts, but never breaking down circumstance into completely different persona's because really, I was a different person then. I should think more on this...
This is (one of) the amazing things Virginia Woolf does in her novels -- her characters always look back at themselves at different points in their lives and try to analyze how the people they were helped them become the people they are, if that makes sense. (See Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway.) I find it really holds up when I look at my life. I wouldn't be who I am if those 'other' people hadn't paved the way.
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