“So, what are the rules?” I asked this to myself, and from this perspective now being the one giving the rules I could see the desperation in my eyes, the hopes and dreams that maybe I could change things.
“Leave what you can find, and you will find it.” That’s what I was told, and this time around, it happened to be the exact words that came to mind. I’d heard it before because I told myself this, but this time around, I truly understood.
Would you recognise yourself if you stood face-to-face with your future self? Better yet, would you recognise yourself if you stood face-to-face with your past self? I’m sure you’d probably say yes. Surely, there’d be some resemblance to make the identification easy.
Unfortunately, I don’t make the rules.
Visiting yourself distorts your vision; you never truly see yourself as you were. Even if it were just a day or a few hours ahead, it’s like looking at someone who looks and acts completely different. You’d be surprised, and the hard rules of the universe will not let you see yourself as you truly are, but there are signs.
While you may look different to each other, there is some sense of familiarity like twins who grew up together but made very different choices. Except, unlike with twins (for the sake of argument, identical twins), they are not at all identical. That’s just a comforting description we use to understand that they are similar enough visually and genetically but in reality, there are more than enough markers to show these are two different entities occupying different points of space and time.
So, what do you see when you look at each other? Can you touch, can you warn, and more importantly, can you change?
These were the questions I had, and I can take the time to answer these questions.
What you see is your character, plain as day. For anyone who has read my posts over the years, you would know I am quite fond of gaming analogies, specifically RPGs (role-playing games), so why would I stop doing so now?
Looking at your past self is like looking at your character at different stages of its journey. If you look behind, then the character sheet or avatar before you is quite wet behind the ears (potentially), with very few accomplishments under their belt (just a growing backstory and sense of development) and not so interesting equipment and skills acquired yet. If you look ahead (ideally), perhaps you are more seasoned.
You look different, you look like SOMEBODY and have a story to tell, except it’s all in your face, your clothes, your very being. Or maybe you look like you lost everything, and that’s a story your face tells. The present is always you. It’s not something you get to open or view in the moment.
The problem with what I just shared above is that, from your perspective when you are looking, it would look like you had a race change. While I do not mean that so dramatically in human terms and its concept of race, I am talking from a gaming point of view. Your past self may look like an Elf, and your future self would seem like an Orc. You’re neither, of course. It’s all just to protect your identity so you can both be around each other, and there’s no sense of progression of what one or the other is.
If you visited yourself again the very next day, you’d just both appear as something else. Again, it’s more a sense of, so long as you are both where you are supposed to be and the character is the same, then so it is. You can’t STOP an event for your future self by explaining it to the past because you need that development, and you can’t CHANGE circumstances by getting CHEAT CODES from the future you to utilise in the past.
What you can do is coexist at the same time and console. You can gift yourself and be there for yourself.
What is allowed is compassion. Self-love.
So far, what I have learned is you can quite literally be there for yourself in the therapeutic sense.
You can let yourself know things will be okay, or at the very least, you will get through this. Again and again and again, because I’m still here.
I’m still here.
Regards,
Alexander/Zenchi
