"Are you better off than you were a year ago?"
It's a question that always comes up around election time, posed by politicians and media outlets and other special interests, but lately it's a question I've been asking myself. A year ago I was writing about and reeling from the shock of going home for the first time since moving to Mississippi. Things that had always felt familiar felt so different and strange. The world had shifted around me and I needed time to make sense of how odd the world felt, in it's new colors and hues.
This year I find myself looking inward instead. I know now that the world had not changed last year at all; I had. As time has passed since then, I have become more cognizant of this. When I think back to college and high school, I wonder at how far I've come from who that girl was. I sometimes find it hard to believe that she was once me, so care free and yet so convinced that she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.
Surely to some extent this is what happens with time and age. People around you change and you do, too, but it feels as if this experience has accelerated that change for me. I don't remember feeling this much distance between the girl I was when I graduated high school and the girl I was my sophomore year in college, but the difference between the girl who walked off Ohio State's campus in spring of 2015 and the woman who walks the halls of a Delta high school is a profound one, though, not necessarily a bad one. Sometimes different is not better or worse; sometimes it is just different.
In recent weeks, I have found myself pondering the same question frequently: Would you do it all over if you could? If you knew then what you knew now, would you still do this thing? Or if you had the chance to start fresh, would you push rewind and tape over this place and this job and this experience?
I cannot say whether I am better off than I was a year ago, but I do know this: I am more compassionate than I was a year ago. I am also more confused than I was a year ago. I am more disheartened at the world than I was a year ago, but somehow I am also more hopeful. I know this, too: I would not press rewind.
