brideoffrankenstein | (no subject)

Recently, I moved out of my parent's house (huzzah!). And since I moved out, I feel like I've changed a lot.. Well, in fact, I feel like I haven't changed at all, but that's sort of why I'm posting. For example, I've been wearing a lot of brighter colours, and gravitating to different things than I used to; different cuts and styles of clothes, primarily, but also my tastes in food have changed (I haven't eaten pasta in weeks and I'm fine with it, I eat twice as much fruit as before), I'm playing guitar again after over a decade, my music taste is shifting. I feel like a different person than I was in February, in many ways, all of them positive.

The reason why I'm posting about this, though, is that all of this feels like coming home to myself in a way I've seen other people talk about but never thought I would actually feel. I thought I would just keep jumping from one fixation to another, and never quite settle into each one. That might still be happening here, so I don't want to say "this is permanent" and then it not be, but this just feels different and encompases more of my life than these shifts have before.

I've been moving in a much more "hippyish" direction, with a lot of it. Not exclusively (I think "being drawn to neon and barbie pinks" is a different subculture) but overall moving in a direction that is at least somewhat....ren-faire. This morning while I was doing the dishes I was listening to Maddy Prior, for example, and I've been listening overall to a lot more fantasy and folk music [I want to learn to play Witchwood by Strawbs, but I need a capo. It's in the post]. I've also been finding myself feeling much more pagan than I did before, and feeling much more involved with paganism despite not having actually changed my practice yet.

All of this feels very new to me, and yet every time I think about it, my eleven year old self appears, with his books of folklore and his broom skirts and his fantasy literature and a new, but discreet, love of folk music.

None of that really went away, exactly, although a lot of it did - I stopped reading fantasy for a long while, just about when most of the YA fantasy at my local bookshop turned into dystopian romance - and while I never stopped listening to folk music, I was heavily ashamed of it, because my parents treated it like it was weird (despite they themselves listening to Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan). I tried to "grow up" into different kinds of mildly alternative dressing, and eventually just wore tshirts and jeans.

But now I'm living with my spouse, who is supportive of every little thing I want to try and every little way I want to develop, and even seems to enjoy that I'm not as "adult", as "mature", as I grew up believing I should be. They've made a living environment in which I can be wholehearted about things, rather than having to hold back just in case my New Thing turns out to get me some weird looks from my parents.

This is very major to me, in ways I think that aren't especially obvious, because it's not just about encouraging me to re-read Dragonlance or whatever, it's also about the fact that they encourage me to try new fruits and don't get mad if I don't eat them all before they go bad. I don't know, I don't think I'm quite grasping what I wanted to say. I guess I just feel like I'm growing into the adult that eleven year old Bow wanted to be, and it's okay that I skipped over sixteen years in the middle.