i'm up to april of junior year of college, and it's simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking to read these emails. the first thing that strikes me is that my emails are already really well-written; everyone always seems to have this experience where they find things they wrote a while ago and they can't believe how bad a writer they were, but this really doesn't seem to be the case with me.
what does seem to be the case but is less apparent is that i was even more unpolished then than i am now, which i guess is a good thing. so i guess in some sense i've made progress in the last eight years. but i'm still very clearly me.
the heartbreaking part is that at this point in my life, i was in an amazing relationship with a truly amazing girl. reading some of these emails makes it really seem like we were going to be happy forever, because we're very obviously happy then and there's very obviously a good foundation there. and indeed, we were going to be basically very happy for the next year, and then i was going to graduate, and then there would be some heartbreak, and then there was going to be a possibly rest-of-our-life period where we would not be living anywhere close to each other. and of course she's currently in a relationship and very very happy, and i wish her the best; i'm not fixated in any sort of even remotely creepy or depressed way on 2007 adrienne.
but reading about 1999 adrienne, i was so in love with her, and it's very clear why, and reading those emails reminds me of that. this was before the series of heartbreaks that to some extent shaped who i am today (which is not to say that they've had only negative effects), back when i didn't have this ridiculous overfixation on relationships and life and love. i just loved her with absolutely all of my heart, and i took this for granted; in the bad sense but also in the good sense, in the sense that i knew that this was the girl i wanted to spend the rest of my life with. it had worked out the way it was supposed to; after various relationships and attempts, i had found the right girl, the one for me.
i'm not even convinced that 1999 me was wrong. those days don't really seem that far away. here in 2007, that world no longer exists -- the world of college, among other aspects -- but in 1999, i think i was right: i think i wanted to spend the rest of my life with that girl, and i think i would have been very happy. i'm not losing sleep over it -- i seem to be having a tough time making that claim legitimately, but it 's empirically true -- but reading that reminds me that i once thought (and as i've said before here, i still think that i was right) that i was on pace for the fairytale life.
and instead, in 2007, i go traipsing around the country looking for potential miracles and overplanning and getting stressed about the whole thing, even though i am only 26 and rationally have lots and lots of time. and i get more and more stressed all the time, which the six weeks of traveling probably have a lot to do with. my stress sawtooth is approaching a global maximum, and i don't know what happens in these uncharted territories.