What we see through our viewfinder changes drastically over time. One's point of view often impedes our understanding of what we see, affecting how we align ourselves to our subjects and landscapes. I have kept journals for many years. Decades in fact. It was not so long ago I read through several different time periods, wondering what was in those journals. Anything significant or just my mental wanderings. Were they something I might someday regret writing down? It spurred many questions that will likely make future blogs, essays and even short stories. Who knows, maybe even a novel. I’m sure they will find their way into the story of my adult life, should I ever find the time to put it to the page. 

I reflected for a long while on what I found there. Each separate period felt like I was reading the thoughts of a different person. Each one had differing opinions, differing feelings, differing reactions to the things around her. Then I realized my journals are all the people I have been and there have been many. Each a lifetime removed from the others. 

While they may have had the same goals, the same dreams in some cases, they were very different in what held priority and sway. What would get in one's way would not get in another's. Even the personalities were different. There was a point in my life when I had no personality of my own, but seemed to bend to those I was most in contact with. This I understand all too well. It came from a need to belong, to fit in somewhere, anywhere. For such a huge part of my life I wanted more than anything to belong in some way to the world around me, to the people around me. 

It took decades for me to understand that some people just aren’t meant to belong anywhere. Some are born wanders whose place it is to float about observing. Different wanders have different purposes. Mine is to record the world as I find it, then translate it into understandable, usable information for absorption by others. To give a view of things that are not readily available to the reader I reach. I never belonged to one particular place, but was a transient being trying to find an anchor that I was not intended to possess. 

I would watch and mimic, trying to find an open spot meant for me, or maybe just take a spot left open by someone else’s twist of raw fate. I was trying to fit in places I didn’t belong, to people who didn’t know what I was or how to associate with my strange otherness. 

When the pain of trying to fit into places I didn’t belong grew to be too much, I let go, let myself drift and found peace there in the current. The struggle is passed, the wayward anchor sent to the scrap heap and I drift, quite content to observe and record as I float through places I could never belong.