The other day, I was telling a friend how I had always wanted to be a writer (fiction, journalism, creative non-fiction, columnist), but due to practical culture of my parents, I took a more feasible route from computer science to human computer interaction.

He requested to see some of my writings and I showed him the 40,000+ words I wrote for nanowrimo a few years ago. For that, I wrote my autobiography (obviously breaking the rules, but hey). Apparently, I didn\’t remember what I had written, just knowing that I had wrote about everything that had affected my life in those 20 years.

He liked how I used to say \”I see you never\” to people I didn\’t want to see again. He laughed about my story of Mike Fernando. He told me that it felt like the Matrix where someone pushed a button and he suddenly \”knew Jenn\”. He repeated some of the stories I wrote about…but to my surprise, I barely had remembered that I had done some of those things. I didn\’t remember why I now dislike calla lilies or how I used to always ask \”do you watch porn?\” Yet like most people, I couldn\’t bear to re-read the parts that were embarrassing and painful. I always thought I would be over it, but to remember the naivete, the what i would do now with what i know now feeling…that\’s always the biggest challenge of confronting the past.

Or worse yet, did I mature?