"I'm Dis Many Yeaws Ow'd"

I'm not the person I once was. This is a fact of life that ought to be a no-brainer. There are so many little things about a person that change every day, even every minute.
But this is a profound truth for me right now:
I am not the person I once was.
This is an important fact for a few reasons. The main reason being that I have never had, for as long as I can remember, an image of myself that depicted me as I was at the time. For a great deal of the last 9 years I have seen myself as a nine-year-old. Only in the last couple years have I finally started to see myself a little older than that.
Just this evening I took a moment to think about how I see myself now. My personal assessment was that I see myself as a 16-17 year-old. Granted, this is a great improvement from nine. But it's still not who I am now.
There have been a few times this last year when I went to bed and just lay there wondering why I am here, why am I in college, living in this room. It just doesn't line up with my image of myself. I'm not old enough to be living on my own. I'm not old enough for all this responsibility. I'm not ready for this. I can't make this work. Not as I see me.
This is of course a grand testament to how much I underestimate myself. Because I am here. I am on my own...to a degree. I am making this work.
Realising this has caused me to think about how I see myself and question my assessments. I realize that I make a lot of judgements of myself based on my past, and that's okay. That's all I know of myself so far. I don't have anything else to work with. But at this point in my life I have acquired enough history that there are some aspects of me that have become out dated; things that were true of me at one time, but that no longer are.
Thus, I am not the same person I once was.
A lot has changed just in the last two years, not to mention the last five or ten years.
I literally
walk different,
talk different,
stand different,
act different,
look different,
laugh different,
think different,
sing different,
work different.
I am not the same person I once was.
There are some things that haven't changed. Some things will never change. Like where I find my salvation, security and purpose. Also the facts that I still live in a 2-D world, I am still left handed and I still enjoy making music.