More Time Capsule

A powerful snippet from an otherwise not-exemplary poem, from June 2001:
Don't flatter yourself to think I'd get
Any pleasure out of angering you.
Everything I say and everything
I do is for the purpose
Sole and unique
Of showing the world a fact about me--
I'm not so weak.
You can strike me down or
Jail me but you can never break me.
I am millstone to your grain.

Another one, undated, but which looks to be in late 2003:
In spite of being by myself,
As I continue to be,
I'd like to declare to the world
That this isn't my optimal state of being.

It's interesting to be reading, in poetry, the chronology of what happened to me after I came out to my parents. Immediately I was resolute and willfull and determined, ready to prove to the world that I could succeed and survive on my own. Two and a half years after the fact, I was tired, depressed, and had given up. Fast forward to four years after the dissolution of my halcyon days, and there's been another change- no longer at either extreme, I feel like I've come to peace with the fact that the world is far from perfect and that instead of fighting it or letting it beat me, I should just get on with my life.
I feel like high-school-me would be very disappointed in me today, but high-school-me was also stubborn to a fault and really pretentious. Certainly, however, I'm doing better today than I was a year or so ago.