Sleeping with ghosts

I - very randomly and unplanned - stumbled upon this picture old picture of myself on DeviantArt. It was by coincidence I found it, since it was through someone's site I was browsing that I stumbled upon it. I always find it weird to look at old photos of myself. This one was taken back in 2008, which means I was either 14 or 15 years old at the time. My family still have that camera laying around somewhere, if I remember correctly.

It's weird, but I feel like the me from my past is a different person than the one I am today. Not metaphorically or anything, but litterally as it was another human being with another life. I can have a hard time trying to think about my past, both things that I have done and how I've reacted to certain event, interests and preferrings because everything is so distant and vague by now.
Of course I have roots of my "previous self" if I can say it like that, I have things that still rings through me and certain characters that are still exactly the same. But seeing the whole picture, it's a minority that still hangs around.
I think there's a lot of reasons to it, first off being the fact that I was a teenager and that time of your life is about forming yourself and figuring yourself out, finding your boundaries and all in all just trying to become independent. Besides that reason, I think it also has a lot to do with being swallowed up in different disorders through my teens. It's quite common to "lose yourself" while having a mental disorders, your way of seeing life often changes and your previous interests often decreases/extincts or changes, which might depend on the disorder (weirdly enough).
I was eating disordered and depressed basically through all of my teenage years, at one point suffering with delusions which luckily went away quite "quickly" (so to say). When I started getting better, though not all recovered, I started to notice a change in myself.
I can easily say that I know myself way better than I did just 2 years ago, which is a weird feeling. The person I was 2 years ago seems so far away from the person I am today, a lot of things now being completely opposite. I was uncertain and constantly going through phases in the hopes of figuring myself out, but it never really happened that way. Differently than all I tried, it came when I stopped trying to find myself/when I got better.

If I met the soul of "my previous self" I probably wouldn't guess it was myself from the past. The way of thinking, reacting and overall just mentality is so off and far away by now.. I might have a lot of emotional outbursts here on my blog, but it usually passes and are way more lighter than they have ever been. Back then, my head was a constant maelstrom of an overwhelming sadness and desperation which never got a break. I was better at concealing it though, which probably was why it kept going on for so long, because I didn't get it off my chest. I've learned the importance of trusting and letting go, though it still can be hard for me sometimes. But at least I have breaks from that sadness now, most often very long breaks before it returns/the negativity isn't constant anymore.
 I always feel weird if someone says "but you used to like/look/think/say.." because the me they knew is not who I am anymore.

Despite all the psychological differences, there's also been quite a big shift in my appearance and interests. Whenever someone mentions my previous interests or looks, I have to fight the urge to punch them in the eye (lol, might be exaggerating a bit here but you know). It's actually quite often someone mentions my previous interests despite not even knowing me at that time - most oftenly mentioned is Japanese youth culture-related things, even though I haven't given a flying fuck about that since I was about 16 years old, haha. But they are all much more superficial things than what I wanted to write about in this entry, so I'm not really going into that (though, surprisingly, there are some reasons behind it all).

I just find it weird to look at pictures from the past and thinking about life and how I saw it back then. I think (though I don't know if it's actually like that) most people will always find it funny to see photos of themselves as young/mid-teens mostly because of the way they looked, but most of the saved pictures I have of myself from the past reminds me of certain mental states I had at the time of each specific picture. There's a lot of memories behind many of them and even though I can't bond or connect with the states I was in back then, they mean a lot to me. I don't live through the old emotions when I look at them. It feels more as if a ghost of the past me is coming over for a brief visit. I tell him that things turned out better than he'd expect.