"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." - Wayne Dyer

My life is composed of a series of epiphanies. Just as much as my memories and my passions make me, the lessons that I have learned and the realizations I have made along the way make me, well, me. Today as I was sitting on the plane, in that state when you're half awake with your eyes closed, and you think your mind is forming coherent thoughts when in fact it's jumping between completely unrelated topics (did I remember to pack my charger? I should be writing my English essay right now. Planes are trippy — I mean were humans ever actually meant to fly like birds? I could go for some mangos right now) I had a moment of clarity. It wasn't one of my larger epiphanies, not one of my most creative or original epiphanies, but (hopefully) one of my more life-changing ones.

And when I say life-changing, I don't actually mean an epiphany so great that it'll completely alter the course of my future and my existence. I mean an epiphany that caused me to question how I'm living life in this moment and prompted me to want to change the way in which I live my life. The reason I say it was unoriginal was because it was basically based on the premise of the quote above by Wayne Dyer. It was essentially a realization of the fact that I had been looking at a lot of problems, struggles and even happy points in my life from the completely wrong perspective and questioning why I couldn't resolve them, why the difficulties were in fact proving to be so difficult and why the happy points weren't that happy.

I guess over the years (and there haven't even been that many), as I've learned more, seen more, experienced more, the perspective I had all throughout my life somehow became foggy, clouded. For some reason the metaphor that comes to mind isn't even glasses covered in a layer of steam from a boiling pot or from the cold of winter but the eyes of Dr. T.J Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. In Fitzgerald's novel, the eyes are a metaphor for God (or any higher being, or not even necessarily a higher being but just an outsider to the world beneath him) looking down at the wasteland that is the valley of ashes in disillusionment. In this metaphor, I am Dr. T.J Eckleburg.

Yes, my mind thinks along strange lines — not necessarily along the lines of common logic or even in pictures but in words and matrices of words and pages filled with text and lines from books and poems and metaphors from novels; but from that chaos, from that jumble of letters, from those little sans serif, 11 pt font, slightly bolded words in my mind, I realized that I have never valued the power of perspective enough. I realized that I never really thought about my perspective, not on concrete events like global issues but on life as a whole.

It seems that only when I was able to look at the world, my world, our world, from above, at a bird's eye view in the tiny window of an airplane flying over a city glittering with lights that I realized the only force in this balance of happiness, sadness, pain, challenges and successes that needed to change was me. So I'm leaving from my spot on the billboard above the Valley of Ashes where I sported the deep blue eyes and thick round glasses of Dr. T.J Eckleburg and taking back my spot in Chicago, at Vanderbilt, and in any other place life takes me, wearing my square black lenses with scratched up but simultaneously clear lenses, as Caroline.