Beginnings, endings, and all in-between

Sometimes I don't know where I am in my life, when I stop to take a closer look at it. Am I at the beginning of something new, am I at the end of what I may accomplish, or saying good-bye to another season of my life, or am I somewhere in the ambiguous in-between?

This feeling creeps upon me when I'm sorting through things that bring back memories. As a recovering hoarder, the kicking up of memories, like so much dust, is inevitable when doing any sort of cleaning, rearranging, sorting...anything related to the objects in my possession.

I don't think I can adequately relay the sense of awfulness I feel when I come across something I wrote, years before, or collected more than a decade prior, and discover how much it is like something I have more recently written or collected. Have I really changed at all? Have I stagnated?

How do I interpret this? That might be a better question to ask. Someone once told me that recovery is walking up a spiral staircase: the view across is almost identical to what you have been seeing all along. And yet...you look down, and you have come a long, long way from where you were, as long as you have been making the effort.

This journey out of not only hoarding, but out of many other things that have kept me from feeling fulfilled and happy, did not happen in a vacuum. Along the way, I have discovered greater honesty with myself, the need for more grace, and what I truly need in my relationships. Those were things I did not have several years back.

So where am I? I'm not entirely sure. At the beginnings of some things...the endings of others...and where life is concerned, overall, the great in-between of everything.