the inbetween

How many identities do people possess throughout their lives? This is a question I suddenly found myself contemplating the answer to over the past days and weeks. I'm not sure what prompted it exactly, although I suspect it had something to do with the accumulating stresses at school, and the photograph-sorting project my mother has been working on for the past few days. It likely also has something to do with my eagerness to pursue roles of leadership as of late, which was always a challenge that was far too frightening in the past.

I'm curious to know what implications it has on my future. If I was such a different person in the past, how even more different will I be in the future? How many identities will I have? I'll grow up, I'll find myself with new responsibilities and new life situations, and I'll adapt my identity to suit them.. but what will it mean for the people around me? I now see why divorce happens. A spouse, after 20 years, could be a completely different person than the one a husband or wife thought he or she married. For extended marriages to work, do the parties have to maintain a process of falling in love with new partner-identities every decade or so? I get it. It's not easy.

Even now, when I look back at the past 22 years of my life, there are events and experiences I feel I missed out on. I was there, I see photographs to prove it, but I was absent. Or I was someone completely different. Someone who no longer exists. Dead eyes, hidden behind a smile. A face that is vaguely familiar, a youthful optimism and willing ignorance, paired with an awkward body; too young, too solid, too material.

I began university 5 years ago. I know there are stories of undergraduates who have made careers out of being a student; I am not one of them. I look back, and as long ago as it seems my childhood was, or my teenaged years, those first 2 years of university feel like a lifetime ago. Who was I then? Did I really sit through lecture after lecture of statistics and trigonometry and discrete mathematics? What did I think about myself? Was I happy? What did I do for enjoyment? What were my goals? Am I fulfilling them? When I'm in classes and teams with students who started 3 years ago, in a completely different program and university, with completely different students and peers than I had, how do I relate to them? They only know who I am now, not who I used to be, or where I came from. I'm the fun one they can talk about boys with. I'm the one who's overly talented in graphics and photography and giving presentations. The one who sings in church every other Sunday.

But they don't know me. Do they? Is that me? Is that all I am? Does anyone know me? Do I even know me? When I look in the mirror, is it my reflection I see, or someone I have yet to be introduced to. And where is this all coming from?

Sometimes I find myself with a clear mind, a still body, an empty expression, with eyes focused on something immaterial. Tuned in to the blood pulsing through my legs, arms, neck, and chest. I suppose it's a way my mind has adapted to stress. Turn off for a moment, pour a little water on the smoking mess, and wait until the system is back in working order only to have it burn out again half a day later.

...I think I miss myself.

I'd like to go back to 2001 and ask how I'm doing. To go for a walk and catch up. Or maybe make a visit to 1997 and help out with a little homework. Tell me I'm a great artist, and should pursue drawing no matter what joy future teachers may take out of it. Remind myself to practice my songs for another hour or two while the grand piano is still in our possession. To remember what the keys feel like under my fingertips, and how the lingering music speaks in the moment of blissful relaxation after completing a tale of notes and rests. Revisit the campground in 1994, searching for snakes and lizards with my cousin and kid sister, or the docks of Pacific Playground in 1993, fishing for bullheads, laughing around a table of cards in a boat somewhere off of Powell River or Savary Island, or staying over at my best friends and playing with Lego into the wee hours of the morning in 1992, or sitting on dads shoulders, my small hands in his hair, watching a western show at Disneyland in 1987. To visit the incubator in 1984 and gently stroke my delicate pink fingers, assure my newborn self that although the journey will be a difficult one, the joys will outweigh the sorrows, and to smile at the wonderful little miracle; scared, fragile, determined, alone,, sheltered, and protected.. while never too far from a loving hand.

I earned this night. No professor, and no bad mark, can ever take it away.

And so begins my future.