Ever the same, ever changing.
It’s fairly common these days to hear people speaking of cultivating and expressing their authentic self. I used to adhere to such a strong sense of self. Define myself according to how I saw, felt and experienced the person I call me. I saw myself as a type, a certainty, a ‘me’ who had emerged from captivity, grown, metamorphosed and flourished. A ‘self’ becoming strong, moving closer to completion. I felt like there was a finish line up ahead; a place (or time) when I would be done with journeying, beyond ‘becoming’. The past few years have gradually unravelled that inner worldview. Now I have a strong sense of fluidity.
The ‘self’ I was as a child, as a teenager, as a young mother, as a religious person or as a wife, is (even to me) unrecognisably me when held up to today’s internal mirror. Yes, like any animal, I have temperament and personality traits that remain consistent – though even these are modified by living. I am introverted, sociable, nurturing, optimistic and pathologically empathetic. Quick to feel rage, absurdly stressed by time pressure and, like a feisty car in reverse, able to go from 60 to zero when it comes to relaxing. I can relax for Britain! Almost instantaneously, with little effort and so deeply that sleep often comes to me in seconds.
But is that self? I can be all of those things across a spread of years that top half a century and yet manage to move from deeply insecure to scarily secure, religious zealot to atheist, apolitical to some strange chimaera; part liberal, part socialist, with an underbelly of green libertarianism. Promiscuous, to asexual, to experimental, to hopeful.
I feel fluid, and – for the first time in my life – I relish being undefined. Just as the life I choose today I may decide to relinquish tomorrow, so the ‘self’ I experience as ‘me’ today reserves all rights to be a different ‘me’ tomorrow. In so many ways the moment is all we ever really have. I don’t in any way wish to appear to be advocating flakiness or even flitting, butterfly-like from one pretty flower to the next. Simply that ‘self’ is not an inner being who ploughs our path through life, becoming ever stronger and less changeable with the passage of time.
So who – or what – then, is my authentic self? I think my only viable answer to that, has to be the ‘me’ that I (and others) are experiencing in the current moment, where that ‘me’ is real and unhidden. Authenticity can be no more than maintaining an honest self-narrative in the now. I am authentic when I am open, genuine and true to what it means to be me right here, right now. When I am holding the fluidity of my me-ness up in my hands while allowing you to watch it dripping through my fingers. An ocean is always wet. It is always water, which is always H2O – but from moment to moment it is experienced as consistent difference. Movement. Rise and fall. Ebb and flow.
Constant re-invention.
And so, as Alanis would say (yes girl, always walking one step ahead):
“I have been running so sweaty my whole life
Urgent for a finish line
And I have been missing the rapture this whole time
Of being forever incomplete.”
(Incomplete/Flavours of Entanglement/Alanis Morisette)
Somehow this blog post seems out of step with the usual ‘diary-type’ writings on Brightest Tapestry, but hey ho – this is exactly the stuff that I needed to say today, and tomorrow I’ll try to come back and share some poetry and an update on the journey.
With love
Ali x
