You are who you never were
Me in the past, myself in the present and I in the future
I find it funny to think the person I was in the past is the same person I am here, in the present. Especially when looking at baby photos, I look at the little girl smiling at the camera and think could that really be me? Perhaps it’s because we don’t have many memories when we’re young. It’s hard to remember things when we’re not sure who we are yet. Then again, we’re constantly changing, growing and evolving into ourselves throughout our entire lives.
Back in January, I wrote a letter to myself to arrive on the date of the one-year anniversary after my Dad died. By letter, I mean email but I prefer saying letter because I like romanticising my life. It was strange to read the words that I wrote, addressed to my present self. Like a pen pal paradox or something from an alternate universe. Because truly, it could have been another person that wrote it. It was hard to place the idea that past me wrote this, that past me is still me. That I wrote this letter uncertain of the present me who’d be reading it. Completely unaware of details and events that took place in the space between the four months of writing and receiving the letter.
A little while ago I read an essay that began ‘you will never be again what you never were before’. When we think about who we once were, we forget. We remember a version of ourselves that isn’t entirely true to the experience we lived, felt and breathed at the time. We often project our current thoughts and feelings back onto the past seeing things through a biased lens.
Nostalgia is a mood that mixes pleasure and pain in equal measure. Consider photographs. Why do we take them? Ask parents this question and they are likely to say that they want to preserve the memory of their children at every stage of development. Photography is an exercise in anticipatory nostalgia. We foresee that come a certain age we will want to experience an odd pleasure that comes from reflecting on what has been lost.
There are the simple pleasures of self-recognition, of recalling happiness and pride, of seeing life as a continuum, of reliving the journey. There is also bitter with the sweet. Baby pictures bring out longing for a time when the child was an innocent wonder, and regret over not having appreciated how fleeting it would be. Vacation pictures remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now. This brings pain, then pleasure in the pain. There is something mildly masochistic about the family album.
The weaving of past, present and future is truly fascinating. As is the human bias of nostalgia and reflections on the past.
In pursuit of other past versions of myself, I decided to resurface an old WordPress blog of mine the other day and wowza. I wasn’t even sure if it would even load, whether the domain still existed or was lost forever. Alas, my 2016 masterpiece lives on, hurrah! It was interesting to read (and most definitely cringe) through what I’d written back then. I also felt an overwhelming sense of pride. There was a clear difference in the overall shape, style and tone of my writing compared to now and then. It was a sign of how much I’d grown. Even when you can’t see the subtle changes and improvements, they’re there. An element of the unashamed and unpolished remained which made me happy. I’ve started to accept that ‘a bit rough around the edges’ seems to be a given in all my creative pursuits.
Having spent a lot of time with myself in the past, it would be nice to think a little about the future. There’s a prompt I’ve been sitting on for a while which is to create a vision of yourself one year from now. I’d likely write something. But I think this could work with sketching or drawing or painting or even scheduling an email to yourself. Here is a promise that I will find the time to do it. Why don’t you join me?