Posted on

I’m always finding random writing in old notebooks, but I don’t know when I wrote this one. It could be anytime in the last eight years, based on the other random stuff on the pages. On one page I find a grocery list with my ex’s handwriting. On another, I find website sketches for work I did last week. Somewhere in the middle, there was this question:

Why do you need to be who you were before?

I have no recollection of writing it or if I heard it somewhere, but it lands on my heart. I don’t know if there’s a better question to encompass my own experience of who I am. In the last two years. The last seven. Longer, perhaps.

To me, this question is about self-awareness. I’ve always wanted to understand myself and through that pursuit, I’ve changed. I keep changing. George Bernard Shaw put it best and gave this project its namesake: Life is about creating yourself.

Although maybe this act of creation is really an act of discovery. Like the artist who uncovers the sculpture in the block of marble, I am just chipping away to see myself.

The imagery that rushed into my head reflecting on this question was of boundless shores — wide spaces of identity and experience and paths to take in life. The Before, a small vessel getting pulled by a river. But if the vessel break and the river branches, it is both a disaster and a revolution.

With that, I was called to turn the question into a short couplet tonight:

Why do you need to be
who you were before?

Burn the bridge and the boat;
you can swim to shore.

With Love,

Natalie