Identity Crisis

When trying to figure out where I belong or what I should do with my life, I often find myself overwhelmed.

A big theme in my writing is travel and how it has been personally transformative. As a kid I spoke French early in the morning with a matronly Madame. In college I was obsessed with Middle English and thought I wanted to study medieval women writers in some obscure nook of England. Then I went to Spain and experienced pure, unfettered bliss. In Iceland I became addicted to that weird coffee they drink so much of - that somehow tastes too much like coffee, if that makes sense. And of course, the bohemian cerros of Valparaíso still haunt me and I know I have to get back there. The rough edges, the stray cats, the outdoor tea-taking. How did I manage to leave?

There's always more to see - another town to visit, another stranger's story to hear. And yet it's time, money, and energy that are finite.

Sometimes I feel like an onion - with too many layers and no essence. I collect experience but I don't know what I add up to.

At any rate, I thought it would be interesting to explore some of this visually. So here goes.

This lady is Yasmin Sewell, a fashion buyer who lives in Australia. To me she represents British migrant identity. She is true to her roots but has also embraced London life and culture. She is European fusion and everything about her is self-aware sophistication.

This woman represents some of my confusion about gender and identity.

Feminity is something I consistently do not understand. As a girl I watched Cinderella every day and all my mom had to do to get me to cooperate was say, "Is that how Cinderella would act?" By the age of 9 I had learned to say, "Cinderella lived a long time ago."

I am a skeptic at my core and nothing escapes my deconstructing mind, including gender. At the same time I am very feminine, and no matter how many flannel shirts I wear or how short my hair is, I always seem to remain that way. But I don't like the choices our culture has made about how women are and can be. Hence this woman: so much herself and so outside of her gender stereotype. Also taken in Australia.

Eva, Milano.

Know next to nothing about her. When I was 3 my dad was offered a position in Milan, and for a while my family thought about moving there. Ultimately we didn't go because it would have meant a pay cut, and an enormous leap which my then very suburban family couldn't quite fathom.

I wonder how I would be now if I had grown up in Italy. I know that I would have learned Italian, despite attending an American School, and would possibly even think in it. Would I be more confused than now? Split so concretely between two identities? How would I feel about the United States? Would I hope against hope that I could have stayed in my home country, or would I reject it entirely in favor of a European identity?

I think I would like to use this journal as a way to share some writing. Here's a new piece I'm working on, called Origins.

My entire life I have been lost in translation. As a little girl I cried on my way to school, not wanting to leave the protective nest of home, where we spoke our own language based on familiar jokes and rhythms. I went to a Swiss pre-school built on the values of harmony and fairness. All I remember is that when I wanted to play a certain game, I had to wear a red circle around my neck, and change circles for a new game, and so on.

At 7 I had a favorite pair of shoes, which I wore every day. They gave me blisters and I remember the specific day I outgrew them. My mom made me buy new shoes and I felt strangely resistant.

“You have always been afraid of change,” she would later say. It’s as though I was trying to get back to some Edenic origin, a place of innocence, no homework, and hours spent playing with the new puppy.

Somewhere around high school I realized that I was different. I approached life abstractly; not entirely gifted spatially, my talents were all word-based. I appreciated a good story more than anything else. I could conjugate irregular French verbs but I struggled to pass a driver’s test.

Conventional narratives about what adolescence was didn’t feel right somehow. Instead of joining the cheerleading team or writing for the newspaper I immersed myself in punk rock concerts. Dissonance and ambiguity felt so appropriate. I formed friendships with fellow weirdoes based on the acceptance that life was absurd, that beneath these high school rituals lay paradoxes and a fear of change. I wore black eyeliner and plaid skirts, I pretended not to care about some boy while inside I was pining Bollywood style. I had all of these feelings and I didn’t know what to do with them.

I viewed my suburban upbringing with a critical eye. It was unsustainable and wrong. In one fell swoop I rejected all of it.

When you reject everything, there’s very little that gives comfort. Well, I thought stubbornly, so be it. I don’t want any part. It was a closing off that couldn’t last forever.

When I was 17, my favorite teacher planned a trip to Paris and I went with my best friend, Megan.

It was incredible. We ate in cheap restaurants in La Marais. Hot Chocolate at every meal and a green-greyness that I am convinced does not exist anywhere else. I fell asleep in the Picasso Museum due to my first pangs of traveler fatigue.

The day before leaving a terrorist warning was issued and all of Paris ground to a halt. It was my first experience with mortality- the sea-sick sense that I could die. I cried on the phone to my mother in the U.S., trying to return to that womb-like state of safety. “Nothing bad ever happens to anyone in my family,” she said with real conviction.

I arrived home unscathed, exuberant, jet-lagged, and undeniably changed. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I would leave the country again, this time for Mexico.

At college the longing for love and connection and perhaps my own personal Eden became too much and I did what so many students do: I formed one of those dyadic cohabitations known as a “serious relationship”. He was controlling and all too able to manipulate my sensitive ideals. After a year of life in a lapsed paradise, I took the plunge. It was time to learn Spanish; the language that punctuated my childhood in the form of strangers’ conversations and music on the radio. It was a blank space in my awareness. There was a trip that my school offered: one month in Guadalajara with a host family and some classes every day. I signed up and left on New Year’s Day.

Mexico was deeply symbolic for me. Confused by everything from buses to my host family, I slept and read English books every day. Then, after some time spent in the city, I spent a week in bed due to a bad illness. After recovering and leaving for a vacation, my relationship ended then and there, on a beach in the Pacific. I reeled after my long-distance phone call ended. I had no sense of who I was. That night my roommate and I watched deeply tanned hippie travelers breathe fire. Who are these people? Who am I? Gallons of alcohol later I woke up and went to breakfast. I sat in a strange French-Mexican fusion café and wrote. I filled notebooks with the ocean of loneliness I felt. Hours passed as my friends went to the beach. I looked on as travelers and tourists explored the fishing village. They held maps, looked confused, fresh from last night’s love-making, argument, drunken episode. I watched the hippie travelers pack up and plan for the next town. Daybreak shed an unforgiving light on their gypsy spectacles, which were merely wooden sticks laced with pitch after all.

Going to Mexico was like receiving the death card in a Tarot sequence. At first you are alarmed, fearing the ultimate end. After the shock subsides, you realize that this is just the beginning, the shedding of your chameleon skin so that you can emerge as something different.

Since Mexico my life has been defined by change. At times I have panicked and taken the first plane to a childhood home, to hide under the bedsheets until I’ve felt myself again. For the most part, I have accepted that I cannot close up anymore like an oyster. That while respite is all well and good, ultimately new experience is the basis of human growth. To quote, George Saunders, “Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”