Re-Inventing the "Real"

Who do you say I am?

Every few months, it seems, I face the shocking truth that I am not the same person I was a few years ago, a few months ago - hell, a few minutes ago. I'm not talking here about the fascinating creepiness of the much quoted factoid that a person's skin is regenerated every seven years, although that is a thought that frequently keeps me up at night sweeping the floor of the discarded bits of myself. I am talking about the ever-lasting fascination I have with identify: the way who I am and what I do changes depending on the place I do it, and the name I use.

My mother named me within hours of my birth, but before I even came home from hospital, she had re-named me with the nickname my family uses. She says now she did it to give me a choice, and that has been borne out in my life. The trouble is not choice, but consistency - I have never been good at giving the right name in proper context, and by now, nearing my fifties, I am hopelessly confused - my 'professional' name is commonly used by people I consider intimate friends, but met on-line or through work, while my 'family' name is used by many I would prefer not to be acquainted with at all.

And the name is just one aspect of the problem. For 15 years, I taught a skill I now am paid to perform. I was a director; now I am back to being a performer under someone else's direction. I stopped writing nearly a year ago this month, and yet I have more to say than ever, and am more confident in my ability to say it well. I keep turning in a new direction, then turning back to look longingly at where I was: unhappy and frustrated as I was there.

I may never find the person I want to be, may never decide on one single persona to fill for the rest of my life. My history, my varied interest, my very name(s) argue against such integration of all the things that compel and intrigue me. I am like a fractured mirror: there are too many people in my life that are given one small reflection of me for me to ever pull it all together into one portrait. Some of that was protection, some fear, some simply circumstance. I cannot, and perhaps would not change any part of me to make a different whole.

But I find the process of disintegration and reformation sometimes exhausting. It cannot be a coincidence that these periods come on the heels of concerns about physical and mental health, about profession and money and family. I know these dark days - these questioning, troubling times - usually pass by like the storm presently dumping a month's worth of rain over the next two days. Beware of the floods, and know that the waters will recede.

And I will be a new person, washed clean by the storm.

Again.