Are you familiar with that phrase? As I wrote it, it seemed so cliché, as if the world would know exactly what I meant – but then my usual sense to second-guess came in and it just seems off. Maybe I’ve altered a coined phrase wrongly.
The point is this: I have and currently do, own so many different voices, sometimes it seems there’s no amalgamation. I am at different points:
- The party girl with the dirty mind,
- The sensitive soul, who wants nothing more than to heal others,
- The philosopher, intent on expanding her own and other’s horizons,
- The mother of Isobel, both boistering and limiting, intent on teaching, discipline and caring,
- The bibliophile, obsessively taking to words on a page at a cost of sleep,
- The bearer of bad news, guilt trips and castration,
- The lover, giving and simply whole-seeming.
All of these different facets exist at different points in time – none coexist. I cannot be the lover at the same time as the dirty-minded rake; being Isobel’s mom cannot happen while I am being the bibliophile. I can try to put on more than one hat, but ultimately, I end up failing in all directions, not just the additional ones.
It’s caused me a lot of identity crises over the years. I can remember speaking of it during one rare conversation with my mother when I was 11 – that I didn’t know who I was, because it was as if I was eight people living in one mind at different times, sharing space, but only when the other people had vacated. My brain seemed a time-share, to put it in more real-world terms.
And it’s gotten more complex over the years and a lot of those people I am have been crafted, leaving me literally with no identity other than a sham of a scam of a person who doesn’t exist.
I’ve been writing a lot, lately – here, there, not everywhere, but also in between. And each address that my words call home is written by a different person.
A beauty editor is peppy and positive, using words like fabulous and glorious in a completely unsarcastic way. The baby advisor is half intellect and half peer – though that peer is refined from stereotyped jokes, 100 ways to say ‘your baby’ and a hidden alternative health agenda. The aspiring novelist wants to put characters to page like the one that you know here, but doesn’t know how to do that fictitiously. The blogger is right from the heart, but still censoring slightly so as not to bring politics or religion or hatred thereof to the page.
All different, nothing the same.
It makes me truly wonder if writing will be a peaceful or tormenting thing to me. If I can make it as a writer – have people option and buy and ask me to autograph my words one day – will it mean a further dissolution of self? Has there ever been a Self? Will there ever be.
But now, I must pause to remove my blogging hat and return to the infant advisor persona, then drink some more of the drug du jour – mon café avec beaucoup de chocolat et une demie-cuillère de sucre – and put more angst into a novel that has no direction or maybe even future.
