Walking home along the beach from my internet session, every new wave seemed to reach higher up than the last. It was high tide.
And I was thinking about something that I wrote in an e-mail just a moment ago. That I can’t seem to get the pieces of my personality to fit together right now.
It was just something I wrote without thinking. I do that sometimes. Get instant infatuations with wordings, without really knowing what I mean with them. But maybe now, here, I had managed to accidentally hit my head on the nail. Temporary personality incompatibilities.
My mother, who is a very wise, albeit quite chaotic, person, says that life is a neverending succession of cycles. We go through crises, lurches of development, stabilization and stagnation. Quite like the adaptive cycle of the resilience scientists, only on the very personal, psychological level. In that way of thinking, the idea that the pieces of my personality don’t fit at present isn’t such a far-fetched concept after all. It just means that I’m between the crisis and development phase. Things are as they should be, and I just need to ride it out.
It’s just. This has been going on for years. This being lost in one part of my life – then I think I’ve figured something out, just to have another part of me freak out or turn upside down and I just don’t feel like one person anymore. Molding my identity as a student, trying to figure out if the identity of a researcher is something that I could carry, rearranging my identities as a daughter, sister, niece, cousin, colleague, woman, friend. Most of all friend.
The epiphanies keep on coming, but they’re washed away just as fast. Like my foot prints here on the beach, being washed away by the ruthless, high-tide Atlantic. I think I know who I am, for a moment, and then it all comes crashing down again.
And, to be honest, today it all feels quite fine. The tropical beach might not be an inspiring landscape for me, and I’m not having any epiphanies. But walking barefoot on the sand, having the warm ocean occasionally wash over my feet, while the sun is turning into an orange behind the palm trees, puts me in a kind of stability. Temporary, for sure, but rest nonetheless.
My personalities might not fit, but what does the Atlantic care about that that? The tide will come and go and the only thing I can do is to see it happen. Wash away my footprints as if they never were even there. And that’s perfectly fine. Beautiful even.
Beautiful even.
Katja Malmborg 