Who am I…?

I was reading an article on The Marginalian, Ursula le Guin on dogs and cats, on identity, on life and youth and beauty and memory. And I went down my own memory lane, sometimes a little overgrown with flowers whose scents I have almost forgotten and tangled vines and nettle patches, but the path is still there, that path I have walked.

Who am I? Am I still in any way shape or form that ten year old child who was plucked from Europe and planted into Africa and expected to thrive in that alien soil?

Am I the 14-year-old who ended up in an English boarding school because educational clashes between European and “Other” school calendars threatened the timeline of my graduating from high school?

am I the older teenager who has just walked into her college days?

Am I the girl who swam with dolphins, or posed for a “glamour shot” on a beach in Tahiti?

Am I the writer?

 

Am I the photographer?

Am I “the hair”?

Am I the con-going fan, and professional speaker and panelist?

Am I the treasured daughter? The beloved wife?

Am I the person who once thought, when she was still very young, that she would for sure die before she was 37 – which, at that time, probably felt OLD? Am I the “old soul” who was born ancient in spirit, or am I really the old woman whom I see in the mirror these days and wonder how she got there and what happened to that redhead who still thinks that tortoiseshell hair combs match her hair?

WHo am I? I mean, does anyone even want to know any more?

Does it matter…?

Or am I simply not anyone specific at any time at all and I simply walking that path, and moment by moment changing and becoming something different with every step I take?

How do I know?

What I carry with me isn’t beauty – I was never “beautiful”, not in that sense, although I have certain claims to bits of me (see up-post, the hair). It isn’t accomplishment, although I have shelves full of books which I have written and stories I have created along the way. It might be all the love that has buoyed me in this harsh world, first that unconditional love of my grandmother, then the support I always got from my parents, and finally the twenty years of life with a man who always had my back and who chose to fight every health challenge, every misfortune, every existential plothole in his way so that he could be there for me in any way I needed whenever I needed him. But now all that love is gone, everyone who loved me is gone – and so who am I, in this twilight, alone, with only my cats for company?

Was it worth it, the journey that brought me to this place?

How do I know?

Who am I…?