Beyond Selidor

Day 2. Who are you? In comparison to who you used to be? What made you change?
I am a person with a fragmentary identity, a different person depending on the people around me.

I am where I come from: the daughter of Keri and Jim, the sister of Mim, Kitty and Nell, the granddaughter of Eileen and Fred and Peter and Friedl, a Phillips woman, a Canberran, a Sydneysider.

I am the identities I claim: an ASNaC, a sraffie, an Obernetter, a Usydgrouper, a nerd, a geek, an internet person, a student, a book-reviewer, a library worker, a woman who worked in patisseries. A reader.

I am the emotions I feel: all of them.

I am the relationships I have: girlfriend of M, friend of too many people to name, secure knowing that I love and am loved.

I am my beliefs and ideologies: a feminist, a social-democrat, an atheist.

I am my words and deeds: the acceptance thereof.

I write about exile having never felt more included, more connected in my life.

I believe I am always changing, so there was no one point where I can say, 'There, there I turned a corner and everything changed', except that I used to be a much more unhappy and disappointed person, much less secure in myself. And it was Cambridge, Cambridge and the internet - specifically the sraffies of The Republic of Heaven - that changed me. After these two places, I was myself again. They gave me strength and confidence and love and by some miracle got me out of the six-year-long depression into which I had fallen, and I am forever grateful.

ETA: I got to thinking about why it is that Cambridge and the 'Pub changed me, and I realised it was because that in both those places, for the first time in over two decades, I had to be myself and build myself from the beginning, without any external references. I was coming into both those situations unknown. And that was both liberating and empowering.

( the other days )