Amy BoughnerSometimes I feel stuck between identities. It’s ingrained in me, because I grew up with one sister but I’m also the youngest of five. I have also become a lot of things I didn’t expect, and tried to be things I could never have been.
The title of mother still surprises me sometimes. I have transitioned from being on contract to being permanent at work and I forget.
I’ve worn the identify of fat most of my life – even through those times when I was unhealthily thin or healthy.
I’ve always been tall, but soon my child will outgrow me and I’ll be the shortest in my family.
Decades have passed without me being aware. Or at least that’s what it feels like. I have become a person who can reference things that happened 20 or 30 years ago in my own life.
I turn 40 in a few months and I have finally become mostly comfortable with my person. I am happy with the way I dress, I present myself to people authentically, I think.
But my internal voice is constantly asking me if I am who I think I am and whether I know what I think I know.
This week I’m getting teary over nonsense. I’ve started re-watching Sports Night – a show I watched avidly when it was on the air and many, many times on DVD since it was cancelled.
I know every episode. I know the storylines. It’s familiar and I love the characters and it made me want to be a television producer. And every single episode has made me teary.
Every. Single. Episode.
I was looking for something familiar that I could watch while working on my NaNoWriMo project and I was thinking about Sports Night because of a specific scene where Casey’s chair breaks and my husband’s chair was doing a similar slow descent and that scene makes me laugh every time.
Instead I’ve been watching episode after episode paying rapt attention to all the things I already know.
Because it’s simple.
I’m stepping back to the simple things and the things that make things easy. At the same time I’m trying to take time for the things that make me get back into myself. The reading, drawing, learning.
Maybe it’s all because we’ve lost so much in the past eight months. There’s so much that just hasn’t happened and won’t happen. Gaps in time. And we’re going to lose even more now.
We’re stuck between past and future. I’m stuck between who I am and who I believe I can be.
