becoming
2003-12-08
The last month of the year has swooped down upon the world too quickly, it seems. An entire year has flashed before my eyes, and yet it seems but an instant in the passage of time…an instant of great transitions, considerable endings, and frightening beginnings.
This year has mapped a significant and important stretch of that long, symbolic passage through adulthood which stretches ever onwards. Having seen my twentieth summer, my twentieth winter, and all that lies in-between, the beginning of my second decade of life has truly been like no other. This year, I have journeyed to the centre of my nation; walked the deepest passages of my mind, gained a driver’s licence, finished my first university degree, resolved to write a thesis, and found many a surprising friend at my side. I have come to know more of what love is, and also what it isn’t. I have faced my doubts and met the criticisms of others with more grace, courage and fortitude than ever before. But most significant of all has been my resolve to make the hard choices and stand by my convictions, not out of stubbornness, but out of finally having the gusto to remain stalwart in the affirmation of who I am, what I stand for, and what I want to become.
If for nothing else, this year has been important because I have not sold myself out. I have lost things this year that once defined and comforted me, and yet I have not lost myself in their absence. I have not substantially caved in for social convention, nor have I given myself needlessly to others merely for the sake of it. At the beginning of the year, I braved a long and trying trip to Canberra which challenged every fibre of my being, and though it was difficult to endure it at times, I came back with more confidence, more courage and endurance than I have ever really had. I also learned to appreciate the value of friendship, and the warmth of company. My family still notices how much more comfortable I have become with myself and the world because of that ‘adventure’: how much more willing I am to try new things and engage myself. True, there have also been times when I have despaired, when I have been frightened and lonely, when I have been gripped by the deepest of doubts and overwhelmed by the seeming futility of my ideals. But none of this has brought me low for very long, not like it once did. Au contraire; it has actually fortified my will to continue on in the face of it all.
What I have truly discovered this year; what I now know rather than merely understand, is the truth of a cliché: I can only ever feel reward in life when I am being ‘true to myself’. It sounds corny, but honestly, it is something that anyone living in this postmodern, highly individualised industrial society should learn from the outset. Discover who you are, what makes you tick, and then live your life in as much accordance with that self-portrait as you can achieve. But also, know that your identity and your environment will change and evolve – let your choices and your beliefs bend with those changes, and accept them as inevitable. Knowing these things has meant that my life and my context in the world have begun to make a hell of a lot more sense.
There is nothing better for the human mind than things making sense. It is the mathematician’s rapture at solving an equation, the artist’s fulfilment in transforming thought into a rare and affecting form, the carpenter’s pride in making furniture from a chunk of wood, and the scientist’s ‘Eureka!’ in a bathtub. But is it, in this world which now insists on uncertainty, bureaucracy and ambiguity, a simple impossibility to want to make sense out of anything? Is it merely childish to want to understand things today, when so much of human thought is now like a grumpy, cynical old man, loath to make sense of anything in an age so far from youth? Am I not contradicting my comments earlier this year that I have truly become a sceptical and resigned postmodern child? Perhaps, perhaps. But in a world where anything goes; where pluralities thankfully reign, and the authoritative is giving way to the personal and the multiple perspectives, why should it matter if I strive for my own kind of sense; if we all search for our own meanings? Why should it matter if one person embraces uncertainties, and another turns uncertainties into poetry? That is the freedom and the chaos of it all.
This year, I have made my way towards the age of twenty-one – a symbolic adult by all accounts. But I have also made my way towards a woman who is much closer to myself than any of those sad impostors of the past. I have not sought absolute certainty; I have not clung to childhood too strongly, though I do mourn the loss of that childish essence in some of my beloved friends. I have not been perfectly happy, but nor have I been hopelessly sad. I still miss my pet dog Willow and my favourite TV show and the feeling that I know where I am headed, vocationally. I still get nervous when I drive in a manual, rather than automatic, car. I still want a job that is more than a job. I still get shy. I still want more. But above all of this, my twentieth year of existence has shown me that I am powerful enough to be who I am, and to make sense of the world in my own way. This is a claim I have never truly been capable of making until now.
What a year it has been.
“The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.” – Michel Montaigne, Essays, III.13
