Identity. It’s a distinctive patchwork of the things that define you. The things you believe in, the people you love; the work you do, your interests and talents. The building blocks you stack and use to place yourself in the world, and which enable you to find your tribe.
A tribe doesn’t have to be large. Unlike Facebook, it’s not a list of everyone you’ve ever met. It’s the people you gravitate to for acceptance and comfort, for support, validation, and laughter. There’s no better feeling than knowing you have found your people.
Like DNA, each of us has a unique identity, a tangle of lived experience, growth, knowledge and choices. There’s no-one quite like you. No other person will have the same mix of ingredients, or walk the same path, or be loved or hurt in the same way. You may believe scars are evidence of a life truly lived, but they are not always of a lesson learned. Live, rinse, repeat. Like never-ending homework. It’s all too easy to fall back into your own familiar footprints.
Should you expect wisdom as you go through life? Should you expect to get through life without any scars? No, and no, would be my response. This world can be a boot camp experience, and these days it’s hard core.
Part of me likes the assumption that the gritty rough and tumble of life is character building. However, given the choice between the easy path, and the walking-on-coals option, I’d choose the first. (Or get some really thick soled boots.)
If you’ve had your own mountain to climb lately, then you may relate to my current impatience. Life lobbed a particularly disruptive hand grenade at me last year, and since then I’ve been racing to an unseen finishing line, wanting the fallout to be over. It’s been ten months now, and I want to move on, to have things return to normal. But wanting it and getting it are poles apart. And like it or not, I have a new normal ahead of me because like any crisis, it has changed me. Added another layer. A scar. Something I wish I could bury and forget.
When you feel broken, it’s hard to remember your put-together self, let alone to imagine how you’ll ever be whole again. For the last few months I’ve been in mourning, grieving the loss of a part of me which feels irreparably damaged. It also relates to myself as a writer; that part of my identity. Writing didn’t break me as such; no, because I delight in the process, falling down the rabbit hole and losing all sense of time. I could live there, in that Wonderland.
It was the aftermath; the struggle of marketing as a self-published writer, the difficulties of breaking through and being seen when you are a grain of sand on an immense beach. Amazon is overflowing with the hopes of millions of other writers and their books. Unless a book is carried to shore by a freak wave how else is an unknown writer ever to be discovered? The publishing world is the most punishing of boot camps. Perhaps I was lucky to get out alive.
I had to take a break from writing and heal myself. Perhaps that’s why I feel so lost (for words) in this void, because so much of my identity belongs to writing. The way I think and see and record the world; the joy of words jumbling through my brain. Who am I if I am not a writer?
So I face a difficult choice. The one thing I truly love hurt me the most. Or rather, the love of it broke me. I’m not sure of the wisdom of live, rinse, repeat in this instance. Is this a lesson learned, or one to ignore?
Perhaps it would be wise to walk away. Or perhaps scars and brokenness level the playing field, and remind us to bask in the spotlight should it ever fall upon us.
Scars carry their own stories. Like words on a page they are the scribbled record of your life on skin. Eventually they will be the fireside tales you’ll tell of your journey from there to here, your face glowing orange before the flames as you talk of how those moments changed you.
That’s what I say to myself as I consider this changed version of myself. There’s no one quite like me.
Isn’t that the point?
Angela J Dawson 
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