Please, don't ask me who I am.

I’ve never longed for August to end before, like I do now. I can’t put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it’s because I feel like summer is taunting me. The sun is going to shine for a little longer, and the evenings are still threatening to linger on, a little later. Supposedly thirty is in the summer of your life, no longer a spring lamb finding their feet, I should be full of energy, wisdom and direction. But I’m tired. I’m craving the vignette of autumn, a subtle but present border around the days, a blanket of cool in the morning, the creep of darkness in the evening; the certainty of September.

I don’t know if September will ever stop feeling like a punctuation mark in my year. It makes me want to sharpen my pencils and get an early night. September means the possibility that summer brings, is coming to an end. It feels like being freed from mandated freedom. Summer fizzes and prickles, it encourages you to chase the night, to hope for miracles, to say yes. Maybe after thirty summers this magic is starting to wear off.

The start of a new school term was always such a sensory experience. The smell of a new school shirt, the squeak of an overstuffed pencil case, the butterflies of nervousness and excitement that come with entering a new year. To think how long a year used to feel is disconcerting, almost unimaginable. A summer felt like six months, a year felt like a lifetime. Sometimes now, I will find myself waking up on a mid-May morning, scrambling to remember how five months hurtled by without my even noticing. If I think about it too much, it becomes terrifying, just how quickly time passes, now. And yet, I am itching for autumn.

Recently, I have felt more present in my body, more aware of the way I give away my time. People pleasing is such an uninteresting concept in the age of ‘you don’t owe anyone anything’, hustle-culture and therapy speak. I, for one, do think we owe each other a lot. Not everyone, but most people we choose to have in our lives we owe respect, kindness, and patience. But just like summer demands us to turn our faces to the sun, to embrace its endless potential and frivolity, so too should we allow ourselves to turn inwards when it passes. To collect our learnings from each season, to keep and discard practises as we change and grow. I feel my life in seasons that go beyond the weather. I cycle through periods of action, fallow time and growing pains. I am in the latter phase, currently. These periods are irregular and random, but over time I have noticed their pattern, the continuous cycle of push, pull and pause.

I call it growing pains because it can hurt, it comes with introspection and accountability. It is forcing yourself to look into the mirror of your recent history, and wade through each choice, dissecting the butterfly effect detonated afterward. Some things get easier simply through age, practise and necessity. Some lessons are hard learnt. Sometimes you end up with more questions than answers.

I came across this quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals,

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

I realised that this is what this particular summer has shown me. Summer is exposing by nature, we wear less, we aim to care less, we show ourselves more nakedly and plainly, we chase the holidays of our past; we reconnect with our childishness.

I am still slowly packing up the boxes in my mind, of the future my recent relationship housed. I have found myself facing the empty spaces where my own certain desires and wants should be. It’s tempting to fill these gaps with other people’s ideas of me, to seek out advice, to follow a better trodden path. But in the mirror of my past, I can see I have already done this time and time again. So, to get further forward without just floating down a directionless stream, I must once again, go in search of myself.

I am often searching for myself in stories that can be told the morning after, gathering up anecdotes as evidence of a life well lived. Collecting laughter as proof that I have a purpose. Outsourcing my identity to the validation of others. I exist in a million tales I have littered across the population of my friends. But when the dust settles, and Sunday calls for me to get my affairs in order, and the laundry is folded and the lists for Monday have been written and the inanities of domesticity have been cleared, I am often left thinking the same as Plath. Please, do not ask me who I am.

I found myself then looking to Sylvia Plath for more unsatisfactory answers, and found this,

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

There is a certain paralysis that comes with possibility. It is why I want summer to end.  I am plagued by possibility. I am jealous of people who have a plan, who know themselves so truly and so deeply that each day is a step towards the next. Summer used to intoxicate me because it indulged what I thought was my natural state. A lack of structure and rhythm, a go-where-the-wind-blows, laissez-faire, female flaneur. I allowed myself to believe that I would simply happen upon myself whilst following adventure. That answers would come to me through love, or that I’d find them in the small hours of the night. I wanted the answer to wash over me in a dream or be presented to me by someone wiser.

It is only now that I am craving the confidence to find out who I am, to pay store to my intuition, to listen to my gut. As the evenings shorten and the planes hit the tarmac, as parents prepare for their houses to be quieter and children anticipate a new school term, I am ready to welcome my own return, to myself. Perhaps my biggest adventure, yet.