Seventy Four

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before but I write under a pseudonym – Scout Price. Sometimes I wonder if I should write under my real name, or if it really matters at all.

I recently started following Caroline Calloway and today I was looking through her old posts and read in awe as she described her past relationships. It’s really brave to lay it all out like that and let the world into your life. Vulnerability can bring intimacy and draw you closer to your audience but also opens you to the possibility of deep hurt, if people don’t respond with love. I guess that’s the risk you run, and you have to take them both or none at all.

Scout Price is the combination of the characters that I’ve related to the most in books I’ve read – Scout Finch and the Price family in The Poisonwood Bible. I don’t write under a pseudonym because I have something to hide but it does make me feel freer to express my mind. Scout is the stripped back, raw version of myself, but all the time. She is never not honest and isn’t inhibited by the ordinary hum drum of life. Maybe one day I’ll write under my real name but until then, this is your gal – Scout.

Seventy One

An excerpt from my journalling this morning, I’ve been thinking about it all day:

Mornings can be hard. Today was one of those. I woke up in a funk, feeling that same dread of living in a reality that didn’t reconcile to what I thought/ expected/ feel I should be living in at twenty seven. My Saturday night was spent in, having wine and cheese with a close friend. But some of my flatmates went out and I wondered if I should have joined them afterwards, and if by not doing that I wasn’t living my best life.

I know that these expectations or “shoulds” are arbitrary and no indication of what a “good life” looks like. I know that I very much could have joined them afterwards but I didn’t want to. I know all of this, but I still feel like I’m missing something.

It’s that fear that I’m going to get to my 40s and look back and feel like I’ve wasted my 20s. Just like me now, looking back and feeling like I’ve wasted my late teens and early twenties.

But everything that I’m doing now is everything I want and if it isn’t then I should change that. I just need to be honest about what it is that I truly want and separate that from what I feel is expected of a twenty seven year-old.

The hard part is reconciling the versions of myself – the past me to the present me to the future me. The past me doesn’t feel like the present me and I’m scared that the future me will be different again, and result in more disjointed feelings in identity and life.

Perhaps the only way that that can be avoided is if we were static, unchanging beings. But that’s not reality. People are always changing. I’m changing. I’m not who I was when I was younger, and I’m glad for that.

So maybe the reconciliation of the versions of me doesn’t come from being the same, but in making peace with the fact that I was a different person back then, so of course I will feel estranged from that girl, but to also be kinder to myself. I was learning then, as I am now. I was on a journey to where I am today and all those decisions that I regret now has in some way lead me to here.

The same goes for the future. It may be that I’ll look back and wish I had done more, but all the future mes need to respect the past mes and the decisions she made, that that was what she wanted at the time.

I’m dynamic, always changing, shifting. I will ever be static so there are bound to be differences in the way I interpret situations, experiences, in the ways I make decisions. And that’s okay.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

We talk about this a lot in English Lit, to look at past texts with kindness because we know things now, that they didn’t back then. It’s not fair to judge their actions in the past using our current knowledge. And maybe that applies with me too.

Past me doesn’t know what the present me knows now, so how would she have made decisions that align with what I now know? I need to be kinder to her. She was just doing her best, just as I am now.

Seventy

Even though the past month has been really really good, there are still times when I think about how easy it was with him – that instant connection and surety of those feelings. Tonight is one of those times, and I miss him.

I miss the him that I knew when we were together, before all the heartbreak and hurt and pain. I miss having endless conversations that feed off each other like gas to fire. I miss the excitement and anticipation of knowing that I’ll see him at some point in the day.

I know that I’ll have that again, with someone who will stay. But that would also be a lot more convincing if I was already there, with someone else, rather than now where I can only cast my hopes for something like that in the future.

Sixty Eight

In the last year and a bit of living in this flat, I’ve bought frames and prints, plants and pots. I’ve drawn and painted and re-arranged furniture. I’ve slowly come to realise how influenced I am by my surroundings and I want my bedroom to foster inspiration and rest. I want to want to spend time there and feel good about it. Speaking of which, I should probably do some tidying this weekend.

Sixty Seven

Unique is a word that I’m becoming very familiar with. My pottery creations often come out wonky and far from perfect – unique. They are one of a kind because I’ve created them and no one else has the exact shape of my hands and certainly not the prints that run in faint lines across my palms and fingers. That’s quite special.

Sixty Six

Summer is slowly coming out of its slumber. I can feel it on days like today – the rain pelting down in the morning but making way for the sun to come through in the afternoon. It’s hella cold but you’ll still see Wellingtonians having drinks in the sun despite the edge in the wind. We’re hardy like that. Or maybe it’s stubbornness that drives us to sit shivering in our seats, cradling our cold beverages, eager to lap up any rays.

Summer is coming.