(Cover photo by Ineke van Wyk)
Everything is soft here – the rain, the light, the language. It’s autumn, but still warm enough to sit outside a café in the afternoon or stroll the Jardine des Tuileries at dusk. The streets and city lights glimmer with the unknown, yet I feel profoundly at home. Something in me recognises this place. The experiences are layered with a quality of memory as if I had existed here many lifetimes ago. As we amble down Rue Yvonne le Tac, a fragment of a sentence catches my eye. It’s written in chalk on a blackboard in the window of a little bookshop. “… so many unfinished selves…” (Paris, September 2022)
This is an extract from the journal I kept while travelling last year. I remember writing this, sitting in La Bohème, gazing at the artists and tourists milling about on the cobblestone streets of Montmartre. Piano music spilt out of the café windows and flowed into a fusion of diverse languages. I ended up reworking these scattered musings into a birthday letter for a friend. My wish was that he would always have unfinished selves, like books next to one’s bed waiting to be read or fragmented forgotten thoughts in drawers anticipating the transformation into poetry. It is so easy to think that who you are now is all there is, but humans are kaleidoscopes of undiscovered passions, aches, warmth, desires. To be open to the possibility of unfinished selves might be scary because it means letting go of any notion of a fixed and rigid identity, letting go of what is familiar and safe. But when you honour your curiosity and follow the unexpected morsels of small excitements like clues, you might just uncover new parts of yourself that got lost along a rigid trajectory.
As a child, I treated dreams and goals as if they were shiny toys, and I could have as many and as dissimilar ones as I pleased. I wasn’t raised with the idea that every child is assigned a specific aisle, that you can choose, but your choice is limited to a particular brand or type. My daily ambitions oscillated between becoming the president, a writer, a coffee shop owner, a CEO, a nomad surfer, a military officer, a movie director or a tennis player, to name but a typical Tuesday. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t surfed a day in my life, hated politics or played mediocre tennis. In my mind, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. I was brimming with partial, ongoing selves. Looking back at it now, I realise that these fledgling visions were clues to the substantial passions I entertain and work towards now. My dream of becoming president really just stemmed from a love of public speaking and a desire to help people. Today that translates into working as a tutor at the university and, one day, hopefully being a professor of English literature. The aspiration of joining the military and playing Wimbledon indicated my longing to be the strongest and most physically capable version of myself. Wanting to become a nomad surfer has its roots in a yearning for freedom, something I get every time I go on a long trail run through the mountains. See, the idea isn’t to fulfil every childhood flight of fancy but to allow it to lead you to the parts of yourself that you can flesh out into a beautiful and authentic existence.
But at some point, that reckless dreamer turned into an eighteen-year-old with a rigid sense of self and steely conviction about the future. I would be a writer and build a merchandising business related to that. That was the plan, and nothing could change it. I didn’t believe that there was anything still to learn about myself. I treated all these wildly unrelated dreams as mere lacunae, pockets of daydreams, eddies appearing and disappearing amidst the flow of the everyday. Then, a year and a half later, I started running. That lead me to discover the captivating world of health and wellness. Before I knew it, I was enrolled in a health coaching program. Suddenly, I started dreaming of opening my own wellness retreat for writers. I wanted to help people uncover their best and most creative selves; I wanted to start a blog that interweaved all these diverse passions of mine and maybe even run a marathon. Well, look at me now. I wouldn’t have been here if my experience at university hadn’t dislodged that fixed sense of self that I clung to at eighteen. I followed the breadcrumbs, the little delights, and the burning blend of nervousness and excitement in my chest. All these things are threads leading from unfinished selves to a wealth of possibilities.
If you look for these clues in your everyday life, you might surprise yourself with how much of you there is still to discover. Every passion doesn’t necessarily have to become a profession, but it can become a purpose, a hobby, something that feeds your joy and creativity. Allow yourself the space to explore and the time to indulge. Don’t limit your passions or the possibility of evolving. A lifetime is a long time, enough to meet every potential self and become intimate with their dreams. And when you do that, maybe it would feel like that sensation of unhomed belonging or strange familiarity I experienced in Paris. Whenever I uncover an unfinished self, I encounter a whole new place, yet I feel profoundly at home because it was within me, waiting for me all along. The experience is layered with a quality of memory, an “oh, now I remember you,” as if I had existed as this version of myself many lifetimes ago.
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