Before They Named You

You were given a name. Later came descriptions: clever, difficult, shy, gifted, too much, not enough. Some were spoken tenderly. Others arrived as verdicts. And somewhere along the way, a description can begin to feel like a boundary.

I keep returning to this question: who were we before we learned which versions of ourselves would be welcomed?

I don’t mean a person without history, relationships or culture. Those things belong to us too. I mean the interests we learnt to dismiss, the instincts we edited, the possibilities we stopped considering because they did not fit the person we were supposed to be.

Perhaps you became the sensible one. The strong one. The person who could always be relied on. There may be truth and beauty in those descriptions. But a role can be true without being the whole truth.

What happens when the sensible one wants to make art? When the strong one wants to be held? When someone with an established career feels pulled towards something they cannot yet explain?

My interest is in that moment of recognition: the feeling that something unfamiliar to everyone else is, somehow, familiar to you.

Is that discovery? Remembering? The beginning of a self you have not yet lived? I’m happy to leave the question open long enough for it to become useful.

One way to explore it is to give a neglected part of yourself a little room. Write the page. Sing the song. Begin the conversation. You do not need to announce an entirely new identity before allowing yourself one honest experiment.

Then notice what happens. What feels awkward because it is new? What feels alive because it matters? What do you want to return to?

Perhaps becoming is partly learning which descriptions still fit—and which ones have been allowed to speak for too much of us.

Edlin