Making Sense of a Changing World

The past 18 months have stripped us of many of the hooks we formerly hung our identities on. What we do with our time has and always will be a hugely defining element of who we are, but the way we've spent our hours has looked incredibly different for us all this past year. As we therefore emerge from this collective time of distance from our workplaces, social interactions and the physical places we rooted ourselves in, we have a beautiful opportunity to recognise the changes that have happened deep within us all.

In her brilliant monthly newsletter, 'The Hyphen', Emma Gannon recently refers to her experience over the past year as less 'an identity crisis, but more of an identity cleanse'. I think there's something so valuable in this reflection - to consider ourselves cleansed, cleaned from the unhelpful identity hooks we used to know and gifted with the opportunity to redress ourselves as we emerge, like empty canvasses awaiting new colour.

Having recently moved to London and finding myself in many a new social circle, I introduce myself to new people almost every day, responding to the (infamous) question, ... So what do you do? . While so straight-forward an ask, I'm always confronted with the difficulty of answering this question with authenticity. We all do it, we begin to gather the pieces of who we are and attempt to articulate our whole self into a single sentence. My workplace, job role, where I call home, where I now rent a flat. Incomplete and uncomfortable, I don't think I'd recognise myself from my answer. We offer up a tiny number of scattered pieces from the complex puzzles that make up who we truly are; not untrue, just a vastly fragmented and incomplete picture of ourselves.

Throughout the pandemic, we haven't had to attempt this identity game with one another so often. We've met far fewer people, entered limited new social contexts, and by contrast we've lived within the relatively familiar contexts of our homes, families and friends. Rather than daily presenting ourselves to the world, we've instead kept our own company. Have we, perhaps for the first time, truly introduced ourselves to ourselves? Physically defining factors have been moved off the top spot in our identities and replaced by far deeper, truer qualities of who we really are. We have dissembled the versions of ourselves who arrived at 2020, and rerooted ourselves around what is important to us.

So as our so called 'Freedom Day' has come and gone, and we find ourselves unlocked from the restrictions of the past year, it feels as though we are emerging from a collective hibernation. But hibernation is far from passive, it's not a stop or a shutdown. Hibernation is a survival mechanism, it's a means of conserving energy to survive the most adverse of weather conditions. The pandemic certainly brought in its wake some of the most adverse, challenging and painful conditions that we've faced both individually, nationally and globally. So, in this momentary release, let's grasp this opportunity to emerge kinder, more authentic and truer to the selves we've uncovered along the bewildering journey of the past 18 months.