musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The I’s have it… don’t they?


Sometimes the Past is instructive; sometimes it is embarrassing. I mean, are we meant to learn from the past, or to learn when we’re actually in it, wallowing through its turbid eddies, lost in its sudden shadows? You’d think I would have figured it out by now, wandering as I am through my own autumn forest, and transfixed by the leaves falling around me. But I suppose that’s one of the cosmic mysteries we’re only allowed to ponder, not solve. A more definitive answer would certainly help -especially when I’m travelling; and more especially when I read some of my diary entries about travelling from my early days…

‘When you travel you enter a liminal space,’ I wrote; ‘it’s a threshold between where you were and where you have arrived; between the you in a different place and time, and the you where you now find yourself. The transition is often a surprise, because it is a different you experiencing it: not the you who was travelling (that’s the liminal part) and not the you who had yet to embark, nor even the arrivee; each is a different you.’

Of course when I read that now, Time seems disjointed. ‘We are always liminal,’ I had suggested. ‘We have left the past that we knew, and are constantly arriving in a future which we don’t. So then, who -or what– is travelling? And how can we reconcile the transition? Where, in other words, do we fit in -where do we live?’

I suppose I thought it was an interesting question in those days. I understood that it was normal to feel a sense of bewilderment on arrival in a new place -in fact, the sense of disorientation was what I enjoyed; it was why I travelled. Still, to lessen the strangeness and to enhance its value, I had resolved to research those places I intended to visit before I got on the plane so I would not be as confused when I arrived. But, of course I never did, so I remained befuddled; old habits die hard. I realized that knowing what I might be in for would spoil the wonder of it all. That was why I suspected that it was always a different me who arrived -not the me I thought I knew…

And yet, it seems I wondered if I could ever be certain if I’d recognize the me who arrived. ‘The me who stumbles around in the strange airport, wondering where and when the suitcases from the plane will arrive is often irritable and tired and in no mood to haggle with the taxi driver using the mispronounced vocabulary from an outdated phrase book. Deception -at least the kind so disguised at home- is suspected with every encounter; direct routes to the hotel are impossible to guess; the fare difficult to anticipate; and the smiles that surround the confusion so evident on my face, seem derisive and teasing through my red and flight-weary eyes. I forget about this part of travelling when I am at home, bored with the banalities of day to day existence; I long for escape -for any change, really.’

‘But’, I wrote, ‘when I think I’m changed -when I have finally arrived and submerged myself in a new environment, new customs, and a new language that I have to attempt to understand- have I really changed? Are the Me‘s truly different, or am I merely a variation of a past me still struggling to cope; still unsatisfied, albeit now situated in a future for which I’d hoped for so much more?’ I’m getting confused with all the Me‘s and I‘s… Why did I write this stuff and why am I reading it again after all these years…?

This is perhaps where I began to wonder about the thread to which I had been told I was attached -the one that tries to link a common me to every place and every time throughout the years. It’s where I had a suspicion that this was an illusion: ‘I am not the bespectacled kid still running from bullies on the playground after taunting them with clever words they never understood; I am not the wannabe philosopher whose mother warned him there was no future in that, except maybe as a librarian in some small, faraway prairie town; I am not even the person in the photograph that was supposedly me on graduation from university… Although they are all people from pasts I remember, I now realize they are not actually me -not the me right now anyway.’ It’s all very confusing.

Still, I have to admit that, in my memories at least, I can trace a pattern, a lineage. And ‘the protagonist in all of them is a simulacrum, a variation on who I am today -although with subtle alterations perhaps not easily seen by others who prefer their friend to remain the same, to remain a predictable entity. They want the me they have come to know. I respect that; I do not make a point of correcting them. I want their memories of all my Me’s to remain intact; a single thread is easier for them to manage.’

It was mainly when I travelled that I become aware of the disjointedness, because ‘Each new day in a new location has to be accepted as a different entity -and not by yesterday’s me, but from the perspective a child experiencing something not only unexpected, but also unique. Something requiring new skills, new thought processes previously not required -today’s me, not yesterday’s.’ Like I said: confusing to explain; more confusing to accept, and definitely difficult to read with all the invented cursive italics I’d used.

Indeed, the more I think about what I wrote in those ruminative days, the more I wonder if I accept any of it anymore. The very idea of a liminal I, an I whose existence is so evanescent, so infinitesimally transient in comparison with the past and future I’s, seems barely worth thinking about. And even when I consider the contradictions that bubble up when I consider my past I’s, and compare them with the time where I actually live, there doesn’t appear to be a point to it.

The very idea of liminality is itself impermanent; thresholds are just boundaries: lines that mark territories; lines that are functional only in delineating here from there. They are not bedrooms in which to linger, they are passages to somewhere else; elevators that open on different floors. Maybe which floor doesn’t even matter… Or is that still confusing?

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gozzter

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