Beautiful essay, Pam. I see a depiction of disassociation in your archaeology metaphor that feels so familiar to me, at once heartbreaking and comforting. It's deeply melancholy to think I'll never be able to truly understand my past self and will continually justify and reinterpret his actions in ways that are completely detached from what felt true at the time. But it's also comforting to imagine myself as a place - one that has existed for a long time and will exist long into the future, past my death, even if only as a misunderstood and poorly maintained record.
A thought I think you imply but that I'd extend the metaphor to explicitly: making a piece of art in the first place feels like an act of fragmentation, not just because of the way we're all imperfect like you write about in your conclusion, but because there's no way an artist could ever put their entire self into a single work. One piece could never even sum up my experience of a single identity. You make a thing, you do your best to be authentic to it, and even if you achieve the impossible task of making it perfect, it will still just be one artifact on the beach of who you are at any given moment.
This was a beautiful read! Thank you for taking the time to express all this. As a cis-male person, even though I am from a latino country, I can only connect with some of the things you say, but it's always great to get to know what someone may be going through better. It certainly feels inspirational in a way as well, as we should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them <3
Beautiful essay, Pam. I see a depiction of disassociation in your archaeology metaphor that feels so familiar to me, at once heartbreaking and comforting. It's deeply melancholy to think I'll never be able to truly understand my past self and will continually justify and reinterpret his actions in ways that are completely detached from what felt true at the time. But it's also comforting to imagine myself as a place - one that has existed for a long time and will exist long into the future, past my death, even if only as a misunderstood and poorly maintained record.
A thought I think you imply but that I'd extend the metaphor to explicitly: making a piece of art in the first place feels like an act of fragmentation, not just because of the way we're all imperfect like you write about in your conclusion, but because there's no way an artist could ever put their entire self into a single work. One piece could never even sum up my experience of a single identity. You make a thing, you do your best to be authentic to it, and even if you achieve the impossible task of making it perfect, it will still just be one artifact on the beach of who you are at any given moment.
This was a beautiful read! Thank you for taking the time to express all this. As a cis-male person, even though I am from a latino country, I can only connect with some of the things you say, but it's always great to get to know what someone may be going through better. It certainly feels inspirational in a way as well, as we should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them <3