Wondering Who You Are

July 2024

My library card has become my greatest ally this summer. I’ve taken to borrowing 3 books at a time because I am devouring them so feverishly, and frankly I’m a little lazy about going back and forth to the library. Last summer I indulged in fantasy and romantasy, especially while I toiled away at a part time job that was more often than not, dead.

This summer I’ve been leaning into literary fiction and memoir, primarily stories about women (Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, omg just go get it). Yesterday I just plopped back into the book return a memoir called “Wondering Who You Are”, a story about a couple navigating life and relationship after a traumatic brain injury erases the husbands memory. In it Sonya Lea poses striking contemplations about who we are, what makes us, and what our histories really mean if we can’t remember them. What do we do with our grief over a loss of someone who hasn’t died? And how do we learn to arrive in new ways to old relationships that are nothing like they used to be?

Story, memory, are how humans have always constructed meaning. We look to understand ourselves and what life is as a whole by telling our stories, telling the tales of our ancestors and the land. We contextualize ourselves in the immensity of space and time by upholding a personal narrative, one that draws a line though experience to create a landing place. We know who we are, in part because of who we’ve already been.

It is a lush, heart wrenching, and gutsy tale of love, loss, and the willingness to start again. I spend many of my own days wondering who I am, what I’m doing here, and what my life is for. In losing his memory, Richard also is without his preferences, his old behaviors, his former skills. But what arises in their place is presence- not beholden to the past or who he was supposed to become, his wife remarks at how both of their experience of the here and now is irrevocably altered.

The reading of this book has coincided with my own reckoning of the past- in my own time travel I’ve been returning to former versions of myself as a way to uncover who I am, what is important to me. I’ve found in my own process of spiritual seeking and laser like focus in the worlds of yoga, wellness, and spirituality that it is really easy to become hemmed in and flat. Rather than letting the teachings open up the world around me, there are times when I instead let it become narrow. Do yoga for the sake of yoga, and keep learning yoga so you can be better at yoga to teach people yoga, and yoga is also what you do for fun so do yoga more but just with friends who also love yoga. Dizzy from the chasing of my own tail, I’ve craved a chance to zoom out and remember other stars in the constellation of Sonia.

But what I have also found, is that I’m quite adept at romanticizing, and throwing things away for the sake of grabbing at others. In the past, I would completely reinvent myself in a new image, forsaking what came before as generally useless to me in my new form. I have Adam to thank for the astute observation, “that’s kind of immature.” (he’s also totally right)

Tempered by this story and the bits of maturity I’ve picked up along the way, I’m realizing that it’s not about going back and becoming someone new, picking up a thread from when I was 16 and becoming that person. But rather, can I just welcome my whole self to the situation? Can I love yoga and also want to be a writer? Would it be possible for me to enjoy singing kirtan as well as practicing my little runway strut in the mirror, going jet-skiing, watching raunchy comedies and geeking out about wine? When the habit of reducing myself to a single thing or identity arises, can I welcome a little space into my view? I may never become who I once was, but I think in it’s own way our memories and experiences season us. They remind us that though the present moment is only here, only now, who we are is a gorgeous kaleidescope that somehow persists in that singularity. I’m learning to try and hold all of myself, which is turning out to be rather voluptuous in my interests. I hope my belly becomes full with contradictions, and I become like those recipes that sound insane on the recipe card but prove themselves to be a revelation.

I’m tired of goodness and perfection and upholding an idea of what I should look like as someone who just happens to be like, really into God. I want to hold that love of the divine in a really cute purse, with the shoes to match. The funniest thing is, no one ever asked me to get small. My smallness was my own response to my confusion- how can a person be and feel so many things at one time?!? It’s not to discredit the very real influences of culture, society, ancestral momentum, etc, but ultimately I’ve been the one remedying my discomfort with contraction. I thought becoming just one thing would make me able to slow my mind and “be here now.” But what I’ve experienced is the opposite of that, because all the while all those desires and parts of myself were just rumbling under the surface- not gone, but silenced. Peace, satisfaction, equanimity, all exist in a world that is alive and complex and layered. So why would I assume I had to erase all those parts of myself to enter them? Perhaps I actually need all of my layers and strange conflicting parts to be eligible for satisfaction, because it is after all, an affirmative experience. It affirms life, desire, appetite, and sense of self.

I think to what my astrologer and mentor has told me more than a few times, that yoga is about becoming completely who you are. So in it’s own bizarre way, all these seemingly contradictory layers of myself are exactly what yoga has been asking me to become. I’m excited to behold her, in all of her glory.