If nothing else can be said about 2020, it’s definitely been a year where I’ve had to carefully consider what things are really most important to me. This week (or month, really) has only continued that process, pushing certain things that had dominated my life for so long into the background as I focus on loved ones at home. As this includes my PhD life, I apologise that I have not been able to stay as active on social media or maintain the weekly blogs. But, while I haven’t been writing, I have been thinking. Hope you’re ready for some half-developed thoughts and pictures of beautiful places!
This whole being home thing, combined with prepping a presentation for an upcoming conference and my getting ready to dive back into the critical side of my PhD, has made me think a lot about the part home plays in shaping our identities. As a writer, I spend half my life creating characters and figuring out how they fit together. Take one of the characters from Shifting Sands, Nayoub, for example. He grew up as the youngest son of a spice sellers, coddled by his mother who could afford to indulge his every wish, but forever struggling to outshine his older brothers. Despite joining the Temple – which discourages its priests from indulging personal wants – Nayoub still holds a great appreciation for pretty things, along with plenty of ambition (though he tries to convince himself that these ambitions are for the Gods). He wants to be the best at something, anything. And so much of this can be rooted back to his early home life.
Home also comes up a lot in researching identity. Talk of longing for home, trying to create a sense of home in new communities, moving away from home… I find it interesting to read up about this because there are bits I connect to and others that I have to place myself in the shoes of someone else to understand. For me, home is a complicated question. At the beginning of this post, I referred to myself as having to focus on home stuff. In this case, I meant my life in Scotland, with some of my oldest friends but, when I talk to them of returning to Wales, I also call that “going home”. I go home when I visit my parents, despite this being a different place from my friends, and both locations are completely different parts of Scotland compared to my childhood home.
When I first moved away from Scotland, I didn’t feel homesick, but it was just different enough for me to feel out of place at times. The parts of myself that I see as being particularly Scottish – the humour, the socialist leanings, the desire to be part of the wider world – didn’t always align with the views of my new world, and this often meant explaining my meanings or points of view more often. It could be fun, it could be frustrating, but I didn’t think it had too much of an impact on me. Living in Australia for a year was far more jarring, after all. Returning to Scotland on this most recent occasion has, however, indicated that there may be things I’ve missed.
Despite my visit being related to circumstances that were not the happiest, I’m the most relaxed version of me than I have been in a while. I’m not really sure what this means, but I do wonder if this is somehow related to the masks we wear. I recently read an article about the fact we tend to create a constructed identity, or mask, when we undertake a particular role. A nurse, for example, may put on their uniform and become a particular version of themselves that suits the environment and the community it makes them part of. When they return home, they may have child-rearing responsibilities that require a different mask. As someone who struggles with social anxiety, and often find myself clinging to my work masks (uniforms give me power apparently), this makes sense to me. It’s not necessarily that you’re a different you, it’s just that the situation emphasises the parts of you that are needed in that role. I’ve known for a long time that I do this for my different work roles. I didn’t think that my Wales-based self was too different from my Scottish-self, but does this sudden feeling of relaxation mean that I have been? Or maybe it’s just that I have different selves for different groups of people. I don’t like blending social groups, after all.
While I’m not sure what all this means, I do find it interesting to reflect on, particularly as I notice that there are parts of myself that are way more important when I’m in Wales than when I’m here. There are subjects that I’m passionate about that don’t fit here, so they’re left to only be mine. Unshared, when at my other home they would be a focal point in who I think I am. Coming back to Scotland for this long stint hasn’t been like stepping back into who I was before. Instead, it’s more like sinking into your spot on the couch and finding that you didn’t need to bring that bag of Malteasers with you because someone already left you a bag of Minstrels.
Writing, research, social media… it’s all affected by the masks we wear which, as with making up a character, can be shaped by ‘home’. I already find myself being slightly different on Twitter versus Facebook because the roles feel different. I’m interacting with different audiences, and so they need their own me. On Facebook, I’m very aware that I’m largely addressing people I know in person. While all social media-selves are, to some degree, constructed, they have at least some input from meeting me in ‘real’ life. There is no doubt a mish-mash of perceptions of who I am on there – I’ve got people who watched me grow up alongside colleagues, good friends, and friends of family – but they have at least some reference points on which to base the way I act online. Twitter, meanwhile… It’s a bit more like a work environment. There are people who essentially do a similar job to me, writing or researching, but then there are also potential ‘customers’ that I want to connect with. Neither group knows about any of my ‘homes’, and I don’t know about theirs. All they know is this constructed online me.
I found an interesting quote in a book about travel and displacement, talking about how the idea of home and identity are linked.
“[I]dentity is changed by the journey; our subjectivity is recomposed. …identity is not to do with being, but becoming.”
Madan Sarup, 2005, p94
It feels fitting, for both me and the project. My life in Wales always feels somewhat impermanent – I do mean to leave at some point – and so I have this constant feeling of being mid-transit. I’m moving through my journey and becoming something. It’s the same for this project. My author self is still developing, working out where ‘home’ is and how to navigate the role. It’ll be interesting to see what the process looked like once I finally reach the end.
