Another thing: Who am I?

Reflections on identity, health, and the light by which we live our lives.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

“For years I’ve tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position.”

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

Starting this substack has meant facing a familiar dilemma: deciding who I am. I’ve never had much of a social media presence but, in launching this newsletter, I decided I ought to make more of an effort to exist online. Of course, I appreciate the irony of trying to “get into twitter” in the same week the whole platform looks likely to collapse forever, but we’ll see how it goes.

My past reluctance around social media stems from a kind of identity crisis. Engaging in these public arenas means presenting a coherent and singular face to the world where, in my real life, I never have to do that. My identity shifts depending on who I’m with and where I am. I can be one person around a dinner table with my family, another with my friends, another with my colleagues. Sometimes these shifts are subtle: a joke that lands with one group might not land with another, an interest I share with one person would be meaningless and tedious to someone else (as I’m sure many of my friends would attest). But these differences can also be significant. At work, especially, I sometimes barely recognise myself. 

I’ve never been much of an alpha (which perhaps goes without saying given I’ve recently launched a sci-fi newsletter) and so some element of my personality has always been conditional, formed in relief. I’ve learned to enhance the most socially useful parts of myself, adjusting how I come across depending on who I’m with. I want everyone to like me, I want people to feel comfortable but, in pursuing this, I sometimes wonder if I’ve lost the thread of myself?

Starting this newsletter has forced me to confront this question head on. I’ve told more or less everyone I know about it, and many of them will arrive here expecting their own version of me. My chameleonic instinct has come back to bite. Writing longer form does at least gives me latitude I couldn’t achieve in a tweet. Here, I have ample room to pile on layer after layer of irony and self-deprecation, but the issue is ultimately still there. Who am I?

Chris Kraus grapples with the same issue in I Love Dick. As she puts it, “for years I tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position.” For her the answer was, in part, cutting free from her own and others’ expectations of her, reaching a kind of emotional nadir that freed her to exist as an artist. “Failure’s changed all that,” she writes, “‘cause now I know I’m no one. And there’s a lot to say.”

The obvious solution to all this, perhaps, is to be myself. But who is that? After decades of allowing my personality to splinter and adapt, I don’t think there’s a simple answer. Perhaps, like Kraus, I’m no one. So just write, I think, and see what comes out, see who comes out. There must be someone at the centre of this. Some truth. Which brings me to the second dilemma in writing about myself: how much of myself to hide, and how much to show.

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Readers who know me personally will know that my partner suffers from a chronic illness, a dynamic disability that can recede for many months at a time and then scream out of nowhere and flip her life upside down without notice. We’re in one of these times of relapse now, and it’s such a present element of our day to day lives that it would feel strange not to mention it here.

For the past two weeks, she’s lived a constantly changing life, dominated in turn by pain, dizziness, anxiety, fear, sadness. I’m not qualified to talk about chronic illness except through my own limited and secondary lens, but I set out to write what’s on my mind, and this is that. 

Health is like light. In times of good health, the light of our lives stretches benignly to a distant horizon; plans are spoken about in months or years, and our futures sit illuminated in the distance, waiting for us. The light is not infinite, and on the far horizon there is darkness and uncertainty, but there is at least enough light to see the way by, enough life to be getting on with. My partner's illness is a narrowing of this light. Whenever she experiences a relapse, the light by which we live our lives tightens to a spotlight, and we’re left only with the present moment, all the more overwhelming because it’s impossible to see beyond it. Plans next month? Next week? Tonight? Let’s not think about them now. The future is a shadowy place, and will remain so until we arrive there. When things get especially bad, that spotlight becomes a pinprick, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Life becomes a thing lived in hours and minutes and held breaths.

Some mornings, I wait in limbo to hear the first words out of her mouth, scared at first to ask her how she’s feeling. Sometimes she’s direct. “Bad,” she’ll say, or, perhaps worse, “dizzy.” She might even say she’s fine, but I can hear by the tone of her voice how the day will go. Spirals of pain and anxiety, the fear that her life is over, that her friends will leave her behind. On other days, when she’s feeling even fleetingly normal, it’s euphoric, the most transcendent thing, knowing that for a few hours at least we’ll be able to live something of a normal life, that she’ll want to see her friends, go out for a coffee, that she’ll talk about things she likes and wants to do, that the light is bright enough to hint at a future.

To watch her suffer like this is hard to bear, but I live this life only by proxy, and my experiences of it pale to inconsequence compared to what she’s going through. She is the only person, I think, who sees all of me, and so it seems natural that in grappling with how to write about myself, I’ve started with her. 

It’s hard to know what comes next but, for now, we inch forward, one foot at a time into that narrow shaft of light, together.

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