Whether you read Eat, Pray, Love or opted to catch the Julia Roberts adaptation with your mom, sister or best friend ( I’m guilty of 3/4 of those accounts), and your thoughts on one woman’s journey across Italy, India and Indonesia aside, Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir proposes a pertinent question in our present drive for easily digestible, yet captivating online content. What would be your word?
In an intimate dinner in Rome where Gilbert is set to showcase her command over the Italian language, she appears less versed in defining herself. While Gilrbert characterizes herself as a daughter, sister, friend, wife before she decides on her word, “writer,” her Italian counterparts disagree. These are all things GIlbert “does” spaces she occupies in the frameworks built around us Writer is her profession, but what is her word? Who are we if we cannot match our words to our state of being? Who are we if our state of being isn’t measure by our actions?
Less we diverge into an roundabout argument, of what came first, the chicken or the egg, does what we do stem from who we are, or is it that which we do that determines who we are, and leads us to who we become? My concern isn’t it with the order in which we build, find and define ourselves. I struggle with the definitions, the words that box us in, that draw boundaries around our emotions and actions, trapped in our own immobility, it’s all we can do but grow into the of the words we assign to ourselves.
If the new resume is 140 characters, so too is our identity. We shrink ourselves down to a list of nouns, verbs, the occasional adjective , and bonus points if you can be witty. It’s what we do, how we declare our presence on platforms designed to catapult our persona onto networks strung together by bits and code. But in the stream of otherwise lesser important roles we play and the words we designate them, who are we?
I struggle with this, just how does everyone seamlessly align their words, serendipitous companions arranged on a single line. I feel I betray myself if I were to compose a profile that reads: Susana_Catalina: daughter, sister, bookworm, runner, writer, infrequent yogi, language junkie, vino and cheese lover. I could run everyday, I could write everyday ( I don’t by the way) and yet I could not feel justified in applying such approbation. It’s not humility, it’s not self-deprecation, on any given day these words are who I am, I realize this as others remind me, when friends casually throw me alongside such words, an effortlesness I’ve grown grateful toward rather than envious as a trait to keep as my own. I’ll never be the architect of my own craft. Not for as long as I still search for the compilation of words that go together if only on paper, unlike any place I’ve found myself.
If you asked me today, what’s your word? I would respond with: lost. Perhaps our words are less who we are but what we seek, what we lack, and what we need. So yes, I’m lost. What I seek is a part of myself that I’ve never known, but then that will always be the case, I won’t know who I will be as an aunt, wife, mother, so an element of blind faith will always forbear. I seek someone I never became, someone I left behind at fourteen, and I’m lost because I can’t, or perhaps just don’t know how to go back, to redefine myself as a daughter or sister or reclaim a space in a city I can only freeze in a fragile nostalgia, with no resort but to crack or grow colder with time. I harbor this need to find a place where I’m at ease, where my body recognizes every crevice of a room, and so I’m left to seek a home within myself, and rebuild everyday, even against words that betray me. Because “lost” may look empty, but it’s proved to me more promising than content.
And, so I can’t help but love words, I crave their sight, sound and shape, holy constructs that feed my soul and solidify my strength. I never expect them to escape me, yet I quiver, powerless at the weight of a whisper that lies at the depth of my throat, unwilling to unveil truths too heavy to endure. If words are my Church and leave me unguided then where does my faith flee? Home.
memories stitched in denim 