I used to be a child, then a girl and a teenager, a student, a graduate. A girlfriend, a wife, a mother. I have been a librarian, a journalist, a manager, a company director, a lawyer, a researcher. Suddenly I find I have reached a stage of life which cannot be labelled with an indefinite article and a noun. Sure, I’m still a mother, but increasingly at a distance as my son becomes independent. I’m a lawyer but I don’t do it all day every day and certainly not in any sort of conventional manner. I’m trying to be more and more of a writer but that’s such a wide term that it does beg for specificity.
So how do I describe myself now? It’s not so easy any more. If I don’t fit comfortably into “a-something” then perhaps I have to talk about what I do and who I am. That’s all a bit more intimate and it invites the other person to get closer, to listen and understand what I’m saying rather than think to themselves “ah, a lawyer, I know what that is, they do divorces/conveyancing/business deals” and make all sorts of assumptions based on their own experience which may be completely inaccurate anyway. For example, I’m a criminal lawyer and I don’t have anything to do with divorces, conveyancing or business so based on those assumptions someone would have completely the wrong idea about who and what I am.
So maybe there’s something wonderful about not fitting into categories any more, not being able to hide behind and indefinite article and a noun. Now I really am a big girl, ready to come out into the real world exactly as I am. If you want to know me, you will have to find out what I do, who I am and what I believe. It will take more than a couple of words and you’ll have to do a bit of thinking, a little understanding, to find out who you are talking to. And I’ll have to be brave enough to be vulnerable, to take the risk that you might not like what you find, and you might not hang around. That has to be fine; if you do stay, it will be because you know exactly who I am. Thanks for listening.
