Past lives
Meditations on a birthday.
As I approach another birthday, I’m thinking about my life in layers—all of the different people I’ve been, or think I’ve been from this future vantage point, even when I’ve always just been myself. It’s both exhilarating and heartwrenching to recognize how much things change, even as some elements stay the same. Freeing that you can let go of certain phases of your life, frightening that it’s impossible to hold tight to others.
In Getting Lost, Annie Ernaux writes:
“I am sickened by time, by the image of that vanished self, though I care nothing for her because I prefer myself now. But that self is contained in the present one, along with the others, like millions of Russian dolls.”
I don’t miss older versions of myself, but I do occasionally yearn for past qualities—greater naivete (it has its perks), youthful boldness that bordered on absurdity, creativity less hampered by outside expectations. And, of course, it’s always tempting to long for the period of your life before harsh reality strikes (dad dies in an avalanche, body falls apart in 5 different ways).
But in those moments, we conveniently forget how painful it could be to live in youth’s constant state of searching…how unanswered questions about the future could gnaw endlessly at our sides.
More than anything, we forget how much that’s passed lives on.
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I’ve watched a lot of home videos of myself in the past two years, thanks to my mom’s project of converting them to digital. It’s eerie to watch yourself during stages of your life you don’t remember, or remember poorly. In the early videos (ages 3-6), I see a little girl with so much confidence and energy it can be hard to reconcile that she’s me. My boyfriend says I use the same mannerisms today and I find it comforting that he sees continuity where I struggle to—it reassures me that all has not been lost.
As I get older in the videos, you can see some of that internal joy seep out of me, the self-consciousness of a teenager taking over. I can summon how I felt in them with much more ease—unfortunately, pain makes more of an imprint. I became consumed with fashion during that time, at least partially for the fantasy of it, the idea that one day (with the right clothes, makeup, and maybe a full body transplant with Kate Moss) I could be someone else.
But is that the full story, or just the one I got stuck on?
*
At a dinner this fall with my best friend from high school, B asked her what I was like back then. “She didn’t give a fuck,” she said with a laugh, implying some sort of bold confidence. At first, this was amusing to me because I knew it wasn’t true—the hours spent getting ready for school only to hate how I looked, the heartbreak over a boy who didn’t love me back, the way I’d cry from feelings I couldn’t explain any time I’d drink alcohol. You could argue I gave too many fucks.
But when I tried to explain to her how false her notion was, she gently pushed back. Was there more truth to her perception than I had come to believe, or tell myself…because the saddest version of a story is always stickier?
I’d shed that version of myself so long ago, but in the process, I’d forgotten that in all of her flawed and contradictory energy, there was something beautiful, magnetic, and yes, confident, too. I’m learning that when we color any phase of our lives in only one shade, we’ve lost perspective.
•
I finally watched “Past Lives” a few weeks ago and it gutted me in a way I can’t remember any other movie doing. It’s one of the truest films I’ve ever seen, wrenching something unspoken but felt in all of us from the depths of hard-to-explain phenomenon out into the open and shining the most gentle, loving light on it.
In its simplest form, it’s about identity and love and the ways they shapeshift, ebb, and flow over time without ever disappearing. It looks at life like Ernaux does, as a Russian doll. There are parts of ourselves, feelings, we never lose even as we move forward and far away.
I liked it because I love uncomfortable truths, the nuances that really make up a life. The movie focuses most on past love—the idea that you can in some capacity still be in love with someone from your past, all while being in love with someone else in your present. It’s not some big salacious revelation, but more a soft-spoken but deeply felt acknowledgment of reality. Love endures in ways that aren’t fit for a Hallmark card.
But the film is also about the way our past selves carry on, our cells never fully forgetting them even when we think they have. Your identity at age six can show itself unexpectedly decades later, flickering past in your daily movements at 32. The tightrope you walked between fear and joy at 16 is still being tread, though perhaps with greater balance, today.
Just as there are people I will always love, there are parts of myself I will never lose, even as the years pile on new layers, new shades of self. I think one of the gifts of getting older is recognizing that, embracing it…learning to live with all of the people you’ve been before, who are always swirling somewhere inside you.
Happy birthday, Jessica