Who am I?

She sits across from me, cross-legged, knee to knee on the uneven planks of the dock. Below us the water shifts restlessly. My skin prickles under the sun, soothed by the breeze.

They tell me to look into my partners eyes. My gaze slides off her face, as if we're opposite poles of a magnet.

We begin with the words, "I am."

Our teachers encourage us to talk in a stream of consciousness, all the time keeping the gaze to draw out the truth from the other's face. We are the channel; a straw to our deeper selves, pouring.

I falter.

How can I define myself? How can I describe the complexities of myself with mere words? How can I speak for seven minutes about me, only me. I feel mortified.

This is the point our teachers are trying to make. Words are never enough. Finding oneself lies far away from reason and analysis, the twin culprits of a false path.

Unintentionally, we all begin with facts. We keep them positive, reaffirming our belief in ourselves.

I am a sister. I am a daughter. I am a friend. I am a lover. I am blue haired. I am smiley. I am beautiful to some. I am British and American and Central European. I am twenty-six years old.

I am a woman.

I am a child.

I am a student. I am a teacher. I am a carer. I am a dancer. I am a cook. I am a yogi. I am a writer.

I am an observer. I am a creator.

I am a healer.


Subtley the flow of words carries us on. The ego's perceptions of itself and traditional compartmentalising of the persona blends with emerging acceptance of darkness beneath.


I am blind. I am whole. I am wise. I am loud. I am in love. I am in hate. I am broken. I am confident. I am naïve. I am burning. I am excited. I am scared. I am happy.

I am peaceful. I am cold. I am nervous. I am clean. I am lost. I am magnetic.

I am hiding. I am emerging. I am gentle. I am angry. I am mean. I am argumentative. I am kind. I am generous. I am insecure. I am compassionate.

I am strong. I am weak. I am running away. I am running towards.

I am transient. I am pure.

I am completely unique.

The calm envelops as we talk out loud. I am staring straight into my partner's eyes now, the veil lifted, my muscles relaxed. The sun pierces my retina but I don't close my eyelids.


I am a million different people from one day to the next. I am new for every person I meet. I am an amalgamation of everything I've ever done.

I am smaller than the simplest particle. I am nothing. I am a speck in time.

I am overwhelming. I am insignificant. I am supremely powerful.

I am a bubble. I am a bubble on the surface of an enormous cauldron of simmering Everything, elements fusing with other elements to make new entities. A perfect model of the sun. My rainbow-coloured surface reflects what is around me. I am full of nothing.


I exist momentarily in my unique state, formed from the whole, hovering above the ever-moving sea of existence, before I explode into nothing, my remains sucked back into the swirling potion, to be fused with Everything once again.

The teacher winds a stick around a gold singing bowl, its clear note vibrating through us to signal the end of the lesson. We sit in stunning calm, our words falling down around us on the lakeside dock like confetti.

I am the universe. I am love. I am everything.

The wild contrasts between statements leaps out at me. Each phrase has an opposite. Inner duality is something about myself that has bothered me for a long time. Now I realise we are all made of it. I can not just be strong. I am weak as well. I can not just be lost. I am found. I am neither and I am both.

I, like everything else in this world, exist in duality. As they say, fear is the same sensation as excitement, only perceived differently. We are all trying to fit together two ends of one spectrum, circles of definition stacked one on another to form the entities that we are. A giant spiral.

What she said about herself is an exact description of myself. What I am is what she is. As they say in sanskrit, om tat sat. It is what it is. Everyone else has the same experience as us. We all just are.

I am left with an overwhelming feeling of oneness.

The question "Who am I?" becomes ridiculous. We are all the same; not just in a figurative sense but in a real, palpable, pinch-able sense.

I get the feeling that if we'd been given endless time we would have repeated every possible attribute to each other, finding a little of everything within us, before finally returning to the only truth:

"I am."

The Void catches up

June brings a loss of direction. My world becomes black and white and blurry.



I plunge headlong into the Void.


I have felt it tracking me for a little while, catching me unawares with flashes of barely-provoked anger and periods of dizzying emptiness. When it finally slips itself under my feet, I fall, rag-doll-like, through its dank depths.


The Void has engulfed us all, once in our lives. You know it from the creeping shadows around your heart. The imps in its employ, sniggering on your shoulders, whisper insults into your ears until you believe them to be true. The tremors of uncertainty blurs lines between reality and nightmare.


This time it comes to me in a disabling lack of self-belief. The path in which I had so much faith seems to have faded.


My self-confidence, boisterous only months ago, has vapourised, leaving me achingly aware of how loosely constructed it must have been.


What, on earth, have I been doing? Why the hell am I here?


I have been out of work for well over a year. I have been rolling around Mexico for seven months. My money is drying up, like the daily puddles spat down on us by June's heavy clouds, and I have no concrete plan for how to replace it. I know I can't go back to work in an office and this thought, once so liberating, terrifies me.


I have had so much time, and yet seemingly done' nothing apart from convert tacos into spare tyres.


Michael encourages me as best he can. He reminds me of all the things I have developed that cannot be written on a CV, such as my healer's hands and my understanding of myself, as well as the things that can, such as my mastery of conversational Spanish.


He tempts me with ideas for how to turn my writing into a career, but I am shocked by my own lack of motivation. I just don't want to do anything. I just don't think I can.

My listless lack of a plan, once so peace-inducing, has become a growing emptiness.


It is during this time that we find ourselves house-sitting a three-bedroom villa (complete with the luxuries of fridge, hot shower, fireplace and beds with real duvets). I cannot remember the last time I was in a room with four walls and no holes.


I throw myself into my long-term passion for cooking, producing elaborate feasts for my boyfriend, who largely sits in front of his computer, working. Mikey, annoyingly, has it sorted. He gets paid for remixes on the road. He deals with them easily and with style. At the same time, he gets handfuls of offers for his new tracks.


His need for the computer and my need for safety means we spend most of our six weeks in San Cristobal indoors. I quickly realise how incapable I now am of doing this.


We argue frequently. Admittedly, the times between arguments are still idyllic and there is no doubt that we are madly in love. But I am strong enough to know that these moments of pain are indicators of deep knots in our lives that need to be massaged out for risk of becoming crippling.


I am also able to remind myself that this journey is and was always going to be about balance - particularly the yin-yang balance of positive and negative forces within my path.


So when I feel myself slipping, I recognise the signs enough to throw out a hand. I catch myself before I fall, like I have done so many times before.


And there, I swing.


I hang on to the edge for a long time, caught between fear of the nothingness below, and fear of the choices above.


You can travel as far as you want, but wherever you are, you will still be you.