Recognition and being myself.
Have you ever noticed the face that people pull when they haven't seen you in a long time? Sometimes it's a happy face, sometimes there'll be a hug or a warm moment, but more often than not, they give you a look that seems to say 'I'm having trouble recalling you'. Not that they've forgotten you, more that all they remember of you is what's committed to their long term memory. It almost seems to say that they're trying to un-canvas you from their memory and try and remember who you were as a person, not a memory.
I see this face a lot recently.
At the moment I seem to be living two lives. I have my life in Southampton, which is based around going to uni, coming home, seeing a few friends and doing the occasional bit of filming. The other life I lead is my old life back on the Isle of Wight, where I have almost too many friends, and I play music every weekend, and I have a family at home. Up until recently, these two lives were manageable; I'd spend a month or two in southampton, doing university work and filming/sound design projects with the occasional gig here and there, and then spent a week or two back on the island, seeing all my friends and playing gigs. This worked, as I had time to remember the person that I was when I was in each of those places. The problem I have now, is that the intervals between travelling back and forth have dropped from months to days. I find myself in a constant cycle of back and forth.
My life is practically printed on a ferry ticket.
This creates the issue of these lives beginning to merge. It sounds ridiculous to say, given that I technically only have one life, but the way I interact with my surroundings in each setting is completely different. I'm influenced by different things in different places, and ultimately this makes me a different person in each place. Now that changing locations has become so frequent, the boundaries between these different sides to me are beginning to break, and I find that I'm becoming a hybrid of the two people I was. I find now that I visit the island and maintain some of the persona of myself when I'm in Southampton, and vice versa. I feel so uncomfortable everywhere because of this. I've almost forgotten how to act in each place. I try to be myself, but I've forgotten what version of myself I was in each of these places, and now it has become such an effort to be who I was when I was in each of these places. I feel like everyone I know is slowly slipping away from me because of this. To them, I will have changed, I will have become a different person. To me, it's the fact that this constant cycle of travelling has caused me to lose my sense of gravity, and I'm no longer aware of who I am in each place anymore. How can someone try to recall who I was when they last saw me, when that person no longer exists? I guess I see that face more often not because they can't remember who I was, but because I can't remember who I was.
I get the feeling my life is in a transitionary state right now, and the best thing to do is to let those who are slipping away slip away, and hold on as my life rounds the bend, and then see who and what remains when I straighten my wheels.
I'm not even remotely depressed at the moment, right now I'm the happiest I've been in a long time, I'm just confused, and feel a little awkward everywhere I go.
So now I've written this little segment of my mind, I'm now going to pack my bags and head of on yet another commute back to the Island, and start the cycle all over again.
