I live in contradictions
“You contain multitudes.” I remember reading that line for the first time and feeling something inside me finally settle. As though someone had reached across time and quietly whispered, You do not need to choose one version of yourself in order to deserve to exist.
For years I tried to make myself coherent for other people. Easy to understand. Easy to label. But I have never been one thing long enough to remain there comfortably. I am contradiction layered carefully atop contradiction.
I am Scottish, profoundly so, though I did not entirely grow up here. My family is Scottish. Highland blood, Celtic stories, generations buried beneath rain-soaked stone and stubborn earth. I was born into that history even when an ocean separated me from it. I speak Gaelic and was born in Edinburgh, but I grew up in the deep American South where I spent my formative years beneath Appalachian skies.
So now I exist somewhere between the Highlands and the South, carrying both accents in my mouth depending on who I am speaking to and how tired I am. I know how to gut a fish and discuss Neoplatonism in the same afternoon.
I can walk barefoot through heather-covered hills speaking Scots Gaelic as fluently as I speak Classical Latin, which tends to unsettle people more than impress them. There is something deeply amusing about watching someone realise the woman in velvet ribbons and red lipstick can translate Virgil aloud without hesitation before turning around and muttering something wicked in Gaelic under her breath.
Sometimes I think my entire existence is one long argument against expectation.
Despite the academic papers and archived research and years spent studying Renaissance and Baroque art and antiquity, I do not work in academia. At least not in the way people expect. I became an artist instead. There is irony in that which I find almost irresistible. After all the years of scholarly discipline, after the translations and publications and sleepless nights spent buried beneath books in Florence and Rome, after learning Italian so I can read documents from archives and churches, I now make my living creating beauty with my own hands. The academic in me should probably resent that. Instead, she seems rather pleased by it.
I think people expect intellect to present itself plainly. They expect severe tailoring and minimalism and an almost masculine austerity. What they do not expect is for a woman dressed like a painting to begin discussing funerary symbolism in Roman portraiture over a glass of wine.
I enjoy disappointing expectations.
Perhaps because I spent so much of my life being underestimated. People see aesthetics and assume frivolity. They hear softness and mistake it for weakness. Then suddenly I begin speaking about Bernini or the cult of Dionysus or the political implications of the Counter-Reformation and they realise, too late, they built an entire perception of me from surface alone. And surface has always been the least interesting thing about me.
I contain multitudes because I was raised among multitudes.
I am Appalachian thunderstorms and Highland mist. Roman philosophy and Celtic folklore. Sacred art and muddy boots. Cathedrals and forests. Latin prayers and Gaelic songs. I am equally at home in museums and on mountainsides. I can discuss Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro before climbing into a freezing loch without a second thought.
There are parts of me that feel ancient. Not old. Ancient. As though some fragment of my soul still belongs to standing stones and oral traditions and candlelit manuscripts copied by hand. And perhaps that is why I have never feared contradiction. Contradiction is where all the most interesting people live.
The world prefers simple creatures because they are easier to consume. Easier to predict. Easier to control. But I have never been simple. I do not think I ever shall be. I am not a singular thing.
I am a cathedral built from incompatible ruins somehow still standing.
