There Is Just One Life For Each Of Us. Our Own.

Social media is wonderful. It was through social media that I “met” Gabrielle Gawne-Kelnar, a Sydney, Australia based psychotherapist. I got to thinking that there are so many Australians over here in London (not to mention all sorts of other nationalities) that it would nice to invite Gabrielle to write a post on what it’s like to be away from home for an extended period of home. She’s written this lovely, philosophical piece for us. Take your time over this one, it’s very beautiful.

If you could stick a pin into a map of the world, pinpointing where you are just now, where would that be? It seems a relatively easy thing to imagine. Particularly if you’re thinking about your physical self.

But what about the other parts of you?

Where might your identity be located?

Where is your inner self?

(And how might each – the inner and the outer – impact one another?)

It’s also interesting that these qualities feel like they belong to us, somehow. That they’re ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – and definitely not ‘you’. But on another level, can self really exist without other? (Other people, other places, other times…). And what if you were transported to a different spot on the planet; another culture, another climate? What impact might that have on your internal latitudes?

I remember living abroad for a while, where it seemed everything was different and new: strange consonants in my mouth, weird customs around me, new norms to absorb. Constant reminders of how I didn’t quite belong. By being plunged into the unknown, in some ways I, myself, and the identity I’d previously known as ‘mine’, had become the ‘other.’

And, yes, there were times of feeling lost and isolated because of that. Lots of them. But there was freedom, too, in embracing that difference. In not being able to help being the ‘sore thumb’ that stuck out. Knowing that there was really no way I could contort myself to fit in. Being different was just a statement of fact (which felt like a kind of permission to just be).

How strange that we often have to travel to another place to really remember this; to really know our identity as an interwoven thing, and to sense the difference, and connectedness, between self and other. In our usual social or cultural environment, our
own little fishbowl, it can be easy to forget that. Easy to believe, instead, that our identity is fixed, or that it’s vital to meet others’ expectations of us, or to try to fit the norm of the day (mistakenly thinking that it’s the only norm there is).

So perhaps travelling or living abroad gives us a passport to other dimensions of self. Permission to see ourselves afresh in a new context. To find out who else we might be, alongside the predictable identity we’ve come to know.

So, if you could book a virtual ticket to anywhere – a plane around the globe, a slow boat down a river somewhere, a trek across the sands on a camel – where do you think you might discover the parts of yourself you’ve been apart from for too long? Or the parts you perhaps haven’t even met yet? Or the parts you’d rather deny?

What might it be like to send these aspects of yourself a postcard?
To invite them over? (Maybe even invite them in…)
To give them a legitimate space in your life and perhaps even be travelling companions for a while?

Hundreds of years ago, explorers pointed their ships at the horizons and hoped for the best as they delved into unchartered waters. Now, satellites tell us the exact path to take via GPS; every piece of the planet seemingly mapped out.

But there will always be places that only you can map. Places that will remain forever undiscovered, unchartered, if you only follow the GPS instructions or conform to a norm that the world outside has set for you. These other, inner places are wilder than that. And they’re yours to chart or to leave a mystery.

In your pocket, you have a virtual compass and an imaginary arrow (saying “You are here”).
I wonder where you might point that arrow next…
And how you might put the things that are important for you, and the parts of you that are yet undiscovered, on the map.

Gabrielle is the founder of One Life Counselling,and you can also visit her blog One Life Therapy for more of her gentle, elegant writing style.

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