Remember all the people you've been...

source

Many months on, I'm still grieving the end of the 11th Doctor's time. I know, I know, he's a fictional character. Anyone with a heart has connected with a fictional character at some point and I connected with the 11th Doctor. I adore the 10th Doctor, he is dashing, isn't he? But the 11th had elements of me in him. Restless energy, and the constant running away. In the end though he came to the realisation that while you can and will change throughout your life time, if you try to forget who you used to be, you'll only get yourself in trouble. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The other day, in a discussion about a friendship, I found myself talking about friends I have on Facebook now who knew me when I was a teenager. We haven't been in the same room in 25-30 years but they know a me my friends today would not recognise.

In another conversation with my mum the other day, she was commenting on my chameleon nature, how whenever I enter a new group, or new environment, I take on the characteristics of that environment. As she put it herself, when she picked me up from a coach line, or airport, she could never be sure if she'd be picking up a someone in a floral dress with brown spiral curl hair and hiking boots, or someone with a sleek black bob and dress in clothing better suited to the 19th century (she calls that my 'goth period', although I never did do the goth thing).

I have been many people over the past few decades, and to me those people often seem like other people - previous incarnations of me who are nothing like me essentially. I feel as if I have lived at least four lives. But I have to remember all those people, what they went through, what they learned and why they changed, because if I don't, I might find myself reliving the past and that is something I absolutely never want to do. 

I do not romanticise my past. I never want to be 18 again, or 26, or 37, no thanks, those days are gone.

I sometimes wonder who I will be next. 

I want to work in academia, and I look at other academics around me - especially now that my desk is in the sessional's room, I look at how they dress and the expressions on their face and I'm not wholly sure I want to change to be like them. I want to do what they do, but can I really change that much? I don't know...