PERSONAL NOTES · 001

THE PARTS OF ME I HAVEN’T MET YET

On intuition, the unconscious, and the strange possibility that a life can reveal itself before we understand it.

WORDS & IMAGES — AMBER DELLA VITA

PERSONAL NOTE 001

THE PARTS OF ME I HAVEN’T MET YET

On intuition, the unconscious, and the strange possibility that a life can reveal itself before we understand it.

There is something strange about being a person.

You can spend every waking hour inside your own mind and still remain, in many ways, a stranger to yourself.

You know your name.
You recognise your reflection.
You know what makes you laugh, what makes you angry, what you are afraid of losing.

And still, somewhere beneath all of that, there seems to be an enormous territory you have never visited.

I think about that often.

Because the older I become, the less convinced I am that understanding yourself means arriving at one final definition of who you are.

Perhaps it is the opposite.

Perhaps growing into yourself means slowly discovering just how much of you has always existed beyond the reach of your conscious mind.

There are things I have wanted before I understood why I wanted them.

People I have felt strangely drawn towards before I could explain what exactly I recognised in them.

Places that felt familiar without containing a single memory of mine.

Ideas that returned again and again, quietly insisting on being taken seriously long before I knew what to do with them.

And moments that seemed completely insignificant when they happened, only to acquire meaning years later.

I used to think everything needed an explanation.

Now I am less certain.

THE MIND LIKES STRAIGHT LINES

We like to tell our lives backwards.

It makes everything look beautifully organised.

First this happened.

Therefore I made that decision.

That decision led me there.

And eventually, everything became what it was apparently always supposed to become.

But that is rarely how it feels while you are actually living it.

From inside a life, there are no neat chapters.

There are fragments.

Wrong turns.

Coincidences.

Obsessions you cannot explain.

People who disappear before you understand why meeting them mattered.

Sentences you write without knowing where they came from.

Versions of yourself you outgrow without noticing the exact moment they disappeared.

Only afterwards do we draw the lines between them.

Maybe that is one of the strange functions of memory.

It turns chaos into narrative.

But sometimes I wonder whether the narrative was already there.

Not in some predetermined sense.

Not because everything happens for a reason.

I don’t know whether I believe that.

I simply wonder whether human beings are capable of recognising patterns long before we are capable of articulating them.

Whether some part of us notices first.

And language arrives later.

THINGS HAVE A WAY OF FINDING ME

There have been periods in my life when something seemed to arrive before I had consciously gone looking for it.

An opportunity.

A person.

An idea.

A place.

Sometimes just an inexplicable feeling that something deserved my attention.

That does not necessarily make these moments mystical.

Maybe they are coincidence.

Maybe intuition is simply the brain processing far more information than consciousness can hold at once.

Maybe we notice thousands of tiny signals without knowing that we noticed them.

Maybe desire begins somewhere deeper than thought.

Maybe we unconsciously walk toward things and then act surprised when we meet them.

I like not knowing.

There is something almost violent about immediately forcing everything mysterious into an explanation.

Sometimes a question deserves to remain a question.

And perhaps that is where I have changed most.

I no longer need every strange moment to prove something.

I can simply observe it.

I can let it exist.

I can write it down.

AN ARCHIVE OF THINGS I DID NOT UNDERSTAND

Maybe that is why I have always been drawn to documenting things.

Photographs.

Words.

Places.

Clothes.

Rooms.

Songs.

Small conversations.

The way light entered somewhere at a particular hour.

A thought that appeared unexpectedly while walking through a city.

Something somebody said that should have been forgettable but somehow wasn’t.

For a long time I thought I was documenting my life because I was afraid of forgetting it.

Now I think there may be another reason.

I am collecting evidence.

Not evidence that anything extraordinary happened.

Evidence of who I was before I understood who I was becoming.

There is something fascinating about returning to something you created years ago and suddenly seeing yourself inside it more clearly than you could at the time.

A photograph becomes a confession.

A sentence becomes a prediction you never intended to make.

A fascination becomes the beginning of something.

And you realise that perhaps your earlier self was already trying to tell you something.

She simply did not have the vocabulary yet.

THE WOMAN I THINK I AM

There is the woman I consciously believe myself to be.

She has plans.

Preferences.

Ambitions.

Explanations.

She constructs an identity from everything she has experienced and says:

This is me.

But then there is another self.

Less articulate.

Less obedient.

She appears in instinct.

In dreams.

In attraction.

In discomfort.

In the subjects I repeatedly return to.

In the things I create when nobody has asked me to create them.

In the strange certainty that occasionally arrives before logic has had time to participate.

Psychology might call parts of this the unconscious.

Artists have given it hundreds of other names.

I don’t particularly care what we call it.

What interests me is the distance between those two women.

The person I believe myself to be,

and the person my behaviour, desires, fears and creations quietly reveal.

Sometimes I think the most interesting relationship I will ever have is the relationship between them.

PERHAPS WE MEET OURSELVES IN PIECES

We often talk about “finding yourself” as though there is a finished person hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

I don’t think that is how it works.

I think we meet ourselves in pieces.

One version appears through love.

Another through loss.

Another through ambition.

Another through failure.

Another while travelling somewhere nobody knows us.

Another when we are alone.

Another when somebody sees something in us we have never seen ourselves.

And every once in a while, something happens that introduces us to a part of ourselves we didn’t know existed.

That may be why certain moments feel disproportionately important.

They are not always changing our lives.

Sometimes they are simply revealing them.

I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT YET

There are still many things about myself I don’t understand.

More than I once wanted to admit.

But I have stopped interpreting that as a failure of self-knowledge.

Maybe complete self-knowledge would be terribly boring.

Imagine reaching a point where nothing inside yourself could surprise you anymore.

No hidden room.

No contradiction.

No undiscovered desire.

No thought capable of changing everything you previously believed.

Perhaps mystery is not something we eventually overcome.

Perhaps mystery is part of consciousness itself.

We are simultaneously the observer and the thing being observed.

The writer and the character.

The question and the person attempting to answer it.

And that means there will always be parts of ourselves that disappear around the corner just as we approach them.

SO I KEEP THE FRAGMENTS

I keep photographing.

I keep writing things down.

I keep paying attention to what returns.

Not everything needs to become meaningful.

Not every coincidence needs mythology.

Not every feeling deserves to become truth.

But I also don’t want to become so determined to be rational that I stop being curious about my own experience.

There has to be room between certainty and fantasy.

A place where something can simply be strange.

Beautiful.

Unresolved.

Human.

Maybe one day I will look back at everything I am collecting now and understand the pattern.

Maybe there isn’t one.

Both possibilities fascinate me.

For now, I am content to remain partly unknown to myself.

To leave certain doors unopened.

To allow some questions to follow me instead of immediately answering them.

And to trust that becoming a person is not the process of finally knowing exactly who you are.

Maybe it is learning to recognise yourself again and again,

in forms you could never have predicted.

Because sometimes life writes something into us long before we understand the language.

And sometimes the person capable of reading it

is simply a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

— Amber Della Vita