Who Am I, Really?

I don’t know who I am right now but I think I'm okay with that.

I am someone who is brave. Who loves life. Who has so much vibrancy and passion. And when I feel like my light is dimmed, when the thoughts in my head become so jumbled that I can’t think straight, that I can’t see where I’m going, I retreat. I get scared. I get lost in the pressure of trying to figure it out. Trying to identify what I’m actually doing in this life. What is important to me, actually? And what have I been told is important and just taken as my own?

When I think about little Julia I want to cry.

I miss her. I miss the ignorant bliss she carried, the abundance she felt. The ecstatic overwhelm of being alive in such an exciting world. That’s how I felt every day as a child. And I am, obviously, a very nostalgic person. I like to look to the past versions of myself because that is where my greatest lessons come from. Past mistakes, past experiences, past ways of thinking and deciding. All parts of me that did their best with what they had.

I feel this especially strong sense of nostalgia right now because I see her everywhere. I see my past self in the people around me. I see little Julia walking down the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in the car next to me on the highway. Not literally, but metaphorically. Like she is always there. Guiding me, listening and looking out for me.

Some might say it’s because I’m in my Saturn return (which is in my first house) so it makes sense that I’m being confronted with identity.

I’ve been struggling with my identity as an artist. Figuring out how I want to claim my artistry, what kind of artist I am, how I want my art to exist in the world. This is where those jumbled thoughts really take their toll. Because so much of my identity is tied to what kind of artist I am. What kind of impact I’m making. What stories I’m choosing to tell. I feel like I’m trying to pull a thread out of a ball of knotted yarn.

I thought being an actor was my one true calling. My identity. And it became who I thought I needed to be. What I was supposed to do. When I started to question that, it felt like I was questioning everything. Because I had claimed this one form of expression as the whole of me.

And now, at twenty-seven, in this beautiful and disorienting process of rediscovering so many kinds of creative expression, I feel that conflict arising again. Why do I feel so much pressure to claim an artistic identity? To pick one lane and stay in it forever?

Here is what I truly know. I want to love what I do every day. I want to create things I feel so deeply that I’ll explode if I don’t release them. I want to be with people, creating, sharing, thinking deeply together. But I could not tell you how this looks. I could not tell you in what capacity or what kind of room this exists in. But every single younger version of me has known this to be true. And every time I’ve tried to go a different direction, I come back.

I’m in the thick of it. The thick, deep, sloppy mud, feeling my way through, looking for an answer that doesn’t exist to a problem I’ve created in my own head.

I’m not having a breakdown (I don’t think). I’m just a person who feels things loudly, in a world that keeps asking me to feel things quietly.

Here is a meditation I made this year that I return to when my mind is moving especially fast. Check it out if you feel like you need a little mind reset.