BEGINNER

‘Our teens are the age of trial and error, experimenting wildly with everything that comes our way…goaded by a legitimate sense that we have all the time in the world. In our 20s the stakes are higher as we assess more hard-core stuff like careers and life partners; we sample several of each and dispense with them with all the reckless abandon of knowing there's more where they came from. We get to work out who we love…we're encouraged to travel. We run through life breathless and mildly panicked as the finish line edges into view. Somewhere in between we decide who we are.’

I think about this concept a lot.  Mostly, where and how these defined periods of individual existence came to fruition…and why we follow them.  It’s the truth of reality and contains too many questions without answers, too many ifs and buts, to be fully answerable.  Yet for something so intangible we still sit right in its essence.

Is it possible to decide who you are? Profound determinations or not, it is the movement of the ever-present that both confounds and excites the individual.  I’m not even sure if that is a static idea in itself, or if it’s even static in my mind.  Weeks away from my twentieth birthday in the year that I finish my undergraduate degree and choose a career to set in motion and influence the rest of my life, the feeling of an innate sense of freedom from time will probably, at some point, become a hastened pace.  A simple change of date – inevitable, assured – has this power.  It’s daunting, exciting, indeed breathless; uncontrollable like so many things and just human.

So here leaves me a space to narrate a little bit of everything – my creative ideas, my inspiration and adventures – and to navigate my way through assorted motives and imagination, or something.  Perhaps it’s a romanticised beginning of sorts, or an attempt to vaguely construct tangible meaning in the eye of the storm.  Maybe I’ll look back on it as mediocre, or even a mild panic.  But it won’t be forgettable in my mind.