i'm not who i am

I feel like I have no clear identity as a writer. Mostly I think this is good. When I’m cycling through ideas and styles and personae like I have in the last year/eighteen months it feels great. But then I think I’m my own worst enemy. How can I expect to place work, or convince people I’m sincere if I keep shapeshifting my way out of every identity? On the other side of that how can I keep doing the same things when it bores me to stay still?

‘You’re that txt poet.’
‘No. I’m the poet that goes “Waaugh!”’
‘But you used to be the txt poet?’
‘A long time ago. Before that I was the love poet, before that I was an urban collagist. I’ve been a poet of signs and pictures, a poet of self-hate, a non-poet, a rock n roll poet, a satirist and a nonsense poet since then.’
‘But you used to do txt poems?’

[Thanks to Helen for inspiration for the exchange above.]

I become a trap for myself. Everyone becomes a trap for themselves. People expect you to be someone you used to be as though they hadn’t changed themselves. Like the ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ character in I’m Not There says at the end of his ‘seven simple rules of going into hiding’, ‘never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.’ Who wants to be a ghost of themselves only reflected in other people’s eyes? Who even wants to be who they are?

But going back to the beginning, my starting point was that sometimes I think it’s a good thing to have no clear identity as a writer. At other times, though, it concerns me that I can’t describe who I am as a writer, or commit to anything for an extended period of time. Sometimes it feels disconcertingly like looking in the mirror and seeing a different face every day.

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