What is so newly scary and baffling to me, is the way that I can contain ‘multitudes’ even within my own desires and repulsions. My own likes and dislikes. Things that have always felt so absolute and clear, but more importantly, so boundaried, are now partial, unclear, practically boundary-less in their seeming contradictions.

It is difficult to know, growing up, if certain aspects of your personality are true and forged in earthy genetics and the airiness of the flapping sheet of upbringing, or are simply symptomatic of immaturity, naivety, inexperience. I feel a strange righteousness to having unchanged aspects of myself. The fact that I did not like warm milk as a baby from my mother’s breast, and I continue to be disgusted by warm milk well into my 20’s makes me feel strong and carved in stone. Like my shore has weathered the tide of time and influence and has come away with the same footprints as before. It makes me feel baselessly intelligent, as if it is indicative of a non-existent perspicacity on behalf of my infant self; “Don’t lose that, it’s real.”

It also comforts me – satiates a quiet screaming panic that prods the constant notion of ‘development’. That it is not only expected but inevitable that you should be considerably different between child and adult. The thought of perpetual change within myself makes me feel tired and uncertain and irritable. I am admittedly soothed by the idea that I came out done, finished. Complete.