The process by which one unearths oneself from one’s life is highly mysterious to me. Is one’s life not oneself, for example, what self is being unearthed and from what other self? Why does one self feel like digging up another self? Why is it hard to do it? What happens if that self is not dug up? Why is there this sense of an unheard appeal from a self that to all intents and purposes is the same person. Who’s to say that what is being dug up is any more authentic or meaningful than the one who is, apparently, persuaded into digging.

Mysterious, and for the most part, unanswerable. There is some kind of appeal and it is somehow appealing. The one who responds to the call to dig is also mysterious, then. Why does she dig?

This digging is what I am spending my days on, so it seems, mining myself for something that is not certain, really to exist. I am so used to it that it feels certain to me. But I never know quite what I am digging for and sometimes when I have dug it up, whatever it is, I also don’t recognise it until later.

But nonetheless, the digging is part of me and so is the apparent regularity of sensing an appeal, often after weeks of performing at a high level other tasks and jobs that I actually do enjoy – I really don’t think I’m faking it. So then how does this part get so buried?

I am unusual in that I keep a daily journal and one of the very interesting elements of this practice is that one can visit oneself in any previous era of one’s life. Sixteen? I’m there, with my sixth form self, questioning the universe and pondering boys with my best friend. Twenty four? I’m there in a corporate job being appraised and wondering if I can get a mortgage on a flat in an aspirational area of a capital city, despite my frail pecuniary beginnings.

This week I have been revisiting selves of seven, five, and and three years ago, a year ago. It’s like digging in various layers of substrata and somehow I feel like I am getting somewhere, but where? It’s like lining up my younger selves in a row and interviewing them as witnesses to an event, the event of me, that I am somehow not quite able to grasp, and I’m relying on them to shed light on things.

Of course I talk to other people too, but almost none of them keep a record. Their thoughts are memories of memories. Mine are of their time.

I don’t know why it felt important to capture this thought in writing, but there is something that I’ve come to recognise as relatively unusual in this process, and this is on my mind as I continue it.