Identity and learning

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago - sorry I only am just getting around to posting it!)

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I think I’m having an identity crisis.

Alton, a wonderful mentor and professor at the University of Idaho, asked me before we left Moscow what my main lesson had been over the three years. I told him with sureness, “I have learned to love.”

Despite love being something I’ve since found that you can’t “know” once and for all and you can never fully learn it, it’s probably a fair statement considering the anti-love, anti-commitment girl that started at the university in January 2010.

I took a big exam this a while ago. I didn’t do very well. In fact, I left before anyone else, leaving multiple blank answers. It was something I thought I was “good at” – general knowledge, writing, basic grammar and numeracy, and last but not least, exams. I thought that stuff came naturally.

I thought journalism stuff comes naturally, that’s one of the main reasons I’m doing it.

In Idaho I studied Anthropology and International Studies. Of course, despite all that training, I didn’t come away telling Alton, “I learned to be an anthropologist.” No, I learned about love.

What on earth am I learning about now? I wonder, as I lie on our bed with a headache and barely energy to type.

Perhaps it is to learn. That’s what I’ve been wondering today anyway.  “Learning to learn” was the catch-phrase when I went to school. I should have taken that more seriously.

Now, faced with my own inadequacies, I see that I can’t, and don’t want to, just float on by doing things last minute and still getting “good grades” (quotation marks implying I don’t know what the worth of those really were in the end). I want to, and need to, truly learn things. Repeat. Visualise. Discuss. Articulate. Question. Repeat.

Or perhaps it is to say sorry. That’s something I’ve always struggled with, that humility thing. I may say it was the cancer that has “brought me to my knees,” but don’t believe it.

The cancer was only a trigger. It was a situation I found myself in that required me to rely on others, and that made me act out of character and have to apologise for it. I didn’t want it to be an excuse, ever.

I guess time will tell what I’m learning from this stage of life. I hope, and am sure; it’s not just journalism.