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The other day, I sent a message to Sam, writing that I felt as if I’d never had an authentic thought. The articulation was perhaps a bit dramatic but I thought that it communicated clearly that as I continue to shed old patterns of behaviour and thought or, in other words, as I Marie Kondo (used as a verb) the hell out of my soul, I cannot see what, if anything, will remain. Do I possess a core that has been eclipsed but not destroyed by 3 decades of unconscious absorption of my environment? Who am I?

My curriculum vitae from a few years ago reads like one Microsoft Word would use for one of its templates. Legal degrees and an exiting career start. An equal number of languages and hobbies that make me sound both peculiar and reliable. A mugshot and compulsive formatting in shades of black, grey and blue.

In my old life, I worked as a research fellow in international development. A few years and a minor breakdown into it, I quit the job, keeping, as a sort of severance, only my recent PhD enrollment confirmation, a handy tool, I thought, that would eventually allow a smooth transition into my next adventure. A friend recently pointed out how ludicrous that was to struggle to regain sanity while at the same time worrying about how the cv, that terrorist instrument in which the only permitted direction is up, would portray the sudden hitch.

In my new life, the doctoral project feels like a remnant from an old life, as if I had time-travelled. All else is new to me. I no longer live in a city but a small town in the Norwegian countryside. While my job is technically in Oslo, the public administration position is far from the prestige of purportedly saving an entire government from itself. Norway is the first country I’ve moved to for love and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Sam is… well, Sam is home. Also, Sam is wild. His second name is Outdoors and ever since we’ve begun to hang out I’ve experienced more awe than in all of my previous life combined.

So, here I am. Nowhere close to where I’d thought I’d be at 33 but exactly where I want to be nevertheless. For one, there is Sam. I’m starting to take seriously my impulses to write and I’ve learned how to make blueberry jam out of blueberries I have picked in the surrounding forest. Sometimes I just breathe. At the same time, I am beginning to question all I thought I knew. I am not doing this in a structured manner but keep being overcome by pressing questions and insights that spring seemingly out of nothing. I am questioning what’s important to me, what I care about. I’m trying to figure out where ideas about me and criteria for success that I no longer recognise as my own initially came from. Some days, as if to follow up on a wholesale destruction of 20 years worth of diaries that I completed two summers ago, I want to dissolve into thin air, so suffocating the past feels. Other days, I don’t even know what foods I like and wonder whether I bought that book because I thought I’d enjoy reading it or because it fit with an idea of myself I wanted to portray after I’ve mindlessly picked up said idea that such a portrait was desirable.

Although I sometimes find the process upsetting, even scary, I don’t actually mind the dissolution of the mirage of me as otherwise there’d be no space left for me, that core, whatever she may look like. I want to be patient, and bask in the liberating and invigorating periods, but I am also curious to meet her. Clueless as to where to start, I sometimes make lists of things I still, again know for sure. The lists are short. I love Sam. I like walking barefoot. And as I draft this essay and listen to summer rain, thunder and the neighbour’s kid’s laughter, I know that I like the sounds of those, too. It’s a start.