Versions of Self

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

Ernest Hemingway

My brother has a running joke that I’m him, but version 2.0 – the model that comes with less travel anxiety and better dress sense. It’s obviously an over-simplification – our similarities are really more in personality type than traits. As his daughter so insightfully put it: “you are not the same but you think in the same way”.

But the reality is that even if I was the follow-up model, I wouldn’t be version 2.0 because he’d been through a few versions already in the 13 years before I turned up. I couldn’t tell you what version number I’m up to now, the many editions of me that I’ve cycled through in my lifetime, shaped by place and person and life all around. The earliest editions weren’t even Suzey but Susie; a variation that the vast majority of people in my life today never even met.

We don’t often encounter past versions of ourselves. Maybe we catch glimpses in old photos or through shared memories brought up around the dinner table. But they are just that: glimpses. Just occasionally, however, we return to a place most connected with a past version and for a moment, we can sense them. An apparition lost to time but so engrained in our psyche that they appear almost as though they are real. 

This is the best way I can describe the feeling I had walking down King Street in Toronto last week with the film festival in full swing. I had just landed off an eight hour flight; I’d have been jet-lagged and bemused anyway. But it felt as though I was simultaneously experiencing a jet-lagging through periods of my life, each footstep jarring between the person I was now – attending a film festival, for the first time as a screenwriter – and the person I was then, when this was my work, a two-week span of the year so intensive and familiar to me that it might have felt stranger not to be there.

That there were so many familiar faces and old friends to be found within that two block radius didn’t make the feeling any less odd. Yet, there were plenty of faces I didn’t know; corners of the building that had changed, alongside those that hadn’t. 

My mind was caught between trying to fit back into the version of me that existed in this world, and trying to remember who I was in this edition. Because we can’t go back. I’d tried before: returning to work at the film festival in Edinburgh in 2019 after nearly a year living in Canada had been an uncomfortable and confusing experience of being disjointed between versions of self. 

Nor was I trying to go back, during my visit to Toronto. I had worked my whole life to make it to the other side of this film festival; to not be the person that had to smile and fix everyone’s problems while nursing aching feet, half a headache, and the aching reality of not knowing when you’ll next get to eat or sleep properly. 

But I still felt caught between the two, as though I was lying through my teeth to be present in this environment and calling myself a screenwriter, when I knew where the printer paper was kept and the fastest way between the venues when the crowds get backed up with a premiere happening down the street. 

Despite a wonderful weekend in Toronto, I returned to Paris feeling overwhelmed and out of step with who I’d been a week ago. Paris didn’t help: it brought back memories of the version of myself that I had been a few years ago, when I’d spent several weeks in the city and had convinced myself I was going to move there. In the time I’d been gone, that pull had been lost for me. I still admired the city and the pockets of it in which I felt most comfortable and relaxed, but it wasn’t the home it had once suggested it could become.

Maybe Paris had changed, or – more likely – I had. Maybe these six months of living across the cities of Europe had adapted my understanding of what this version of Suzey wanted from a home. Maybe the beauty and chaos of Paris reminded me forlornly only of the beauty and chaos of Rome, where I’d spent a month and which I missed desperately, even though I couldn’t see it as a permanent place for my future.

How many different versions of self had I ended up going through in this year alone? And how different are these versions, anyway?

Not all that different, I conclude as I go the following week to visit my family. My brother’s children still tuck themselves next to me for a cuddle while we watch a film, and know me decidedly as Auntie Suzey. My brother comments that I seem well. I joke that it’s probably all the running, or the summer spent in the peace and sunshine of the Nordics. Both are probably true, in a way. Just like neither of them are. 

The truth is that maybe each version of self that we pass through takes us closer to who we really are. That as we continue to learn and grow, informed by the world in which we live and those with whom we spend our time, we uncover a little more about the person we are. In turn, growing towards being more comfortable at showing those parts of ourselves to the world. 

The past version of Suzey that worked at that film festival can remain there as an apparition. Just like the version I might encounter this weekend around London, left behind from just last year. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on the version that I am now as, before long, she too will be left merely to memory.