The Future of Myself

While reading Joanna Nadin’s The Future of The Self, I found myself sitting with a question– something I’ve been mulling over for a while. Lately the question has been loud, though unintelligible. I don’t think I really knew what I was asking of myself until the morning I cracked open the book. 

It’s no secret that I’ve experienced a lot of big life events over the past couple of years. First, the initial leg of the pandemic in 2020, which led to the complete separation of my identity from my career. I was no longer “Chelsea the photographer” or “Chelsea the influencer.” I was just Chelsea, at home alone with my thoughts. There, I began unearthing something that I have continued to dig at and brush away debris from. It was around this time that I began reading again and said out loud for the first time that I wanted to be a writer.

In the middle of the pandemic (though to indicate a middle might seem as though it has ended) I turned 30. I moved from the extended teenage years of my twenties into the young adulthood of my thirties, or at least that’s how it felt to me. The scales on my eyes continued to fall off. 

Right after that one-two punch was delivered to my ego, I also divorced myself from the only adult home I had ever known and moved away from Austin, where I’d lived for six and a half years. Through the move to Nashville I continued asking the question of self as it pertains to my career. Up until that point I’d only ever been self-employed, aside from a few part-time jobs in college. I worked for myself dutifully for ten years. And then, with grand ideas of buying a house at the forefront of my mind and decision making, I got a job. I wanted to put down roots, to say the word home and mean it. Trading the inconsistency and unsteadiness of self employment for twice-monthly paychecks and a house seemed like a worthy barter.

Over the almost three years of working for someone else, I began developing hobbies that were just for me. With every hobby I picked up, I could feel myself continuing to separate who I was from what I did and building up a new idea of self.

In The Future of The Self, Joanna Nadin writes

Self is not an object, but a construct or process. It is a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

With the clarity that only hindsight can give, I see myself constructing the fable of me, as a person viewed through a vast array of lenses. I see me grappling with generational trauma, with my upbringing, and with the mountains from which I hail. I see myself decoupling from my career as a badass professional photographer girlboss and then needing to re-evaluate who it is I am if not that. 

Lately the voice has been louder because again I find myself in a new place careerwise. In the past six months I’ve been reconstructing a self-employed career. I’m a photographer again, yes, but I’m also doing other things. I’m a creative consultant to several small businesses who offers free sessions for creatives who are in a rut. I’m a writer who publishes a twice-weekly newsletter and has paid subscribers who support her work (still screaming over that one). And recently, I’ve joined TikTok where I post about books because it’s fun and because I’m reading enough to warrant an outlet. 

And with all this, I’m back at the beginning stages of constructing a presence both in business and in self. I am sorting out an online life that feels representative of who I really am, while grappling with the fact that everything online feels fake. It is all a facade of some kind. It's all a curation. 

I am obsessed with the way we define who we are, who we project ourselves as, and how we talk about that projection online. 

I am a child of the 90’s, and at the height of my pubescence I was given the gift of an AOL Trial CD and joined the world wide web. Since then, I’ve had information at my fingertips and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it. I spent many a teenage afternoon in chat rooms with strangers, lured there by the mystery of what it would be like to talk to someone that didn’t live in North Wilkesboro, NC. The internet showed me the possibility of a larger world—a larger life than what I’d seen in my hometown. It broadened my horizons. It welcomed me to a life of more. And it gave me an outlet. I started my first Xanga and started blogging when I was 13 years old. 

My sense of self was forged right alongside my involvement with being a person online, and so of course I have an interest in how the self interacts with the person you position yourself as on the internet.

What I want to project to you is as close to the truth as I’ve been able to muster: I do not have it all figured out. I am curious about the things that have shaped me into who I am, and I am a person who makes her money by being online, but I don’t have it all figured out. I am changing constantly, as you are, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m trying to get to the nucleus of who I am as an individual and as a community member, and my goal is to let you in on that process.

While reading this book, I paused and scrolled TikTok and saw something I wanted to replicate. The format was simple. Set to Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, you post a photo of yourself and a photo of the things you love. While I was making my collage of the particular water bottle brand I like, the albums I like, and the exact color of red lipstick I use I questioned the vanity of posting something like that at all. Why do we do it? What does it contribute? The answer is that it really doesn’t contribute much more than expressing your personality in a sea of personalities. But I wanted to do it, so I did. Once it was posted, it reminded me of putting Spice Girls stickers on my Lisa Frank binder in middle school—I saw someone else do it and I liked it, so I did it. And expressing myself I saw a girl who put Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports beside Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour. Even if it was a projection, it felt like me.

I think in forming my hypothesis of self, there will always be space for the whims of the middle school version of me who earnestly decides to like things and let them be part of her for a time. I think as I continue contending with all the versions of me, nothing is truer to who I am than the earnestness of my enjoyment. Nothing feels more me.

I realized today that the question of who I am isn’t finite, and it never has been. Who I am is ever-changing. I exist both individually and as part of a community, online and in real life. Who I am is viewed through who you are, a projection of who you assume me to be. You are both correct and incorrect.

Because of this, I hope the future of myself is flexible and squishy, with room to breathe and change and evolve, and I hope my assumptions about who I might be don’t get in the way of who I am becoming.

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