Thoughts by Sigrun Guggenberger
Image by Theo Gosselin
Today I got a message from my former Au-pair kid, that for a week she is in the city where I live and she would like to meet me again. She was a kid and I was a teenager that time. So many years have passed in the meantime but I still have vivid memories from that period, from her, the host family and one of the first times I was living abroad. I remember that one of the most liberating things about moving abroad that time was that I could start from zero, without anyone knowing me I could be whoever I wanted to be and take the time to really get to know myself, like painting a white canvas. Like the feeling of starting a new year. I truly look forward to see her, to hear about her life, to see who she has become, all grown up now. And it also makes me think of who I have become in the meantime. Have I changed a lot? Have I become the person that I wanted to be at that time? And would I be the way I am now, if I wouldn´t have had this experience? I wonder how much we are already the way we are and how much are we made up by all the things we decide and experience as each new year comes and another year passes. Sometimes your old-self feels like a life-time away, especially if you lived in different places with different people and the older you get the more different fragments you need to put together to obtain the whole piece of yourself and your story. And once you have so much together do we stop changing at all one day? The canvas might get full one day, so full that you feel you can´t put anything else on it and you are left with what you painted for all the new years coming. But if you want then a canvas can always be overpainted to add more stuff without losing what is on the subsurface.
