There’s something freeing about placing ourselves in the unfamiliar, where we think we don’t belong, about casting aside the people we think we are. We become rigid, less free-flowing, stuck in the details of ourselves. But I have realised that these assumptions can work against us. For instance, I thought I always needed cafés to write in, art galleries and noisy bars full of interesting people. We put a lot of emphasis on our identity and knowing ourselves, our likes and dislikes. And all these aspects that I identified with, viewing them as the essential furnishings of my being, worked like human scaffolding, keeping me together and giving me shape. I thought I needed a plethora of things, specific requirements that needed to be met in order for me to be me. And in all this self-examining, I learned something: one can get stuck in one’s own identity. It allows us to hover around, drone-like, examining the contours of our very being. Very few times in life do we find the other within ourselves. But this difference that so starkly set me apart allowed me to discover the “other” within me. Here I stood alone, a solitary figure, a ghost wandering the land. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the diversity of London. I couldn’t help but acknowledge the difference in culture, landscape and skin colour: there was no one like me. So I navigated my way in a new directionless Welsh land, in its dark woods and forests. Bereavement, and all that goes with it – my family imploded when my mum died – made me feel I was no longer part of a family, as if I had lost my identity. If someone saw me, would they think I was lost? In a way, I was. I wondered what a brown city girl like me was doing wandering around the Welsh valleys, the only Indian in the village. And yet, I had never seen myself as foreign. The lack of international cuisine made me think this was an unfriendly coded message that extended to me: not interested in the foreign. My new abode: small, quiet, provincial and white. Rural Wales couldn’t be further away from my hometown. My life had changed rather dramatically, so I left what was once familiar But my life had changed rather dramatically, so I left what was once familiar. I’d often engage with those voices, in the conversations that weren’t meant for me: one can live vicariously in the city. Walk down the street and you’ll hear a plethora of voices with varied accents. Moving from London to rural Wales was a strange decision for someone who feels they belong in the city, London, a place where a person can feel as if they’re at the centre of the world. Not enough is said about stumbling around in the dark. Standing alone and being lost is a place where many things can be found. Perhaps this is the natural way in life, to gravitate to the things we recognise: who wants to stand alone when there is safety in numbers? But I have discovered something. A milieu that is familiar, a cave that reverberates our very own sound. It seems our entire lives are dedicated to finding spaces we can nestle into until, ultimately, we find ourselves. The idea of being “found” holds so much importance. I lost my 62-year-old mother to cancer in 2014 I’ve been drifting ever since. A sound that, one day, will belong to us all. But this particular one, the separation of the lambs from their mothers, resonates more than any other. Country sounds have become familiar to me I swapped the city for the country four years ago. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.It’s the time of year when the ewes are being separated from the lambs, when their cries and the guttural noise from their mothers can be heard across the valley, a natural amphitheatre for the soundtrack of their separation. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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