The Unfinished Self

A dragonfly spends much of its life underwater as a nymph, feeding and growing through successive moults. It is an active predator, already adapted to that environment, with developing wings enclosed in wing-sheaths. The final moult takes place out of the water. The wings expand and harden, and a creature whose life has been aquatic begins to fly. The conspicuous change draws attention to a process that has been going on for much longer.

I find the difference between development and its visibility useful when thinking about people. An ability may be growing before anyone has a familiar description for it, or several abilities may exist before a person finds work in which they can be used together. Human development has no corresponding guarantee of an adult form waiting to emerge. The comparison gives us a reason to look more carefully at an unfinished period, while leaving its value to be established through what the person learns and does.

Progress is easier to recognise when it follows an accepted sequence. Someone chooses a field, acquires qualifications and becomes increasingly competent at identifiable work. A person moving among several interests can be harder to understand, especially when the connections are still unclear. The uncertainty may concern how to combine the interests, how much competence has actually been acquired, or which one deserves a more sustained commitment. Calling all of it distraction resolves those different questions before they have been examined.

There can also be a difficulty in allowing an existing ability to enter a setting where it does not seem to belong. Someone who is valued for being precise may hesitate to draw on an emotional response, even when it alerts them to something they have overlooked. Someone who has learned to be forceful may treat gentleness as an exposure they cannot afford. The available response becomes narrower when the person has to defend a role before considering what the situation requires.

By integration, I mean becoming better able to use these different capacities in relation to one another. An emotional response can identify something that reasoning then examines; reasoning can alter the interpretation that first produced the feeling. The two can contribute without always agreeing. Some conflicts will concern incompatible aims, limited time or obligations to other people, and learning to work with them may involve a decision that leaves part of the conflict unresolved.

Polymathy adds a requirement for developed competence across fields. Having several interests supplies opportunities to learn, but it gives us little information about what someone can yet do with them. A connection between painting and data analysis becomes useful when the person understands enough about each to make a particular result clearer or solve a problem. Openness permits the attempt. Practice and feedback help determine whether the connection works, and further learning may be needed before it contributes anything.

An unsettled period can make room for these attempts. Skills that have been kept separate can be tried together, and a role that previously excluded an interest can be reconsidered. There may be little immediately visible to show for it. But uncertainty, changing motivation and a stalled career can have many explanations. Calling the period integration should lead to a more specific account of what is changing: a new use for a skill, a decision made with more of the relevant information, or a task that the person can now approach differently.

A settled commitment can support that work. It supplies a task to return to, standards against which to judge an attempt, and enough continuity to discover what practice changes. The risk comes when a useful description of present work becomes a restriction on what the person may bring to it. Someone can commit to being an analyst without treating painting or poetry as evidence that they have failed to choose. Equally, they can decide to keep those interests private without having failed to become whole. Their value does not depend entirely on being incorporated into a career.

Consider a hypothetical woman in her forties who is established as a precise, reliable analyst. She also paints, writes poetry and has philosophical interests, but has treated them as private activities with little place in her professional life. Over a couple of years, she begins to consider them together without requiring each connection to justify itself immediately. Then a client asks her to make a dry dataset easier to grasp. She uses her analytical knowledge to preserve what the data says, a painter's attention to balance and tone to make it readable, and philosophical questions she would previously have kept out of the task. The work feels less divided because she has allowed those abilities to contribute.

The example assumes that she has already spent time learning the things she is combining. It also leaves the quality of the result open to assessment: an attractive presentation could obscure a distinction, while a philosophical question could expose an assumption that changes the analysis. The useful connection would need to survive those checks. What feels easier is her willingness to make the attempt without first classifying parts of herself as irrelevant.

A change like that may appear sudden because a task finally gives several abilities a shared use. Much of the preparation can precede the occasion that makes their relation visible. The dragonfly's emergence offers an image for that change in visibility, although even its first flight is weak and its maturation continues. For a person, a successful connection may be followed by more practice, another period of uncertainty or the discovery that a familiar approach fails in a different setting.

I am wary of an identity that becomes complete by excluding what has not yet found a use. The exclusion can make life more coherent in the short term, especially when other people know what to expect, but it can also prevent experiments through which a wider competence might develop. The analyst can remain committed to careful analysis while testing what painting contributes to the work, leaving other interests available for their own purposes. A name for what she does can guide a commitment without deciding everything she is allowed to become.

Further reading: British Dragonfly Society, Life Cycle and Biology.