In the Hour of Thoughtless Youth:
Final Show, Riverdale Country School, 2016
I am not the same person I was ten years ago. I don’t mean to say that I have changed a lot, or transformed and grown; I am actually a different person. All the cells that made up eight-year-old Cate have died, and just about the only thing holding her and me together are a few vague, constructed memories.
At the beginning of my senior year, I started to realize this concept. I felt a strong sense of depersonalization and anxiety surrounding my identity. I longed to rediscover my childhood interests: I was buying dolls again, and princess watches, and wearing hairclips from when I was a toddler. It still confuses me that, I, an eighteen-year-old girl, could feel so incredibly nostalgic about these relatively recent memories.
As high school came to a close, these were the questions that I was asking myself. What is it that is going to make the present Cate and the 20-year-old Cate the same Cate? Thoughnothing can really tie all my selves together, I know the next “me” will only exist because I, in my present state, do.
Based on the self-reflective poetry of William Wordsworth, I have put together a series of works as a way of saying thank you to all the previous selves that have made me possible. Each piece is titled with a line from his poetry, which served as the inspiration for the work.