Traditions and Identifying Your ‘Roots’

In this podcast episode, I reflect on a personal tradition and address some questions about how to know you’re staying rooted – using this tradition as my example.

Your life will not look from the outside as it feels on the inside. And that’s how it’s meant to work.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:21 – Introducing the Tradition and Listener Questions
01:16 – My Tradition on 5^th November Each Year
02:13 – An Overview of this Tradition across Life Changes
03:10 – The Identities in the Film and My Personal Identities
04:10 – Recognising the Thread of Reinvention
04:29 – My Shift in Reason for this Tradition (My Fears about British Society)
05:45 – Reflecting on Listener’s Questions Applied to this Tradition
07:22 – The difference between what people see versus the roots underneath
08:57 – Reflecting on my Other Traditions and What they Mean to me
10:37 – If you feel lost on reinventing from your roots…

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Episode Transcript:

Today I’m reflecting on a personal tradition and weaving in a couple of questions that I’ve had from listeners specifically about how you know your reinvention is rooted when from the outside either:

* it looks like nothing is changing
or
* it looks like you are burning your whole life down

How do you know that you are reinventing from your roots?

And I’m going to use an example of a particular tradition that I have, and how I feel this illustrates what is considered my roots: In the hope that it will provide a little bit of clarity with a concrete example of how I see my personal reinventions and how I see and feel my roots underlying them or the thread that’s pulled the whole way through them.

So starting off with the Tradition
It is November and I have a personal tradition that I watch a particular movie called V for Vendetta.

I will link it in the show notes in case you’re interested.

If you’ve never seen it or heard of it, it is a movie about the 5th of November (which in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night) where there are bonfires and fireworks, because of an event that happened in 1605, and the movie focuses on this kind of plot.

And I call this a personal tradition because, since I discovered it around 16, 17 years ago, I have watched this movie every year on November 5th I want to say 13 times.

For me this is a tradition. This is something that I do on the 5th of November and it’s something I’ve done throughout versions of myself, throughout different living situations, throughout different reinventions.

I began watching it by myself in my room at my parents’ house.

I then moved into a flat. When I got my first job and my second job I then moved in with my partner of the time.

We then watched it most years together. When that relationship ended and I moved out of that home, I introduced my new long term partner to it and we watched it for a couple of years in a row.

Now that I’m in a relationship again, I watched it with my current fiancée for the second or third time.

From the outside my life is so different how it was even five or 10 years ago, let alone 16 or 17.
And yet the things that led to this being a tradition for me have not changed.

With hindsight, I can particularly see how things that I didn’t even know about myself when I first started watching it were the things that pulled me in.

• I did not see myself necessarily as a queer person.
• I was not, at that point, considered physically disabled.
• I had not got the diagnoses that I have around my mental health.

And I say this because the film focuses quite a lot on minorities: particularly those who are of a different sexual orientation, or who have some kind of extra vulnerability, or who are seen as not following the rules ascribed to them.

And looking back, with all the knowledge of how personal reinvention works, it is literally a story not just of personal reinvention for the main characters that are in it, but also of society and the world around it.

The changes from the beginning of the film to the end of the film, of how the people within the movie are portrayed, how they see themselves, how they work through their life, what they believe and what actions they take, it is a story of reinvention.

So now that I see that thread, it makes some sense to me, you know, recognising my own threads of reinvention and my own roots.

I consider myself to be queer.
And therefore, when the characters are persecuted because they are part of the LGBT community, it really hits different.

And I find myself watching this movie more every year because, terrifyingly, I can see British society becoming more and more like that one in the film.

And there is a part of me that wants to keep my eyes open and keep myself alert to which bits feel like they are more realistic than ever, but also hold on to the hope that by the end of the film, the reinvention was for the better.

There is a line even at the end of the film that says, “What this country needs now more than anything else is hope.“

And again, thinking about – I’m not a movie critic. I don’t know a great deal about the original graphic novel that it’s based on, but I almost look at this as a tradition of facing the fear that my country is becoming more and more like this dystopian universe, and yet also reminding me that there is always hope underlying it.

The only way that society will shift, will change, will transform, will reinvent itself in some way, is if the people who make up that society reinvent or shift or change the way they are.

And sometimes in society, it can look like someone either:
* is not changing and will never change,
or
* that they’ve changed so much so that they’re not rooted anymore. It looks like so many things are different that they almost aren’t the same person.

And this is where I got thinking about this particular tradition and this particular movie and how I can see that thread forming all the way through it.

There have been a couple of questions specifically about what a rooted reinvention is when there’s a lot that’s changed that would traditionally be considered, you know, like you are burning down your old life.

You are uprooting and going elsewhere. And I have followed this particular tradition: I have been drawn to this movie across a couple of decades at this point. And my beliefs, and my sense of self, although they have shifted, and my understanding is greater of who I am, what it is about this movie that calls to me.

The actual pull is the same.

When I look back, I can see that I recognise myself as a queer person, as someone who is neurodivergent, as someone who in this society would likely be considered disabled and therefore considered to have less worth than others.

Although I didn’t consider myself to come under any of those labels. I knew the feeling of not feeling good enough, of feeling like I’m broken, of feeling that I need to be fixed.

And that, I suppose, is the root.

So whether I watch the movie in my childhood bedroom, in a flat by myself, with a partner or something, the core route, although it may look very different from the outside of where I am and who I am and what I’m doing with my time, that root of who I’ve always felt, this connection to this movie, I’ve always felt this.

The roots of that connection, that sense of feeling, that desire to have hope, that need to face the fear, but then also make sure I don’t lose the hope within it.

That is something that I feel is so rooted in how I work and how my brain works and who I am.

Whereas, you know, I feel like on the outside, oh, she’s watching a movie on the sofa.
It’s a different sofa to the one she was watching it on 5 years ago.
It’s a different sofa to the one she was watching it on 10 years ago.
She’s watching it with a different person.

I might have different things to say about it as I sort of explore the narrative from a slightly different lens each time. When I see it again and I get reminded of certain bits I’d forgotten.

But the pull and the roots and that feeling is what I’ve been chasing. It’s what I’ve been following. Those are the roots which I now allow myself to grow from.

I now have the language to recognise that I fit into these categories in my life.
And therefore this movie has a slightly different meaning to me now than it did back then.

But that tradition: I started that tradition for a reason.

I don’t have any Christmas movies that I watch. I don’t have any summer movies that I watch. I don’t have anything for New Year’s Eve that I do all the time.

You know, I don’t have traditions around pretty much any other holiday but this one.

Because there is something in that movie that really speaks to how I see the world, what beliefs I share, the sense of fear of how, you know, the country can go, and the sense of hope that we all need to cling onto sometimes.

This is the only movie that I watch every single year. This is my only tradition I have of watching a particular film on a particular day. I don’t have any particular traditions aside from this one.

I open Yuletide presents from my partner on Yule instead of Christmas, but that is because I am Pagan and it’s just nice to open something on what I see as my true version of Yuletide.
And then obviously everyone else who wants to do Christmas, we open Christmas presents on Christmas Day.
But otherwise I don’t have any other traditions.

And I couldn’t explain in just a few minutes why this particular movie is such a good analogy for how I feel rooted and how things might look very different on the outside or might look very the same on the outside.

And yet the internal reinvention, the experience inside my brain and my body has shifted.
And yet as just as it was the first few times I watched it.

So if you are feeling a little bit lost: “What are your roots?”
“How can I feel rooted? How can this be my roots if actually things have changed on the outside?”

If I’m in a different space or I see different things in it, please know that they’re not mutually exclusive.

Just know that any reinvention you are having personally will not look on the outside as it feels on the inside.
Because the outside systems in our world work so differently from our internal ones.
And that’s okay, and you don’t need to justify it to anyone.

I hope this little ramble has been useful and that you’ve gleamed something from it.

If you have any traditions or you have any kind of roots that you feel you’ve pulled through what might look like multiple reinventions on the outside, but you’re still rooted to what was there before, please share them in the comments.

I would love to hear from you. Otherwise, I hope you have a lovely week and I’ll speak to you next time.