I AM SO FULL OF HOPE - IT OVERFLOWS
Anu Shree is one of the Public Programmes Coordinator at MAP. Within her current role, she focuses on the need for increasing youth engagement within cultural spaces and exploring tangible means to achieve it. She holds an MA in International Cultural Heritage Management from Durham University, UK. Previously, she has worked with various cultural organisations in India and the UK, focusing largely on community engagement and outreach.
If I take a moment to think about all the things that make me who I am - I immediately start noticing all the little bits of the world I borrowed. My love for history comes from my sister, I text just like my friend from college and I found my favourite poem because it was loved by an artist I love.
It is amazing how we go through life collecting these tiny little quirks and moments that go on to define who we are as individuals. Our lives are just an ongoing collage of all the things we wanted to be growing up, all the things we are right now and all the things we could not become.
Navigating our personhood is a constant work in progress - as we make our way through the world we borrow pieces from it and create a toolbox to help us understand ourselves better. We go through the world fighting all these brand new monsters, challenges, changes and big bad confusing spaces like “banks”. Along the way we pick up a few tricks and survival tactics.
We navigate this maze of a universe using all the tools we scavenged along the way. We form a community for ourselves, create new visions for our future and learn to embrace bits of our older selves. We make our way through this world as a constant work in progress, not knowing who we are and slowly realising that we have time yet to revise and review. And there is a certain kind of hope in it - a kind that cannot contain itself and tends to overflow quite a bit.
It is a pleasure being a work in progress - because I am far from complete (or incomplete) - I am just on an adventure trying to figure out who I am.