I Am Me? 

From The Years of Travelling Anxiously by Tom Sykes published by Icon Books, out the 26 March, 2026.

How anxious was Emil Hollanders when he crossed the English Channel in 1858? From Kempen, now in western Germany, my forefather may have been born too soon and not easterly enough to have suffered in the pogroms. In these grisly rampages, 100,000 Russian and Eastern European Jews were murdered by mobs. Armies and police forces were often complicit in the violence. As a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia, Emil might have been used to what we’d today call microaggressions. There and then, antisemitism was ‘actively preached and spread’ in workplaces, schools, social clubs and taverns, writes the scholar Daniel Goldhagen.

I look at Emil’s name in the 1861 census, rendered in graceful, zaftig handwriting, and picture him, a boy of twenty, being cold-shouldered on that trip by gentile passengers for his dark complexion and pointy features. If he knew much about Britain, he’d have been nervous about emigrating somewhere that barred Jews from attending university or standing for parliament. He may not have been wanted in his place of origin or on the journey from it or at his destination.

Maybe I’m over-worrying about my dear ancestor and he enjoyed his voyage. Perhaps he was optimistic about a better life ahead. Many immigrants are – have to be. Like other young Victorian men, he could have seen it all as a big adventure, with fortune, glory and a pretty girl the prizes. He was a trained clock/watchmaker, a skill that was transferable once he’d settled in Portsmouth. Emil might therefore have laughed at the idea of me, his descendant in a cushier future, feeling even a pinch of dread while travelling in safety, with no risk of shipwreck, cholera or racism.

Driving through Cherbourg to the cross-channel ferry port many years later, I see African men on pavements and roundabouts. They’re about Emil’s age when he’d split for the UK. They look at once listless and frantic, yawning and walking in circles around each other or sitting on benches gazing at their phones while swinging their legs. Their bodies are moving without going anywhere. They’re stuck between the place from where they came, to which they can’t return after risking their lives to leave it, and two places that don’t want them – France and England.

Whether you’ve done anything wrong or not, it’s hard for the calmest person not to feel a flicker of fear going through immigration control, wherever in the world you are. The beanie-hatted, puffer-jacketed Police aux Frontières officer holds my passport up to the light and studies it with one eye closed, like a jeweller searching for a cutting error in a gemstone. Nobody’s passport photo ever looks like them, yet this has never caused me grief before.

He pushes a pen and notepad across the desk. ‘Write signature.’

Write my own name. This should be easy. Automatic. But not in this state. I got little sleep last night and spent the morning stomping aimlessly around the campsite I’d been staying on with relatives. Already feeling disconnected from myself, now my selfhood’s being tested: Is that picture of me really me? Can I prove that I am me by writing a signature that looks enough like the one in the passport, itself a document designed to prove that I am me?

If a passport photo resembles us less as our appearance changes from age, stress and poorly chosen haircuts, does our signature alter over time, too? Even a small divergence between what I write now and what’s in my passport could trap me in France on suspicion of illegal emigration, like the Africans earlier. As I shakily hold the pen over the notepad, I consider what else about ourselves changes, and whether these changes are so frequent and extreme that they make us contradictory to the core.

People like to believe that they are the same at any time, in any place, acting consistently according to a fixed personality and set of attributes, like a computer-game character. Our culture reveres the consistent, steady, principled. But my anxiety barraged brain reckons this is rubbish. Doesn’t the self shift constantly? Tom who goes down the snooker club might as well be a different person to Tom the lecturer, Tom the uncle to toddler nephews. And within those selves are more discrepancies. Tom the writer is fairly intelligent. He has a high level of knowledge about some things. But Tom the writer has also done some epically stupid things. So, overall, am I bright or dim? I’ve been kind and I’ve been unkind. I can be forbearing or I can be severely impatient – especially when I’m anxious.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that this self-uncertainty starts in babyhood, when we first notice our image in the mirror. We’re relieved to gain a sense of ourselves as a living entity. But the coherence of the body we see – the head attached to the torso, the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, as the old song goes – is at odds with the lack of control we have over that same body. At that age we can’t walk, talk, eat or defecate without help. As we get older and gain more power over ourselves we don’t solve this identity crisis, Lacan argues. Indeed it gets worse as we come into conflict with the ‘symbolic order’: the systems of language, law and social norms to which we try to conform … but we never can since these systems themselves are conflicting and fragmented. This is especially true of language, in which words are never quite able to represent the world, our ideas or our feelings.

‘Monsieur?’ prompts Beanie-man. ‘Write your signature.’

I make a squiggle on the page. It sort of resembles the squiggle in the passport below the picture of some chubby-cheeked, big-nosed, middle-aged man called ‘Thomas Sykes’.

Beanie-man waves me through, holding me with a gaze that screams, ‘I’m still not sure who you are.’

Well, that makes two of us, mate.