Transformation isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s the only thing that makes sense. Alchemy is going on around us 24/7, and the act of life itself is a chemical transformation. All life comes from the culmination of matter that at some point in time, was not life. We transform living things into food, and that becomes absorbed into our bodies, become a part of us, until it can no longer remember its original. Once we were stars, and once we were a part of our mother’s body, a small egg waiting for a spark.
Transformation is a part of our legacy.
We can’t help -but- transform. It is not possible to stay in the same shape forever, but it is possible to desperately cling to the same shape, wishing that everything would stay the same.
Close your eyes - can you see the primordial grasses from which an atom of you once came? Can you see a piece of you that was not yet you dancing across the Martian atmosphere? Riding on the back of a dinosaur? In the fingernail of your father? The fingerprint of a pilgrim? If you can’t, then you can imagine it. It’s beautiful isn’t it - the way that every single piece of us has always existed, since the beginning of existence?
Sometimes you dip your hands down expecting to pick up a dirty sock off the floor and instead what comes up is a soup of all existence.
I write about transformation a lot, if you’ve read any of my other work you already know this. It should be obvious why: It’s because I desperately wanted to transform. I wanted to be anyone but me. I wanted a way out of the scum-crawling misery and the wreckage from which I was born, and I saw no other way expect to be someone who wasn’t me. I did not see me as the me that I was, being a creature that was capable of happiness and success. I felt that I had more in common with a weeping angel of stone than a cheerful woman I’d see running in the park, or playing frisbee, or trying on a pair of yoga pants without criticizing her stomach for not being hard enough and flat enough. It wasn’t that it seemed difficult to be happy - the creature that could be happy didn’t even seem to be the same spcies.
In my stories women butterflies, and butterflies into enormous planets, and ghosts into stories that become a mythology that teach us where to stand, how to act, what to fear, who to fight. Vampires become dust, and worlds become wastelands where only gleaming machines are allowed to live.
There’s the soup again, bubbling at my feet. If I dip a toe into its hot swirling center than anything could come out.
You will not always be you.
And you will not always be.
But there will always be being, and the you that dissolves into being will die, but the perpetual motion of everything in existence will not. I don’t know if that’s comforting. It doesn’t have to be, because it is. Look sideways and you may fall off the universe.
I try to find ways to be different than who I really am. I try to search for an authentic self (Or maybe an inauthentic self, because I abhor myself).
I cut my hair and dye it blonde.
I do my nails.
I get a new wardrobe.
I lose weight, or gain it.
I acquire a new personality trait.
I write in a different genre.
I pluck my eyebrows.
I wear a different shade of lipstick - pirate red to teddy bear brown.
I change the sheets on my bed.
I go from chaste to wantonly whoreish.
I pick up a new musical instrument
I pose in front of a camera with flowers in my hair and ochre on my eyebrows
I drink alcohol, or smoke weed, or take a tab of acid, or snort coke, or take adderall, or get prescribed antidepressants, or chug kratom tea.
I put on fishnet
But none of that really got into the center of what I wanted.
To not be me.
Don’t worry, I want to tell myself, not being me will come soon enough. But as long as I’m alive, that’s not going to happen. I have to continuously remind myself that there is no way I can transport my eyes to another mind.
What’s changed in the last three years is that slowly over the accumulation of many days I see that me is of the same species as the woman who is happy even if as of yet I am not that color. And it is not the modification of my body to be someone else that I need, it is the refinement of me.
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