Transformation, Life and 24/7 Alchemy
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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I like how you described both transformation and oneness as if they are one thing. Life has its mysterious way of bringing everything together and putting it in apparently different order.
We can’t transform from what we really are because what our essence is is the reason we are here. It is the only place where we can find authentic joy and contentment. Being who you are is more of allowing than transforming. Allowing against all forms of conditioning, judgment and fear. The gap between who someone really is and who he thinks he is can only be covered by removing the layers of identification we cling to and embarking on a journey of self discovery where we drop any thing that we know about ourselves.
This post resonates with me. From 98-08 I tried to drink myself to death. It's a lot harder to do than you'd think... or my liver is just a superhero. I didn't even almost start getting my shit together until I turned 30.
It's weird, I spent every second of every day for most of my life hating myself and wanting to die. I tried to off myself a few times but I couldn't even do that right. I wish I knew what changed. Maybe enough years passed that my shit childhood was far enough behind me that it didn't affect me anymore. Maybe, as I aged, my brain chemistry just settled down. Perhaps all the potions I buy off the internet to self-medicate have been working.
For whatever reason, I changed. Then, instead of running from myself I started building myself. I remember being 23 and thinking how bad I failed at life because I hadn't done anything yet and there wasn't any point in bothering because life had already passed me by.
My older brother was bummed as fuck when he turned 30, probably for the same reason. I remember thinking, "If I only make it to 60, that means I get to live the entire time I've already been here over again, except for this part I have a fully functioning brain, dick, and wallet the whole time, plus, I'm an adult so nobody can tell me shit." It still took a few more years for that to really sink in and me to start really "building." Since then I've been blown away by how shit feelings and actions are a bottomless pit, but positive shit stacks up FAST. I have 38 years behind me and I've never been more excited about the future. It's annoying looking back and thinking, "Fuck. I was awesome the whole time. I could have gotten so much done if I hadn't spent half my life kicking my own ass." But you know what, fuck it. Now every day is full of opportunity and I absolutely love being me. Life didn't pass me by, its just getting started. Most importantly, I look fucking good.
Hello @snowmachine, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!