in the crucible of selfdom

the sun is rising outside my window. i can see it creeping up between the tops of the trees, washing the sky in pink-gold light. i'm thirteen years old and have just discovered a curious hollowness in my chest, the acute feeling of something missing. when i think back on this time, it'll be these few seconds that will come to me clearest, but i don't know that yet. here is where everything begins.

just over two years ago, i sat myself down and forced out the words that would become the first real post on this blog: a desperate list of things i knew about myself disguised as a reflection on the slow discovery of personhood, hoping it would come together as something cohesive. i felt so hopelessly, terribly lost - and to be honest, that hasn't entirely changed, but i struck true to the resolution i made in that essay, to jump off the cliff of becoming and not look back. i've let the waters of fate do with me as they will, and i think i'm finally beginning to understand.

for as long as i can remember, i've been searching, hoping i would find something, or someone, to make me feel real. i've struck out in every direction following one constant thread, the echoing question that runs through each one of the posts i've made here over the years: who am i? over and over, i am returned to the same aching hollowness deep inside, a feeling i feared meant i was missing something fundamental. it all begins with a sunrise, see, one moment of many that i would begin to steal for myself to keep inside my chest like a dragon's hoard. here is a sunrise, here a fresh salt breeze, here stumbling fingers on guitar strings on a porch deep in the woods. all of these things carry weight i can't quite capture, defining in broad, hazy stretches a life i've only recently begun to understand.

the world has a mysterious way of turning back on itself in circles. i have a tattoo of an ouroboros circling my forearm, the ink scarred there in raised lines that i can trace without looking. i've always known i would eventually come home to this feeling of non-existence, a constant presence seeping in through the drafty windows of my mind. after all, what else do i have? the funny thing about building your life around running away from something is that you will never fully escape whatever it is you're running from. it's baked into the very foundations of having a thing to run from, after all - defined by itself, in some kind of paradoxical sense. a snake biting its own tail, the sun rising and falling. like clockwork, i find something to stake my person-ness on and it falls apart. i am left, over and over, with nothingness. i take another picture of another sunset.

i've written and rewritten this essay a handful of times, stopping myself each time partway through cleaning up the same conversation with my therapist, making it poetic enough to be consumable. i'm playing with the pieces, trying this time with: i'm crying, the cat wants to be let into my room, my therapist asks me "what if that's just what it feels like to be you?" i'm grappling again with this blog, the things left behind when the words fall out of my head. here is the revelation: i have spent my entire life trying to see myself outside myself. what would i be like a little more perfect, a little less everything else? i am running away from something that begins to become the running.

back to the sunrise: i am writing about sickness without writing about sickness. there are moments here of clarity and others long lost to the fog. of the several points around which my existence hinges, sickness is indisputably one, though it isn't until nearly a decade later that i will finally give it this name. sickness of mind and of body, a body-brain-haunting, the orange-red flash of the sun cresting over the trees, another essay about surviving. the snake eats its tail again. i loathe to reduce myself to the frailty that the sick-girl-trope implies. wasting away in a bed, but it's beautiful. when i leave these words behind, they will be beautiful. here is my biggest secret: i am terrified of what it would mean to not be perfect.

this is all a kind of exposure that is gratifying in some raw, unashamed sense. i am an emotional autopsy in this great blank space and i post it for everyone and no-one to read. another essay about another kind of despair that is unique and different and beautiful, right? i'm aware of the irony. i am busy trying to capture a self i can look back on without aching. i am trying with all my might to forge a selfdom born from a determination to do something besides survive. one day i'll stop looking and realize it's been here all along, i was just too busy running away to find it.

published february 6, 2022

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