There’s a story, from when I was little, about a child wearing a new shirt who falls down, scraping their elbow and ripping the shirt. When they see that the shirt is spoiled, they start crying. “Well yes, the shirt is ruined,” their father says. “But look at the wonder of your elbow, of your body, that it can heal when the shirt cannot.”
I think we often forget that our bodies can do this, that we are regenerating when we heal; it’s a superpower, like Wolverine. A body closes wounds, it replaces cells—the latter so much that we don’t even have the same body we had however many years ago. I take a great comfort in that, in knowing that the cells people touched when I didn’t want them to no longer exist. I’m not the same person I was before.
Katherine comes to visit me at Shiny, and she’s so alive. It’s fascinating to watch how she moves through air, space, and time, like a whirlwind of rose petals and pink salt and candlewax and herbs and tea and soups and sketches and paint. We went through the plants and she noticed I was pruning them rather aggressively, so we talked about it. Katherine’s very into sitting with imperfections, while I excise them as quickly as they appear. I became curious—what would it look like to let a leaf brown all the way, to let the plants be the one to drop it off, grow a new leaf on its own time, instead of me hurrying it along? It made me think about patience and what healing can look like—sitting with the browning parts, waiting for them to die, waiting for the old skin to slough off instead of ripping it apart. Maybe the skin underneath is too raw, too new. Maybe if I was more patient with certain deaths, I would be more ready for the lives that come after them.
And so I started thinking about sitting in the rot, in the decomposition, in the decay of things. I had an anxiety attack at a gala and hid in the bathroom, thinking about how rotten I felt inside, how the people who engage with me tend to be either intimidated by my brightness, not bothering to look beyond it, or to be interested in nothing but that brightness, like there’s something else underneath repelling them, so they don’t want to go too deep. I felt like the thing underneath was something rotten, something decaying and dark.
When I told you this, you said I was haunted. I didn’t know what you meant. “You are someone who has seen darkness and been consumed by it, but who is not dark themselves,” you explained. We were talking about grief and the reluctance humans have to look at something directly. I can’t help but look at it, and not just look, but see it, point at it, ask them to look with me.
“People don’t want to touch things that are dark,” you told me. “It’s not that something else or another person is haunting you. You are yourself a haunting thing.”
When I told Katherine about the rot, she said compost was useful. It’s making something. I thought about that some more. When I sit with the decaying skins of myself, I begin to allow that I don’t have to be a carefully pruned and perfect thing. That the decomposition can be interesting to observe, a necessary stage in regeneration, like pus or removing necrotic tissue. I have to allow the old skin to become lax enough to slip it off. I could tear it myself, but I’m trying to step away from aggressive pruning. I’m very glad that I died and resurrected. I cannot emphasize enough how old that skin was, how much pain I was in, how badly I needed to molt it away. On the other side of it, I feel raw, certainly. Fresh colors, new scales.
Eloghosa told me the other day that living is new, different. You said that you had decided to live as well, and I wonder if the three of us at least are choosing life from different angles, but on roughly the same timeline. I think about life now as more of a loop, a cycle that includes a constant death, selves that are dying and being replaced, skins slipping on and off. In that constant death, you find a fuller kind of living. I’m interested in that, in how being a dead thing leaning into decomposition is also part of a story of regeneration, of newness, of living. Years ago, I had dinner with Okwui Okpokwasili. At the time I was looking for how to be, desperately so. She told me that my search was essentially pointless. I was looking for a map where there were no roads. What was happening was that a new planet was forming, land masses were breaking up to the surface, seas were boiling forth. There is no way to map something like this. There is just seeing what the planet has done every morning.
This is what this period of my life has felt like—a new planet forming—and I cannot tell if I am the one traversing the planet or if I am the planet myself, volcanoes erupting in my right shoulder, extinction happening along my thighs. What is clear is that it is constantly unfamiliar, that whatever pattern I could expect from myself, or my life, or my relationships has been violently upended, tossed around, impaled on a thousand possibilities. I have no idea what is going to happen in the next year or month or week or even the next few hours, something could come along and warp whatever I’ve just been settling into. I had to remind myself that, before I started writing letters to anyone, I was writing letters to myself; all of these are letters to myself. I was writing reminders because so much of this is a constant war against forgetting. This summer, when I talked to Marguerite after one of the brushes with death, she told me, “You write when you are most fragile, because you’re changing from one form to another. These transformations and transmutations that take place—it has to be painful.”
“Go deep,” she said. “You’re not going to drown because you’re not a being that can drown.”
One of the reminders was about how to navigate all this: the madness of having whatever steady life you had before ripped apart, of a new planet forming, of an unrecognizable world that leaves you scrambling for anything familiar, but it’s all funhouse mirrors and broken masks and lies you didn’t even know you were blindfolding yourself with and you’re still grasping for a lifejacket, a map, a flashlight, a constellation that will tell you where to go, for how to hold on to yourself without going the wrong kind of mad. It all feels so terrible, even as wonders beat against you from the outside, even as your dreams aggressively come true, it all feels like being lost.
I wrote these letters to remind myself that there is always a hack. There is always something I can do, even if it is the smallest seed that will grow into something almost as unrecognizable as I am becoming. Usually, when I wake up, catapulted from the dream realm into this one, there’s a moment of being untethered. It feels uncomfortable, like being lost, as if realities are hovering above me and I’m trying to figure out which ones to pull down, but I can’t reach them. In that moment, sometimes I reach for old things because they’re familiar. They feel like sanity, they feel like something known—but when we’re coming from the places we’re coming from, running from the things we’re running from, it can be treacherous to choose something old, to try and crawl back into a dead skin, to try and revitalize what has rotted.
What do you do? What do you do when your life turns into this breaking and resetting of bone, of spirit, of self, of reality? When you’re unfolding, when you’re being called to become the beast that you’ve known you are yet been afraid of, when your wings are cracking and snapping out with ugly cartilaginous sounds and bloody membrane, when you’re screaming because it hurts to be and it hurts to be seen and it hurts to look at yourself. People are running from you and turning from you. You die and come back to life and you go mad and you find sanity on the other side. What do you do? How do you survive it?
I’ve asked myself what I need to put down, what old skin I keep trying to crawl back into. I’m not a child anymore. I’m not an abandoned kitten on a porch, a bereft thing waiting for someone else to come get me. Those old skins died in that hospital in LA, they died with the magician, and I don’t miss them. I don’t miss the person I was when I was loving him, the way that love kept me uncertain and begging and wanting beyond sense. I told myself that being loved by him was making me more powerful, and maybe it did, for a while, in some directions. It is better without him now. When he and I first fell in love, I warned him that I wasn’t the kind of person to stay out of despair, if things went bad. “You are the sixth person I’ve fallen for,” I said. “I have no doubt that there can be a seventh.”
That was a clear skin; it got flayed away in the months that followed, but now it is growing back, and that is the miracle of regeneration. There is redemption in growth. At my garden in Shiny, I started a lot of the plants from seed, but the okro plants were my favorite. They didn’t need to be started indoors; I just tossed them out on the soil and watered them and watched them become whole plants. With seedlings, once the root system is established, they hit a vegetative stage. It’s dazzling to watch, as they go from being so tentative, so fragile and easy to kill, to becoming strong. That’s the moment when I stop worrying too much about them, the moment when they become their own thing. The most substantial growth of the plant happens in this stage, it makes leaves and stems and branches, it takes a deep breath to become what it intends to be. Eventually, it will make flowers and fruits and seeds, but this first establishing is crucial. My okro plants became so big that I couldn’t pull them out of the soil, not even with both hands. I think my own unfurling will be like that, old roots running deep, a steadiness that cannot be shifted, but right now, I have become my own thing.
After being tentative for so long, struggling to become a seed, to find soil that I could germinate in, to make cotyledons and true leaves and now, to be here with a planet being created both before my eyes and behind them, is an entire wonder. I am not going to die. I choose to be alive; I choose to let everything else go. It continues to be hard and heartbreaking, as sacrifices always are, but I spent so much of my life afraid of unfurling, afraid of all the things other people feared in me. There are only a few decades left before I go home; I don’t want to waste them being folded. I am choosing the new life.
I don’t know what it’s going to look like, other than brilliant perhaps to the point of excruciation, but I intend to wake up every morning and find out.
Thank you for listening. I love you.