The project of becoming is tenuous and impossible. Yet by pure biological fact, being is really the only thing given to us on earth to do, the baseline task we’d been assigned, outside of our own volition or choice.
We spend our lives in phases then, like this :
- first, by imitation
So we spend 25 years or so becoming copies of the snapshots of people we see around us; bare flesh absorbing the stamps and tattoos of every institution that touches us; our voices synchronising with the cadence, tone, and words of everyone we hear. - then, we come sort of midway at an intersection between the past and the future, existing in a tension of two selves
- there is a great divide, and there we rest.
From as early as I can remember I searched for Freedom. It started without a name — but rose from within my belly as a yearning. It came as a desire to not be named or branded, to not take form and shape, to run like a river that sometimes rages and sometimes diverges and sometimes simply flows. At the same time, I believed what everybody said about me like it was objective truth, set in stone. Still do, in some ways. It’s twisted and contorted me into quite the awkward form.
I find myself midway; living two selves, two stories. A Russian doll within another. There is a call for freedom that has always been there / there is crippling Fear — from always looking at myself from the outside, always against a script (Who wrote this script?).
The programming is difficult to break, even after years of decoding.
The project of becoming will not be achieved by laying dormant for fear of exposure, however. It has been 14 years of moving since I first left home and began this project; half a lifetime really of dismantling and being put back together (oh God, it’s been me this whole time who’s been writing this script, hasn’t it). It will not be achieved by hiding.
The project is begun in earnest through conjecture — by writing down half-baked thoughts and ideas; by being okay with doing things badly; by allowing a feeling, a mood, in a moment, be captured and pinned down and seen. Maybe more writing will come from these markings — echoes of new thoughts, new characters, new stories. Whether it does or doesn’t, at this halfway point to death and still living with this ghost, I don’t suppose I have much of a choice.
