The Understudy

or: notes on setting down the weight of transformation

You know how a word, repeated, loses its skin?

Healing. Healing. Healing.

Say it enough and it goes grey at the edges, becomes bureaucratic, a checkbox in the mouth.

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Somewhere between the first time you said I’m working on myself and now — the work ate the worker.

Not violently. Tenderly, even. The way ivy takes a wall: so slowly, so greenly, you only notice when the wall is gone.

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He carried it everywhere, the project of himself.

Into rooms where nobody asked, into silences he couldn’t just let be silent, into the ordinary Tuesday of a life that kept insisting on happening without narrative significance.

The coffee going cold. The body wanting rest. The afternoon arriving with nothing to teach.

And still — he annotated it. Still, somewhere in the chest, a small archivist, sorting the feeling into folders, asking: what is this for, what does this mean, what am I supposed to do with what I’m feeling.

image by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on unsplash

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There is a particular loneliness in being your own ongoing excavation.

The dig never closes. Every stratum another answer and another question underneath, turtles all the way down —

and you, with your little brush, on your knees in the same dirt for years now, half-certain the artifact is you.

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But listen.

The wound is not a door.

I mean: it might have been once. I mean: maybe you walked through it and found something real on the other side, something that made the scar feel like punctuation instead of just — damage.

That’s not nothing. That mattered.

But a door is for passing through. Not for living in the frame of.

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There are nights that don’t want anything from you.

They arrive the way fog arrives — without announcement, without agenda, filling the low places first.

On these nights, the self that knows how to process, how to witness, how to hold space for its own becoming —

that self goes quiet.

What’s left is just a warm animal in a room, breathing, wanting small things: the weight of a blanket, a sound from the street, the comfort of continuing.

This, too, is a life. This, too, is the life.

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What I am circling is this:

the present tense does not care about your relationship to your past.

It is not waiting for you to be ready. It is not a reward for sufficient introspection.

It arrives the same way for everyone — sudden, ordinary, already half-gone by the time you’ve named it —

and you are allowed to be in it without making it mean something.

You are allowed a feeling that is not also a finding.

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The self-improvement industrial complex will not tell you this, because it cannot sell it:

that sometimes the most radical act is to be aggressively, embarrassingly here —

un-theorized, un-optimized, laughing at something that isn’t healing you, wanting something that isn’t growing you, moving through a Wednesday without witness, without record, without arc.

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I keep thinking about how a river doesn’t become the sea.

It runs into it. Loses its name in it. Is changed by the meeting completely, without ever having understood the meeting was coming.

There’s no preparation for the sea. There’s only — suddenly — salt.

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Maybe you are not a project.

Maybe you are not even, precisely, a story — not the redemptive kind, with its clean causality, its earned resolution, its image in the final paragraph that rhymes with the image in the first.

Maybe you are more like weather.

Fronts moving through. Pressure changing. Beautiful and ruinous and completely indifferent to whether anyone is watching.

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So put it down.

The becoming.

Put it down the way you’d put down something heavy you forgot you were holding — with that small shock of how long, how long you were carrying that.

You don’t have to stop healing. You just have to stop making healing the only thing you’re allowed to be.

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Be, instead, the part of you that existed before you had a name for it.

The part that is not wound, not witness —

just the original animal, breathing in a room, briefly here,

briefly, wildly, ungoverably

here.