Notes on Becoming Something Else

Notes on Becoming Something Else

What the body knows that the mind refuses to acknowledge.

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The body starts keeping secrets around the same time you start keeping them from yourself.

This is not a coincidence. This is a system.

The mind, magnificent and self-deluding instrument that it is, operates primarily as a curator. It selects. It edits. It decides which experiences get framed and hung on the wall and which ones get quietly rolled up and slid behind the water heater where you won't have to look at them. The mind is very good at this. It has had a lifetime of practice and a powerful organizational instinct and absolutely no interest in being wrong about who you are.

The body has no such commitment to the narrative.

The body just knows.

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Here is something nobody tells you about transformation: it doesn't announce itself. Not really. Not in the way you've been promised, the sudden clarity, the road to Damascus, the moment where everything crystallizes and you understand with complete certainty that you are becoming something different from what you were. That version of change is a myth we constructed because the alternative is deeply uncomfortable. The alternative is that you become something else slowly, incrementally, in the dark, and your mind is genuinely the last to know.

Your body, meanwhile, has been trying to send memos.

You ignored them. We all ignore them. We are very busy and the memos don't come with subject lines.

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I have become several different people in my life. Not metaphorically. Biologically, actually, the cellular replacement argument is real, you are not the same physical object you were seven years ago, which is either comforting or horrifying depending on what you were doing seven years ago. But I mean something else. I mean the more vertiginous kind of becoming, the kind where you one day realize that the person you were five years ago would not recognize the things you want now, the things you fear now, the specific texture of your ambitions, and that the transition happened without your conscious authorization.

The mind will tell you a story about this. The mind will tell you that you made decisions, that you exercised agency, that you grew. The mind loves the word grew because it implies intention and an upward direction and a certain botanical dignity.

The body will tell you something different.

The body will tell you it knew before you did. That it was already grieving the old self before you'd finished introducing yourself to the new one. That it held the grief in the shoulders, specifically, and in the jaw. That it carried the knowledge of what you were leaving the way you carry anything too heavy: badly, compensating, pretending not to notice the strain.

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The mind refuses to acknowledge things for excellent reasons. I want to be fair to the mind here. The mind is not being deliberately obstructive. It is being protective in the only way it knows how, which is to maintain coherence. Identity is not a fact. It's an argument. A continuous, internally-consistent argument the mind is making against the entropy that would otherwise dissolve you into pure sensation and reaction. The mind says: you are this kind of person. The mind says: you do not do that, you are not afraid of this, you do not want what she wants. The mind says: you are still who you were.

It says this with tremendous conviction.

It says this right up until the moment the body makes it impossible.

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The body makes it impossible in its own time and in its own way and with complete indifference to your schedule.

It makes it impossible through insomnia that has no logical cause, through an inability to eat in the presence of certain people that you haven't yet consciously admitted drain you, through the specific exhaustion of performing a self that has quietly stopped fitting. Through the strange elation, the almost cellular relief, of a conversation that the old you would not have had, the new you stumbling into it before you even knew you'd crossed a threshold.

Through tears in the car that seem disproportionate to the song.

Through the way your chest opens up in one place and closes down in another and you don't know what changed but the body knows exactly what changed, the body made a ledger entry, the body has been waiting for you to consult it.

The body is always waiting for you to consult it.

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There's a particular kind of knowing that lives below the collarbone. I'm not speaking mystically. I am speaking anatomically. The vagus nerve alone, that sprawling communication superhighway running from brainstem to gut, carries more information upward, toward the brain, than it carries down. Eighty percent of its traffic is ascending. The body is not receiving instructions. It is sending them. The brain is, in a very measurable and specific sense, mostly listening to the body.

What the body says: something here is wrong.
What the body says: something here is right.
What the body says: you are not finished. You are not who you thought. You are not done becoming.

What the mind says: let's not catastrophize.

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The most unsettling thing about becoming something else is the lag. The delay between when it starts and when you're allowed to call it by its name.

You live in the lag. Most of life is lived in the lag. The period where you are no longer who you were but have not yet committed to who you're going to be, the interstitial space where the body is already navigating the new territory and the mind is still standing in the doorway insisting the trip hasn't started.

I've spent significant portions of my life in doorways.

Most people I've talked to have spent significant portions of their lives in doorways.

We are not taught how to be in transition. We are taught how to be things, finished and named and categorized things, and the process of getting from one named thing to another is treated as a regrettable inconvenience rather than the majority of actual lived experience. We want the arrival. We romanticize the arrival. We will describe the arrival for the rest of our lives.

But the doorway is where everything real happens.

The body knows this. The body is completely at home in the doorway. The body has been standing in doorways its entire life and has never once found it strange.

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I think about the moment before understanding. The breath that precedes the articulation. The split second where the body has already processed and responded and the mind is still loading.

Everything lives in that split second.

The truth of what you feel about a person. The truth of what you want from a room. The truth of whether a decision is right, not correct, not logical, not well-reasoned, but right, the way a key is right for a particular lock. The body knows it before your tongue assembles the words. Before your brain completes the cost-benefit analysis. Before you have managed to talk yourself into or out of anything.

The body is already there.

The body is, in this very literal sense, always slightly ahead of you.

You are always, slightly, running to catch up to yourself.

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Becoming something else is not a betrayal of what you were. I want to say this plainly, because nobody said it to me and I needed someone to say it. The self you are leaving was real. It was completely and earnestly real. It served you, in the ways that it could, for as long as it could, and the fact that it no longer fits is not a verdict on its worth. A coat you wore through seven winters did its job. You don't owe it a continued wearing.

But you do owe yourself the honesty of noticing.

Of listening to the memos.

Of sitting, occasionally, with the discomfort of the lag and not immediately filling it with productivity or noise or the extremely compelling argument that everything is fine and you are the same person you have always been.

You are not.

You are not and you know it.

Some part of you, somewhere south of the thinking and north of the knowing, has known it for a long time.

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The body is not wise in any romantic sense. Let me be clear about that. The body is also the thing that craves the bag of chips at midnight and panics about the email and develops an irrational physical dread of phone calls it has made thousands of times before. The body is not an oracle. It is not a guru. It is a dense, complicated, frequently unreasonable system that is doing its best with imperfect information and a genuinely punishing workload.

But it does not lie about the big things.

It cannot. It doesn't have the architecture for it.

That's the mind's department.

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The becoming never fully stops. This is the part I find most interesting and most difficult and most worth saying out loud. You do not arrive at a finished self. You arrive at a current self, a self that is accurate for now, for this configuration of experiences and losses and recalibrations, and which will begin its own quiet obsolescence roughly the moment you've gotten comfortable with it.

The body is already taking notes on the next version of you.

The mind will be notified when it needs to know.

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In the meantime: breathe.

The body, which has been here through every version of you, which has carried every grief and metabolized every joy and navigated every doorway whether you were ready or not, is not concerned.

It has done this before.

It knows how this goes.

It knows you come out the other side.

It just isn't going to tell the mind.

Not yet.

Where's the fun in that.