The self survives

The marvelous thing about a well-kept journal is how present it can make one's past.
The miserable thing about a well-kept journal is how present it can make one's past.
Memory is fluid so that we may be as well.

Can it really be only four years ago that this began? Reading the entries, I cannot believe how distant, how uncertain this voice sounds. I feel old. I feel weathered and bent and hardened and somber, like an old pine stooped low atop a windy ridge. Not that I don't also feel like a new bud at the break of spring, leaning gently in a breeze every time I feel my smooth hands, with every breath that stretches my tee around my nascent chest. But we are manifold creatures, we humans. And so … so I am old.

When was it that I aged? I think I might guess. I aged every time I cried, every time I sobbed at the endings that had come to stories I thought I was still writing. I aged the night I broke under her denial, broke my possessions in despair and fury, broke my promise to leave her to her choices, her silence, leaving both our hearts broken on the floor. I aged when I saw what I had done and swore myself new oaths, with bonds too tight to chafe. I aged when I surrendered our past and wept for our present. I aged when I asked for what I needed, and received it, when I decided to grow, when I impaled my thigh on 1½" of 22-gauge surgical steel and, gently, died. I am so weary. I have been and been and been: filling those terrible moments with days of worry and fear, pouring seasons of grief into minutes and hours of wailing dissolution. We are manifold beings and we live so brightly when we burn in the dark.

How is it that we can live so much in so short a time? Even with the goad of mortality, reminding us of the finality of every loss, every change, it is not fear that kindles my anger at falseness. Nor is it a looming end that ignites my need. I grow and change because I cannot do otherwise and survive. This is a new-kindled drive: until the closet disintegrated, survival—persistence—was rarely so central. Perhaps our transitions—not just our bodies and our persons, but our worlds and words, our homes and our others—are the bulk of our lives, to date. Perhaps the wonder is not that these few years grip us so but that those few decades before them held us so terribly little.

Those selves we shared—who joined and fled families, built or pursued careers, raised and lost children—how, exactly, did they grow? Where were we when they lived fiercely? Were we there, too? Did we fuse for those fiery moments, out of need and love and joy and desperation, into chimeras of presence and embodiment? Maybe we cling so resolutely to these moments of brilliance and terror in our closeted past because they are our own: lived briefly for ourselves and not for any other. I may, myself, only now be waking, but I have stirred so many times during that long, quiet fever-dream of survival.

I think that must be why the man in this journal feels so distant in his fearful and morose reflections. He was only just ceasing to be that man, and his perspective was that of a frightened yet hopeful child who knows only how little she understands. As a youth thrust forth into independence, she struggled and grew as only the survivor-child (Walker's gifted child?) can. She found children in her heart, loved them, nursed them, and grew; she found herself in a career, accepted it, built it, and grew. She found a partner in her life, loved her, held her, lost her, and grew. Four years, and a recapitulated lifetime: such a gulf separates the man I was from the woman I am becoming.

And now comes the reflective denouement where, embracing anecdotes at last, we recant our hyperbole and repent of our metaphors. Of course I am no binary man-girl chimera—and never was. I have ever been blessed with a single voice, even when I have consciously partitioned it by name (in high school, I once tried to name six! they were all boy-selves or neuter, though …). The search for authenticity could only begin once I surrendered those partitions and accepted this. But the idea of multiplicity is what coalesces most clearly when I try to paint the transitional identity in words.

Similarly, the self that lived my pre-transition life was every bit as much me as the self I am now. However, who we learn as has so sweeping an effect on what we can recall and retain that the concept rings true. And yes, I do find that I am starting a new life, and I find no issue with the idea of many fractional selves populating my past. Every role I have filled, every context I have inhabited, is a part of me—though some I may wish to deny. I do not so much change as allow a more authentic self to blossom and overcome all its peers.

For truly I am a manifold being, and today I am alive.

'anima, ex multis; inde, superstes' : from the many, a soul: thence, a survivor