On the Idea of Reinvention vs. Regeneration
Grifting, finding oneself, and accepting our gifts
Friends! I have two offerings. The first (Seagrass, a workshop for healing) is this coming weekend, and you can find info HERE and register HERE.
The second is much more substantial. BODY TALK is all about loving and embracing and connecting with ourselves. Info HERE.
In May, I’ll be graduating from my 200 hour yoga teacher training. The training has been transformative. I’ve heard people use this word to describe trainings, but didn’t think my experience would culminate in transformation. I’m grateful it did. I’ve learned that I am a gifted teacher, and to release the imposter syndrome that has plagued me for most of my life. It’s not that imposter syndrome isn’t there anymore. It’s just that I don’t believe what it says I am.
Using the word “gifted” in reference to myself brings up lots of old baggage. The baggage is packed with words like “bragging,” “too big for your britches",” and “full of yourself.” In my human experience I learned to adapt to these words being used against me, as if my innate confidence was somehow threatening, or could hurt others. That’s generational, and I forgive the people who used those words to make me feel smaller. They felt small, too, and were likely threatened by my strong sense of self (and their own). I made myself small as time went by, and, like them, I was threatened by people who appeared confident in themselves.
I’ve written a lot about my childhood in this newsletter— I forgive it all. I forgive myself, my mom, my dad. Everyone who hurt me. I have to let it go, or it will consume me.
So, yes. I’m using the word gifted. I can hold space for others. I can see patterns. I have faith in myself. I see the good in others, and I see people’s gifts when they can’t. I’m grateful for all of that, and I’m not going to pretend that my gifts don’t exist in order to create comfort for others. What I will do is use my gifts to unearth the gifts of others.
I turned forty last summer, and this summer I’ll turn forty-one. In many ways, this upcoming birthday feels more significant. I look backwards and can see a clear trajectory: I was born as who I am now, but with each year I was wrapped in the assumptions and expectations of others. I was abused, and learned to abuse myself. Since my mother died, each passing year has taken with it an artificial layer of skin; a layer of protection that my child-self grew to survive. The removal of these layers involved incisions, excavation, and reckonings.
The narrative doesn’t stop now, with this newsletter. But it has changed. My capacity for compassion has grown. I have more to offer. In loving myself for who I am, in loving my fat body and nonbinary identity and my stupid old tattoos and my flat feet and the way I can be so slow to get ready and all my quirks, I love others for who they are. In seeing myself more clearly, and accepting myself more fully, I can see others more clearly, and accept them more fully. Funny how that works.
We can reinvent ourselves, is what I’ve been thinking. It’s interesting— this whole series on grifters was just released on HBO, and I watched a couple episodes (and fell in love with a former WeWork employee who wasn’t taking any shit). Most grifters are excellent at reinventing themselves and yet lack an essential true self. Hm, maybe lack isn’t the right word. They have rejected themselves for one reason or another, and feel the need to create another, more palatable or sensational identity in order to garner sympathy or empathy or love or admiration (which the HBO show definitely conveys, unfortunately).
I can’t help but think of my mom as I think of grifters— she lied about having colon cancer (and later, brain cancer). There was no cancer in her body at all, and she fessed up to her lies in her suicide notes. I knew my mom was lying when she was alive, but I didn’t want to believe it. I vacillated between believing her and believing my own intuition, but eventually told her: if you’re lying, it’s okay.
She continued to lie. She didn’t want to be a liar. She wanted to be someone who deserved love. The life she’d lived, the childhood she had endured, had convinced her that, in order to ask for love and care, she had to be sick, so she made herself sick.
The psyche finds love, no matter what.
I have empathy for grifters because I could have been one. As a kid, I moved so often that I can’t remember the names of all the elementary schools I attended. I started my grift early, in middle school, where I began to invent more fantastical former lives, knowing that it didn’t matter; I’d move again soon. My mom lied all the time; to our family, to creditors, to me, to the men she dated. I absorbed.
Constant instability taught me to read people carefully. They loved me more if I was interesting, and I was confident that I wasn’t interesting if I was just myself. Throughout high-school I lied. I ran away and hitch-hiked down the west coast, trying out a different name with every person I met. After high-school I lied, until I met people who loved me enough to tell me I didn’t have to.
Reinvention isn’t just for grifters(!). Anyone can “reinvent” themselves, but the secret is that reinvention is the wrong word for it. Reinvention means to appear entirely new. The word “appear” is what grabs me. Appear? So reinvention is superficial. Reinvention is to slap on a new facade, while leaving our insides the same as they were before.
I tried to reinvent myself many times, especially in my twenties. Moving to new places, making new friends. But that old saying, wherever you go, there you are; well, that saying is true. I was wherever I was. Me, with my bulimia, my gender dysphoria, my alcoholism, my sex addiction, my inability to be with myself as I was. Wherever I went, I denied my experience, because that’s what I’d always done to stay alive.
Instead of reinvention, let’s try regeneration.
I mean, we do regenerate all the time, on a cellular level. Take the Axolotl, which can regenerate infinitely. Regeneration is inherent to life for all species, bacteria, and (as we know intimately) viruses.
We are constantly being reformed. And to bring ourselves in tune with that reforming is to experience our true selves, psychically and physically. Unlike axolotl’s, we have these intensely intelligent brains, which seem to resist and fear change when change is absolutely essential to staying alive.
How are you regenerating right now? If you can, pause for a moment and find a piece of paper. Spend a few minutes making a list of the ways that you’re regenerating— from physical to emotional to spiritual.
We are all living in constant movement and change. In this moment, many of us are going from pandemic life to something that more closely resembles “normal” life, and yet now this normal life is no longer normal. What does it feel like to sit down in a crowded restaurant without a mask? I remember. The crush of combined conversations; the clinking of silverware and glasses; the sounds coming from a busy kitchen; leaning towards people to hear them more clearly. I used to, sometimes, sit back in my seat and hear the combined conversations as an oceanic wave of sound, meaningless in its incoherence.
We never thought about those crowded restaurants. Now our brains are conditioned to see them as risky.
So, be gentle with this new way of being. A reminder to myself, and you.
Links:
I used to be obsessed with Leelee Kimmel when she was an actress, and now I’m obsessed with her art.
Have you listened to Mary Lattimore? She’s one of my favorite instrumentalists. I can’t believe what she does with her harp, which sometimes sounds like the inside of my brain on an unnervingly sunny day.
This video of a baby stoat meeting another baby stoat is fucking ridiculously cute.
Remember the song Divers? Sigh.
If you feel inclined, Venmo some cash to Seattle’s Covid 19 Mutual Aid.
Reyna Cohan helped me and my fellow yogis in training learn about sequencing. Check out her Body Kind Yoga- which is great for beginners.
Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a full moon ritual with Amanda Yates Garcia. I’ve found these to be incredible for stock-taking and feeling in tune with nature.
That’s all I have for now. Oh, and I’m starting my own business, Nova Bodyworks! More about that later.
Love,
Stace