Before you Begin Again
The inevitable and necessary predecessor to the death of an identity
When You are Lost, Create Something
As many of you know, if you have read the last few substack articles I have published, my trip to Spain has invited me to release my grip on an old self. Spaniards do not shy away from voicing their opinions, even if those opinions are incongruent, incorrect or just unnecessary.
While I spent a month living with a Catalonian family, I found myself predisposed to take other’s opinions to heart, believing that I must be in the wrong rather than questioning the validity of that assumption. In the past this belief would send me into action, changing myself for the satisfaction of someone else’s beliefs and values.
I have over the course of my life built up the habit of giving away my personal power, relinquishing the idea of myself to the imaginations of other people. I thought before traveling to Spain I had let go of this habit, but during my stay with this family I found it coming back in full force, only differently.
This automatic people pleasing behavior felt deeply untrue to me. It made me angry. As such, I often found myself asking the question: “Why am I making myself miserable?”
Which invited other questions like:
Do I need to believe this about myself? Why do I believe this about myself? What if I no longer believed this about myself?
Enter the musings on death, Death and Flowers and Death and Ghosts, which Ayanda Stood in her piece titled, “The Wisdom of Being Lost” perfectly describes: “...when we are lost, a version of us has died. We can no longer relate to our reality, lives, friends, jobs, or whatever it may be, the way we used to.”
More so than describing the death of an identity, Ayanda describes what comes after, which is what I want to talk about today.
To be lost is death’s inevitable predecessor. Behind us is a personality we can no longer claim as our own. Ahead of us is miles and miles of liminal space. We are the seed prebloom or the baby bird preflight. We are becoming.
As Ayanda puts it, to be lost is a space of asking questions rather than shouting out answers. It is in this uncomfortable and societaly disregarded place of not knowing that gives us the opportunity to redefine, reestablish, and reinvent the Known into something more healing for all of us. If we are lost, the questions we ask inform the answers we discover along the way. The process therefore can be intentional. We get to dream. We get to hope. We get to shape who we become.
Anna Brones, writes in her essay titled “Make the Art”, “Art is a form of hope, and creativity sustains it. We need the ability to think beyond what we know, to make connections that go backwards and forwards in time, to say to ourselves ‘I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I will try anyway”
To shape how and in what direction we change is also Art, a form of hope, in which we must be lost before we can ever be found. That’s the point of “death” anyway. It precedes the rebirth. And in between is where we necessarily struggle.
No one said being lost is easy. Only that it is inevitable. We can fight against that inevitability–-run back to a self we have outgrown or blindly let Other’s dictate who we become–or we can embrace the unknown while tending to the fear of it. Ayanda points to the necessity of community while being lost, because we don’t have to and perhaps are unable to effectively create alone.
Art is a form of hope and change is a form of hope, both are relational practices of creation. To create anything is a process of connection. We need context, circumstance, community to be able to see ourselves clearly and to hold us accountable to the work.
Ernest Hemingway wrote “In order to write about your life you must live it.” Which is to say, in order to reshape your life you must live it. This is how we know what questions to ask. This is how we find answers.
To be lost, is to point ourselves in a direction, whatever direction feels the most full in our bodies, whatever way pulls at our heart, and let the understanding we find be part of our reshaping. We ask questions like:
Who will I be if…? What do I believe about…? Why do I want to…?
We ask these questions and co-create the answers.
Ayanda speaks to normalizing not knowing as an integral aspect of collective social change. We can practice this skill by normalizing being lost within ourselves. We don’t always have to Know. Instead, we get to not know, which means we get to change. Which means we get to shape that change, creating something new, where the outcome might not be certain, but we try anyway.
The point is we will try anyway.
Erin Rose Belair writes“ I want to tell you that I invited you in like a reckoning, like a wrecking, like a rebuilding, like a rebirth, but not a redo, just redone.”
What does it take to invite in a new way of being? What does it take to become? There is no going back.
Speaking of becoming and the questioning necessary to get there, Erica Heilman, host of the Vermont based podcast Rumble Strip, has created a series in which she asks the question “What class are you?”. This answer/ exploration with Garret Keizer is a must listen to.
I have been taking more walks since coming back to Spain. They are an invitation to bring more gentle movement into my day and a much needed connection with nature. I feel immensely grateful that these trails are so close to home.
In connection to being lost, I resonate with this song, “When I was Done Dying” by Dan Deacon. The music video is a must watch.
Journal Prompts
Please feel free to explore any of these ion the comments. I would love to hear from you!
What part of my life (jobs, self, friends, environment) no longer resonates with me?
What support systems and practices do I have in place that can sustain me during times of transition?
What communities or contexts might shine a light on/ push me toward/ co-create with me a new and more aligned sense of self?
What does it take to invite in a new way of being? What does it take to become?