The alchemist you are

So, okay, you’ve seen it all. 

You’ve seen behind every curtain, heard or lived every story. Same shit, different day. Animal after all, just coasting the loop of shattering depravities with only one certain end. 

Before the world, unblinking, you cut your own heart out with a blunt ax. You take a big old squelching bite, blood flowing down your chin. Nothing shocks you. Nothing could. 

You can’t break me if I break me first, you shout to closed ears. 

You sweet thing, hold my hand. That jaded, knowing, post-ironic thing you do is rat poison! 

Everything you are - that you’ve ever felt - reverberates in the collective. You gut yourself where you stand, why? Maybe, for just a moment, to feel seen? Please. Everything is you. What is not you is a projection of you - so in other words, you. 

“You” are not that great. You are, though, all you’ve got. “You” are your one chance at inhabiting both a physical form and a cognition at the same time. A singular expression of the universe, toddling around with no real clue. That’s so fucking awesome - and furthermore, it’s enough. 

To feel seen, to feel seen, to feel seen. The neurosis of a generation. 

Simone de Beauvoir: 

“I am fully aware and in full possession of myself… I have no desire to be understood, admired, pitied, or even known.” 

Susan Sontag: 

“I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.” 

We can kill time explaining ourselves, chasing smoke, or not. I have only so many breaths in this life made of hours. So, okay, trauma has shaped me. As has beauty and love and heartbreak and the tops of mountains and good, hard summer rain. Experience has shaped me, and here I am. Shaped. 

Enough psychoanalysis, enough memoir. You are the stories you tell yourself, and it’s reruns every day? Boring! I’ve had enough of talking, of mapping the whats and the whys. 

Seen it all? Good. In tragedy, then, surely, you find divine comedy. In suffering, then, surely, you find the conviction to be love. 

Seen it all? Good. You must know, then, surely, how badly this world needs its healers. 

Try this: You can find the brutality I’ve seen in the gentleness of my hands, the patience in my voice, the steadfastness of my work, and the ease of my laughter. 

Marie-Louise von Franz: 

“It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

You shout into the ether that no one can hurt you - to go ahead and try. You’re dressing each morning with brick and mortar, then wondering why the world’s gone hard. 

Radical accountability, baby! You are what you eat, what you do, and what you say. 

Haim G. Ginott: 

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.”

If your values are not self-evident, those aren’t your values. Uncomfortable? Good. That’s cue information. That’s radiant heat from the infection of inauthenticity. 

Never fear: you get a new morning every morning like everybody else. 

I love you, I do. You’re me! I’m you! We’re two sun-facing nodes on the same root system, borrowed energy on the pulse of the world. 

Let’s start here: When the room is too cold, I will be the warmth. When the sky is too gray, I will light a lamp. Where I cannot find the love, I will become it.