out of water

above the surface, beyond the shore.

I’m starting to wonder if I was a bird in my last lifetime. Or maybe a horse, or a dog, or a salmon, or a dandelion. Anything but a human.

The experience of being inside of a human body has always felt to me like listening to a foreign language, like playing a character on a stage without knowing my lines. And now, decades later, when I’m supposed to have figured it all out, I still feel… strange. Like I’m stuck in the part of the movie where the suddenly legged mermaid must learn how to be human, the part where she wobbles on new legs to take walk on land for the first time in her life.

Honestly - I’m unsure I completely buy into reincarnation, past lives. Here’s another theory: this wad of particles called my body, my person, are just as confused as I am about the shape we’ve been assembled into. Maybe these atoms, molecules, chains of information and starstuff, are used to following a different recipe. Perhaps I’m like a collection of pieces pilfered from many different puzzles - instead of a clear, well-assembled picture, I’m a mishmash of color and ill-fitting shapes.

I wonder, what (truly) am I? A lump of multicolored Play-Doh that’s not yet become a consistent shade of beige? A piece of memory foam, still holding the shape of those it held, those who held it? Am I an echo, a wave, a beginning, the end?

Which leads me to a confession: I don’t know how to love myself. I’ve written about love in the past, but the interpersonal, existential kind. Not the quiet, daily kind. The kind that makes your bed in the morning, speaks gently to oneself in the mirror, forgives faltering, remains present through the painful or mundane. The kind that comes without purchase, has no cost or condition.

Self-love like this has always felt… slippery. Like trying to grasp fog. I reach for it earnestly, desperately, sometimes even convincingly, and still, my arms usually come back empty. It’s hard to love something you don’t quite recognize as yours. Harder still when so much of oneself feels unfamiliar, borrowed, or out of place.

To clarify, I don’t mean this in the way that people with body or gender dysphoria experience - their disconnection runs far deeper, is so much more visceral. What I’m describing is quieter, murkier: a lack of clarity in this moment of my life about how and where I fit, what I’m worth, what it means to belong at all. Still, even that softer form of misfit is enough to create the sense that there is no safe place to land, especially in a cultural that punishes anything that doesn’t fit the ever-changing mold. We are conditioned to see far more unloveable parts of ourselves than the ones worth accepting, appreciating, worshipping.

Love, like water, flows in the direction it’s guided. I grew up surrounded by people (especially women) who survived by being hard on themselves. Who equated worth with output, appearance, self-sacrifice. Who apologized for (or completely ignored) their needs, made jokes at their own expense, pinched the soft or rough parts of their bodies with shame-sharpened fingers. Love, in that framework, was something you gave to others, in hopes it would be given back. You earned care by being useful, exceptional, pleasing. Simple, impossible transactions.

Self-love? That wasn’t even in the vocabulary.

It’s not that I don’t want to love myself. I do. But how do you love a body that has so often felt like camouflage, costume? Not protection, but performance. A face you’ve trained to mirror what’s expected, not what’s true. How do you speak gently to a self you’ve spent years trying to translate into something more legible, more palatable… even to yourself? I’ve worn so many versions of me in order to survive that I’m not always sure which one is real, or if real is even the right question.

There’s a dissonance in being both the observer and the observed. In watching yourself move through a world calibrated for someone else entirely. A world where one’s wiring short-circuits the norms, instincts drum off-beat in a rhythm never quite matching the desired tempo. And a distant whisper, “Something’s off,” just audible enough to make comfort impossible, makes it hard to believe this body, this life, this self, is a place you’re meant to belong. Do you hear the whisper, too, in this strange time of so much and so little?

The worst part is knowing - being aware of that dissonance, able to name it, even trace its origins, but not yet having the recipe to change it. I want to be there already, at the finish line. I want to have arrived, to know the steps, to embody the kind of steady love I hear others speak about. But I’m still in the middle, in the tension between awareness and integration. Still aching with the impatience of becoming.

Maybe that’s what true self-love requires: a sense of rootedness, of arrival, of unconditional and unshakeable wholeness. The feeling that you’re not just passing through, mimicking the motions, but finally home. The patience to hold out a hand to oneself and be willing to hold it in return.

I’m here, in the middle of something that feels like everything, looking for that feeling. Still wobbling on new legs, still learning the words.

While these particles of mine feel, at times, like an unusual amalgamation, a combination of vibrations heretofore unseen, I feel them cling to one another. Grateful to be in good company, desperately alive.

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