The Madwoman
I was driving. That’s it. Nothing particularly remarkable about the circumstances.
Just driving.
The Madwoman’s DJ had apparently decided Alkaline was up for review.
I wasn’t paying particularly close attention.
I was thinking about other things. Letting the music occupy whatever part of my brain handles the business of knowing every word to a song while the rest of me wanders off to do something entirely unrelated.
Which, frankly, is a remarkably efficient arrangement.
Until it isn’t.
My mind had wandered to an old thought experiment. The what if she’s not into you test.
Not even the specifics of it. Just the concept. The strange business of desire, of wondering whether someone wants you, of trying to understand what another person sees when they look at the object of their affection.
A passing thought.
And then I heard myself.
Not the song.
…Myself.
My own voice, singing words I had apparently been singing for some time without actually listening to them.
Something about being caught up in her design. About the way it connects to mine. About seeing desire differently.
And my brain, apparently incapable of allowing a perfectly ordinary car ride to remain perfectly ordinary, supplied an observation.
Ha.
I’m fucking caught up in my own goddamned design at this point.
(I actually thought that. And then I kept going.)
And how it connects to the new me…
Wait.
And a new perspective on my desires within myself…
FUCK.
Because what if I was singing Alkaline to myself?
Not imagining myself as the person being described by somebody else.
Not borrowing the song to explain how I wanted another person to see me.
What if I was both?
The person singing.
And the person being sung about.
The one looking.
And the one who had become so thoroughly fascinating that she couldn’t quite look away.
What if I had become the object of my own desire?
I have spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to understand myself.
(That probably comes as a shock to absolutely no one who has ever had the misfortune of being trapped in a conversation with me.)
I take things apart— I examine the pieces. I turn them over. I look for patterns and contradictions and the places where two things that shouldn’t fit together somehow occupy exactly the same space.
And I have been doing that to myself for years. Trying to understand who I am. Why I do the things I do. What parts of me belong to experiences I never asked for, and which parts I have deliberately chosen.
Which parts are survival?
Which parts are desire?
Which parts are simply me?
But there is a difference between studying something and being fascinated by it.
I know that difference.
I just don’t think I realized when I crossed it.
Not long ago, I wrote about becoming the loam. (It is published on the Arcus flavored Madwoman site)
Not the flower— Not the beautiful thing that might eventually grow from the wreckage.
The dirt.
The decomposed, dismantled, thoroughly unglamorous material left behind when things have been broken down so completely that they no longer resemble what they used to be.
I wrote about surrendering to that process.
About no longer needing to preserve the person I had been. About allowing myself to be witnessed while I was still coming apart, instead of waiting until I could present some finished, comprehensible version of myself to the world.
I wasn’t waiting to emerge from the loam.
I was learning to become it.
And I meant that.
I still do.
But something has happened since then— Or perhaps it was already happening, and I hadn’t yet noticed. Because somewhere between accepting that I was becoming something new and driving down the road singing Alkaline, I apparently developed a rather inconvenient fascination with the thing I was becoming.
Me.
Not the finished product.
Not the flower.
The becoming.
What makes this so fucking strangeis that Alkaline is full of contradictions.
Not one thing. Not its opposite.
Something that refuses to behave neatly enough to be classified.
Perfectly misaligned.
Caught between black and white.
And for years, I’ve been drawn to that language because I understand the fascination of encountering something you cannot easily define. Something that resists the categories you keep trying to place it in.
But what happens when I stop directing that fascination outward? What happens when I turn around and discover that the thing I cannot quite classify is myself? Because I am not particularly interested in resolving all my contradictions anymore. I don’t need to decide which version of myself is the correct one.
I can be capable and uncertain.
Strong and vulnerable.
Frightened and curious.
Entirely too much and somehow still unfinished.
I can recognize the pieces of myself that don’t fit neatly together without immediately reaching for a tool to make them fit. And maybe that’s what I heard when I caught myself singing.
Not an argument for why I should be desirable.
Not a request for someone else to find me worthy of their attention.
My own fascination.
With my own design.
With the ways the person I have been connects to the person I am becoming.
With the things I want now that I didn’t know I was allowed to want before.
And with the possibility that I might be worth discovering simply because I am not finished.
I keep coming back to the fact that I wasn’t trying to have this realization.
I wasn’t sitting down to write about myself.
I wasn’t conducting an experiment in perspective.
I was driving.
I was singing.
And somewhere along the way, my mouth apparently once again got ahead of my understanding. Which is becoming an irritatingly familiar experience.
Sometimes my body knows the steps before I understand the dance.
Sometimes my hands know what I’m making before I understand why I’m making it.
And apparently, sometimes my voice knows who I’m singing to before I do.
I don’t know exactly when the direction changed.
I don’t know when I stopped needing the fascination to come from somewhere outside myself.
And I don’t think that means I no longer want to be desired by anyone else.
That’s not what this is.
I just realized I can desire myself, too.
I wrote that I knew what I was becoming.— And that it was enough.
I meant it.
But I didn’t know that one day I’d hear myself singing about the object of my desire and realize I wasn’t thinking about anybody else.
Fuck.
I’m caught up in my own goddamned design.
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Caught Between Black and White