I don’t hate myself anymore. I don’t feel insecure about people leaving. I don’t try to please, all the time. I don’t fear oblivion. I don’t let my hair define me. I don’t read to catch up. Sometimes I don’t document events. I don’t function out of fear of falling back into depression. My locus of control still resides outside me, but it is less valent to others’ words. At 10, my aunt said I need jaw surgery, I still think in her voice, but I don’t delete photos of myself anymore.
I am proud of myself, the therapist reminds me to say. It sounds wrong in her voice, I complain. It tells me “what you are is not what you aren’t.” The voice is ever so sophisticated, so sure of itself, of its pale skin and delicate fingers. It demands importance. But recently I have noticed a feeble hum in my head which comes from a distant corner. The hum has a coarse voice, but it is unmistakably and assertively there. The voice turns as if scared of itself, surprised by its own existence when it echoes. The hum hums with a certain kindness that makes my eyes swell with tears.
This hum, in all its glorious novelty, hums my unbecoming. And when it hums, I am not paralyzed by the fear of developing schizophrenia, I am less scared of becoming my mother, every day when I laugh very hard or trust with all my might, I am becoming all the good in her. And every time I confront, I am not papa. All my un-becomings are important it implies. I feel, today, full of substance, that keeps me sane in a house devoid of P and a certain smelly T, when I leave a job that had come to define my adulthood, I feel like an adult, when I shed things, I become, in my own person, in this skin, the things I un-become.