Evolving, Embracing, Emerging
The Monetization of Hopelessness and How to Heal This Age's Insult to the Soul
You feel more like yourself.
You trust your direction more.
You stop questioning every step.
You feel guided without needing constant confirmation …
It’s about becoming fully available to who you already are.
~Sue Crielaard
The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.
~ Carl Jung
Richard Rohr describes the “first half of life” as building a container, while the second half is about learning what’s inside that vessel.
I propose that life has a third stage—feeling your way into it.
The Veil
Lately, I’ve been saying to myself, “The veil is growing thin indeed.”
When I first heard that self-summons, I didn’t know what it meant. It just fit … me, the age we’re living in, and what navigating age means for me. The reason I feel the veil thinning is that too many convergences show me that there are no coincidences.
When I was young and imprisoned by presenting as a male assigned at birth, I didn’t build a container but a fortress. Everything was a soul insult, and I feared I was the only one who felt that way. Lo and behold, I didn’t transition till later in life, and again, I thought it was just me who felt like the world was a constant assault. In the years since my transition, I’ve suffered much worse assaults and insults on who I am than I ever did previously, coming out as I did a little after the “Trans Tipping Point” inflection. Interestingly, I saw that I’d never been alone in suffering the ever-burgeoning soul insult of the past ten years.
The persistently insightful and eloquent author of The Career Ms. Medium page notes that
I have male and female friends whom I watch struggling, and it upsets me. Good people. Well-intentioned people. Men trying to figure out who they’re supposed to be. Women exhausted from fighting the same battles their mothers fought. And what I keep seeing is this: the moment either of them speaks honestly about their experience, their own gender comes for them, as well as everyone else. Challenged, criticised, publicly shamed for not being outraged enough, or for being outraged in the wrong direction.
We seem genuinely incapable right now of holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. The default response isn’t curiosity or empathy; it’s to shout louder, TYPE YOUR MESSAGE IN CAPS, be more outrageous, or simply tear down whoever dared to complicate the narrative. Nuance has become a kind of betrayal.
Honestly, people, I have to ask when did nuance become the enemy? When did the idea of empathy or trying to understand the opposing view become a betrayal?
And the loudest voices on both sides have a financial and ideological incentive to make sure you never actually see the full picture.
Rage is a business model. Complexity doesn’t convert.
It’s Not Just You
So, it’s not just you who feels like everything’s ratcheted up to screaming-soul proportions. This age is about the capitalism of outrage, umbrage, carnage, and rampage … to the damage of us all. My coming of age amidst this monetization of soul damage didn’t happen instantly. Transition, especially in a time when trans folks are demonized for political points, doesn’t wave a magik wand and make you whole, mellow, and unflappable.
What it does grant is the capacity to grow into what Thomas Oppong calls the “telescoping effect”:
Your brain stops filing new experiences as distinct memories. Routines blur together. The calendar is almost non-existent. But single experiences like a walk, a conversation, a good meal with a social connection become more important. The surprise is learning to live in both time zones at once. Taking in the slow Monday without panicking about the fast year. Early in life, you measure time forward. What’s next? What can I become? Later in life, you measure it backwards and inward. What mattered? What was worth it? How was I useful to the people I cared about? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
Oppong is talking about aging into one’s 60s, 70s, and 80s, but the parallel to transitioning is both apt and accentuated because, well, you’re finally at home in your own body. The difference of course is that aging is the long, untracked process of growing into yourself;1 transition is all about heart-leaping at the chance to be at home with yourself in a way that you can now finally age into the soul you always knew you were but didn’t have the body to allow it. Again, though she’s not talking about transition, Sue Crielaard nails the experience:
When your soul is fully in your body, your perspective shifts.
You don’t just think about your life.
You experience it differently.
You start to see things through the eyes of your soul.
My veil-thinning experience didn’t happen to me until I was nine years transitioned. In effect, I had to go through the proper puberty to build a container the walls of which are thinning enough to let me see through what transition has built. Along with that x-ray vision comes the ability to see through the prison walls this ragged era tries to confine us in.
About That …
What our current would-be cultural overlords are monetizing is the call to “build a new order.” That keeps us conveniently infantilized and rushing around to “do something, anything” and not grow into the sort of people who can, as Oppong notes, measure ourselves backwards and inward. World- and order-building are illusory and self-defeating for all involved. We don’t “build” orders, containers, lives, or ripe old ages. They evolve, emerge, and embrace the temporality of our bodies as a home we will necessarily move on from.
Trying otherwise is exactly what the monetizers want us to believe. The lever-pullers refuse to evolve because cognitive and spiritual dissonance pads their coffers) They chase the notion that either you can take it with you or that this life is a zero-sum game, the winner being the one who dies with the most toys. Problem is, they’re still dead … and so are millions they’ve killed in their heedless pursuit.
Aging is the inexorable (but not only) transition that invites us to give up that pointless chase. Other transitions can and hopefully do happen at the same time, without which, even Methuselah and Tithonus would become wrinkled old prunes with no more sense or soul ripening than Scrooge McDuck.
None of Us Really Knows
I don’t know if transition, aging, and other influences are doing that for me. Better to ask those who know me for who I am. Knowing it isn’t the point. Being it is. And the only measure of that is feeling it.
And the veil has thinned enough that I can sing James Brown’s words to my body and soul:
I feel good …
So good, so good, I got you
Well, not for everyone. We have too many prominent examples of individuals for whom dozens of decades wouldn’t suffice to grow them. Hopefully, that’s what reincarnation might heal.