We're Everywhere But Where We Are?
There's no hero's journey, no heroine's journey. Just us journeyers.
I’m a trans woman who writes stories. Both being me and writing have taught me the nature of journey, a narrative staple from the Upanishads to the Odyssey to Harold and Kumar. All my novels and memoirs (especially TransCountry) and even my philosophy book, Magik, depict a road trip.
What I’ve learned is that no journey is ever “out there.” Journeys are always in the heart and soul, over ground that is a homeland, a birthplace, we’ve never seen before.
Out there
From the printing press to the advent of social media and now AI, our world assigns ever-increasing urgency to the external realm—what’s happening “out there”—the White House, Beijing, London, Tokyo, the high seas, the Moon, the intra-webs, and exoplanets orbiting distant stars.
Anywhere but right, smack here, with ourselves.
This materialistic mindset says that our inner hopes, dreams, and desires aren’t quantifiable and hold no purpose until we fling them “out there.” You’ve heard the madding crowd:
Go west, young man!
Put yourself out there!
Get out get a job!
Take them out!
Our definition of cultural success is fame, driven by accumulation of money and toys, our picture on every screen, our name on everyone’s lips. Negative, positive, or indifferent, we’re desperate to measure ourselves by external impact.
Yet roadtrip stories spawn from anything but wanting to spread ourselves here, there, every f*cking where. No, we thirst for a roadmap of the unchartered territory inside our ribcage. The fear driving this endless external dissemination is
What if there’s nothing inside me? Maybe I’m not all here. Maybe I’m not here at all, a greasy spot of protoplasm that’ll fade despite my pains.
We’re everywhere but here with ourselves, and key to human experience is getting there.
So, about me …
That’s why I write. I don’t do it for my readers (though I truly am grateful for you). I’m not doing it for income (that would be nice, but so would winning the lottery). I don’t do it to “put myself out there” (though that’s a mighty temptation I don’t always resist). Instead, I feel something inside that matters more than anything “out there,” and the only way to get to those mysterious mansions of the heart is to dredge them up from the depths like a monster catfish, words as the bait my heart-lunker prefers.
I’m tenaciously good at avoiding who I really am even while I strive for attention. It’s odd that our societal cry is “Me, me, me!” when the last thing we can handle is the heart of ourselves.
We can blithely say that we’d like to have a word with the gods, karma, or fate, but what could we say to the me we really are? Would we recognize that person?
I’ve always been a writer and artist, but my books and paintings didn’t burst into productivity until I transitioned, so I think trans experience has at least made me bump elbows with the real Bethany B. I’m still getting to know her, and that won’t end with my transition from this earthly plane.
Who is me?
Current neuroscience insists that our senses and brain take in not “objective reality” but rather an evolutionarily successful desktop analogue of what’s “truly” out there. It’s to our advantage that we don’t truly see reality, our physiognomy instead equipping us with what we need to survive and thrive.
In that case, who’s the me surviving and thriving? I won’t find her “out there.” Yet I live in an “out-there” that I have to navigate to be here. I can Forest-Gump jog down the road to find, as Bruce Springsteen sagely noted, “nuthin’ but road” … without arriving home.
So I write. To learn more about this chick who types words. Maybe life is thinking out loud, whether we use words or a surfboard, backhoe, a bottle, a pen, or a constituency.
Our real audience isn’t a spreadsheet of click metrics.
Our audience is one. Are we listening?
Hmm. Till next time, I’ll keep journeying to that.
Send me your takes in the comments. I love to learn.
Bethany Beeler writes novels of transformation, love, and self-discovery. To read stories portraying what she says here, go to her Amazon Author Page.