Select all, delete

Walking through life with dynamite on my heels

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

-Joan Didion

Are you allowed to blow it all up? Start over? Disappear, dissolve, detonate all that was just right here in order to clear the decks, to evolve?

Working as an online business owner and creator has meant that the answer that has been beaten into my brain here is an unequivocal no. But this has put me in an uncomfortable confrontation with what I feel most called to do, with what I always want to do, with what I always do.

I’ve embodied many identities over the last ten or fifteen years, where “identity” seems like a weak and inadequate word to describe what was really entire worlds that I was fully and entirely immersed in, worlds that blended the professional and personal, work and play, that came with their own languages, vocabularies, communities, cultures. Photographer, fitness professional, health and life coach, to name a few. These were roles that I used to fill all the way out to the very edges, practices I honed and sharpened into expertise, identities that became my income, my hobbies, my passions, my philosophies, my life.

A few months back, a herniated disk prompted regular meetings with a physical therapist, where, over video chat, I stumbled around a small rocking sailboat and attempted to find enough cramped space for my limbs to stretch and run through tests and execute exercises while we discussed my complex spinal issues.

Through all of our lengthy discussions on the body, the nervous system, muscles, and the various complex interactions and esoteric mechanics of all of the above, I was privately struck by something: just how much of it seemed entirely foreign to me as we spoke. Which perhaps for some is no big deal, but as someone who spent seven years living, breathing, eating, sleeping, teaching, coaching, programming, competing in and embodying physical mechanics and movement as a weightlifting and fitness coach and athlete, this sense of indisputable distance, of strange unfamiliarity with the terms and processes of which my PT and I spoke, was … interesting.

Yes, I have been entirely out of this world for five years since my injury, and maybe half a decade is a long time, but maybe it’s also not, and maybe it seems a recent enough departure from a world I was so deeply involved in and committed to, both personally and professionally, to at least still retain some semblance of comprehension or familiarity.

But when I look at the changing years and seasons of my life on a broader scale, this bizarre phenomenon of comprehensively forgetting just about every prominent feature of any given self I once was and life I once lived, save for the fact that I (allegedly) lived it at some point, becomes part of a clear pattern: one where I change my life, and almost immediately after my feet touch down in a new terrain, any sense of identity, knowledge, or intimacy with the previous world and life I once lived seems to detonate on impact, placing me immediately at a stark and detached distance from everything I just held close, from everything I just knew, from everything I had just been.

Who I once was is not who I am. And not just that, but she doesn’t seem to be anywhere even nearby. Everything she knew, excelled in, understood, believed, and to some degree even thought, is gone. I couldn’t summon her back here even if I wanted to. And this is not just about recalling the names and functions of muscle groups or producing beautiful portraiture or other skills that come with a long enough immersion in any science or craft, but rather about feeling entirely removed, separate even, from who that person, that me, even was. It’s less about the inevitable loss of mastery of a profession or passion after leaving it, and more about the total loss of the self that was once living it. Because that person? That person is now entirely, hopelessly, and permanently unreachable, as accessible as a boat wake dissolving into the surface of the sea. It seems that, in the words of Maggie Smith, when I go, I stay gone.

An interviewer on a podcast once referred to me as “an expert in changing my life”, and it surprised me, maybe because I had barely ever considered that there was any other way do to this. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I’m more of an expert in blowing up my life, but the truth is that I walk through my life with dynamite on my heels in a way that frankly feels involuntary and almost accidental. Perhaps it’s all just as simple as the fact that I just don’t have a good memory — I literally cannot remember the details and intricacies of a place I no longer stand, a space I no longer occupy. Maybe it’s because I throw myself fully into whatever I’m currently compelled by, and the rest seems to dissolve on its own from neglect. Or perhaps it’s because I have always felt that Who I Am was never meant to be some static identity, some immutable mountain of mastery in one terrain, some singular position to occupy, some cohesive sequence of traits or events that I can create a tidy story and linear narrative around. Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt particularly compelled to carry around versions of myself just because they took a long time to establish or represent something or feel cozy and familiar or help to frame the present moment in some fuller way. Or maybe it’s just that I am a sucker for a blank page and the catastrophic drama of hitting select all, delete.

In some schools of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a tradition where monks labor for days, weeks, even sometimes months on end, crafting a staggeringly intricate and stunning mandala: an array of geometric pattern and detailed design made entirely of colored sand, carefully placed and constructed with small tubes and tiny pushers and minuscule funnels, grain by grain arranged slowly, arduously, ultimately forming a large and extraordinarily delicate masterpiece. But the significance of this artwork is not just in its creation, but rather in its destruction. Once the mandala has been completed, it is destroyed — an exercise in the impermanence of all things.

“Who I am”, who we all are, to me, is merely a shifting collection of neural patterning and preferences of attention, engaging in a constant, two-sided conversation with a complex and changing environment — something that is practiced but certainly not fixed, and perhaps to some degree is within our power to influence, but mostly is something that is in such a constant state of flow and flux that we hardly even notice its perpetual unfolding, at all. We mostly see ourselves as always the same, but are we? In my view, who I am today is not just distinct from who I was five years ago, but who I was yesterday.

Whether you are a serial life-blower-upper who stays gone with a propensity to forget or not, the truth is that we are all always new. These changes to our persons are constantly underway, perpetually moving and shifting under the surface of our stories about ourselves. Something is always getting turned up while something else is getting turned down, something is growing while something is fading. To refuse to see ourselves as eternally new in some way, in every way, is to potentially miss one of the greatest truths and gifts of life — but I can already see the ways in which our online existence has begun to rob us, rob me, of this long cherished freedom. Our modern digital spaces don’t have the depth or dimension or capacity to honor us as the breathing, living, changing beings we are, and instead represents us as flattened avatars of opinion and story, where we are rewarded for maintaining allegiance to our previous selves, to our loudest self, repeating our one hit over and over, endlessly encouraged to double down instead of evolve. I can sense this influence in the particular season of life I currently find myself in.

What’s different for me now is that while all the vestiges of my old selves have been dissolving or discarded or fully detonated, and I am not there, I simultaneously am not really here, either. I am somehow not fully planted in the world I am in now, not fluent in the identities and terrain I find myself inhabiting. While the utter demolishment of a life is familiar to me, it has always been a necessary clearing of a space that quickly becomes filled with the building of a new one — a project that starts immediately and holds me captive for as long as it takes for me to learn my way around.

But this time, it seems like more and more is being deconstructed and less and less is being built, and I’m standing here on what mostly feels like a vast wasteland squinting out at the distant past that I can’t even distinguish from the horizon anymore and the unknown future up ahead that remains in a permanent haze, and still somehow I long to just select all, and hit delete. Maybe it’s because my body is in a new place, in a new life, but a new identity hasn’t been forged with it, and the mismatch is throwing me off. Maybe it’s because even here where there is nothing, I can sense the stagnant energy I am still carrying, the loyalty I think I aught to have to everything I have built and been and created, some strange duty I think I owe to some audience or person who sees me in some specific way. Maybe this is where, for the first time, I don’t walk through life with dynamite on my heels. But maybe shaking these shells of selves off of me is the only way for me to truly clear the decks, to clear my vision, and to actually allow who I was to become the compost, the fertile soil in which whoever I might be next can grow.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

-Heraclitus

My many years as an online persona and entrepreneur has taught me that to be successful, you must stay obedient to and dutifully repeat who you say you are and what you think and what you do, but this is because to be an online persona is to be a brand. To be a brand is to be a product, which is to be consistent, recognizable, and dependably predictable, and always within your single, narrow, unchanging lane. But to be a human is to be complex, in flux, perpetually in process, comically contradictory, eternally new, forever unfolding, and like pure energy itself, always transforming. All of being a part of this organic universe is to always be well on the way to becoming something else.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t detonate every place I just walked through and every step I have just finished taking, that more pieces of my many selves were within reach, or that I could reference or recall these past identities and eras with the apparent ease that others seem to possess. And I certainly don’t know if any of this is wise or right or advisable at all. But here’s what I know for certain: I don’t want my life to be a product. I want my life to be art.

And no matter where I go from here, I want to always feel free to respectfully annihilate any piece of me at any time, not just because I find beauty in the destruction or feel fondness for a blank canvas, but because I don’t want to wear a skin I’ve already shed, repeating a practiced refrain that might build into someone else’s idea of success. I want to be a mandalic masterpiece, some sprawling collection of color and shape and pattern that turns this way and then that, something I delight in painstakingly creating and studying and becoming, and then, whenever it feels right, I ceremoniously wipe clear off the table.

xo,

Taylor

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