Little Deaths
The deep intensity of inner transformations
I’m twenty-three years old and I’ve died about a hundred times. In the privacy of my bedroom. In my darkest seasons. In accordance with the moon’s phases. On some level, I’ve always appreciated endings more than beginnings, even though each is a door to the other. Endings bring out the most sentimental parts of us. They are what start up that supercut of past moments in our heads, playing the tender scenes in gauzy filters. But the endings that occur within me are a little harder to process. It’s always a grand affair that I can never seem to escape. I am destined to experience drastic transformations throughout my life — little deaths here and there — because it’s what my soul requires in this lifetime.
What I mean is, whenever it’s time for a phase of my life to end, I’m always spiritually and mentally exhausted. It feels like something is dying. I often say that these moments are me metaphorically shuffling away from the rest of civilization to pass away peacefully in a cave somewhere. I’m not quite a holy prophet when I emerge, but it feels pretty close. Because I’ve survived another death…the death of what I previously thought I was. My identity, shattered and swept away and conjured up again from some other material. This shattering and conjuring is essential to my soul’s journey on Earth. At least that’s what I’ve been told.
Okay, let me bring this back down to our world. I’ve collected enough evidence over the years for these little deaths of mine. You can find it all in the journals filled with frantic, almost neurotic scribblings, proof of me trying to make sense of what was happening. But there isn’t enough time to parse through it all, so I will give a more recent example. This death was a long, drawn out process, one that I went through kicking and screaming, but eventually succumbed to.
Last year was traumatizing for the entire world in many ways. While I was fortunate not to be directly affected by the collective loss we experienced, I and other young people internalized this trauma in a way that wasn’t immediately recognizable. My realization of how the pandemic touched me came months after I’d just graduated from college. The state of the world compounded my fears and anxiety surrounding being a 20-something who was tossed into the deep end, tragically unprepared, with nothing to cling onto. But in the beginning, I didn’t think this situation was worth deeply interrogating, because it wasn’t like I was fighting for my life against the deadly virus or grieving the loss of a loved one from police brutality. But now I see that there was something happening with me, alongside the rest of the world’s tragedies. A crucial piece of myself was slipping away and I couldn’t get a hold of it.
I didn’t have a plan and I was trying to reconstruct my identity by force since I could no longer fall back on the title of “student.” I thought finding a job was the key to claiming this new identity I was so desperate for. I fought for that illusion of security until my last breath because it felt as real as the breath, as the body.
When I was rejected for a job that I was sure I would get, I spiraled. I finally let myself be angry after nearly a year of strictly denying myself of that emotion. I would scream into the empty drum of the washing machine when I was alone in my family’s house. I wept and pounded my mattress like a child having a tantrum (something I never did as an actual child which is probably why I needed this release so badly). The part of me that I wouldn’t let die was going out with a bang. And after a few weeks, I began to feel numb, like an empty space. The conjuring was happening again.
Every redirection in my life felt like the end of the world because I would mourn the loss of what I thought I was so intensely. I thought something was wrong with me. But after these shifts and transformations, I always emerged with a new course, as if I’d been given new life. These periods of internal struggle in my life seem inexplicable; when I think I’ve found some clarity, something changes and I start to question everything I believe to be true. Over and over again, forever. It’s just my nature, it seems.
I have a hard time surrendering to these little deaths when they occur. I don’t know why…the human condition perhaps? But when something new comes out of the empty space that’s left behind, I celebrate. I celebrate because I’ve witnessed the magic of my soul. In this way, I am indestructible. Just as the snake is destined to shed its old skin and move forward with a new one, my soul is subjected to the same fate. It is exalted in the space of transformation. Each death brings me closer to my authentic self — that’s my soul’s purpose. Eventually I will reach some sort of enlightenment, one way or another. But while I’m still here, my greatest lesson will be embracing the depth of these life cycles and seeing it for what it really is: power.
