I’ve been collecting understandings about myself from a very young age.
Before I could form legible words with a pencil on paper I was writing stories. I dictated the actions of kind people and friendly animals to my mother and my father, who would take turns recording them in their own handwriting. My mother then arranged the sheets with my illustrations and bound them into little books with covers of thin cardboard that I decorated with drawings or stickers.
This, one of the first additions to my collection: my imagination is a place that’s all mine and if I want to, I can use words to cross it over from the inside to the outside, usually a pleasant, satisfying outcome.
What a treat for my small self to discover this gem early on. Because they couldn’t all be like this one. Some arrived as a punch in the gut, others after a long and tedious coming to terms stretched out by boring old resistance. Some have been forced through with the hope of fitting in, looking cool, or getting loved.
Over time my habit has been to save and organize my findings, filling tiny drawers and dusty shelves labeled, “This is me.” I have boxed and unboxed and reboxed, all in the effort to curate and polish, define and refine the self. But something has been pecking at the edges of my consciousness. Something is off with my precious collection. How many fakes and forgeries might I discover if I dare probe past the meticulous organization?
Although the most uncomfortable, these self-misunderstandings are the ones I’m most interested in right now. I am compelled to dump everything out into a heap on the floor. I begin to resort, recategorize, and, yes, reduce. What have I done? Where did this massive owl pellet come from? The one jam-packed with the tiny skulls and feathers and entrails of self-deception, self-disappointment, and self-hatred?
I’ve come across something foul, but look at this miracle: the curious collector in me wants this specimen for their own. With my ego set gently to the side I can recognize this tight bundle of my missteps and vanities as essential to the self-knowing originally sought. My ability, my prerogative, to self-reorganize after testing various hypotheses and abandoning those with unwanted results may be the most valuable item I could pick up, messy as it may be.
My disparate experiences haven’t helped me put more shine on my collection of self-understandings; on the contrary, they have pushed me to this moment of upending. Here I palm the contradictions, the grotesquely beautiful and the fascinatingly ugly. I don’t understand and I want to understand. I know and I will never know. I sense the truth of myself, feel it as real as a mountain of rock looming over the desert. The truth eludes me, flows away like water, changes direction and tempo, transforming again and again, maintaining time after time.
— Brynn Grumstrup (they/them)