Personal debrand

i wanted to be something so bad i forgot how to be anything

Having a dream makes you a difficult person. Difficult to get around, to approach. To describe and summarize. Difficult is a calcifying prerogative; the word alone implies a necessary distance from access, a required obstacle. The difficulty is indexed to the dream itself: you may want to introduce yourself at a party by your weekend hustle, not by your primary means of paying rent, but once you do, an apologetic ‘but, like, not full-time,’ follows. Like the discrepancy is a moral judgment of your skill. Like you have waited all your life to be you and still haven’t quite arrived.

debranding defrosting detaching

And it has long fascinated me how dream means both a wish in the works and the vignettes you see with your eyes shut at night. Desire over the horizon and a low budget noir film that dissolves by the morning. In my native language, they’re different words. How can two notions, one so governed, requiring full awareness and agency, the other ephemerally surreal, a portal to the third world, be represented by the same name? “I had a dream,” you tell me. Were you at the beach singing karaoke, birdwatching, dancing in stockings lathered in perfume oil at the Shangri-La? Did the characters play hide-and-seek, blending into faces of everyone you’ve known? Or was it more disturbingly affixed like cheating, getting fired, dying in a battle, yelling at your father? Maybe what you’re saying is you’ve given up on a certain life path. There’s no way for me to know from that sentence alone.

Well, I had a dream, too. I dreamt that I had murdered somebody. My only concern, frankly, was people finding out – not that I had done it. There was a body to dispose of, the face of which I could only faintly recognize, and it looked familiar as it morphed by the minute. That’s how I knew I was dreaming. Too grotesque for the delicate psyche, the guilt and remorse lingered awhile.

The night before, I was putting together the About Me section on my website. An exercise in stipulated certainty — go tell the world about you, be aspirational, seem indifferent. The running message wraps around my head in red: if you’re a person with a dream, better know how to market this brain of yours. A kaleidoscope of a woman is described by titles and grants and a curated assortment of achievements: some inflated, some downplayed, others not mentioned for NDA purposes. Mostly, it’s all just a performative bouquet of particles held up by a hawser of voluntary self-flattening. Writer, author, somehow has nothing to say about herself in 150 words. If a Vieux Port fisherman cut the rope, and it all unraveled, slipping into the glossy water, what would float up to the surface? What would they really see? The truth of me?

They’d see that I have succeeded as a woman of scarcity and fear, not of abundance and joy. That whenever I feel unremarkable, when I’ve ceased to interest the public and it’s too late to reset myself to default settings, I’ll accelerate in all the breakable ways. That I long to be known intimately without having to spill my guts for profit. That I strip with hesitation, always leaning to the right, and sometimes adjust my hair in the middle of a conversation because the embarrassment of being caught performing doesn’t override the fear of being seen. That it’s not quite summer yet but I’m already dreading all the tops I’m planning to wear, which coincides with all the tops I’m never going to wear: my absolute belief in the existence of a speculative ‘perfect’ top that will, one day, irremediably change my life is always there, beaming with stubbornness.

They’d hear the clasp of my bra disconnect, and while it does the job of holding some form of attestation together, feminine sensuality and decay all come undone at the seams at the end of a long day. We know this. They’d hear the steady footsteps in rooms I’ve outgrown and undermined. They’d hear the sleepiness where I could easily spend my days stretched across the left side of the bed and not feel ashamed, if it wasn’t so ghastly, in social terms, to live a life of solitude and static motion. They’d hear the tap turning; a bathtub filling up, all feelings rising like sourdough, good and bad, where I can finally admit that I’ve lost more in vain than I’ve gained in experience, and that my integrity suffered at the hands of forgetting myself. They’d hear the radio silence of a lost friend to offhand miscommunication, in which neither of us can bring our egos down, as I count weekends to my birthday knowing, factually and intuitively, that a text won’t come. And if it does, it will be dry and neutral, and that’s even worse. That I want wealth and praise much like the next girl, but for all the wrong reasons; mostly so I can do fuck all and finally be left alone in my underwear and silk sheets, which is what I feel I was born to do, however sociopathic and lazy. It’s nice to know that my need for attention has an end objective contrary to attention itself.

But would they know the worst parts of it, ones I can’t bring myself to mention? Would they know that I hold my breath every time I call home? That I’m unbearable in the summer and a tryhard in the city lights? That asking people to spend time together feels like being at the mercy of a train schedule? And that I can’t sell this book if no one with real credentials wants it? I wanted to be something so bad, I forgot how to be anything. Describing myself is an apparition, an assault on structure, a sentiment of a desired image, and saying I’m done with pretense is only honest if you’re done, too – otherwise, we’ll just go on playing, jumping on the count of three. One, two, three, jump. Hey, why are you still standing on the ledge?

credit: @seebylaura

We all have things to put in our About Me. We get woken up by the news and lovers, brush our teeth and march into truth seeking, affluent and approachable, busy with overlapping lunches and the letup of a dinner cancellation; sometimes lonely, other times overwhelmed. Take liberty in forgiveness, draining substance until there’s nothing left in privacy and a big party is just another hurdle on the way to bed. Our big titles are fortresses of armor, the sticky floors of the dance floor. Maybe we need to be described so that we know how to feel about ourselves. About Me is both the perfect summary and the perfect severance. And as we brim at the heart with our overflowing knowledge of each other, we become more abrasive, sentimental, in need of a mother’s touch, sounding like a W-9 form. A glacier is moving through the icy water faster than I am able to admit I’ve made a monster by trying to build something special of myself. That should’ve been an afterthought. Instead, it was the goal. And then I killed her in my dream and it felt so good – all her titles, all her prizes to dispose of and wash away. Her face, only faintly recognizable and covered in dirt, looked familiar. I knew, deep down, that it was me.

Being known doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it startles me how fast it is, how irreversible. A ceremony of immediate repose. The stranger looking mysteriously solemn in a bar seat facing my good side, carving himself into the beginning of a beautiful story, is the sleepyhead whose worries are my worries, whose joy is my joy. The artist with a CV intimidatingly assorted, sharp as a needle, is the girl in front of me, barging into the coffee shop in sweats with her hair tied back, panting. “Sorry I’m late,” she goes. “No worries,” I say, and I mean it. The same tingling sensation meets me when the very real particles of a very real life of someone I admire clash with what I’ve managed to mythologize about them, when I get closer to understanding they’re no match to the precedent I’ve set. It doesn’t make them less alluring, it just makes me exhale. This is where we are, here and now, progressing in parallel, not flattened by the online or commanded by the letters pressed into empty spaces, and my head isn’t clouded by the advance assessment of you I signed off on insecurely. I’m taking you in real time, all your humanity behind the labels, your flushed cheeks and the tooth gem, the faint smell of drugstore shampoo, and your gaze glued to your right when your thoughts start drifting. How fast a circle grows into a sphere, fills up with warm air, how easy it is to breathe by the sea. We’re all just trying our best, and we’re all scared of being something. Of being anything.

And then About Me unfolds into I’m not yet who I’m going to be then scatters into Well, I just may never be. It feels so good to dig my nails into the soil behind your bio – it’s why I came here. I wanted us to be a mess together. You’ll share what keeps you up at night. I’ll tell you that I’m scared of my question mark of a career, my wide ribcage and my split ends, but, god, I’m dripping poems, I’m the funniest in my family, and, thankfully, always acutely alive.

“You know, I had a dream,” I’ll say to you. I’ll be referring to my nightmare. My deep silken desires are still intact, hidden under the locket, never in past tense. I don’t think I’m that difficult of a person.