A Tiny Compass

On changing at New Year. On Girard's Mimesis vs Knowing Thyself.

Dear Known and Unknown Friends,

As the New Year dawns, we’ll paste charming images onto vision boards, collaging together the lives we’d like to lead. Little cut outs we cast as moments to symbolize the emotionally regulated, clear skinned and fit, fiscally stable era we’re stepping into. I actually have had my aesthetic Pinterest boards created for weeks in preparation for the annual rite.

As usual, I’m not writing to you as any sort of pinnacle of together-ness. I’m writing to you as someone who has spent a lifetime trying to change herself. I want to unfold the little map in my back pocket, get out my tiny compass, and show you where there’s Escher stairs that lead to nowhere and shortcuts that are actually haunted trails delivering you to a more damaged place than where you started. There’s a secret I have to tell you.

Changing ourselves is the hardest thing we can do.

Please, do me the favor I wished I’d done myself many times over. Think really hard about whether change or self-acceptance is the better option. Neither is an easy way out.

There are lots of discussions on lifestyle and daily habits in spaces devoted to the practice and study of Religion and Spirituality, Esotericism or Ceremonial Magick. I adore thumbing through the pages of books I turn to often—Hildegard Von Bingen, Franz Bardon, Thomas Merton--and seeing what types of lives their authors led and what I can try on for size. I made Hildy’s cookies. I wanted to garden by moonlight like her but couldn’t as I have no garden. I settled for lots of potted herbs and flowers on my cute little sliver of squalor. I started taking long rambles in the woods like Merton, using a loofa like Bardon suggests in Initiation Into Hermetics. Raising any of these as course corrections on the way to live is not my intention. It is really hard for us not to recontextualize the asceticism of days bygone into the service of our contemporary fixation on appearance. That’s been my reluctance to ever even bring it up, and also knowing I am a very flawed person who should think wisely about the advice I dispense.

I have a silver compact mirror I use to check my lipstick when I’m on the go. It’s got the words, “body dysmorphia” engraved on it in cursive. I joked I should get one, so every time I clasped it shut, I’d remember my reflection was lying to me. Then, my boyfriend got it for me as a little surprise gift. It used to be that my particular brand of neurosis was not quite rare but definitely rarer than it is today. I spent my entire life calorie counting and restricting despite the fact that it would never lead to results other than being batshit warped in the head. Now, though, neurosis is the norm.

I ask you to not to do what I did for years and let dysmorphia take the reins.

There’s a cacophony of voices telling you to put needles in your stomach and face. I get it. I am wearing acrylics and false lashes on most days. I got Botox injections once, but was so afraid of looking like Joan Rivers I barely let the needle touch me. True to form, I wound up paying a lot of money to look exactly the same.

I’m not, like, some deluded chick telling everyone to just be happy with themselves, as if it were that easy. I am cognizant enough to say there is something not quite right about being fed processed trash, trying insincerely to make body positivity a thing, then just giving up and stanning Ozempic. And yes, I know there’s legitimate medical uses, we deserve to feel beautiful and accepted, and all the things. Please don’t misunderstand. I am pleading for you to think more deeply than I did before volunteering to change yourself.

My point is that self awareness is at the foundation of any lasting and meaningful transformation. That includes the changes we make to our reflection, and deeper, less transparent ones. We learn so much about who we are from the changes we initiate or fail to see through. Each act we undertake alters not simply our mindset but our entire being. We learn what we are made of, where our limitations need to stretch and grow, who we are and are not.

What the maxim “know thyself” means is only just starting to dawn on me. In recent years we’ve gotten into the habit of translating individuality into taxonomies of intersections, diagnoses, privileges and disadvantages. Understanding differences and the scaffolding of normativity can be helpful for us (especially educators) to reach one another with more competency. But it can also be rather futile and generate impotent resentment if we overestimate the significance of this knowledge. DEI initiatives have altered our deeply personal relationships to our ancestors, our experiences, ourselves into something to be commodified for the institutional gaze. In the end, they function in a predictable way—as little ramshackle ghettoes attached to a great power, where radiant minds are shoved and can be disposed of as soon as the wind blows ill. Our relationship to ourselves is a very large thing to surrender for such a faulty system.

When we reduce something so unquantifiable, mysterious and singular as the Self to a lifeless census of genetic and social traits we cheapen it. Even if these things shape us greatly into who we are, it is how our soul and imaginations guide us through living within and beyond those parameters that has meaning. It is how it gives voice and tone and texture to the experience, not the experience itself.

Chivalry fades in and out of popularity and level playing fields are elusive. It is safe to put your faith in the decency of people, it is less safe to put your faith in the decency of political parties, institutions and corporations. The reality is we must know ourselves so we can navigate a harsh world. It rarely meets us where we are. When it does, it is for the briefest of times. Non profits and leftist culture tells us we’re owed something based on our positionalities so we will put our trust in them. Yet they never settle the debt and often profit from it. All the land acknowledgments and phoney gestures at representation in the world will never amount to anything lasting.

This is not to say inequality is inevitable and resisting it is futile. It is to advise there’s a long road ahead. Save your energy for something more worthwhile than the broken promises of legacy promise breakers. When it comes time to choose your fighter, your best bet is yourself. Make sure you have plenty of battery life.

Knowing the genesis of our patterns, the intricacies of our triggers and where we are positioned in society is not the same as knowing ourselves. Those things are levels of self-awareness that are helpful but overrated and incomplete. Knowing thyself means clarity on one’s values, calling, capabilities and will regardless of whether we are in a forest with only deer and foxes, among people with nothing to their name or at a cocktail party filled with CEOs and celebrities. French philosopher René Girard proposed we can only imitate the desires of others, that humans are lost without looking to one another to emulate, and that rivalries are borne from our mimesis. I do believe that desire without envy is possible, but I have yet to find concrete proof. So maybe, just for fun, you’ll undertake scavenging for originality with me.

Is it possible for us to strive towards a version of ourselves that is based on an inner and truthful understanding of who we are, rather than imitative?

I love changing.

Change is empowering.

Even just the possibility is exciting.

I hope, though, that I can change not only my circumstances.

I hope that I can also change not from but into myself.

Wishing you a New Year filled with lots of good books and conversations, conviction and authenticity.

LVX,

Alejandra

p.s.—

You can always find me for divinations here: Gemineye Tarot. On IG/ TikTok @gemineyetarot. And soon, Discord.