Kaleidoscope Challenge: January

My brain perked up upon reading about the Kaleidoscope Challenge, a monthly creative writing challenge kicking off in the new year. The inaugural challenge is hosted this month by

Mark

who writes over at The Curious Detour, and future challenges will be co-hosted alternately between Mark and Moon Arica.

As a fresh-faced Substack n00b here mainly to write for my own mental health, with now one little follower to match my one little published introduction/essay, I have very little to lose, so why not jump into the deep end and put myself out there? Seems better than perseverating on “what should I write next?”

The prompt for January is “The Tipping Point,” and aside from the challenge description and one previous entry, a lovely poem by Charlotte, there’s no instruction manual. So, rank navel-gazing it is! Reader, I hope you enjoy this, but if you don’t, it’s really OK. I wrote it for me.

The Tipping Point

“This is fine” dog comic by K.C. Green

Everything was fine. I was fine. Until I wasn’t.

Decades passed and life happened while I held up a cast of agreeable puppets shaped vaguely like myself to take all the hits for me. Long enough that even I started to confuse the puppets with an authentic self, and devoted all my energy to maintaining their friendly felt facades, neglecting to tend to whatever was beneath. Carefully crafted smiles layered atop a can-do attitude and a willingness to cut off my fingers if it seemed like you could make better use of them. Approaching loved ones, friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike with a preemptive “I mean you no harm, so please don’t harm me, I’ll give you everything I’ve got” interpretive dance, a reflexive apology always at the ready, even if I was the one wronged.

This facade, this dance, was worth every exhausting kilojoule of effort and all the bits and pieces of my agency I willingly gave up to keep it going. The alternative—breaking down the barrier between body and mind, actually feeling everything taking place in there, and having a hand in my own fate—was scarier. Until it wasn’t.

I realized that through all this terrible dancing I was not just eating myself, but feeding bits of myself to others. Not a vague, theoretical self (a “brain in a jar,” as I often thought of my consciousness trapped in a body I had little control over and felt alienated from) but an actual, measurable, finite self that had mass and required upkeep. I was passively and actively allowing that self to be consumed, and soon there wouldn’t be enough left to bother maintaining. The scales were tipping. Could I tip them back in the other direction?

Beneath the layers of gaudy felt and grinning teeth that formed the false selves, somewhat atrophied by neglect but very much alive, emerged a real human being, made of a multitude of real human parts. Not a new person; they’ve been here all along, hands working the puppets, choreographing the dance.

“We deserve better,” said the person in a barely recognizable and very quiet voice. “We get to live, just like anyone else. All of us is worthy.”

They’re a confident and compassionate adult; a genuinely loving human parent who raised two beautiful humans to adulthood with a minimum of trauma; an older sibling who was inappropriately parentified but nonetheless deeply loved and loved by the younger ones I was made responsible for; a devoted friend and community member who wants us all to thrive—autonomously. They’re a terrified child; an angry teenager; an opossum in a trench coat; a wounded fae. They are messy, confusing, contradictory. They occupy five feet and four inches worth of space, and deserve to take it all up. They are an electrical spark, temporarily animated in a carbon golem; a stupendous badass, descended from billions of previous stupendous badasses; a mundane miracle; an ordinary person. One of a kind—just like everyone else.