We like to think we know things.
It’s kind of what Anglo-European societies are based upon. We’re taught that there are paths to follow that lead certain places: education and training to degrees, jobs, and promotions; relationships to marriage and children; renting and consuming to owning assets and property. Accumulating signifiers of a life of one who Has It Figured Out.
Spiritual traditions in these cultures we’ve created are similar: there is a class of people who have the answers, and if you say the right words and take the right actions in the right way, then those who know will tell you that you’re saved, and you can be certain that your soul will go to the right place when mortal death comes.
But if you look to traditional, Indigenous, and ancient worldviews, you’ll find that they tend to be processes of not addition, but subtraction: scraping away the beliefs and conceptions that make us think we’re something separate. The word “shaman” may mean “one who knows,” but rather than gatekeeping knowledge, they teach the others to experience this directly, realizing they are inextricably interconnected with the most divine things. Humanity’s longest-running cosmologies have their myths and origin stories, hierarchies and systems like the rest—but rather than trying to definitively answer life’s big questions, they tend to center on unlearning: quieting the mind, getting into the body, surrendering and listening. And when you do this long enough, you realize that the answer is the question.
Why are we here? What’s the purpose of all this? What does it mean to be human?
Hell if I know.
Indeed, one version of hell is losing something that seemed certain, and having to start all over again. Jobs and marriages ending; losing homes and houses; people dying; injuries and illnesses; the conclusion or our own body’s sensory experience . But rather than a linear timeline, traditional perspectives approach this as more circular, where in one thing ending, another is already beginning. The trick is persevering through the fear to find what happens next.
The human game is predicated on pretending like we know, but in reality, nothing is certain. Culture itself is a system for transmitting knowledge: finding and producing food and shelter; interacting with other members; making tools and art; maintaining balance between humans, spirits, and other living creatures; perpetuating the species. But when it comes to dimensions other than this one, those unseen realms just below the surface of our own psyches and the cosmos, the game is subtraction: peeling back the layers of the onion to get to our base essence and collective experience.
Consciousness itself is not fixed, but flexible. We’ve been told that other living things don’t have first-person perspective, but mainstream science and technology has no way to prove it; there’s no way to know what it’s like to experience the world the way as a tree, dog, or even as another human does. Even colors and the so-called laws of nature, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake says, are more like habits: apples are red, grass is green, the acorn grows into a tree, people with certain kinds of bodies perform certain duties—but that’s just because we learned that way from being in proximity with others, sharing knowledge through fields of resonance both explicit and energetic.
Through mainstream methods, there is no way to know whether the acorn is aware of becoming the oak; to know whether the color I call red is the same shade you see; to understand what it’s like for another person to live in their body, regardless of biology. The queer and trans* experience is the lens through which I understand things, but any transitional journey, whether it’s coming of age, graduating from school, starting or ending a relationship, taking or leaving a job, joining or separating from a religion or practice, aging, or embarking on a spiritual or philosophical path, begins with questioning everything you think you know, tearing it down, and using the pieces that still seem sound to build it up again.
I think that in the Anglosphere and Europe, but especially America and the U.K., gender and sexuality becomes such a cultural flashpoint because it targets something that for centuries, many saw as one of few certainties: the organs you were born with determine your gender, which in turn proscribes specific social roles and functions. It was something we didn’t have to think too hard about. For some, I think, this is why it can feel personally threatening: If not even our bodies are fixed, what else might we question?
This kind of uncertainty can be terrifying, even completely debilitating. And when people are terrified, they may say and do really hurtful things to the ones who are doing the challenging.
In societies predicated on knowing things, there is often the expectation that coming out is a linear journey like any other: you repress or deny who you are, until one day you realize your true identity, then live happily ever after. If you’re trans, the narrative says that you’re born into the “wrong body,” so you switch from one binary gender to another and go back to following the same paths within the same structures. Nothing has to change except your body, especially not society. But for many of us, it’s not that simple. Whether or not we need to modify aspects of our bodies to feel more at home in our skin, the experience and interpretation of gender is completely different from one person to another. Even two people who transition from a binary conception of “masculine” to that of “feminine” don’t necessarily have the same interpretation of what that means, or inhabit and express it in the same ways. Besides, for many of us, gender is much more fluid, mutable from one day and even moment to the next: inherently indefinable, falling along a spectrum that is itself not flat and linear but multi-dimensional and circular.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if the color I call red appears to you as green, as long as I don’t try to tell you I know exactly what you’re seeing. as the best kind of death, an ending that is an invitation to freedom; the beauty and relief that can come from releasing our death-grips on thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors, throwing our hands up, and saying:
Hell if I know!
That’s hard for Anglicized frameworks to hold, and most of them break under the pressure. And that, in turn, is scary for people who cling tightly to them. But the beauty of realizing that nothing is stable means that you’re free to do and be and make anything.
Indeed, parts of the queer and trans* experience are more universal than they may seem, extending to anyone who ventures outside the mainstream; every kid who didn’t fit in and adult who doesn’t know how to “act normal.” When you stray from the established path, you may find that pulling one thread causes the others to unravel. For me, the queer journey has come with questioning everything, knocking down every signifier from a permanent address to my femininity. As much as I claim my queer and trans* identities, embrace the nomad life and winding path, the whole thing remains really, really fucking scary!
Whatever realizations I may come to in meditation, during ceremony, or on this Substack, I’m only human; I want to know things like the rest of us. Constantly toppling and raising the foundations is really difficult. I’m still in the process of fully accepting my own queerness; being a woman isn’t something I’m rejecting or even celebrating the departure of—it’s horribly painful, I am actively grieving it, and some parts of me really wish I could keep living in that place that once felt fixed.
But that wouldn’t be the truth, because the truth is, I don’t know who the hell I am, where I’m going, or what I’m doing. The beauty is that eventually you learn that everyone who seems to have the answers, from parents and leaders to our most celebrated artists and performers to Ram Dass, Alan Watts, and even Jesus has just been making it up as they go. And today, I wouldn’t trade any of it, not the darkest days or deepest pain, because those moments where I can let it all go and melt into the great unknowing are so beautiful, it’s worth it.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if the color I call red appears to you as green, as long as we don’t try to tell each other what we’re seeing. I now understand why some use the term “trans” with an asterisk: because words can’t ever encompass our experience. We are all stardust, and the thing at the end is whatever we make it, mutable from moment to moment.
So let’s all come out, and stop pretending that any of us knows what the hell we’re doing or what any of this means. Let’s revel in unknowing, delighting in the mystery.
For paid subscribers, below the break is a recording of a spoken-word piece about transcendence. (If you can’t afford a paid subscription and feel it would benefit you to listen, send me an email.)