The Worlds in Between
Becoming is messy, being is cool. Guess which part we're currently in.
On the 14th of February, Now and Zen will have been in existence for a whole year. This newsletter began as an experiment in storytelling without the guiding and shaping force of corporate media — a direct dispatch from my brain to yours. Creating these comics and telling stories requires time and effort, and I need your support to keep creating. Here are some ways in which you can help me to keep going:
Subscribe to this newsletter and/or forward it to a friend.
Buy prints — you can choose an artwork that you like from these newsletters, from my Instagram or write to me and commission an artwork that is your very own.
As a younger woman, all my longing for transformation was a longing for power. Movies where ordinary protagonists received makeovers or discovered powers, that suddenly turned them into what my teenage heart desired above all: to become someone people paid attention to.
As I grew older, the desire to be noticed and admired turned into a longing to be feared. Once again, stories where women turned into she-monsters with ravenous appetites, wreaking havoc, seeking revenge (see: Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, Teeth) became a way to fantasise about power I did not wield in the real world and that I desperately craved. Agency in a body that never felt like it was entirely mine.
Writing to you this week, I realised that my love for transformation-lore has changed again: I’m no longer interested in the tragic Befores and magical Afters — the lover who wins their once-unrequited love, the wronged that are finally vindicated, the hero who has already stepped into their power — I’m happy for them, but I want and crave stories of the in-between. The glorious, messy detail of trying to carve out a new self, chipping at old patterns, grieving the loss of old selves, befriending the parts we were ashamed of, our tenuous, dizzying relationship with the freedoms we fought for and still aren’t quite sure that we deserve. I want to know what around us is a sign of an old world dying and what portents a new future.
I need these stories because this is where I see myself.
I keep track of dates and timelines as a matter of habit. It’s been twelve years since that life-altering Bad Thing happened. I spent the next eight years trying to defend my right to say it happened. It’s been four years since it ended in a way that was terrible, and also, four years since I decided I was worth fighting for regardless of the outcome. It’s been three years in a new country, three years without the reassuring ka-ching of receiving a salary, three years in which everything I believed about myself has been put to test.
The changes have been colossal, and somehow the ones that mattered most of all don’t exist on a timeline at all: I thought everything would fall into place once the Bad Thing was over, and I’m shocked and pleased to tell you: there is no happily ever after. I’m still alive, which means I’m still making mistakes that I cringe about every night, growing in ways that surprise me and exhausting as it sounds, I am still becoming. Maybe happily ever after is a place of stasis, stagnation and inflexibility. May our horizons expand with every transformation.
Everything I shared with you in my comic is true, and also — shedding old skin is awkward. The discomfort of still-becoming is so profound and so silly, it sometimes feels exactly like being a teenager, which is perhaps is also the age when we first become self-conscious of a not-quite-there-yetness.
I’m channeling some of this discomfort into watching training films — i.e. films where an ordinary person undergoes a prolonged and tortuous form of discipline in order to (surprise!) conquer their monkey mind. It’s still a longing for transformation, but this time, the transition from Before to After feels less disingenuous. Training movies give their protagonists time to struggle, fail and break. Their self-doubt is essential to setting up why their victory will ultimately matter, and while external wins still include romance and/or bloody revenge, a good training film acknowledges that the real shift is subtle, even hidden, within the protagonist’s own heart. In case you’re wondering, my current favourite in this genre is a delightfully hokey film called The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
This week I fell utterly and completely in love with a now-defunct physical theatre company that made this short film. It is funny, moving, electrifying and musical.
On the subject of power, desire and terrifying transformations, I cannot recommend Samanta Schweblin enough. Read Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds. Trussst in me.
More soon,
Nish