Who Am I?

Now who can answer that honestly? Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Let’s start with the “facts.”

One of my annoying tics is that I think in song lyrics and clichés. So I’m a literal space cowboy. A joker and a sometimes smoker. A walrus. I am [s]he, as you are he, as you are me.

I am a woman. I don’t want to say a white woman—not out of guilt. I think that’s more of an American framework. We Germans are plenty shamefaced about other matters. It’s a national sport. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I really came into being a woman. I always identified first and foremost as a human.

I had a long phase in college when I tried to look androgynous, inspired by David Bowie’s Thin White Duke and Patti Smith. I can’t pull that off anymore. If anything, I’m too much woman, slouching towards some kind of Bethlehem, walking on my knees “for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

I’m a mother. A wolf mother, feeding the pup, feasting on the kill. A bad cook. Sometimes an excellent one. I get eczema so I cannot cut vegetables. Allergic to nightshades and pollen and bees and penicillin. I’m a neurotic, psychedelic, infinitely jesting kind of mother. A good enough mother, as Winnicott would say.

I’m a liar liar pants on fire, hiding behind big ideas. A writer, for sure. But oh, what kind of writer? A poet, you know it. A muse. A menopausal overripe mango of a muse. I am all the women I admire—though most elude me right now: Nico, Anne Sexton, Anais Nin, Debbie Harry, Edna St Vincent Millay, Mary Magdalene, the whore of Babylon, Salome and the seven veils, the siren that sinks ships and the stone-turning Medusa.

I am bold yet often scared.
I am scandalously hermetic.
I glow sometimes. Or so they say.
I wish I were skinny. Not young. Just skinny.
I get bored very easily, even with myself.
I was born with Weltschmerz.
I like beauty and lush, sexy shiny things.
I like ruin and decay.
I am a seeker. God help me.
I’m a sprite. A puck. A player. A sashayer.
I am smellin’ like the rose that somebody gave me on my birthday deathbed.

I think, therefore I am. Supposedly.
I wasn’t bottle-fed on Descartes, but I kind of was.

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Inspired by @enlightenedhedonistdo, based on an “unintended prompt” from @ellieanderphd