Part 2: I have been dying
// the programming designed to clip your wings is what makes you realize, you can fly
log 5.14.26
There are 3 moon cycles in May: a full moon, a new moon, and another full moon as Pluto goes retrograde. The aesthetic was chosen before I opened the planner. As if it were a memory buried somewhere deep within my cells.
“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.” — Octavia Butler
Every culture has a name for this.
The Tibetan Buddhists call it “transition”. They teach that we have already died many times in each life — the surprise that takes your breath away, the almost-accidents, the near-death experiences that leave more questions than answers. Death is not the interruption of life. It is woven through it.
The Stoics call it “memento mori’, remember you will die. Not as morbidity. As liberation. The awareness of death is what makes the living deliberate. Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private journal, not for publication, just for himself, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” A man dying to his illusions of control, every single day, on purpose.
The West African and diaspora traditions hold something different and something older. Death is not an ending but a transition of role. The person becomes the ancestor. The relationship doesn’t terminate — it deepens in a different direction. The dead are consulted. Their wisdom doesn’t disappear with their body. They remain active participants in the lives of the living. This is not metaphor. This is cosmology.
The Celtic tradition marks the thinning of the veil at certain times of year. The dead can be spoken to. Their counsel is available. Death is a doorway, not a wall.
This is not depression. This is not failure. This is not collapse.
Although the process can feel like all of these things.
It is something older. The fracturing of what once was with what can be. A realization arriving slowly and then all at once that no institution can grant you power. It all comes from within.
The version of you that was built for a particular environment: a particular role, a particular set of expectations, a particular idea of what success was supposed to look like stops being necessary. The identity that was functional in one context becomes incompatible with what’s next. The programming designed to clip your wings is what makes you realize, you can fly.
This is not failure. This is information.
The question isn’t whether it hurts. It does, just not in the traditional sense of nerve endings firing to signal trauma. This pain is different, and the question is whether you are conscious during it. Whether you are choosing what survives and what doesn’t. Whether you are designing the transition or defaulting through it.
Most people default through it. They let the dying happen to them. They wake up one day on the other side and don’t know how they got there or what they left behind.
The alternative is to be present for it. To name what’s releasing. To decide, deliberately, what you are becoming.
Designed, not defaulted // applied to the self
If we’re not careful, we allow others to benefit from this process without us realizing its value. The clarity that comes from a true death is rare. The perspective it produces is hard-won. The person who emerges is not the same as the one who entered — and that difference is worth honoring.
To whom, and in what form, is still becoming clear.
Some deaths are quiet.
You smile at someone you don’t particularly like and later, alone, you wonder why you did that. You don’t reach for the phone when it rings. You let things that used to feel urgent simply fall away.
You find yourself with less to explain.
And somewhere in the integration — in the scrambled eggs you finally had the strength to make, in the shower you finally took, in the day that was good followed by the day that was awful — you begin to notice something.
The signs you were questioning become signs you are honoring.
The noise you were managing becomes a signal you are reading.
And one day, without announcement, you realize you have stopped looking for signs.
Because you have become one.
Something is taking shape.
It lives somewhere between the technical and the sacred, between the institutional and the personal, between what I was trained to build and what I actually believe is worth building.
It is not what I left. It is not what I imagined I was going toward. It is something else, something more powerful.
What if we learned to trust that little, small voice when it whispers? I am learning to trust what is emerging is exactly what was meant to be.
More soon.
// thoughts before dawn.