July 1st 2026

A Lifetime to Own It

*A change is taking place, some painful growth, as in a snake during shedding its skin — dull, irritable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near blinded by the dead scale on the new eye. It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.*

— Peter Matthiessen

The snake sheds because it has no choice. Its body outgrows the old skin and the old skin simply fails. There is no version of the snake that stays inside it a while longer, adjusting the fit, deciding if it's ready.

I have had that choice, with the people I love. And I think, if I'm honest, I've spent long stretches wanting to look shed rather than doing the shedding — for us both to see.

~

Rather than a courageous love, it became a sort of accounting. Debits, credits, a tally sheet I consulted before I'd risk anything out loud. When the numbers looked bad, when I felt someone might be pulling away or might be angry or might see me clearly, I withdrew — not to survive the loss, but to author it myself before it could be done to me.

That much I've named before, to myself. It felt like finding something. It was something. But I have to be truthful about what I did next with the finding.

~

I took the naming of the fear and turned it into a performance of healing. The insight became the offering.

Look — I understand what I did now.

Look — I can trace it to its root.

Look — I am doing the work.

Please see me.

But understanding the ledger is not the same as tearing it up. I used the desire to make amends as a way to seem repaired, without being repaired. It was faster. It felt like movement. It let me skip the part where change occurs, where I might still be cold or unfair or afraid in exactly the old way, except now I have language for it, instead of the change itself.

~

I don't think the fear was ever only fear of losing love. Under it was something plainer and harder to look at: fear of the actual labor of becoming someone worthy of it. Fear that what I owe the people I love doesn't happen in a letter, an insight, one true sentence delivered at the right moment to move them. It happens slowly, unglamorously, mostly unwitnessed, with long stretches where nothing I can point to has changed at all.

A moment can produce the appearance of a truth. Only a lifetime can own one. I don't want to hand anyone the appearance again.

~

So here is what I want to be honest about, since honesty is the only thing left I haven't already spent cheaply.

I am not doing this so I'll be forgiven. I am not doing this so someone will see the change and soften toward me. If that happens, I will receive it as a grace I did not earn by trying to earn it. But it cannot be the reason, because a metamorphosis undertaken for another's verdict is still the old ledger — just with someone else's name at the top of the column instead of mine.

I want to become the man who doesn't keep the ledger, for my own sake, not anyone else's. Because I am tired of loving from inside an accounting. Because I would like, before I die, to know what it is to love without first checking whether it's safe to. Not to be witnessed doing it. Not even for it to be known that it's happening. For it to simply be true, whether or not anyone is watching, the way the snake's new skin is true either way.

~

I don't know yet who is doing the adjusting 

—

the man shedding, or the one still dressed in the old skin, describing the shedding beautifully to whoever will watch. I'd rather live inside that not-knowing, honestly, for as long as it takes, than resolve it today in a piece of writing and call the writing proof.

That's the only kind of love I trust myself to offer now. The kind that's too slow to perform, and too quiet to need applause — even mine.