July 28th, 2026

**The Skin of the Myth**

the snake does not shed its skin and then step forward.

it sheds by stepping forward.

the old skin splits at the mouth first. everything after that is friction — the body pushing through what it no longer is, dragging itself against stone until the dead layer peels back like something turned inside out. there is no clean moment of finished and new. there is only the push.

~

i want to believe the new skin arrives armored. it doesn't. it comes up soft, more open to the world than the skin it replaced, easier to tear. the brightness i mistake for strength is only rawness catching light.

so the step i take in it is not a reward for having already changed. it is the changing. nothing hardens a skin that holds still and waits to feel ready. the callus is earned by the walking, not the other way around.

~

there is another skin under that one. the Myth itself — the story i told about a fall, a sleep, a Sophia who wept and so the world leaked out of her weeping. i needed that story the way the snake needs the old skin: something to press against on the way out. but the Myth was never the thing itself. it was the shape gnosis took before i could bear it directly.

so i shed the shedding-story too. not because it was false, but because it was skin, and skin is not meant to be kept. what's underneath has no plot. it doesn't fall, doesn't sleep, doesn't need retelling. it only asks to be walked in, soft, unfinished, now.

~

i keep wanting the order reversed — myth first, understood and settled, then the walking. but gnosis was never offered that way. i step while the story is still shedding off me. i step because it is still shedding off me. and the ground does not wait for the myth to finish being told before it asks me to walk on it.