Shift the way you view your feet and watch everything transform
On selecting your most miraculous realities
Growing up, I learned how to despise my feet.
My friends cackled at them for being too scrunched in. Possibly from wearing the wrong shoe size.
I hid them reflexively and learned how to throw hate towards that section of my body. Planting neural seeds to grow this area of self-consciousness.
Then, after a lifetime, or really just the years it takes to become an adult, the roots of that plant were pulled.
On the couch in our West Hollywood apartment my roommate cocked her head to the side, taking in my feet.
“I know they’re ugly stop looking at them.” I reprimanded her.
“No, no they really aren’t. They’re actually really cute. My feet are ugly.”
I was shocked. She thought her long drawn out toes were the ones which looked odd. How mine appeared more delicate as they gently curved in.
I giggled in disbelief.
What reality was she living in?
⊹₊ ⋆
I’d say I’m someone who can easily let go of my perspective. I can take off my point of view and shift it instantly into another’s. This can be both a good and difficult thing.
Good, because I enjoy shifting the way I look at something.
Difficult, because I reflexively can look down on my own perspective. Believing it is somehow lesser than someone else’s who believes more adamantly that their perspective is more true.
A book I’m reading, titled Dreaming Reality, states there is no one ultimate reality.
How each person’s experience on Earth is subjective, contributing to the greater kaleidoscope of consciousness, and how it is better for each person to focus their specific reality on their own growth and survival.
The book features a study which puts this theory to test.
The study simulated artificial “living” on computational models to see if highly accurate sensory systems, meaning systems which are more able to capture a more objective reality, would help contribute to their evolution.
The results were as follows:
“Simulations indicate that the agents — which placed a premium on accurate representations of their virtual worlds, as close as possible to how things really were — actually went extinct after a few generations.”
“a completely [truthful] version of reality may threaten to overwhelm an organism with information that is not necessarily useful of enacting adaptive behaviors.”
“What ultimately matters is that the agents contain internal models that succeed in surviving and passing on their progeny, regardless of how faithfully they capture reality as it is.”
⊹₊ ⋆
A lot of people are very good at pretending. Pretending to know what’s good for them and others, too. I’d argue to say most people are pretending before they actually believe something is true.
However, I’ve also learned that pretending is the gateway to knowing. To fall asleep you have to pretend to be asleep — I learned that from a TikTok.
Well, when is the exact moment the body goes from pretending to believing something is real? Is it a series of shifts, small transformations? The real sashaying into the pretend and back again, twirling through the cells of your body — like when you fall asleep, inching closer and closer into REM?
Or, does the real swoop through you like a curtain dropping? Signaling the performance is finally over?
Was it that day on the couch? When a new reality flickered to which I apprehensively walked through?
Beginning my journey of loving my feet, enjoying them, fiddling them in boys hands, laps, and mouths.
At what point does what you choose to believe in sink into your life? When does the story officially change over?
There is no one ultimate reality.
We get to decide how and what we see.
⊹₊ ⋆
At lunch, I place my feet in my mother’s lap.
We’ve been at the hospital every week this month. This is a number that most likely will be continuing. Everything can change while nothing is really that different. Suspicions can be confirmed and the worst news you thought you could ever hear pings through your eardrums. Then flowing back out again the sounds will leave you, and you will continue being alive.
Stories of possible realities break like waterfalls flushing down your face through the medium of tears. You will collapse on the bathroom floor. You will cry in the shower because it’s easier for the tears to blend.
For some reason, it feels easier on the body.
Because the first onset of tears can be such a burden. The changing of states, so hot and wet, pulling your face in different directions.
But, in the shower the tears run cool and coaxed. They render invisible. You appear more like a mime, like someone just imitating pain. It doesn’t seem as real.
All this water makes it feel like something else is happening.
Doctors will tell you one thing but ultimately you will be the one who decides how you will live the story. The way you live the story will change everything.
Each day we point ourselves towards miracles.
I have never in my life been so immediately confronted with how I would like to construct my own reality. When intense medical news is given, suddenly, there is no room for a weaker, less hopeful perspective, because my reality will affect the person I love’s reality.
Suddenly, it’s all focus on miracles, starting now.
I have come face to face with the fact that inside of me there is a person who is supercharged with vitality, pure optimism, and high-energy visions of the future. Inside of me there is a person who will accept no less than that.
This moment is calling for no less than that.
So, who I was in the past, who quieted this supercharged inner self, in a plea to more accurately fit my ideas into more “realistic” ideas, is now a completely irrelevant person to me.
A cut off circuit.
I believe in my own perspective.
⊹₊ ⋆
It’s incredible how wishes can come true yet break apart simultaneously. The casing of an old reality cracks open to reveal the glowing center of a new one.
It is the duty of a wish to crack.
For it to blanch your atmosphere.
But, wishes are not held outside of the body. A wish comes from inside the body and inside the body is where a wish will come true.
“And it is inside myself I must create someone who will understand.” wrote Clarice Lispector.
There is no one ultimate reality.
Several things can be true at the same time.
Profusions of perspectives, all breaking open like diamonds, shining reflective lights, this way and that.
Thus, whether it is reorienting yourself to love your feet or choosing to believe in the path of miracles, you get to decide what this reflective light means.