15. Happy Rebirthday! 🐣
Easter's Greetings from Your Friendly Neighborhood Heathen
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Rebirth.
Imagine it as a viscous thing, slick and sticky as the first time you came out of the womb. Unfurling fetal form, stretching your arms out wide—you’re brand new again!
Free of your mistakes! Free of your flaws! Free of the cumulative, heavy weight of everything you used to be. Being reborn is like being born but BETTER because you still get to be you, but clean. Cleansed.
“I used to be mean! I used to be stressed! I used to be selfish!” you’ll say to the incredulous masses. But now? Ha, HA! No way. New You™ is nice and mature and well-dressed and confident and organized and not at all a chaotic mess. You’re no longer the person who your parents and siblings used to call “too intense,” and “too competitive at Horse and every other game that’s supposed to be casual and fun.” Nay, that was the old you, who is dead.
I’ve attempted to be reborn a few times. Reinvent myself. From soccer player to fashion student. Fashion student to tech mogul. Tech mogul to starving artist (my final form, I fear).
I planted so many seeds, expecting new plants: I moved to New York. I went by “Ata” instead of “Nat.” I started a start-up. I cut my hair. I studied Spanish. I dyed my hair black. I bleach-washed it out. I moved to Los Angeles. I dated new men. I dated new women. I dated “no one ever again.” I grew out my hair. I started doing stand-up. I joined a stretch program to learn how to do the splits so I could finally be flexible. I started learning Italian. I got engaged. I cut my hair again. I’m growing it out now.
(As if all of these versions of myself are separate, re-birthed people.)
(I’m still convinced a haircut can change the trajectory of a human life.)
What I’m asking is: What does it mean to truly be reborn?
What I’m saying is: I’m jealous of Jesus. Yes, H. Christ.
Think about it: When things didn’t work out, he got to lay low for a while, let people miss him, and emerge anew as the SAVIOR to the very PEOPLE who SMITED him. What a glow-up.
Disclaimer: I’m not religious. (I think I was supposed to capitalize He and Him when referring to Jesus? But maybe that’s just for God? See—I know nothing. I pray you’re not offended by the gaping gaps in my religious etiquette; rest knowing that probably means I’m damned to hell anyway? Are those the rules?)
That said: it’s Easter and rebirth is on my mind.
Annihilation of Joy
And a series to watch if you haven’t already.
There’s an episode of Midnight Gospel called “Annihilation of Joy” where the main character—a universe-hopping space-boy named Clancy—gets trapped in an existential prison where he watches one of the inmates go through a cycle of death and rebirth. By the end of the episode (spoiler alert), the inmate finally learns to live his life to the best of his ability and achieves self-absolution.
(Midnight Gospel, if you’re unfamiliar, is a psychedelically-philosophical animated series created by culty podcast-weirdo Duncan Trussell and Adventure Time daddy, Pendleton Ward. Some episodes are rambling, some absolutely devastating, all worth watching if you want to see death, enlightenment, and the human condition turned inside-out like a polkadot sock.)
The aforementioned inmate who Clancy meets is a mute prisoner named Bob, who bit off his own tongue in a fit of anger. Every time Bob dies, his body is presented to two divine multi-eyed figures with heads like soccer balls who proceed with the same routine: from his lifeless body, they remove his heart (which snaps at them, bared teeth like a cornered dog) and place it on a scale, weighed against a feather:
This image of the heart on the scale is a reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Per the Digital Occult Library’s summary of this episode:
“The soul’s heart was weighed against the ‘Feather of Truth.’ If it was heavy with sin, the heart would be fed to the monster Ammit and the soul would be destroyed. While the show uses the Egyptian imagery, the fate of Bob’s soul is quite different upon his judgement. Instead of the hall of the god Osiris, Bob’s soul is in the Buddhist state of bardo. While not all Buddhists adhere to the concept, bardo is the place between life and death where the soul has an opportunity to see and learn things before they are reincarnated. This knowledge of a higher state beyond the material gives the soul a perspective to help them escape the cycle of rebirth.”
Imagine: knowing the exact mistakes you made in life, so as to improve upon them in your brand new reborn life. That delicious idea of New You™. Every time Bob died, his snapping heart removed from his chest, I thought of my own anger. My own snapping heart. My resentfulness. My jealousy. Feelings that dissolve me from the inside, sneaky as disease, as I try to survive in the silly and competitive and ego-driven world of screenwriting and performing. I question the life I chose, constantly. How many times would I have to die to eventually live the right life?
Over the course of the episode, Bob attempts the same challenge, which visually plays out almost like a video game: he needs to escape from the prison in which he met Clancy. In every iteration of that challenge, he comes across obstacles that implore him to learn how to lighten his heart on the judgment scale. By escaping from this physical prison, he’s learning to escape a spiritual prison, too. With every life/death/life/death, Bob learns to empathize instead of react, work with the other prisoners and prison guards instead of against them, until his inner hatred dissipates and his removed heart stops snapping its teeth. His heart finally at peace, its tired eyes closed, it’s rested on the scale as light as its opposite feather.
Bob needs not be reborn again — he is complete.
Oaxaca!
You are who you were whenever you’re with family.
This holiday weekend, I’m currently in Oaxaca with my abuelitos, my mom, and my siblings and Easter is in the air.
In Los Angeles? Baby, there is no God. But here? I’m half-convinced Jesus is going to show up in El Centro like a surprise guest at Coachella to meet and greet his many fans. Religion flavors the Mexican culture, lives in the breath of its people, forever implied. A familiar, familial flavor. I think of the ceramic angels that guard my abuela’s house.
Family will always remind you which life you’re on, don’t they? In the series of attempts before you achieve Bob Self-Absolution. They elicit the flaws you thought you grew out of years ago, seducing them within like a snake charmer.
For example: A few days ago, the lot of us went on a mezcal tour through the agave fields. Bumping through hilly dirt in this barrel-shaped vehicle that looked like a centaur-combo of a pickup truck and an Oregon Trail covered wagon. (I can’t describe it any more accurately than that.)
Our guide spoke Spanglish and blasted mariachi music from a speaker while all twenty-ish guests (my family and a large group of Oaxacan friends we didn’t know) passed a jolly bottle of mezcal from person to person. When the bottle reached you, you were supposed to stand up and dance as you pour yourself a shot. But I didn’t want to dance. I was too embarrassed. So I smiled and sat through my turn and passed on the bottle to my mom and felt—well, a little bad. Why didn’t I just dance?
“Because I’m not the one who dances.” I’m sure I told myself. As if it’s law.
As we clanged on through the fields in our semicovered wagon, I leaned in toward my mom and said: “I can’t believe I do stand-up comedy on stages in front of random people and yet I can’t bring myself to dance for point-five seconds in front of a crowd of drunk strangers. How’m I ever supposed to be the fun sibling?”
My mom smiled at me in that way that suggests, profoundly—It’s okay. I exhale my little moment of regret. Releasing it, believing her. She said:
“Oh, Natalie. You can be the fun sibling whenever you want to be. Just decide to be the fun sibling. And then, keep deciding to be.”
I can’t die and respawn until I’m perfect. But I can get incrementally closer to the person I want to be. Miniature rebirths, inside new actions.
My heart snapping a little less, maybe. Every time I choose to dance.
What’s Next
Talking about us, Substack family.
I was in Edinburgh, Scotland two years ago when I wrote:
Dandelions are weeds you make wishes on.
Blowing spores with every wish.
Walking through the fields below Arthur’s Seat,
looking at the dandelions—
I can’t help but live inside this poem.
I’ve made so many wishes.
I’ve blown so many spores.
What should I have expected - but more weeds?
I was sad about so many things when I wrote that. I’ve since felt this same kind of hopelessness, for new reasons. I’ve been off the grid because everything has felt like the wrong decision, and so… I do nothing. I’d post a cartoon to Instagram, but what’s the point? That app isn’t built to push images anymore. I’d submit more art to the New Yorker but what’s the point? It takes too much time to draw. I’d write my movie if I could, but maybe it’s too big of an undertaking? I’m already past my prime. I’d write something on Substack, but who even wants to read that?
Weeds.
Admittedly: It’s been a hard year. There was a writer’s strike that gutted my already hollow financial prospects as a television writer for the past ten months, I had a number of intestinal problems that made it impossible to enjoy food for almost a year, and my parents split (messily). I’ve watched my mom go through her own rebirth, and my dad resist his.
I’m done listlessly blowing dandelions.
Rebirth is just permission, isn’t it? Given by you, to you. To add something different to your beautifully cumulative self.
I don’t want to be angry, bitter, jealous, exhausted; pockets turned inside out by my own self-hatred and self-doubt. Coins on the floor.
When I’m reborn, you watch! Things will be simpler. Better. I don’t need everything, everywhere, all at once. I just need to:
Enjoy my food.
Write my movie.
Make more shorts.
Meditate, probably.
And see you next Sunday. I’ll be back on my Sunday Newsletter grind.
I’ll be writing a lot more, folks. Announcement coming soon for a series of weekly writing prompts, and a writing class.
That’s my rebirth list. What’s yours?
xx
nat
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