reinvention is really remembering yourself

a personal essay on the importance of self-reinvention and authenticity

I crave rebrands and new eras, I crave the feeling of unfollowing people, archiving posts, donating old clothes, clearing spaces and clearing my mind. I crave the feeling of changing my name, choosing a new favorite shade of green, leaving as one person and returning as somebody else. I crave creations of ideas of who I could be.

I constantly crave reinvention.

Yes, I got that itch again — I hit delete and press my phone’s power button before dropping it in my purse between tangled earbuds and dog-eared pages. Exhilarated, I pull the bag’s strap up my shoulder and walk to the tiny bookshop a few doors down from the café.

“Planners and journals are over here now,” the woman at the counter says — somehow, she knows I’m there to purchase another one before the year ends, even though there are eighty-nine blank pages left in my last one.

I buy one in a different shade of green, and I unwrap it as soon as I get home. But I wait to write until it’s January and I’m someone new — it’s so blissfully blank.

If this is exciting, waking up on New Year’s Day is ecstasy. It’s limitless and a little bit dangerous.

I think of one of my favorite sections of one of my favorite books — Sylvia Plath’s fig tree passage from The Bell Jar:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

In the same way the figs rot as she suffers choice paralysis and the passing of time, they could rot when the fantasy of becoming someone else fades, when you remember you could’ve picked a different sort of self to become, when the euphoria of newness disappears, couldn’t they? And when the rotten figs fall to the ground, what’s left?

Sometimes, the constant longing for change can become self-abandonment (not always all at once, but in little pieces). As escapism, we grasp at new personas to attach to ourselves. I’ve been a mirrorball in that way before, and I’ve watched those figs rot and fall.

But at the same time, I wonder if the chasing of reimagined aesthetics and versions of us also come from the ache of missing ourselves. A silenced voice or a laughed-at love, we have forgotten parts of our souls that we traded away for cheap compliance and acceptance. We yearn to find those neglected pieces and feel them again. When you know yourself deeply, it’s not self-abandonment...it’s becoming yourself by returning to yourself.

This is when reinvention is really remembering.

Some of the figs might fall, but the figs are only ideas and “what-ifs” anyways — we’re the branches of the trees. We can hold on tight to the ones that matter, and we remember what makes us us.

Yes, I’m reinventing myself this year. I’m remembering how much I love colors like burgundy and wine and plum (along with my shades of green!), how I used to devour books in days, how I’ve always wanted to wear a few more piercings, how I miss playing piano, how I used to collect pretty things just because they’re pretty.

I’m becoming the most myself I’ve ever been.

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