Transmuting: The Process of Transforming into the Fullest Version of Yourself or Your Character

You can’t choose where you are in this moment—only how you feel about it.

You definitely can’t change where you’ve been—only how you understand it.

At any moment, the present and the past are forging a path to your future. That in-between point is the sweet spot. That in-between is agency:

You get to choose the target you’re aiming for. You get to choose again and again to take one action that brings you one step closer to the future you want.

That’s how you co-create your life and your corner of the world. That’s how you reach the future dream about. You engage your agency, and you employ the resources available to you, including your time, attention, and energy. You realign your path to the target you envision, and you take the next right step.

But for that process to happen, you must start where you are.

Then you need to reassess what’s actually available to you. 

Invest time and energy to befriend what has happened, either in your life or in your story, even if it initially appears to be a negative.

If you’ve been reading the stories of this Season closely, you may have already made this connection:

In the Ever Afters, Lena loses her hands while influenced by a misguided authority figure, and after she regrows them, her hands become an anchor point to assert her own authority around her inventions.

In college, I scarred my brain’s eighth cranial nerve while influenced by a misguided authority figure, and the vertigo it caused became a barometer to remind me to assert my own authority around my body and take better care of it.  

Lena’s experience of losing her hands to one of her own inventions comes directly out of my experience of collapsing into a puddle and losing my words for an afternoon. 

In Of Giants and Ice, I wrote: “There is before, and there is afterward. This is before. Everything will change.”

In the context of that story, someone was talking about the characters’ trip up the Beanstalk, but I was thinking about the moment I woke up wordless in a puddle. 

At some point, you hit a limit, and there’s no going back. For Lena, it’s her hands—even for just a little while. For me, it was losing my words—even just for an afternoon. For both of us, we lived a moment that changed us forever. Though painful and frightening, these experiences were thresholds that invited us to become the fullest versions of ourselves, because we both decided that there was no going back. After that threshold, neither Lena nor I gave away our authority—over our inventions or our body—to someone else again. 

In our culture, we’re often taught that limits are bad, but what if they aren’t? 

What if you treat your limitation as a very good reason to set limits? 

To do so requires investing your time and attention into making meaning of the experience that has shaped you. To befriend whatever circumstances led to creating that limit in the first place, you have to revisit and process it. 

The event may be painful, the circumstances scary, and this can’t be ignored. Eventually, the danger is past, and you have room to process the situation and create your meaning from whatever you experienced.

As I mentioned in the section on journaling, the significant shift isn’t complete during the climax. During intense events, you are acting and reacting to what’s around you. The resolution and new understanding of self happens afterwards in quieter moments. 

After Lena lost her hands, she had an important conversation with her best friend, who witnessed her exactly where she was and comforted her as best she could.

After developing vertigo and quitting the rowing team, I spent hours with my journal and with my mom, unpacking what had happened and making my own meaning from it. 

Processing what had happened and how you feel about it is an investment. Many people won’t take the time and energy to pause long enough to make their own meaning. Instead, they’ll spend the rest of their lives saying, “I’m fine,” even when they’re not.  

For them, there is no threshold. There is no before and afterwards. There is only trauma—and a deep well of unprocessed pain.

You may read that and think, How sad for them.

When I see people with unprocessed trauma out in the world, I think, How sad for us all.

Because from those hours and hours of personal processing in my journal came powerful meaning, unique to me, rooted in my own experience.  

With that meaning came the raw material from which I created the Ever Afters. In this section, I’ve just named two parts of the series which were birthed from me waking up wordless in a puddle. From the same experience, I could literally list thousands of more examples that ended up in the Ever Afters. And that’s just one person and four of her books.

Imagine if everyone turned their pain into such meaning. 

What a world that could be.

We don’t have to wait for something to happen to make changes.

Lena needed a big wake-up call—losing her hands—for her to take back her authority. That appeals when writing or reading a story.

Big wake up calls are much less fun in real life, and I know this from my experience of waking up wordless in a puddle.

Using these two examples may have given you the impression that something terrible must happen before a healthy change can occur. However, this isn’t always so. 

You may need an intense experience as a catalyst, but in my experience, something intense has already happened somewhere in your life. For example, the overall catalyst for the “In Sickness and In Health” story—me waking up wordless in a puddle—happened during the spring semester of my sophomore year of college. It impacted both stories, including the last section which occurred twelve years later, in 2018. 

 That year, there was no dramatic catalyst. Instead, in my usual beginning of the year planning, I took inventory of my life and decided my health required my attention.

Sometimes, in the midst of a murky middle, you simply decide that you are done with how things have been. 

That decision can be a mini catalyst, and it can change the trajectory of your experience.