London and Transcending the Transition
London smells like cigarettes and the sidewalk after it’s rained, and I breathe it in deep and easy. I’m on the east side in an anatomical museum next to a focaccia shop—London really does have it all. It’s the brick and mortar of the overground, turned home to cafes, hipster hideouts, and now a gallery space for vagina plushies and women’s health tips. Sometimes I wonder what my mother would think of the things I don’t tell her—like how I ended up walking alone down a deserted street in London with my phone dead or how I donated five pounds to a museum she could spend her life criticizing—but I’m trying to care less, which is harder work than people give it credit for.
I’m here to hear my friend in Nashville play drums at the Roundhouse Theater, a relatively large venue in Camden town, but I decided to make a weekend out of it, a decision I only regret in part: lack of planning left me with an abundance of time alone, and I’ve found myself returning to the same places I went last year, the year before, but this time without the people that made it special. The city feels hollow when I’m here as a tourist, visiting the same sights like a ghost haunting the home I grew up in. I’ve known three Londons, and this is the loneliest. It’s not worse, just objective.
But today I am in a new part of town, making a new memory: my friend from Nashville, Mik, is leading a writing workshop at the Vagina Museum, and I decided to join. Today’s theme was on transitions and the gray areas in life, a theme that seemed ever relevant as I sat there with a body in England but a mind in the United States.
Periods of my life are getting harder to define. I’ve always loved categorizing time by some overarching theme or moral lesson, but as I’ve grown, these periods are less distinguishable. The more experiences you have, the less each new one is earth-shattering and definitive; things tend to take on more nuance as I age, and this frustrates my brain that likes to attach meaning and language to everything, that likes to see a clear cause and effect.
On the theme of transition, one person at the workshop brought up their experience as a non-binary person, whose life was constant transition, and so poignantly said, “I think life is about getting comfortable with change—transcending the transition.”
Transitions are hard for me, and I think a reason why it’s been so difficult to define the last year and a half of my life is because it’s all felt like one big change to the next; I can’t point to a time when the arch of my life dramatically shifted. I’m still in the transition—I haven’t found the words to summarize this era, because I’m still in it. And maybe that’s what marks the end of a transition: when you’ve found the words for what you were feeling. When you’ve drawn a dotted line in your life separating before from after, pretending that the two aren’t walking side by side on the same street, hands tied.
As a recent college graduate, I've been thinking a lot about time. During my final term at university, I read T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, two texts that center around our modern perception of time and offer new ways of looking at it. The protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five encounters an alien species called the Tralfamadorians who view time as nonlinear. One of the aliens explains:
“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
This challenged my view of time; not only is it impossible to arrange your life into perfectly coherent chapters, but it’s not the most productive way of viewing time. There isn’t a clear cut “before” or “after”; rather, every memory interacts with the present.
Coming to London, I felt plagued by the before. Even in a new country with a new job, I still mulled over the same problems I had in the States. I find new ways to revive old loves; I hoard the dust of last year’s heartaches and draw lines in it when I’m lonely. I am still in the before.
It’s hard to reflect on your past and look to the future while still feeling present, and it’s something I’m trying to get better at. Transcending the transition, for me, means embracing the undefinable and welcoming change. It’s accepting that moments and memories live forever but not letting them take over our present. It’s living on uneven ground, walking through constant change, but knowing that somehow, I’ll fare forward.
