becoming – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 6 - First Crushes and First Heartbreaks

Orbiting April – Day 52

February 15, 2026February 16, 2026 ljandkari1 Comment

Prompt – Your Earliest Crush

April was her name. I was twelve. She was beautiful, or at least the memory of her is, softened by distance and the way time edits what it can no longer hold. Her father was a TSgt, and they lived a few houses down from us on Plattsburgh Air Force Base, close enough that it was easy to accidentally run into her when I wanted. Her mother looked like an older echo of April, same features but worn thinner, as if life had pressed its thumb into her for too long. Years of folding a life into cardboard boxes every eighteen months had settled into the lines of her face. Some military wives learned how to pack without leaving bruises behind. She never quite did.

April and I went to the same junior high school but did not have any of the same classes together. I had to see her around the neighborhood if I wanted to see her. I saw her at the bus stop. I saw her when I went to her house to collect payment for the newspaper that month. I saw her when I was walking to the South Side Trails to hang out with the boys. I saw her often; she never saw me.

My crush on April looked like an orbit. I circled her life quietly, measuring my day by the chance of passing through her gravity. I practiced conversations in my head that never left my mouth. I changed the speed of my bike when I thought she might be outside. I learned the dance of pretending not to care while caring so much it felt like a fifty pound secret I carried in my chest.

I do not remember a single real conversation between us. What I remember is the anticipation of a conversation, the sharp awareness of my own body whenever she was near, and the sudden self-awareness about my red hair, about weight, about how to stand or where to put my hands. But, alas, nothing. It was not like she was not cruel. She was simply living her own best twelve-year-old life, and I was learning the quiet math of a one way conversation.

My crush on April never really began or ended; it just faded the way base housing always did, quietly replaced by the next season of trying to belong somewhere. The invisibility was not new. I had been practicing it long before her. She just gave it a face I could not ignore. Looking back now, I laugh a little at that twelve-year-old version of me pedaling past her house like it meant something cosmic. Jesus Almighty. I thought one girl noticing me might repair everything that felt unfinished inside my chest. It was never about April. It was about a boy who wanted proof that he existed outside his own head. The truth is harsher and cleaner now. Nobody arrived to make me whole. I learned to stand there, unseen, and open anyway.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Unfinished, Yet Worthy – Day 51

February 14, 2026February 16, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Who You Thought You Were Becoming

Reading through old college papers this past weekend felt like opening a time capsule written by someone who believed becoming was a destination instead of a motion. Every paper held a version of me trying to decide who deserved to exist long enough to grow. The theme was always the same regardless of the assignment. The theme was simply becoming. I wanted the chance to stay somewhere long enough for roots to allow something to grow.

Growing up between bases meant growth was temporary and stunted. I learned to adapt faster and grow shallow rather than deep. Peace at all costs became the unspoken rule, which meant parts of me stayed small so the room could stay quiet. I tried on identities the way other kids tried on jackets. Some fit for a season. Some fit well enough to almost feel true. But none stayed long enough to mature into anything stable.

What I wanted most was not a specific identity. I wanted permission to become something recognizable. I believed everyone else had already arrived somewhere solid while I kept circling the runway waiting for clearance to land. I thought if I chose the right role, did the right thing, performed the right version of myself, then maybe love would return, conversations would reopen, and I would finally be seen as someone worth staying for. The moment never came, at least it was not a moment.

Becoming did not announce itself with applause or resolution. It stretched across years instead. It took me across oceans to Japan where silence felt honest for the first time. It carried me into Rwanda where history sat heavy in the air and made my own questions feel smaller and sharper at the same time. It placed me at tables with presidents where power felt strangely human, almost fragile. It sat me in pubs glowing with warm wood and laughter where friendship felt less like performance and more like breath. It led me into churches that promised healing yet left echoes of harm that took years to untangle.

I still have not crossed a finish line; rather, I am content with standing in the space where old versions of me linger while new ones are still learning how to breathe. Past and present speak at the same time, asking different questions with the same voice. Clarity never arrived the way I expected; instead, I know becoming is not a destination. The person I thought I was becoming dissolved somewhere along the way of me actually becoming him. What remains is not fixed, but rather a life being lived. I am less interested now in arriving and more willing to stand in the in between, where memory, grief, and possibility sit side by side and refuse to resolve into anything simple. And for the first time, my worth is mine. It is no longer measured by who stayed or who left; it is measured by the simple fact that I am still here, still becoming, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Identity: Annotated in the Margins – Day 50

February 13, 2026February 15, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Outgrowing an identity.

I wrote the paper I mentioned in my previous post before I knew I was actually beginning to draw a map. Back then I thought I was explaining two people, Rodney and Lj, like they were characters in a story. One careful. One loud. One polite enough to be invited to dinner. One reckless enough to laugh at the invitation. I thought I was making sense of opposites. I did not realize I was documenting my survival up to that point.

Rodney was the name that arrived first. It came with expectations and rules and the quiet understanding that good children did not take up too much space. Rodney knew how to observe, how to blend, how to make himself acceptable in rooms that did not always feel safe. Rodney watched more than he spoke. Rodney carried the weight of being seen as good because being good felt like protection.

Lj came later, but he felt older somehow. He showed up in locker rooms and late conversations and moments when the rules stopped making sense. Lj said what Rodney swallowed. Lj used language like a blade and a bridge at the same time. He did not wait for permission. He did not soften edges just to make others comfortable. Back then I called him the “bad” extreme. Now I think he was just more authentic and honest.

Reading that old paper now feels like opening a time capsule written by someone who knew more than he admitted. I can hear the younger version of me trying to organize identity into categories; good versus bad, reckless versus respectable, loud versus quiet. He needed the world to be that simple because he had not yet learned that both voices were trying to keep him alive.

The truth is that Rodney and Lj were never enemies. They were translators for each other. Rodney understood the cost of words; Lj understood the cost of silence. Rodney held the map; Lj lit the match. Somewhere between the two, a writer started to form.

I think about how often I moved as a kid, how every new base felt like an invitation to reinvent myself. Identity was never fixed; it was something I packed in a suitcase and tried on again when the walls changed. That paper captured the moment when I first noticed that reinvention had a pattern. I did not become someone new; I just shifted which part of me was allowed to speak.

There is something tender about the younger voice calling Lj loved or hated but never ignored. I hear a kid trying to make sense of visibility after years of practicing invisibility. He did not yet know that being seen would come with its own kind of grief, that every word spoken out loud would echo longer than expected.

What surprises me most is not how different I sound now, but how familiar that voice feels. The metaphors were already there. The obsession with language was already there. Even the quiet awareness that identity was not a single story but a conversation between versions of myself had already begun.

Maybe this happen when returning to old pages; not to correct them, but to recognize the person who was brave enough to start writing before he knew where the story was going.

Rodney is still here. He always will be. He is the part of me that pauses before speaking, the part that listens for the unsaid. Lj is still here too, louder now, less interested in apologizing for taking up space. They no longer feel like extremes. They feel like witnesses to each other.

If I could speak to the kid who turned that paper in, the one who received a modest grade and moved on, I would tell him this: you were not describing two personalities. You were describing the beginning of a voice that would take decades to understand itself.

And maybe that is the real battle. Not outgrowing Rodney or Lj or any other identity, but learning how to let them all sit at the same table without one trying to replace the others. But seriously, a C-? WTF!

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Breadcrumbs of Identity – Day 49

February 12, 2026February 15, 2026 ljandkari1 Comment

Prompt – Trying on Identities

Identity was never a fixed address. Like moving to a new air base, my identity could shift without warning. If one piece of me did not work at this base, I could always try something new at the next one. New school. New hallway. New version of myself walking in before I even knew who I was supposed to be there. Each new place offered another identity, or at least another mask that helped me survive long enough to figure things out.

Some identities arrived assigned and had little to do with my choice. The smart kid. The quiet kid. The redheaded kid. The husky kid. Labels handed out like Oprah handed out cars. I wore them because they were already waiting for me when I showed up. Other identities were experiments. I tried on invisibility first. It felt safe, like maybe shit would hurt less if I stayed small and unnoticed. That identity lasted longer than most and followed me well into adulthood. But invisibility came with a cost. It protected me from harm, yet it also kept me from being fully seen, even by myself.

College was the first time I realized identity could be rewritten on purpose. I remember writing a paper about it, splitting myself into two voices. Rodney was the rule follower, the kid who survived by staying small and predictable. Lj was the observer, the writer, the one willing to question things even when it pissed people off. I did not know it then, but that paper was less about names and more about giving myself permission to exist in more than one way at the same time.

I tried on other identities too. The class clown. The artist. The writer. The badass. The observer. Each version carried risk. Writing meant stepping out of hiding and leaving proof behind. Observing meant noticing patterns that others preferred to ignore. Being the badass let me channel anger that had nowhere else to go, but there was too much anger for everyone, including me.

Looking back, trying on identities was never about pretending to be someone else. It was a quiet form of survival, a way to test the edges of who I could become without losing the parts of me that refused to disappear through all the moves. Some identities were armor. Some were escape routes. Some were honest attempts at becoming whole. But none of them were wasted. They were breadcrumbs left by a younger version of me who did not yet have the experience to know what the hell I was searching for. I do not see those versions as mistakes. They were thresholds. Thin places where one version of me ended and another began, often without ceremony. Identity was never a single choice. It was a slow accumulation of selves, layered over time, until the noise faded enough for me to recognize the one voice that had been there all along, steady and patient, waiting for me to stop trying to become someone else and finally allow myself to arrive.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Not a Replica, Just an Edit – Day 44

February 7, 2026February 13, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Something you secretly liked about how you looked.

I spent most of my childhood avoiding pissing people off and staying small and out of the way, and this included staying out of the way of myself. After Alaska, mirrors were no longer friends as I was now “husky,” as the adults called it. I wanted to disappear inside my body that seemingly refused to cooperate. My carrot top red hair walked into the room before I did. Adults called it distinctive. Kids made fun of that distinction. Still, if I am being honest, I secretly liked my hair, just not the color.

It was thick and styled well. There was no strange cowlick that other kids had to use water, gel, and frustration to tame. My hair always cooperated. It feathered and fell into place without much effort, the kind of easy that felt unfair compared to how hard everything else seemed. I complained about the color, but damn, at least it had possibility. Even under certain light it shifted, less fire and more copper, almost calm. My hair belonged to me and not to the people doing the teasing. That realization felt like a small act of rebellion, the kind that stayed hidden in plain sight with a subtle middle finger to all. I hated the attention of my carrot top, but I still appreciated the way my hair moved when I turned my head. That contradiction lived quietly inside me, a private agreement that I would never admit out loud.

My nose was also a feature I secretly liked, but for a different reason. It was not the sharp line and hard angle of my father’s nose. My nose curved differently. There was no harsh slope, no rigid echo of authority staring back at me from the mirror. As a tween and teen, the mirror confirmed that I was not a replica of my father. I was an edit. Hope lived in that small difference. Liking my nose meant I did not have to inherit everything. I could carry pieces forward and leave others behind. That thought stayed with me longer than any insult about my hair ever did.

There were moments when I stood longer than necessary in front of a mirror, dissecting my reflection. I would pretend to adjust something that did not need fixing, knowing I was really searching for proof that I belonged, if nowhere else, at least to myself. I did not feel confident about who I was, but I was damn sure curious about who I was not becoming. Maybe that was the beginning of rebellion; not loud or reckless, just a slow refusal to disappear. Even when I tried to stay small, parts of me kept stepping forward first, red hair and all, as if they already understood what I was still learning; that becoming someone new does not begin with change, it begins with noticing the pieces that were quietly mine all along.

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Decimal Down in Front – Day 39

February 2, 2026February 7, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A time you betrayed or hurt a friend.

I went off to Oklahoma Christian University in the fall of 1992. At the time, I did not yet know how to name what I was running from, only that leaving felt necessary, even to a shitstorm like OC. My first year unraveled quickly. I drank too much, stayed numb on purpose, and called that suspension “figuring things out.” When the year ended, my GPA arrived like a small, undeniable truth…a decimal lead the way, as if even the numbers were hesitant to claim me other than the zero.

So, I went home for the summer and worked at Pepsi, driving a forklift. They were long days that left my body tired and my thoughts loose. My house felt quieter than I remembered, as though something had already begun to close. I did not linger there. Most nights, I met old high school friends after work. We went to Applebee’s because no one questioned our age. We drank and talked and tried to decide who we were becoming by comparing ourselves to who we had already been.

Steve appeared in those quiet spaces at my house, a friend from before I had figured out how to be me. Back when I still rode the bus to school! Steve had learning disabilities and parents who seemed permanently absent in all the ways that count. He was kind, earnest, and always a little behind the moment, though never behind in heart. When he asked what I was doing, I told him about college in Oklahoma, about going back in the fall, and about my plans to figure things out.

Later that summer, he told me he had applied to Oklahoma Christian University and had been accepted. He said it with a kind of hopeful certainty, as though being near to my opportunity might offer him a door of his own. I remember feeling surprised, then unsettled, then quietly embarrassed by that reaction. I told myself a story about standards and readiness and merit, though what I was really protecting was distance.

When fall came, we were on the same campus. Steve arrived unprepared for the weight of it. The rules, the expectations, the rituals of belief that asked for performance more than understanding. Chapel, bible classes, the careful obedience that hung in the air all about. I recognized his confusion because it mirrored my own when I first arrived. I understood his shock because I had already absorbed it once. And still, I stepped back.

I told myself I was busy. I told myself he needed to figure things out on his own. I told myself I was trying to survive. All of those things were partly true. None of them were generous. I spoke to him when we crossed paths. I was kind enough to avoid guilt. But I did not offer help. I did not walk beside him. I did not lend him language when he had none.

The truth is simpler and hell of a lot more harsh. Steve reminded me of who I had been. Staying close to him felt like risking my fragile reinvention. So I chose distance. I chose silence. I chose myself. That is how I betrayed him. Not with cruelty, but with absence.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – Day 36

January 30, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – A friend who helped you see yourself more clearly.

Lots of firsts happen in high school. Some turn into great stories, while others stay quiet and make a person better without fanfare at all. Carol was one of those quiet firsts for me. She was a minor character in my storyline, but she helped me see myself more clearly and understand that I was a process inside a process.

We found each other in Ms. Peregrine’s art class, and then we kept finding each other outside of it. We went to coffee shops and talked the way early 90s kids talked when we thought the world might be ending and might also be remade in the same week. Our conversations had that grunge, almost avant garde seriousness that made everything feel both ridiculous and sacred. Music was always part of it because music was how we translated ourselves back then. The Smiths, The Psychedelic Furs, Nirvana, it all gave us language when we did not have enough of our own.

Carol drove an old Saab, and we would head out to Derry, New Hampshire, to a small coffee shop where time slowed down. For a while, life really did seem simple: coffee, cigarettes in the cold air outside, art talk, future talk, and the illusion that we could choose our next chapter without the past reaching up to claim us.

Right before graduation, we went for coffee the way we usually did, and I told her about the next move, the one that was supposed to mean freedom. College. It was another fresh start with another address, but this one would be mine. It was still another version of me being packed up and carried forward, but it was going to be away from them. Carol listened, then reached down and handed me a gift. It was a vase she had made.

It still sits in my house. Like me, it is not smooth. It is textured, marked by the touch of others, and it does not pretend to be untouched. Its surface is made of rings, each one visible, each one earned. I can see where the clay was pressed thinner, where it was pulled upward, where it almost failed and did not. The shape narrows, widens, and narrows again, and nothing about it feels accidental. It looks like a thing that has been worked. It looks like a thing that has been tested. It looks honest.

When Carol handed it to me, she did not talk about the beauty of the object. She talked about the process. She told me that each move, each experience, each hurt, each whatever, reduces us. The wheel pulls the clay down even as it spins it forward. Loss compresses and change thins because living costs something. But then, she said, another hand builds us back up. Another layer with another pass, and another choice. She spoke like she was offering a map, and I remember realizing she was not just talking about clay. She was talking about me, and she was doing it in a way that did not feel like pity. It felt like recognition.

What stays with me is the part that sounded almost too simple to be true. The height is not predetermined. The clay does not decide that. The wheel does not decide that. The hands do. I do.

That sentence landed in a place in me that had always assumed the opposite. I had lived as if the moves and endings and misunderstandings were the authors, as if the next chapter was always something that happened to me rather than something I shaped. I had learned how to adapt, how to read rooms, how to disappear when necessary, and how to be grateful for whatever remained. I had not learned how to claim the idea that I could still choose. Not in the shiny motivational way, but in the real way, the slow way, the hands on the wheel way.

Experience is experience. It is not good or bad in the clean moral categories people love to use to make life feel organized. It is formative. It shapes. The vase does not judge the pressure that made it narrower. It holds it. It carries it forward. The narrow places make the wider ones possible. The evidence of strain becomes part of the strength, not an argument against it.

Carol helped me see myself more clearly. She gave me an image that could hold complexity without turning it into judgment. She handed me a physical reminder that being shaped is not the same thing as being broken.

The vase sits there, quiet and unimpressed, holding its own history without apology. It reminds me that I can honor what shaped me without letting it name my limits. The clay remembers everything. And still, it holds.

Tag: becoming