You may think I’ve gone crazy now. But here goes: I’ve finally become a magician. This weekend I reached the Sun in a magical working with a dear friend. After all these years of studies and exploring I am now confident to call myself a magician. I am Mercury-Hermes-Thoth if you like symbolic language. I am a shaman, I walk a different path, I am one who changes existence through the forces of a magician.
I also think I’ve come to the end of myself in this manifestation, as I came to the end of the one I was before that, and so on. I carry the memories of being an innocent child that is no longer me. I remember being the only girl dancing in a black midsummer dress. Inside there is the joy of an euphoric musician on stage, the shame of once having been an arrogant man, the sorrow of a despairing woman, all the feelings of an inquisitive explorer, a fatigued partner, a loving master, an introvert student, an ambitious writer. I am not them, yet I am the consequence of them all. I am a conglomerate of my previous lives. Now I need to reorient and reorganize all my selves. Solve et coagula!
I have been mostly Ellinor for some years now, and I am so happy that I finally could let her out. She have been with me since the beginning, hiding inside, and to get her dressed and out in the world interacting with people that didn’t judge her have been marvelous. My friends and co-workers didn’t flinch an eye as she slowly emerged. I am very happy to be her, and I still am, always will be.
But I am also M. He’s this curious boy living inside Ellinor, as she lives inside him. Not as a separate person, but as a simultaneous being, like the drawing with the rabbit-duck illusion where both animals are there all the time but you only see one at a time. Ellinor had so much to catch up to that while being her, manifesting and defining her, I pushed M to the back and instead neglected that part of myself. Because I’m not completely one or the other.
When becoming a magician I was dissolved and assembled again. Balancing the wand and the cup, wielding the sword while standing firm on the discs can not be done by neither M nor Ellinor if they are separate. They have to become one. My mercurial genderfluidity takes me in a third direction outside the binaries, much like in the tradition of a shaman. It allows me to move curiously in the borderlands. It is my magical mission to disrespect limits and break the rules that should be broken. That is what makes magic, that is what changes the world.
I am still Ellinor. But now Ellinor + M. I am a writer and a magician. And still a fox (in change).
☿