The Mirror
The Holy Ache of Being Witnessed
This essay originally appeared in Former Pujari, Joanne ColdSteel's Substack, October 13, 2024. All artwork by Joanne ColdSteel.
Ganesh is really big for me, personally. Big like physically, literally, like an elephant. An unstoppable force, like an elephant. Big like a tree growing upward at an imperceptible rate, but a rate that is part of a constant process with a conscious goal, with an intelligence behind it. An unknowable intelligence like an ant creeping, a mind moving in a way we can only imagine in context. It leaves evidence only measured in inches after the fact.
He's in charge of doorways. You'll see the pictures where he's in his little throne room, and it's so beautiful with silk pillows on a gold throne and incense and flowers and sweets and everything. How did they get the big elephant man inside the room, though? Probably magic, doorway magic.
I feel like I'm always finding myself walking through a doorway into a room, asking myself why I came in here. Twenty times a day, I'm asking why I came in here. All I know is I am in a room that is definitely a different room than I was just in, so at least I know we're getting our quality time.
Ganesh is in charge of when you're making your bed, and you shake out the top sheet (I just started using a top sheet, brag), and it's hanging in the air a little bit and waving around. Once you flatten it out, it will stay in that position until its next use, but until then, it's defined by movement. Ganesh is like a billowing, weightless sheet, pure, clean, brilliant cotton, warm out of the dryer.Everything feels so polarized all the time to me. Everything's always on a cycle where it's either got me totally beside myself, streaming tears, grateful, or everything is totally fucked. Nothing's ever felt fast enough to me; I'm still convinced my time moves faster than other people's. It's silly that one's connection to God can move around on a hormonal(?) cycle.
Maybe that's more natural, though. Now that my whole purpose isn't so wrapped up in that kind of stuff, it makes me feel less despondent when I'm not feeling it. It always goes like: I catch some sort of inspiration, and the light changes; it feels like fall or maybe spring, and there's no choice but to feel totally moved all the time. Sometimes, it's so heavy it's distracting; it's almost inconvenient. When my whole thing had been about sacrificing everything to make that happen all the time, when it wasn't, I'd feel really scared and demoralized. It's good that I have a new, much more accomplishable task: being a beautiful, confident woman.
What makes the cycles move? Why do I look in the mirror and see something one day, then see something different the next? Why do I look in the mirror so much? Looking in the mirror is a lot like looking into the picture frame at the picture of Ganesh, and he's got his own little room in there, and how the heck did he fit through that little door? Can I go through there and hang out with him? Sometimes, it feels like I'm in there with him, and it's dark and lit by flickering oil lamps, big tall multi-tiered oil lamps, and the room feels so small, like you have to shrink to the size of a mouse to fit in. You have to be so small, like a little ant drawn to the sugar in the crumbs of all the cookies he's eating in there. How can looking in the mirror feel that good?
You never know who you might see in the mirror. When you walk out of the house, when everyone looks at you, they see what you just saw when you were looking in the mirror. They look at you, and there's that same frame around you as when you look at yourself, and maybe they think, "How did they fit through there?" Sometimes, you'll look at someone, and it feels like you're both in an impossibly tiny little mouse hole together. I felt like that the first time I listened to Shank talk. It felt like I was looking at him through a paper towel roll. The first time I looked at myself in the mirror with my wig, it was like she was right there in the room with me.
Is she in the room with us now?
Around here, people love to stand in doorways and talk. Well-to-do straight people with this whole social world I’m only tangentially involved with. Behind a pane of glass. And there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I've been concerned with the amount of time I present as a man out and about. If I'm not out being seen looking the way I like to look in the mirror, do I even exist? In order for Ganesh to give me one of the cookies that Make You Feel Like a Woman, I have to make the sacrifice of stepping out of my front door with my face on and, like, go walk around, go to a bar or something, I don't know. The deal I've made with him is that if I don't do that, I feel pain, but if I do, I feel accomplishment and pleasure. God has guaranteed me that if I leave the house, I will get a little compliment on my bag or something, and it will make me not want to explode. Hoping we'll be on better terms soon, but that's kind of been where we've been in our relationship the last couple of weeks. Maybe I'm hormonal. Funny how that goes, but I guess life isn't all good all the time, huh? Would it be easier to accept that or to look and act and do perfectly all the time? Would it be easier to count progress in inches and days than anything bigger?
