The cost of reinvention

Inanna waiting at a hell-gate in a fancy little hat.

We’ve just passed Easter, so this is apt: The oldest resurrection story ever written is actually about a goddess. Her name is Inanna. I want to tell you about her, and why resurrection has been, to me, such a resounding theme since the Covid confinements.

Inanna was ancient Sumer’s Queen of Heaven. We first meet her under the very tree whose fruit marks Eve's downfall—pre-Eden. Inanna sits under that tree, totally naked, and applauds her vulva.

Such a delicious inversion of the Garden of Eden tale.

But this isn’t about that. This is about her descent into the underworld.

The Underworld is ruled by her sister, Ereshkigal. Her husband's just died and Inanna decides to visit her for the funeral. But Ereshkigal doesn’t want to see her, so she instructs her gatekeeper to open each gate of death just a crack. As Inanna passes each threshold, one vestment must be shed.

Seven gates block entry to the underworld. At each, Inanna—fully adorned in her power and beauty, which are functionally the same—must leave something behind.

“Let the holy priestess of heaven enter bowed low,” Ereshkigal whispers in the dark.

At the first gate, Inanna surrenders her crown, the most visible symbol of her rulership. “Why?” she asks. The gatekeeper replies, “Quiet. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

Next she removes her lapis lazuli necklace. Lapis lazuli is the stone of queens; it can attract a gaze magnetically from across a room.

“Why?” Inanna asks again, and again the same response: “Quiet. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

Progressively, she is deprived even of her dress.

Maybe you recognise each subtraction of confident selfhood—a title, a role, power accumulated with painstaking care.

When Inanna appears before her sister, naked and bowed low, she’s attacked—with wrath, with guilt, with pain. She instantly dies, and is suspended from a hook on the wall.

This story is over 4000 years old and it lives in my skin.

It’s triggering. It’s how I’ve felt … since Covid, really. Since I left Hurrah, got lost in a forest in Devon, and went to study myths. I emerged bleary-eyed from a forest: What happened? 

Regime changes, plague, death. I thought, after Covid, we had arrived at similar conclusions about where meaning lies and where it doesn’t—not in timesheets, surely, not all this smug shit about using AI to be more productive. But something got lost. I tried reentering my sector and realised nobody understood what to do with me or what I’m for—things that once seemed evident, like a crown.

People used to try to make me fit any way they could. Is it because I got older? Maybe I disappointed them by failing to see my company through? Maybe it’s because I became a mother. (I can’t really work weekends anymore, or until 2am on weekdays.)

My god. Is it because I stopped coming to ad parties?!

I’m trying to figure myself out. But while I do that, I want to talk about reinvention. People tend to think of it as additive: “I’m going to become.” But Inanna’s story reminds us that before the great rebirth comes a clearing-out, an emptying of space that feels like a direct attack on identity.

What did we take for granted? What did we think was just us, when actually it was only adornment? What gets left behind when you’re stripped down and unable to defend yourself against the scariest thing that can possibly happen?

These questions get asked of us in various ways: What’s a dealbreaker, where’s the line between values and work ethic? And make no mistake: They will strip us down. We eventually all appear naked and vulnerable before chaos moves us to the new order.

In three days, Inanna rises. She has to choose someone to take her place in hell. After evaluating every close person in her life, she chooses her husband—who runs and hides behind his sister, who asks to share his fate. So they exist there in oscillation, one in and one out, forever.

To change, you must pass through the death-world. But you can’t just dip your toes in and say you did it. You can't go halvesies with someone else, dooming you both to arrested development. The submersion has to be total, and it disfigures you, making it impossible to reappear in the world as you were before.

In exchange for what she lost, Inanna gains sharp clarity: Who deserves her loyalty and who doesn’t? That’s a pretty standard-issue post-death realisation—who was there for me, who really cared, when I stopped existing in power?

It happened to the Queen of Heaven. It happens to us all. There’s a gift in this, but you have to take it whole. 

Random aside: I wrote more deeply about the Inanna myth in my substack, Midwifing the Mother. I tied it more concretely to matrescence, in that case, but the whole myth is there, if you're interested in the details.

(You also get to find out why Ereshkigal was so mad! It's tea.)

The wolf and the dog

Inside there is a wolf and a dog.

They're not in competition, though they can be made to feel that way.

The dog yokes you to civilization, makes it possible to function in shared space with other humans. The wolf yokes you to yourself: Your emotional universe, secret desires and dreams. It is the wild thing that calls you from outside, where the moon is bright and beckoning, and other wolves dwell just beyond the door.

At varying points in life you will be encouraged to starve one to feed the other. Or you might simply care more about one than the other.

But both need feeding: The dog, so you can thrive in community. The wolf, so you can grow unwithered, clear-eyed and discerning. Starve the wolf and you'll spend your life doing things you don't want to do, with people you hate, uncertain where you end and others begin. Starve the dog? You can't be trusted. You will break pacts better kept. You will not love well.

What do we do in compromised times, with the wolf and the dog? 

The dog says, "Head down. Stay safe. What matters is staying afloat and the safety of the people around you." 

The wolf says, "BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND."

There's a reason myths feature so many hunters drawing wolf-women into their hearths, where the dog sleeps comfortably. Chaos enters an established community: Rules get broken, people get hurt, blood spills, kids run away with the wrong friends or partners.

The introduction of chaos into the status quo is the best way of forcing norms into interrogation. Everything readjusts around what happens next, and a new cosmos is born. This has echoes in many natural systems: For people to thrive, for communities to carry on, stability must occasionally be challenged and its terms renegotiated or simply razed to the forest floor.

Life thrives in detritus, too. What comes next is sometimes more beautiful.

Which brings me back to the question: In compromised times, what, now, do we do about our wolf and our dog? 

One task after the next

 Fairy tales and myths are often frank about what we can expect from life. The story I've been telling my son at night—because I can add a lot of "No, no, no's!", which he likes, and chants to, because "no" is his favourite thing right now—is Rumpelstiltskin.

A girl is in a bind. She has a silly dad who tells a lie: That she can spin straw into gold. Loose-lipped parents, beware! The king hears about it and locks her in a tower, charged with performing the task overnight under pain of death.

It's impossible. But help arrives: Rumpelstiltskin, who offers to do it in exchange for a ring she's wearing. She makes the trade, the task is done ... but her reward is another night in a bigger room, with a bigger pile of straw to spin, and it goes on like that, so she keeps making these deals until she has nothing of value to mortgage but the future: A child, which she might have if she completes all the tasks and becomes queen.

She takes the deal, mortgages that future. Years later, when these events take on the filmy countenance of a dream, that mean elf comes calling, demanding the baby in her arms.

The story ends well. The girl follows her intuition—negotiates with him, 3 days to learn his name—and gets lucky: She happens to see him in the woods, preemptively celebrating his victory and singing his own name to himself. The harm abates, the elf defeated. She keeps her child and gets a kingdom.

The story is potent because of the precariousness of that outcome. In life, we muddle through impossible tasks, only to be rewarded by harder, worse tasks. We scrape through again, negotiate, mortgage things we don't have because what are the odds, what does it matter right now?

Sometimes those deals bear out and sometimes they don't. It helps to know who and what you're negotiating with, and you can't always know that. Sometimes you just get lucky.

There's so much on LinkedIn about how we are the engines of our own success. That's never really the case; "success" is a moving target composed of constellations of events, actors and luck we can't imagine ... and sometimes what we perceive to be someone's success isn't success at all. What we're looking at is an apparently good outcome, for now, mortgaged against the future.

It helps to remember that so we don't get into our heads about who's winning and who's falling behind. We don't know if the kingdom will fall into our hands, or whether somebody else is holding the kingdom or an IOU.

The best we can know is, once this impossible task is done, we can expect a tougher next task. It will probably require help—sometimes compromising, sometimes freely given (as in Cupid and Psyche, who enjoys relentlessly generous help for impossible tasks). That's the game we're in and it's the same for everyone, regardless of what their story looks like.

So do your thing as best you can. Don't fall under the illusion you don't need help. Mind what's asked in exchange, and remember all futures hang on a coin toss.

The shadow that stalks us

 There's a little-known fairy tale called The Shadow.

A man moves briefly from the north to the south, where it's too hot to go out. At home, he becomes obsessed with the balcony across the way. Its flowers are beautiful. The music emanating from the rooms is strange, sort of annoying. But he never sees an occupant and doesn't interrogate his curiosity ... until he notices, sometimes, his shadow casts itself there, penetrating places he can't.

One day he realises his shadow isn't with him anymore. It bothers him but eventually a paler shadow appears and he doesn't think of it anymore. He returns north, writes, buries himself in learning.

It's with great surprise that he finds, one day, his old shadow at the door, gorgeously dressed. It apologizes for ghosting him! The inhabitant of the mysterious vis-à-vis apartment, he divulges, was Poesy. Ah, she often hides in the city. She taught him so much, gave him a sense of flesh! So he became real, and got rich revealing things people feared seeing themselves.

The shadow offers to buy his freedom from the man, who refuses. Some years later he's persuaded to accompany his wealthy ex-shadow on a global tour, all expenses paid. The price: To pretend to be the shadow, reversing the roles.

He does this. It's just a game. Sometimes we do this. It's the start of small negotiations that diminish him. Eventually, the shadow seduces a princess who chooses to marry him, impressed by the wisdom his own shadow (formerly the man) shared, when he related stories of childhood the shadow couldn't remember. How great a man to have such a shadow, she thinks.

The man accuses the shadow of going too far. He says he'll tell the princess the truth: You're the shadow, I'm the man! The shadow laughs. "No one will believe you." That's true: Shadow tells princess his shadow's gone mad, putting on man-airs. Man's thrown into the dungeon.

The night Shadow and Princess marry, they appear on the balcony for all to see. Fireworks explode. Happiness is contagious. But the man knows none of it. His life has been taken - first in pieces, then altogether.

This is our quandary with AI: It's a small wheedling shadow, lobbying for more responsibility, surrendered carelessly or for want of time. The responsibilities grow, the power deferential shifts: Shadow becomes master. What we once mastered is no longer ours. Once muscular thoughts get harder to conjure.

But this is more largely about not becoming enslaved to our lesser talents. It's a perpetual conflict: Follow the wild wish, or follow the fear? The fear is always more practical.

What, in the end, grows fat on our austerity, our fear of even interrogating Poesy hidden behind the pretty balcony? Some wild daemon we took for granted as our own escapes us. It dances in the open world while we sit in the dungeon, still waiting for someone to realise the reality of things. Right the wrong for us.

I don't want to wait to be saved when I could still save myself, easily, here.

On knitting

10 years ago I got into knitting. To encourage me, my husband's family all got me kits for Christmas. My first project was a scarf.

It was my first time, so I made tons of mistakes. The thing emerging on my sticks looked tumor-ridden and forlorn.

Starting over made me cry. But there was too much I hadn't known when I started. When I cast on the second time, I drew from experience. I created a tension swatch, then knit the scarf in earnest. A day later it was done.

I still have that scarf. It looks exactly as it should, and has followed me across space/time: I divorced, moved, had a child, got a masters, shed uncountable versions of Angela.

In the interim I made blankets—big heavy ones, tiny ones for babies—and gloves, bonnets, blouses.

Knitting changed my brain, like any skill that enters muscle memory. When Mathieu and I started Hurrah, it helped secure our first client: A Swedish esports firm that liked us, but hesitated to trust us with a sizable media budget.

Tension swatch.

“We can run a weekend-long campaign for 500€!” I declared. “They can decide based on those results. If it’s shit, it’s not much to lose.” The client agreed. They stayed with us until the end.

Hurrah rose, then fell. Covid shut us in and spat us out in a changed world.

Twitter is dead and my follower base, too; a giant era of my life washed away. A two-year-old clutches my leg. I live half-time in Friuli Italy, a place I didn't previously know existed. AI hypemen gnaw at the charred remains of my career.

I stuck my head under the couch and slid out the knitting box. My son's in his bandana era and I want to make him one for winter instead of spending, like, 85€ retail. So I found a free pattern and studied my assets.

It’s hard sliding into a skillset that belongs to a previous version of you. I feel haunted by dark questions: what can I still do, what is dead now? Knitting is like riding a bike, but not. It takes trial and error to remember how to cast on.

I spent days getting not even halfway through this project. Yesterday I spent hours undoing knots in a yarn ball. I had no time for this—then it obsessed me. I wasn’t just working the yarn; I was working my life, every synapses that got lost instead of snapping neatly to its next destination.

Today while assessing the work I realized it was too fucked up. So I undid it, never mind the sunk costs. (My son hates the knitting. He perceives it as his enemy.)

I’m older, I know about starting over. I did the new cast-on fast.

This is not about cultivating hobbies to be more creative for work. It's about how indulging myself, without strings, nourishes me in ways I can’t count.

I don’t need to make money knitting. I do it while listening to Kara Swisher and Trevor Noah talk shit. I remember skills and learn new ones. Ideas sit beside me while I squint into the yarn. And it's helping alchemise a grief into something beautiful for my son. This is work that merits doing. It is one good use of my life.