Freaky Friday and Finding the Gift
The original Freaky Friday movie with Jodie Foster and Barbara Williams came out in 1976 when I was just 7 years old. I saw this film at the cinema with my mum. The premise is a mother and daughter find their personalities switched and have to live each other’s lives on one strange Friday. Maybe you have fond memories of this film too?
It was hilarious and captivating and in the months that followed it wormed its way into my imagination such that I had daydreams about what it would be like to inhabit the bodies of various people in my life. I recall one particular childhood friend, who I perceived to be very pretty and popular, for whom I had an elaborate scenario planned out for what I would do with my own freaky friday moment and how my life would be so much better if I got to do the swap with her.
The idea that who we are, as a personality, is a separate entity that is riding along inside the body, as if it is our vehicle, and that this personality could leave the body and take up residence somewhere else, is an example of the unique skill which homo sapiens possess, put simply that of imagination. It also encapsulates the belief that something non tangible and ethereal, call it a soul if you will, is what we really are at our core. Something that will continue on in some shape or form forever after and can float off and leave the body.
I now know what would happen if there was a magic button, and someone pushed that button and I could swap bodies with any one of my choosing — absolutely nothing.
All the conditioning, memories, habits, preferences and behaviours that we lump together and call a personality that makes me who I am, well they all belong to the body. They can’t come along for the ride when this swap takes place!
The animating force that lights up my own body, and lights up all the other bodies around me, is one and the same force. That which is looking out of my eyes is the same presence that looks out of the eyes of all creatures.
This brings to mind a slide that Michael Dowd included in many of his talks as below:
The consciousness that animates this body, at its most fundamental core, has no individuality and no home. It is one and the same consciousness that all organisms share.
But we are so very, very conditioned by our identities, our categories and our labels, our past, our traumas — our stories. We celebrate our humanness in this way and acknowledge our ability to tell stories as perhaps THE most human trait of all.
One particular category or label I have given myself lately is doomer. So in keeping with this label, the latest book I have just finished reading is called ‘Racing to Extinction: Why Humans Will Soon Vanish’, by Lyle Lewis.
There is a chapter in this book on Myth and he makes a compelling case that humans’ ability to imagine things that don’t exist and to tell stories, has been both our greatest boon as a species and ultimately our downfall, (along with human’s use of fire and the evolutionary development of the shoulder girdle enabling us to throw). He also posits that there is no evidence, thus far, that other species create myths, they only live in objective reality. They do not make up stories.
The last essay I published here on Medium was a human story and I titled it ‘Neoliberalism and Transgenderism — What’s the Connection’, but this story was deemed to be in violation of the rules of Medium and hence it is no longer available. This story looked at all the vast influences and conditioning taking place in western culture currently that is leading to a tsunami of teenage girls wanting to transition to boys. In some ways — wanting to leave their body, to do a body swap to become a boy.
This is what my daughter wishes to do and this has brought about an intense amount of grief and pain for me, one that has been just as challenging to deal with as collapse, and in a similar way as it is something that has not yet fully unfolded. It has been a pain for an anticipated, but very imminent event. It has the same feeling some days; ‘what’s the big deal, life is still fine, what am I worrying about?’ But then there is the cognitive dissonance of living as I have always done while knowing the life support systems all around the planet are failing faster with each new day that dawns.
So this is really what got me remembering back to Freaky Friday. If what we are, at our very core, is just this aware presence looking out the eyes, that all creatures share, then the attachment to the body is a misguided identification. So this means I don’t need to suffer, that I am not going to lose her or lose anyone.
This is where the suffering has been for me, the belief that I will lose my daughter, lose her beautiful face and her soft skin, her voice, that very intimate quality with such familiarity and tenderness. But the animating presence that looks out her eyes will be the same presence that beamed up at me when she was a little baby, regardless of what appearance her outer form will take, regardless of how her personality may change and what side effects the medical changes may bring.
In the end, my collapse acceptance skills have come to the fore to adjust to this new way of things, and with a bit of help from my mum as well. Mum said to me ‘if you can accept collapse, you can accept this too, and you just have to be there for her no matter what happens when she goes through it all.’ This was a wonderful gift of love from my mum, and she showed me that my unconditional love and support for my child is the most important thing of all.
I can’t hold on to my story of pain and outrage any more, I can’t keep going around the internet leaving outraged, TERFy comments on blogs and substacks, as it conflicts deeply with my knowing or seeing that life is unfolding in the only way it ever could and that I am not making life happen, I am not the doer, I am not directing existence.
There have been times where I thought both of these attributes of my personality, being a doomer and being someone who believes in no free will — are both just ways of coping with being really depressed! But I realise, NO — this is where my deepest peace lies, and in peace there is freedom, that beautiful, beautiful quality that says ‘I don’t mind what happens’. And genuinely means it.
So collapse acceptance is acceptance of everything — of all of it. Surrender, so I can know my peace, the peace that passeth all understanding, and the gratitude simply to be alive — come what may.
Which is what I believe Michael Dowd was referring to when he preached to us about finding the gift on the other side, as in shown in another one of his slides below.
It is the freedom to know that I don’t have to answer that pesky question from the Mary Oliver poem: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? As life is living me and that understanding is like winning the lottery when it really sinks in. Sure I will forget it again, as I have done so many times before and be filled with whining and complaints, but with each episode of forgetting, the remembering returns stronger and more sure.
The poem from Mary Oliver below I still love and even though the last two lines of this poem are the most famous, the first lines, where she questions this animating force that looks out the eyes of the grasshopper, and questions who made the world, is the sweetest mystery of unknowing that this poem offers to us all.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver
PS. In my next essay I want to delve more into the treasures offered in this new book by Lyle Lewis, Racing to Extinction. Who else in the doomsphere is reading this one? Would love to discuss…
