The Origin Story of My Ecdysis

Twenty five years later, my ecdysis becomes shells and skins to share.

A story in three scenes.

I. Cincinnati, Ohio 2001 / Aberdeen, Washington 2002
Nearly 25 years ago, I was sitting with a teacher in a retreat center in southern Ohio. After a lengthy sharing of my emotional latitude and longitude coordinates—allowing him location access to some of my deepest fears about love, god, and the intimidating future, he took a moment before responding. His eyes were thinking. Contours of empathy from his face morphed into words, "As you talk, I feel like you’re a bit of a snake, moving along…shedding an outer layer.” I looked down, letting my mind sketch the metaphor so I could see it. He continued, “There’s new skin trying to come out underneath as you grow and shed.”

A snake, shedding. New colors.

One evening, a year later, and living over two thousand miles away with six housemates in the Pacific Northwest, sitting on the floor of the stingy living room with an old record player and floral couches that smelled like dust and overuse, I loudly challenged one of my roommates during a playful but heated game of Scrabble, “You can’t use ‘navajo', Sporto. It’s a proper noun.”

A dry laugh darted back, “Screw you, Factora. It’s a regular noun.” Mike and I went back and forth like we always did, but I wanted to show I was right, and since it was 2002, I grabbed a dictionary to finish him off. Charged with cockiness instead of focus, I picked up the heavy book with one hand and dropped it. Gravity pulled both the book and my attention down as the dictionary fell on its spine and split perfectly before me with a dull thud. My eyes scanned the pages as I reached for it, and something caught me at the top of the left page.

Even the aesthetic of it, I liked. The double rounds of the e and c, following by the sky reaching d and baritone dip of the y. Finishing with slithering sounds of sis. My roommates’ trash talk faded as my mind drank this new word.

ec·​dy·​sis, noun. : a biology term. the act of molting. shedding of an outer skin, integument, or cuticular layer.

This is it. This is the word. There’s a word for this process?

Mike and the others were losing interest in Scrabble, and the game was moving into wrestling. I dog-eared my new word, and closed the dictionary not wanting to show it or explain why. I tossed the dictionary onto the couch, and jumped onto a heap of limbs, laughing and mystified.

II. The Internet, USA 2004 - 2016

In 2004, I tiptoed into the feminist blogosphere. After months of lurking, I started writing under the pseudonym, Sudy, about politics, faith, and feminism. This was just before the advent of social media that brought Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. There wasn’t an organized search engine or system to find other writers or communities as seamlessly as you can find them now. It was all still so new and I wanted to write about what my life felt like to me, as a young woman of color in the United States. I called my blog, A Woman’s Ecdysis. There, in a political time that had not yet dared to believe that Obama could win or that the housing market would ever recover, or whether writers could make money online—I wrote about race, feminism, and power. Blogging helped connect me with others who also wrote under a pseudonym. There’s a lot to say about that time period, but many of us felt safer that way.

The blogosphere shifted after social media took fire. The ability to find like-minded people and communities moved to lightning speed with search engines, tags, and Twitter lists. The impact of Black Twitter, especially, reshaped public discourse on social justice issues with its unmatched dissection pairing tools of wit and racial analysis. Eventually, though, digital trends began to favor image-based content, and Instagram was purchased by Zuckerberg for a billion bucks. Literally. And just as we got used to 140 characters only, we were urged to master camera phones as videos and memes became the dominant currency through TikTok’s rise to power. What really marked the new era of (dis)connection and storytelling is when Elon Musk bought the prize and let the rain fall on the chalk, effectively killing Twitter with a depressingly foreshadowing name like X. Predictable as it was, the new landlord forced a mass exodus of writers which created a new era of wandering and wondering. We are in that era, still, and it may not not ever be quite like how it was again.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing because, as history has shown us, everything — like empires—comes to an end. Everything changes.

III. A Newsletter + Book #2, 2024

During 2004-2016, I did a bunch of literary work to help strengthen and shape my voice. I published my first book, an anthology of missives, prose, and poetry for survivors of sexual violence. I attended writing workshops and residencies, and got my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University. I served as a publisher at Guernica, the editorial director at Bitch Media, and worked as an editor for Catapult, Rumpus, make/shift, and Literary Mama magazines. I published in a bunch of places, helped built communities, learned how to organize, birth two kids, nourish a loving partnership, and started my second book.

I’m not sure how to define this next era.

Whatever the era is, I’m here now. I publish under my real name. I’ll be sharing the things that could never fit on social media or would get me shadow banned for having the audacity to name what causes fracture and interference between us: supremacy of ideologies and the infallible call of the conscience to rise up.

But, if I have to offer a name for this era, I would call it the season of the Mombaki, which is teaching me how to embrace being a lifelong learner beyond institutions—to excavate and embrace what is difficult, what my tongue cannot even pronounce yet. I feel more liberatory promise in the awkward effort to sound out what I do not know than to repeat what I do. I feel enlivened by the blade of discomfort that cuts across modalities, species, and languages. From healing circles to abolition work, from culture theory to theological debate—we keep talking about a new world, but I keep wondering how are we going create something new if we keep using the same frameworks and tools?

St. Augustine famously said, our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. I wouldn’t know what life would look like without restlessness, which I experience as the fuel for seeking. I nourish a big, relational life with my partner and our two children with hundreds of extended family members across the globe. Ohio has seen me abscond its state borders five times, only to move back again. It’s home for now, again.

Don’t you feel restless, too?

Friends, this isn’t a brand as I’m not a brand, and what I create may or may not follow a pattern. I will also be using this space to update you about my second book, a memoir about political consciousness and spirituality. It has lived so many lives already. What I can foretell about this “newsletter” is that it will be a space to offer the shells and skins of my ecdysis—what moves me, haunts me, and what has set me free.

I can’t wait to share it all with you,

Lisa