East Street Arts x Babeworld
“Unlearning Michelle,” commissioned by East Street Arts for Babeworld’s publication, “Imma burst your bubble two times if you don’t mind”
A friend once called me a submarine. I can immerse myself into the depths of the sea and never get wet.
You see, through little round windows I can look out, but I’m always an alien in the water.
I moved to a small beachside town in Southern California when I was nine, to yet another house, another school, and another metamorphosis. This time, I changed my name to Michelle.
I tried on Michelle, because I was tired of the REE-koh’s and REI-koh’s and RIK-koh’s and the sweaty-palmed anxiety when the surname roll call hit the W’s. I shaped myself into the armour of my alias.
At least I could cloak myself in the protection of Whitfield when my mother and I moved from Japan to the home of my adopted father in an affluent Virginian suburb. The Whitfields sang in the choir, attended fundraising galas, and vacationed in exotic lands.
I was loved and I was safe.
Out in California I was nobody. The cushy salary and palatial new build out West was suddenly taken away, and I wore holes into my socks while my parents juggled two toddlers, financial instability, and bouts of suicidal depression.
The real Michelle’s of the schoolyard aren’t submarines; they have never known life out of water. They are weightless, blonde and freckled, floating through a life of oblivious self-assurance.
Michelle clung to me beyond schoolyard years. Just call me Rieko, I’d say, but RI-eh-koh tastes foreign on the tongues of my peers. Michelle I stayed until the day I left.
Rieko was gifted by my mother and my father, the dead one, from a near royal samurai bloodline. In California I paid no mind to archaic backstories of an immigrant with holes in her socks. I wanted to make myself worthy of love and safety on my own terms.
Sometimes I still wear the Whitfield as protection.
There was a diamond and ruby bracelet on my grandmother’s wrist that was handed to me as she drew her last breath. When I’m unsure about myself, I wrap my wrist in diamonds and rubies and feel held, like a queen, until I tuck the bracelet back into my drawer.
I look back now and wonder why I ever needed Michelle in the first place. I always felt different from the other kids, not just in the shape of my eyes but the terrifying depths of my own perception. I didn’t want to be seen at all if I could not be understood. To this day, unlearning Michelle is a constant practice.
I think when you’re a submarine, you feel out of body, like nothing can ever touch you.
The reality is, I am not a submarine, and names are just the stories we wear.
Here, people are constantly sizing each other up.
Recently I met a posh gentleman in a posh cafe, and as we introduced ourselves he started Googling the origins of my last name on his phone. He looked me up and down and said, Whitfield, Whitfield… you must have a nice big pool in your house in California (I don’t).
Somehow, like Michelle, I am anonymous. In London I can be invisible.
The power of anonymity is that I can always reinvent myself. I can be whoever I need to be, because that’s how I learned to survive.
Often it is our strength in times of survival that sheds light on our own quiet magic.
I’ve been drifting around for decades now. I changed my name and changed it back. I spent my entire adult life moving continents from one unfamiliar city to the next. I got married, I got divorced. I joke that I should wear long gloves and smoke from a cigarette holder, wise and mysterious beyond my years, but really I am just exhausted.
Sure, I can be invisible, but I no longer choose to be.
When nothing is ever quite yours, you don’t hold onto anything too tightly. I don’t have any real ties to my names, to my bloodline, to my diamonds and rubies, to the holes in my socks. When you can step back from your story, you can write whatever character you want.
So I do. I write the parts of myself that are healed and need healing. I write the multiplicity of who I am, the bits that are messy and incomprehensible. I write the hope and the anger, the love and love lost.
And when I perform this character for you, look at me when you say my name. Look at my power and rage and defiant joy that challenges your sense of order. Look at what is beautiful and hideous and raw, and then and only then, let me transmute your fear.
Look around us. Our lungs are burning and our oceans are rising as we drown with the systems that fail us. We are at the precipice of a devastating transformation. We all need a hard rewrite.
Maybe this time we can reinvent ourselves – not out of shame, or even out of survival, but out of faith in our own quiet magic of metamorphosis.
I am not a submarine. I choose to swim with the shifting tides.