Chameleon-A common name for certain lizards that are well known for their ability to change colors. The chameleon changes color when it is frightened and in response to light, temperature, and other environmental changes. The color change is caused by hormones that affect special pigment-bearing cells in the skin.
To be a woman is to be a chameleon. She intrinsically carries so many personas that in her own quiet way she is on an eternal journey to find out who she is on her own. Not that she is someone’s daughter, not that she is someone’s wife or mother, these personas she is all too familiar with. There is inside all women something very similar to what T.S.Elliot said there was inside every cat. He claimed that cats had three names, an everyday name that the family used all the time, a name that was of high standing, formal and of significance that the family would view as the full name. Somewhere deep within the depths of a cat’s soul though, he believed, there was one more, a name that the cat never spoke to anyone. A name so intensely personal that it and its use were that cat’s alone. This is a woman’s soul. Something so real and significant but incredibly camouflaged that it remains inside her for eternity. Many people in her life will see glimpses of it but none, save herself, will ever know it in its entirety. That requires an honesty that we have denied ourselves for time unimaginable.
In my last year of high school I was asked to write an essay. This would prove to be the most difficult essay I would ever write. It was one that I needed a good mark on; I was trying to get into university after all. The part that made it difficult was not the grammar or the vocabulary or even the composition, as would be expected of an 18-year-old student, but the content I would struggle with. I was asked to write an essay on myself, and then hand it in for grading. I was to tell my story and have my life receive a mark. Does one write, then, of the daily inanities, and use the cat’s first name? Or the good one has done, and intends to do, using the second name? Or does one give the honest although sometimes shady truths one’s life really consists of? Did I dare to speak the sacred third name?
I thought long and hard as to what I needed this paper to say. I think I started a million first drafts all variations of the first two names. To make a long story short, in the end I had a paper to hand in on the day my dreaded course outline demanded it. My paper was one that lasted a duration of 34 pages. Thirty four painful, demanding, excruciating, ecstatic, but authentic pages. I dared to speak that name, the private part of me that lay in the corners of my spirit, which had long ago been swept under the rug. My heart absolutely ached as I handed in this diatribe of who I authentically was. Upon receipt of the paper after marking I was left speechless, too afraid to see what grade my reality was worth.
Ninety four. I had received a 94. Not because of the goodness in my life or heart but because I had actually done what was requested of me. I had allowed myself to be strong enough to be true. It had been truth that had won that battle for me. The truth scribbled on thirty four pages with a cheap green ‘Bic’ pen had been my success. I had and would continue to have no frame of reference to put that in for many years.
I have spent much of my life frightened. Frightened of what the truth would or would not bring into my life. Even as I sit here writing this I realize I am scared to death to again speak that name, that sacred personal name. To speak your soul is a very scary proposition. As I had said to be a woman is to be a chameleon. But the one conquering question remains, what does a chameleon look like when it is beside another chameleon?
It has taken me a lifetime to come up with an answer to what has felt like the biggest question in the universe; what would a chameleon look like when it is beside another of its own kind? It is simple of course; it would look like every other lizard out there, plain and yet a mastery of the universe’s creation. What a ridiculously simple answer which has eluded me for years. Why then do we as people masquerade ourselves trying with all our might to be more, to be bigger than just a creation of the Divine power in the universe? For the same reasons as the chameleon; fear, defense and in response to light, temperature, and other ‘environmental changes’.
We plod along in this world through the ‘environmental factors’ we continue to orchestrate for ourselves. Most are little more than asinine tests of intestinal, emotional and spiritual fortitude which no one can really get beyond. We then turn around and notice our inability to get ahead. Set ourselves up for failure and then wonder why we got just what we did. What needs to change? Our starting point, in my mind. We need to start by setting ourselves up for success. We need to want, as good ol’ Oprah keeps taking about, our best life. What then is the chameleon’s ‘best life’? What does a small lizard which can reinvent itself require to feel that it is adequate?
I imagine that recognition is a beginning step in changing the world. In changing my world. Recognition is a choice. We choose to recognize the impact of our life and the implications of our actions. We choose to recognize the role we play in our own created reality and demise. The choices I have made bear down on me like a woman in labour. There is pain, that is undeniable. There is life changing pain. There is old and new heartache, there are old and new tears, there is and old and new sadness but there is a constant little light that is small, indefinite, unbelievable and yet so undeniable. I question myself daily as to what that light is. It might be the proverbial ‘end of the tunnel’. It might be the train on its way to run over my soul stuck in between the tracks. It might be the Divine; just maybe... it is the Divine telling me to be what I was created to be. Me.
