Getting Back to "Original Mel"...

... or Moving Towards "Essential Mel"

Ten years ago I decided that I needed to get back to “Original Mel.”

I had a definition in my head about what that meant - “Original Mel” (OM).

• It doesn’t escape me that OM is a sacred sound in Hinduism.

OM is the person that I was before culture, family, religion, patriarchy, capitalism (and more) indoctrinated me into their expectations about what I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to behave, and what I should desire.

In my narrative, when I thought about a previous time in my life where I felt like I was close to OM - where that indoctrination hadn’t quite landed - I imagined that I was probably 5 years-old.

That was my story.

That is the story that I tell in my one-woman show Sexology: The Musical! (Check it out. It’s 60 minutes of some fun and education around alternative relationship structures and sex positivity. It’s me then, it’s not me now.)

And then last week I got a reality check from one of my partners.

Lachlan named a truth.

The fact is, I don’t actually remember myself at age 5. I was sexually abused between the ages of 5-7. I know the truth of that. My body has the experience and trauma of that. I actually don’t know what OM was before that time.

I just have a thought that when I landed on this planet, there was a reason, a gift, a something that brought me here that isn’t about compliance or behaving or being yet another cog in the wheel.

Lachlan’s question was:

“When you say ‘Original Mel’, do you mean that you want to have some idealized version of your childhood that doesn’t actually exist?”

That took my breath away.

He spoke a truth that resonated in my body.

I wish I had been held as precious in my early childhood. I wish my family of origin had been curious about who I was instead of having the agenda to mold me into what they wanted me to be.

My conversation with Lachlan moved to:

“Why go back, why not move forward?”

That is why I call this Substack “Essential Mel”

I am moving towards “Essential Mel” (EM)

• It doesn’t escape me that EM is the sound of the first letter of my name.