“Measure twice, cut once.” If you’ve done any kind of craft, someone at some point has probably said this to you. It refers, broadly, to the necessity of doing work in advance – often, depending on the type of craft, actual measuring out of materials – before engaging with them in an irrevocable way.

For me personally, this has often meant actually measuring an actual body, whether mine or someone else’s. These measurements, though subject to change depending on the type of garment being made, may or may not vary with the body or where they’re taken on the body, but they nonetheless serve to guide the subsequent work. I vividly recall taking measurements before the fabric for a garment is even purchased, to determine what size pattern I’ll need, and what adjustments I may need to make to it, depending on the type of garment I’m planning.

How and why these measurements may or may not change over time, though, is another matter entirely. (Waist circumference may fluctuate, but back-waist length, as a general principle, does not.) When my mother and I were making a garment for a friend of mine, they were shaken and a little thrilled by my mother’s off-hand remark that they had a deep armscye: the distance from the top of their shoulder to the bottom of their armpit was on the long side, proportionally.

“So that’s why women’s shirts never fit me!” they said.

Here’s how to find your back-waist length, if you’re curious.

This is the beauty of making garments to measure: the garment is made for a particular body at a particular time. Allowances can be made for how that body might change – high-quality clothing often has additional fabric in the seams, so it can be let out if need be – but things like armscyes and back-waist lengths are, to an extent, set by that particular body, and often remain characteristics of that body. I say this as someone with a phenomenally short back-waist length, a fact about myself that I’ve known since I was about seven years old, and which I have used to assist in sartorial decision-making since. I’m now thirty-two.

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“What are bodies?” is a common refrain for me and many of my friends, because, leaving aside the biological and chemical characteristics of meat and bone, they’re fucking weird. Like many other things with biological and chemical characteristics, few generalizations stand up to scrutiny, but socially, we tidy them into broad categories: male or female; abled or disabled; gradations of skin tone. But those categories, of course, melt in the light of consideration. The body, too, is a shifting thing, depending as much on perception as on experience.

I say all this like someone who just learned they have flesh. While that’s not untrue, for a variety of rather tedious autobiographical reasons including an ontological about-face, it’s a bit beside the point. I also say all this to stress it: this tidying, while useful in specific contexts – doing demographics if you’re boring, building solidarity if you’re cool – offers fewer benefits and more than a few hazards on an individual level.

The theatrical release poster for Satoshi Kon’s *Paprika*, and as you read about the Big Other in your head, please imagine the dream-parade.

We’ve all, I’m sure, been enjoined to kill the cop in our heads, but it’s not just a cop in there. There’s a friendly little shopkeep, greeting you as “sir” or “ma’am”; there’s your mother, complaining about having gained weight in a way that suggests you should never do that; there’s some guy from your high school telling you that you’re being a wuss because you’re very reasonably upset about something. You may rationally not agree with them, but they’re still there, a little chorus that bands together into an almost overwhelming Big Other guiding how you move your meat-mech through the observable world, the horrible mirrors of the many thousands of bacteria in your digestive tract that are just trying to keep the mech operational (or are in open revolt).

In The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, Meghan O’Rourke touches on the concept of the human person as a kind of holobiont, a superorganism made up of many other, smaller organisms. I’m excited about this concept, in part because it moves us away from the pernicious myth of “self-ownership” or “self-governance,” which Cameron has touched on elsewhere, and its many – generally bad – philosophical implications. As a human person, it becomes less a matter of “having” a self and much more a matter of “being” a self, in the sense of an emergent property, capable of thinking about what that might mean in the context of your specific being in this specific moment.

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Obviously, being an emergent property of the sludge in your digestive tract and the various secretions in the brain and – arguably – gonads is not super useful to community-building, but we make do. Part of how we do that is governed by electricity in the brain, some of which allows us to exercise abilities called by various names but fundamentally boiling down to imagining what it might be like to be a different kind of self. Forgive me: I am a language guy, not a science guy, and I’m probably showing my entire ass here.

To move into territory I know a little better, one of the ways we do that is by looking at art. I use “looking at” here in the general sense of “perceiving through one sense organ or another”; I use “art” here as broadly as you’d like to take it. When someone makes art, they express something about how they experience the world, grounded in the facts of their particular being; when someone else looks at that art, ideally, they experience something like what the artist experienced, in one way or another. This can be very one-to-one – I like reading stories, factual or imaginary, about other nonbinary people, for example – or it can be more abstract – Ad Reinhardt’s famous comic strip, in which an abstract expressionist painting springs to life and asks a skeptical viewer, “What do you represent?” comes to mind – but ideally, something bridges the gap.

But if all it took to make the electricity do the thing – call it “empathy,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” “compersion,” or whatever else you’d like – was looking at art, we’d be a lot closer to finding a resolution to most social injustices than we are. Instead, we’re dialing up the volume of racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, and a host of other violences, and that’s not just because mean people aren’t reading better books. Hell, a lot of the worst people read very good books indeed, and are somehow still like that.

I don’t have an answer to solving social inequity, or at least not a particularly grand one; an injunction to do what you can where you are is about the best I’ve been able to come up with, accompanied by a few explanations of what I mean by “can” and “where” – but that brings us back to the brutal fact of existing in the first place.

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A few more epigrams to consider: “Gnothi seauton.” “Whatever happened, happened.” “And that would become the real you.” “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” “How ‘am’ I?”

How do words, deeds, and memory interact with the things “which are beyond our power”? Obviously, there’s plenty beyond our power: institutional responses to a global pandemic, for example, or the history of cascading decisions that led us to the present moment with respect to systemic racism, homophobia and transphobia, and climate change. But there are also things about any one person’s very being that are out of that person’s hands.

Let’s look at these epigrams, then. “Gnothi seauton,” a transliteration from the ancient Greek, roughly means “know thyself,” and was ostensibly emblazoned somewhere on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle held her seat. Seauton is, of course, the “thyself” part of it; gnothi is the aorist imperative of gignosco, meaning approximately “know.” But, grammar aside, it’s worth considering the fuller meaning of the verb: gignosco means “know,” sure, but with the connotation of perception, of study, of judgment – knowledge gained by observation and understanding. It’s not mere self-knowledge that’s advised here but self-awareness, observing and understanding what your deal is.

As LOST, television classic that it is, noted, “Whatever happened, happened.” In a show that had one eye trained on time travel and one on the multiverse, it’s an important guiding principle, as the characters learn over and over again in later seasons. It is, to lean on another of those epigrams, “beyond our power” in a very permanent way. Whatever happened will still have happened, no matter what, and with it one must sit.

Since I’m writing this piece, is it that much of a surprise that I’m leaning on Thomas Ligotti again? After reflecting on the process of becoming very ill and then recovering, he notes, in Conspiracy Against the Human Race, that one might feel one is “back to [their] old self.” But if instead that person spends all their subsequent time worrying about becoming ill again, “that would become the real you,” a person who worries constantly about once against being subject to their biology (or something else). So, sure, “whatever happened, happened,” but how one choses to understand that experience for themself – my focus here is on the individual, not the group, and ethics scale strange as physics – has an impact on how they are afterwards, and accepting that, as well as the fact that some things are, as Epictetus noted in the very first line of his Enchiridion, “beyond our power.” Epictetus goes on to enumerate the things that are within our power – opinions, deeds, and that sort of thing – but also numbers the body (soma) among things that are beyond our power.

So I don’t know: how are you?

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In talking over Cameron’s last piece with him, the word that kept springing to mind for me was “facticity,” which has some overlap with both factuality and with haecceity and quiddity. It was also used in more specific ways, I’m given to understand, by Heidegger as well as Sartre and de Beauvoir, but I haven’t read any of them, so I’ve shied away from using it much here.

Or, you know, making friends with them. Or being a girl. Detail of the cover of *Dealing With Dragons* from here.

But, as he noted, we often twin memory and identity, or view them as somehow hopelessly entangled. I’m not saying they’re not, though I do agree with his premise that they’re not always reliable. To use only my own example, whole swathes of my childhood were taken up completely by suspension of disbelief – but just because I remember fighting a dragon doesn’t mean I actually did the thing.

What I offer here is an additive to the mix: if we cannot trust memory per se, there are things about a person – about a self – that we can at least use to guide our work. I do not suggest the facts of the self as something to be used in a bioessentialist way: I’m trans, and that would be patently foolish; besides, what I’m talking about in this piece falls very squarely into the category of haecceity; further, it is not only the body that offers this information, because we’ve still got to parse it somehow. I could, for example, blame the eight o’clock hour for my mood dropping and my thoughts growing sluggish, but I could also recall that I ate probably seven hours prior and could do with some food right around then. This requires not only that I understand what my body is telling me and how, but also that I do something about it.

Admittedly, a moderate amount of what I’ve outlined in this piece builds on my general knowledge of dialectical behavioral therapy, especially the concept of radical acceptance. The idea, as the name suggests, involves noticing, naming, and accepting – not embracing, necessarily, but sitting in the presence of – feelings. But the practice extrapolates reasonably well.

Maybe all this is just the serenity prayer in long form, but in fairness to me, the serenity prayer is just bite-sized Stoicism in a Christian hat. Further, I’m looking specifically at understanding a self – your self, or arguably you’re self – through observation and awareness. And I’m torn here because while it would be easy to offer a take-away here, and my background in service writing says I ought to, I don’t think it’s especially necessary, and I don’t have any favorite personal-habit-tracking apps to shill here. So instead I’ll say that maybe sorting out a back-waist length from a waist measurement, as it were, might a good use of personal time, and in considering the construction of selfhood, alongside memory and identity, to take into account the raw fact of existence in the first place.

The Facts in the Case of You