Identity Is Malleable. Become That Version You Love: What You Create

DISCLAIMER: I do not mind being quoted by others; in fact, I find it flattering. However, if you choose to use any of my lines from here, please have the decency to credit me. Releasing work on the web is an entirely different scenario than it is being published in books or magazines. In other words, I've had plenty of my lines swiped in the past—probably more so than ahem! the 'other' types of lines from my degenerate past. The difference was: I had physical proof to prove the plagarism. I feel information of this ilk should go without saying, but since I'm presenting the following work as an 'Exclusive Blog' (fulfilling the claim on my Buzznet banner posted elsewhere, as well as my esteemed title as a 'Star Blogger' on the site), I particularly want to reiterate that QUOTATION MARKS and CREDITED NAMES make a world of difference. Ya naw mean? Now...all of that palaver out of the way, I had an intense conversation with a friend last night who's a nurse in a unit with 'disturbed youth.' I myself was branded 'disturbed' in the backwater town in which I was raised, and felt the need to put some words out there for those of you who may be in a serious transitional period in your life—in other words, coming into being. I hope you get something from it.

Identity is malleable. Once you’ve set your sights on shredding that person you were, once you’re steadfast and willing to renounce any nay-sayers along the way, there’s no turning back. Claw your way through the psychic debris accumulated throughout the years, maul apart the mental and physical memories of what parents and students and teachers pigeon-holed you to be. Rip deeper still, soft flesh-tone bits that’ll fester beneath your fingernails as you face even the most painful of memories, secrets and shame you thought you’d take with you to the grave: and then you will.

It’s as easy to slaughter the semblance into which you were born as it is to split continents. It’s as seamless a gesture as slipping off a silk dress. The secret is: through language, you can scrawl every detail out of whom you were in the roughhewn quiet of those tender a.m.s, capture every minute detail and lay it down in syllables, undressed. Skinned, wounded, unclothed on the parchment you’ve chosen—you’ve been purged. You’ll find distance, a fissure in that family, that city, that state, that place of which you had no say. But if you’re dead-set on casting it away, the cracks turn to fractures, the story you separated yourself from becomes exactly that: An anecdote.

By this point, the intoxication of senses should kick in: the colors surrounding this mass of energy that’s you becoming you are more lurid than anything you’ve experienced; the scents and sounds and touch of whatever setting you’ve chosen, newfound. Establish yourself: claim a name. Establish yourself through consonants and vowels into the being you’ll make true. Establish yourself, and from that moment on, demand this is who you are—because so long as you pour your heart into the insistence, that’s who you’ll soon be.

Any trepidation on this journey tossed among the remains of the person who used to be, the universe will open wide with boundless opportunities. Each of us, if we commit to this path with more fervor than we tried to “cover up” those darkest moments, will become out new version: the version of ourselves that we’ve carved out, we’ve claimed. It won’t be long until the calls of our former birth-names don’t even register. They’re but whispers drifting through the stratosphere.

And those faces, sneering and hateful, eyes tinted verdant with a jealousy unsophisticated as colored contacts? Characters we—in all honesty—no longer recognize. The past now passed as what came before “Catalyst,” what came before this construct I’ve trampled thousands of miles across the country to create new stories, a new history still in the future while my “softer, sweeter” portions remain stashed away in the brash and hard-headed person that I’ve become, someone “much too much” for some, but just enough for me: a small-town Southern boy who’s hell-bent on success through this living, breathing incarnation that I am:

The version I’ve chosen to love.

The question now is:

What version do you want to be?


--Clint Catalyst

Volume 26, No. 5 (The July 17, 2007 Issue)
Tori Spelling may be on the cover, but I’m pretty stoked to be inside letting you have it, lovers!

The magazine is free and distributed throughout Southern California, but for those of you who live elsewhere and don’t want to have to shuck out 5 bucks and order one through the mag’s website – here it is:




By clintcatalyst1


By clintcatalyst1

MASSIVE THANKS TO CAROLINE RYDER FOR WRITING SUCH AN EXCELLENT PIECE, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF (though he’s leaving soon…awww) ALEX CHO FOR DEEMING ME ‘PRINT-WORTHY, AMANDA BROOKS FOR “WORKING HER MAGIC” AND MAKING ME LOOK BETTER THAN I FELT THAT SWELTERING DAY, AND—AS ALWAYS—JARED GOLD OF BLACKCHANDELIER.COM, WHOSE SUPER-CUSTOMIZED VICTORIAN BLING MADE THOSE BRASS KNUCKLES REALLY HECKA SOMETHING!

Very Best Regards,
SuperSadoMasochistiClintySoAtrocious!