Did anyone warn you about second puberty?

Notes from the spiritual seventh grade

Hello, readers! This one’s a little closer to the heart, so I recorded a voiceover to go with it. If you’re on mobile, you can click through to the Substack app to listen as you read. You’re welcome to share it—especially with anyone going through their own strange little metamorphosis.

— Rey ☀️

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Dear diary,

I regret to inform you that I am once again going through puberty.

Rotten luck, right? Personally, I’m still reeling from the first puberty.

Do you remember it? The braces, the zits, the voice changes, the existential panic—or was that just me?

Puberty is that awkward liminal space between 1) what you think you are and 2) what you’ve always been. It’s messy. Cacophonous. Not something any of us would voluntarily sign up for. And yet—it is only because we go through this awkward liminal mess that something else can blossom.

And something’s blossoming now, in me, in this unhinged second puberty. What is it? Let’s give it a little time to reveal itself.

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Look, I thought puberty was over 15 years ago. For some cursed reason, I’m 27 and knee-deep in yet another one.

The difference is that this puberty is not hormonal so much as it is spiritual.

Like a fifth grader doodling the cool s all through sex ed, I, too, have been ignoring the warning signs for far too long. I’m a meditator. One thing pretty much all meditative traditions agree on is this: Hey, just so you know—that self that you think you are? You’re not that. And I kept saying: Yeah, okay, boomer. I have a big brain. I think I can handle it.

But they kept saying: Well, okay, but you should be ready when you find it out for yourself. That thing at the center of you? That moves your body? That thinks your thoughts? That speaks your words? It’s not you.

And I kept responding: Uh, random? I’m gonna draw another cool s. A cool s for a cool guy.

Now? Now I really wish I’d paid attention in sex ed.

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When it hit me, it didn’t feel like a sudden flash of lightning from above. It felt like admitting, after months of lying, that you do have a crush on the popular kid. Completely undebatable, and wildly uncomfortable.

Some of you know I recently went on a retreat. For two weeks, my life consisted only of silence, community, and concentration. As the day of release drew nearer, I yearned for the moment I’d hop in my car, take a deep breath, and just be myself.

The day came. I hopped in my car. Freedom, at last! Okay Rey, I said. You made it! Go ahead. Be yourself.

To which my brain went:

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Now the big brain wants to say something:

I bring to mind some words from the Tao Te Ching, which says “Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub; it is the center hole that makes it useful.”

Thank you, big brain. That quote is beautiful, and true…but also not at all how it felt in the moment.

It didn’t feel useful to have a hole in the center of my self. It felt—without getting too graphic—like being John Hurt in the movie Alien.

There was a hole in the center of me.

And who knows what was coming through?

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Puberty feels like great loss but is ultimately a great gain.

Or is it the opposite—an apparent gain, but an ultimate loss?

For me, middle school was a frantic putting-on and tearing-off of masks. Sesame Street: out. Family Guy: in. Going to Target with my mom: out. Going to the mall with my friends: in. I was losing and gaining masks so quickly that I never thought to ask Who’s wearing these?

That moment in my car, at age 27, was the first time I ever asked. And the only honest answer I could come up with was I don’t know.

While I don’t know much about wheels, I do know this: It is the center hole that makes a pinhole camera useful.

It is that hole in the center of the camera that allows light to shine through, and images to appear. For each of us, too, it is the hole in the center that puts color in our world and light in our eyes.

Yes, masks are lost. But what is gained is a remembering: that each of us has always been the light, and not the mask.

Puberty is a process of exhausting all the things which you are not. Turns out that you’re not good at dodgeball, not crazy about French kissing, and not at all into Family Guy. But there comes a moment—maybe after absolutely crushing your clarinet solo, or being treated like an adult, by an adult—where you realize Oh. I don’t have to try to be what I am not.

I am who I am.

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It’s not just masks, but bodies, too, which come and go. And yet something underlies them all. What is it?

Before I am an adult, before I am a child, before even I am Rey, there it is: I AM.

Before being angry, being happy, being a somebody, or even being a nobody, there it is, and it is always already there: being.

Being—not being this or being that, but just being—is that light which shines through the center hole, and that light illuminates all beings equally.

I can feel it illuminating me, and if we come in contact, you will feel it illuminating you.

To be clear, the light is always illuminating you. But some of us forget. I still do.

When I’m around others, the light shines effortlessly. Speech comes out of my mouth. Actions and reactions flow through my body. And yet there is no speaker, and no actor. “Rey” is not deciding to act—there is only action, and yet that action feels more me than me. When I act, I’m doing all any of us are ever doing, but I know it: I’m just passing the action on.

When I’m alone, it gets more complicated. The personas swim around in my mind, as if in amniotic fluid, asking questions like Are you getting rid of me? Am I even real? And—I’ve got to say, this one’s pretty good—Can I speak to the manager?

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Last night, I hopped on a Zoom led by a teacher I greatly admire—a kind-hearted, but deeply cutting Welsh man who packed up and moved to a California Zen center for 25 (!) years. I’d been holding onto Can I speak to the manager? for weeks, and figured that if he couldn’t make sense of it, nobody could. I submitted my written question anonymously (to the group, but not to him), and waited.

He read the question out loud and chuckled at that line. As he did, I saw a flash of recognition across multiple faces in Zoom boxes. He repeated the question—Can I speak to the manager?—possibly watching my face to assess how much truth I was willing to handle.

And then he just said it. No, you can’t.

In that moment, I felt 27 years of existential angst, childhood Catholic longing, and mistaken identity leave my body all at once. Something deep inside me unclenched, and I burst into half-teary laughter.

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I am both regretful and elated to inform you that you don’t get to meet the manager.

And yet, the manager is right here.

Sunlight doesn’t meet the sun, and yet the sun is present in every ray of light. The manager cannot be seen, and yet the manager is the one seeing.

I leave this essay with more questions than answers. What speaks? Why? Who made us? What animates us? And yet I know that in whatever animates me to ask the question, the animator is present. Animating me, animating you, and animating all. Same animator. Same light.

The Catholic theologian Meister Eckhart wrote that:

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

The mask through which I look at my own work is different from the mask through which you read it. And yet, if we learn how to remove the masks, we recognize the same eyes peering out. The same light shining through.

That light is not mine to own, and neither is it yours. But somehow it’s more me than me. More you than you.

In case you were confused about the cool s, it’s something a lot of kids love to draw. For obvious reasons: because it’s really cool.

And yet, the completed s is a little bit rigid, isn’t it? Sometimes I want to rewind the steps. Erase some lines. Empty out its center.

Because maybe, just maybe, what’s left when we take everything away…

is even cooler.

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