The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Reflection
There is a lie people tell about growth.
That it happens once.
A breakthrough.
A healing season.
A clean before-and-after moment where the old self falls away and the new self arrives polished, wiser, complete.
Real life rarely moves like that.
It comes in layers.
One version of you learns how to survive.
Another learns how to protect itself.
Another becomes hard where softness once lived.
Another finally gets tired of carrying what the others built.
That’s the world Kunitz walks through in The Layers.
Not a neat story of transformation—but a lifetime of selves stacked inside one body.
Some buried.
Some unfinished.
Some still speaking.
That’s why the quote matters.
“I am not done with my changes.”
It isn’t frustration.
It’s wisdom.
Because mature people understand that becoming does not end at a certain age, after a certain heartbreak, after a certain success, after a certain failure.
You do not graduate from growth.
You keep shedding what no longer fits.
Keep grieving identities that once protected you.
Keep meeting versions of yourself you didn’t know were waiting.
Some changes feel chosen.
Others arrive like weather.
Loss changes you.
Love changes you.
Humiliation changes you.
Work changes you.
Truth changes you once you stop running from it.
And perhaps the hardest change of all is this:
Learning to stop worshiping older versions of yourself.
The stronger you.
The younger you.
The one who had more time.
The one before the damage.
The one before the mistakes.
That person had their season.
So do you.
Now.
Even unfinished.
Even uncertain.
Even mid-reconstruction.
Because the self is not a monument.
It is a landscape.
And landscapes are shaped by erosion, fire, flood, roots, seasons, and return.
Reflection Prompts
- Which older version of yourself are you still trying to live as?
- What current change feels uncomfortable only because it is unfinished?
- Are you resisting growth—or grieving what growth requires you to leave behind?
There’s a truth underneath Kunitz’s words:
You are not failing because you are still changing.
You are alive enough
for the work to continue.
Memoirs of Madness 