I ONCE TOOK AN UNDERGRADUATE poetry workshop led by a quasi-druidic professor. He had wire spectacles and a wizard’s goatee and a dutifully genuine drive to help young people find and refine their perspectives as artists. He helped us understand the difference between the deeply consequential and the self-serious, and our class’s commitment to messy exploration felt reciprocal and rigorous and fun. One prompt involved writing toward the lived experiences of our ancestors. The professor emphasized memory and impressionistic family lore over parental fact-checking or concrete research. The point was about finding creative ways to engage with the inescapable distance between us and the people we come from, to tease out the nuances of those distances across time and culture and geography.

Both sides of my family have lived in West Virginia for generations, but the community response to my parents’ interracial marriage forced them to move to Columbus, Ohio, where my brother and I were born and raised. My parents would take us back to visit on road trips, crossing and recrossing the Ohio River to try and give my brother and I the chance to connect with our extended family on our own terms. The results were mixed. It took many years for me to realize that, when it came to reconciling the glimpses of history these visits afforded me with my own midwestern sense of self, I was little more than an overburdened footnote.

To avoid tragic mulatto clichés, I responded to the prompt by writing toward Mothman as a spiritual ancestor. A large humanoid moth creature with reflective red eyes and inky black wings, he’s a different kind of alienated, not-really-West Virginian who exists on the same folkloric plane as my notion of family legacy. Moments and reflections from my own life encroached on the work until the cryptid and I became one in the same. The persona’s goofy, low-stakes surreality allowed me to subvert prepackaged racist narratives and interrogate my tenuous relationship to family history. Titles for these pieces included “The Mothman Takes a Cartography Elective at Marshall University,” “The Only Pictures of the Mothman’s Paternal Grandma He’s Ever Seen are the Two His Dad Managed to Save from the Fire,” and “While Getting Coffee at the Starbucks in Pullman Square, the Mothman’s Friend Tells Him about How Her Ex-Boyfriend Single-Handedly Killed Any Hope for the Resurrection of Third Eye Blind.”

The metaphor proved an intoxicating mask. I had stumbled onto an idea that was dynamic enough to support a larger project while still being doable at my then current skill level. I remained obsessed with Mothman long after I turned in a few pieces for the assignment. I went on to draft, edit, and whittle down three dozen poems over the next several months, ultimately culminating in a digital chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, published by a small press called The Operating System just before I graduated.

As can often be the case with old work one puts their whole self into, I don’t feel like Flight of the Mothman holds up very well. When graded on the curve of undergrad poetry, I suppose it’s solid enough, but hindsight has rendered the amateurish underdevelopment of the whole enterprise suffocating. The collection’s autofictional framework reads to me now as insistent and contrived rather than clever or revealing, and what moments don’t feel thoroughly derivative feel thoroughly unexplored. A lot of my stuff from this period relied on a very specific set of formal conceits to establish voice and tone. I tended to forego punctuation and line breaks to render mundane moments as dense chunks of text, stacking anxious, free associative details on top of one another to travel everywhere in time and space but forward. I was interested in vertigo, in how to expand a single interaction into an entire solar system through granular, strategically mapped-out tangents. It’s a mode whose potency necessitates its narrowness, the perfect comfort zone for someone who had no interest in making any forward progress in his own life. Revisiting Flight of the Mothman feels like looking at stone knives behind museum glass. It’s a relic of the tools I was able to make for myself at the time, tools whose perceived crudeness or sophistication hinge entirely on the context they have been ripped out of.

I do, however, find it vital to exercise kindness toward the obsessions and attempted expressions of the kid who carried me, day by day, to the life I live now, the life I myself am carrying day by day toward my own future self. There is a performative self-deprecation baked into the ways writers are incentivized to understand their work through the lens of market trends, institutional decoration, and online comparison. This is the same framework of content-first panoptic pile-on that fuels all forms of mainstream online “conversation.” It’s disingenuous not to understand these modalities as, first and foremost, instruments of surveillance, and thus instruments of commodification. That shit is wack. Your previous incarnations and the work they did deserve more than knee-jerk dismissal. I was trying to do A Thing, and when it comes to self-reflection, cringe is often the body’s autonomic timekeeper. Blessed are those who have survived long enough to grow into new people, to surpass their past selves.

When it comes to growing older, to choosing life again and again because I actually want to, it is the process of stepping into something new, rather than leaving something behind, that I still haven’t fully come to terms with. Maybe I never will.

It is this attempt at a more tender version of personal introspection that forces me to highlight the chapbook’s primary blind spot. Namely, how obviously more robust and effective its cryptozoological obsession is as a trans metaphor rather than a (bi)racial one. It reads like the author isn’t in on his own best joke, though of course he couldn’t help it.

The existential bugbear of this closeted subtext is what lingers most when I consider these poems now, when I consider how clarifying Mothman as a mythological idea felt, even (especially?) when I didn’t fully understand why. I wouldn’t have been able to elevate or maturely engage with the monstrous trans body as an archetypal lens with its own storied history even if I had been out at the time, but still. The power of working through this sense of identification felt immense, and my connection to Mothman via my familial home state was enough to induct me into a popular, quintessentially gay enthusiasm for cryptids. In keeping with my history as a dedicated “ally” in my high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, as a Tumblr dweeb who reblogged gender studies rants and Homestuck fan art, as a gamer who only ever wanted to play as a cute girl or some grotesque abomination, making my obsession with Mothman my whole personality for a while did, at the time, feel genuinely liberating. I felt like I had excavated something true and important and fun about myself, like I had finally found a way to contribute to the conversation of my life rather than continuing to only be its subject of half-breed contention.

Though slightly embarrassing, it feels crucial to honor this sense of freedom. This is one example among a frenzied lineage of examples that prove how little control people often have over the things that give them language for their own self-definition. It’s a miracle that anyone is able to claim ownership of themselves.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately because a week or two ago, as I was idling in a supermarket parking lot trying to hype myself up to buy groceries, a group of college kids packed six or seven deep in a beat-to-hell Nissan Altima parked in the space directly across from me. Through the rearview mirror, I watched the crew climb out of the car. They were laughing as the New Mexico wind tousled their dyed hair and the sun danced off their elaborate piercings. I know all young folks to be better than me as a matter of sheer ontology, even on the rare days I don’t feel like a concussed baby giraffe stumbling through her life. I found myself moved by this brief vignette of their camaraderie. I took a moment to admire the avalanche of bumper stickers adorning their dented ride, a mix of classic memes and bespoke absurdity that each operated on a different level of irony. They included MILF: MAN I LOVE FISHING, WOULD YOU STILL HONK AT ME IF I WAS A LITTLE WORM?’ COEXIST but with fandom logos instead of religious symbols; #FOURDOORSFORMOREWHORES; YOUR SON IS AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT? MINE’S AN AUTISTIC CATBOY, a thin blue line sticker in Baja Blast green as a heartfelt tribute to the sacrifices of Taco Bell employees everywhere, hearts and moons in various pride flag colorways, and a Mothman sticker modeled after the Adam West Batman logo, the following declaration engulfed by his wingspan: I LOST MY VIRGINITY TO MOTHMAN—HE WAS A GENEROUS LOVER AND I REGRET NOTHING.

Tears began, stupidly, to stream down my face. I gripped the steering wheel and thanked God the kids were already inside. The dumb shit plastered on their beautiful lemon ignited my age-old suspicion that I have been alive for far, far too long, that I am nothing but a soft breeze haunting my own continued existence. This has nothing to do with the kids themselves and everything to do with what slightly older people like myself project onto them. Another circle Flight of the Mothman ultimately proved itself unable to square was the negotiation of monstrousness as an expression of suicidality, though this time it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The process of surviving myself, of choosing life again and again and again and again, has obliterated my linear expectations of mortality. You can stay alive without living, the same way you can die without leaving.

The kids’ sticker reminded me that Mothman has always existed primarily as an idea form, that symbols are defined by how we use them. Their power lies in how our imaginations interface with their construction, in what parts of ourselves we’re able to pour into the scaffolding they provide.

Blessed are those who have survived long enough to grow into new people, to surpass their past selves.

First spotted on the side of the road near an old munitions plant on November 15, 1966, Mothman’s myriad sightings and local notoriety soon sparked national attention. John Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies details a heavily sensationalized version of his investigation into the creature, as well as his pet theories about UFOs and psychic premonitions. While the whole myth can almost certainly be chalked up to large, out-of-migration birds whose presence was twisted by communal lore, Keel’s book cemented Mothman as a recurring object of fascination in various paranormal and pseudoscientific communities. The book is most famous for claiming a link between Mothman and the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge that led to the deaths of forty-six people in December 1967. Between this lurid connection, the book’s subsequent 2002 movie adaptation, and Point Pleasant’s annual Mothman Festival, not to mention the occasional claims of new sightings and goofy memes made by alt dorks of all stripes, Mothman has become a bona fide pop culture icon, second only to the likes of Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Jersey Devil in the pantheon of famous cryptids.

In this way, Mothman has always been a meme. To paraphrase a hauntological point made by the late theorist Mark Fisher, though Mothman doesn’t exist, he insists through cultural storytelling and symbolic adaptation, and thus persists as a reclamatory social character. The man, the moth, the legend, able to thrive and inspire in the new context of a memetic ecosystem sixty years removed from his original sighting.

It’s obvious why queer people become attached to cryptids as community symbols. Less obvious is how things begin to curdle when that memetic ecosystem plays into an insidious type of “it me” branding. In reconsidering my college tryst with Mothman, I came to see how much of the creature’s ability to speak to queer expression revolves around the buying of cheap product as a way to signal one’s beliefs and sense of identity. Of course, this has been true for many, many years, of American political identity in general as much as silly cryptid-themed merchandise, but the systems of production and the incentives that they foster have become much more bloated and dire in recent years. There is an endless flood of Mothman apparel, stickers, and patches for sale, all remixing the same handful of memes. It’s so strange to see this kind of parasocial relationship to Mothman, this fan vision of him as an embodiment of acceptance and emotional support and a kind of playfully crass sexuality, regurgitated as so much tenderqueer slop. There’s something sinister about a legend that once brought me sincere comfort being transformed into a mascot for insecure shitpost sloganeering and toothless progressive agitprop. With a quick online search, you can watch the merchandise go from dumb to didactic to desperate in real time: MOTHMAN ATE MY ENTIRE ASS AT DENNY’S—IT WAS A GRAND SLAM BREAKFAST; I MET MOTHMAN AND HE SAID HE HATES DONALD TRUMP; MOTHMAN SAYS PROTECT TRANS KIDS; MOTHMAN HOPES YOUR ABUSER DIES; MOTHMAN IS MY THERAPIST—HE SAYS I HAVE ABANDONMENT ISSUES; THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS ME GOING IS MOTHMAN’S FAT ASS, etc.

I can admit that these observations are ultimately personal and maudlin, an attempt to chart the inability of the symbols I once found so much meaning in to effectively speak to this bleaker, more urgent moment that said symbols helped give me the strength to arrive at. Everything is worse now. On one hand, I feel a sense of clarity and community and love that I had never fully experienced before: even if I am a broke, mentally ill brick, I am a whole human being who finally feels like she sees the beauty in herself, in staying alive. On the other hand, this beauty doesn’t come from the saccharine narrowness of cozy self-acceptance or commodifiable affirmations. Rather, it comes from finding ways to love and be loved by others that resists isolation and the authoritarian impulses it bolsters. It comes from a commitment to a more mature, historically informed vision of liberation, from study and self-reflection and community action as ICE disappears people and climate disaster arrives at our doorstep, as tech companies continue to plunder the globe and erode consumer protections to feed their impossible empires, as Israel commits genocide with American weapons and tax dollars in Palestine.

It’s tempting to frame the soulless Etsy-fication of my once beloved cryptid as some kind of grand queer psyop, but I know this shit isn’t really that important. Still, it feels like another small example of techno-fascist chickens coming home to roost, of the continued substitution of informed perspective and community engagement with incurious hostility and moralized consumption. I want to emphasize that, despite the kids’ ornate hooptie, this is not a generational critique. Nothing, regardless of import or niche appeal, is above being flattened and commodified, and no one, regardless of age or demographic, is above the mental and emotional deterioration inherent to being an American. I have to accept that I have outgrown Mothman as an insightful tool of self-exploration, if not a fun folk hero. When it comes to growing older, to choosing life again and again because I actually want to, it is the process of stepping into something new, rather than leaving something behind, that I still haven’t fully come to terms with. Maybe I never will.

Still crying and idling in the supermarket parking lot, I shut off the car, wipe the tears from my face, and step out into the midmorning sun to embark on my dreaded errand. I will remember what it felt like to compose myself and walk past the kids’ car when, a week or two later, I take a break from writing this essay to pick up an order at my local dispensary. The trans girl behind the counter complimented my outfit once, so of course I have become a loyal customer. As she hands me the tiny paper bag, she notices the insignia on my hoodie’s left breast: MOTHMAN SEARCH TEAM POINT PLEASANT, WV. I spent too much money on it, along with a cute plush and a copy of The Mothman Prophecies, when I visited the town with a college friend a number of years ago. Nowadays, I mostly throw on the sweatshirt whenever I enter another slatternly writing pit. As I’m heading for the exit and putting my change in my wallet, she calls after me and gives me a serious stare. “If you’re looking for him, I know where Mothman is.”

I offer my own pressing expression. “Where?”

“My place. My roommate’s cat is named Mothman.”

I laugh all the way to the car.