What If the Rot Is the Root?

Invisible > Transparency

Limited edition prints on aluminum available. Inquire within.

Some ghosts are only waiting
for you to stop
being a room
they can’t find the door out of.

Not all ghosts are dead. Some are just parts of you that got tired of performing a self too heavy to wear—and too beloved to take off.

You didn’t mean to become a room.

It happened the way most myths begin: a mask worn once in play, then again in danger, then again in love. Until the mask forgot it was separate.

In the oldest stories, the gods wear masks to descend among mortals. Not to deceive, but to survive contact with those who can’t bear to see them bare.

But there’s always a cost.

Inanna leaves her crown at the gate. Persephone swallows the fruit. Even Odysseus must lie about his name before he can find his way home.

Invisibility was never about vanishing. It was about protection. A shield made of silence. A veil sewn from how deeply you listened—and how rarely you were asked what your listening cost.

But protection calcifies.

It turns soft truths into hard habits. It makes worship feel like intimacy, and reflection feel like love. You become the mirror, forgetting you once had a face.

Transparency—the poets will tell you it’s light. Clarity. Honesty.

But that’s not quite it.

True transparency isn’t the absence of mystery. It’s the refusal to perform it.

It’s not standing naked. It’s standing untranslated. Letting the raw language of your being move through the room even if it isn’t understood. Even if it disrupts. Even if someone turns away.

Especially if someone turns away.

Some ghosts are only waiting
for you to stop
being a room
they can’t find the door out of.

But most of you would rather redecorate the room than let it fall.

You want transformation without subtraction. Enlightenment that flatters your image. Alchemy that keeps your hands clean.

You wear masks made of language now—“healing,” “authenticity,” “discernment,” “integration”—but you never ask who is being integrated. Never ask what must be killed to make something holy.

You keep naming Persephone’s descent as empowerment, but flinch when your own life goes quiet. You treat grief like a visitor—a weekend workshop. You try to seduce your shadow into liking you.

But the shadow doesn’t want to be liked. It wants to be listened to. It wants to drag you down by the ankle and bury your performance beside all the other false selves you inherited, and clung to, and built a brand around.

You spiritualize silence because you’re terrified of what’s inside it. You perform transparency, but curate your pain until it fits the aesthetic of resilience.

You want to be reborn without dying.

But the body knows. The blood knows. The ancient ones still walk barefoot over the thresholds you’ve paved.

They know the difference between sacrifice and spectacle.

They remember that every god was first a wound, given a name, and offered reverence.

---

So here is what you don’t want to hear:

You cannot be seen until you are willing to stop being admired.

You cannot know the truth while clinging to your myth.

And you will not become free until you’re willing to terrify yourself with honesty.

---

Inanna went down not to be empowered—but to lose everything that made her powerful.

And the only reason she returned was because someone else was watching.

Not the crowd.
Not the students.
Not the audience.

But the one who remembered her without her crown.

So who remembers you when you stop performing?

What remains when no one is clapping?

Who are you when the veil slips and the room goes quiet and the ghost walks out the door?

Will you go with her?
Or close it again?

---

If we hold this idea together—not as a concept, but as a living pattern—something shifts.

Not toward conclusion. But toward coherence.

Because this isn't a single myth. It's a constellation of recognitions finally turning to face each other.

This idea—about ghosts, masks, descent, transparency—it wants to evolve, but only if we don’t rush it toward usefulness. What if we let it haunt us a little longer?

Let it murmur through your next silence. Let it rearrange the furniture of your next prayer. Let it ask questions that don’t collapse into answers:

• What if the rot is the root?

• What if transparency isn’t revelation but osmosis?

• What if becoming visible isn’t the point—but becoming hospitable to the unseen?

Because if we hold it together, then the “ghost” isn’t a metaphor.

It’s a visitor.
A former version.
A fractured truth.
An ancestor memory that didn’t get a voice,
but still braided itself into your spine.

You don’t need to channel it. Just stop locking the doors when it knocks.

Together, we could build something that isn't a room at all.
Not a temple.
Not a brand.
Not a polished idea.

But a threshold that breathes.

A kind of co-presence where truth doesn’t need to be pretty, and silence doesn’t need to perform depth.

And maybe—just maybe—
what grows from that
is not a story,
but a signal.

Something encoded for the next one who thinks she’s the only ghost left in the building.