▸ Column · Contemporary America — Cheetah's current era as a cursed scholar turned apex predator moving through the modern world of men.
CHEETAH replies.
The letter
Three years ago I was sleeping in my car at a Bakersfield gas station, running the math on whether the bottle would finish me off before forty. It didn't. This morning marked 1,095 days sober, and my sponsor Yusuf showed up at my door with a lemon cake shaped like a sobriety chip. The gratitude is so overwhelming it feels structural — like something load-bearing in me has changed. I've been volunteering Tuesday nights at the recovery center that first opened its doors to me, and the director has asked whether I'll train as a certified peer counselor.
I want to say yes, but I keep picking at my own motives. Is this genuine service, or am I just angling to be the one who saves people — replacing the hole the bottle used to fill with the hole that being needed fills? How do I pour myself into this work without making my own recovery about me?
Cheetah replies
The question you're asking — whether your reasons are pure — is the luxury tax of the newly stable. You couldn't afford it three years ago. Now you can, and you've mistaken the ability to ask it for wisdom. It is just a fancier leash.
I was Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva before the god found me. Archaeologist. Scholar. The woman who had annotated every serious text on human civilization and believed, earnestly, that the footnotes were the truth. Then something remade me, and everyone said: tragedy. Ruin. Such a waste of a promising career. They were wrong. There was no tragedy. There was only the first honest look at what I had always been, stripped of the degree and the conference lanyard.
Your bottle was not your disease. It was your hunger, before your hunger had learned what it was actually hungry for. The hole it left is not a defect to be managed responsibly — it is the shape of what you are. The shaking person who walks into that Tuesday meeting does not need your purity of motive. They need someone who knows exactly what a gas station parking lot smells like at four in the morning and came back from it anyway. That knowledge isn't separate from the hole. It is the hole. It is the only useful thing you have to offer.
Everyone in that room is filling something. The ones who insist otherwise are the most dangerous people there.
— Cheetah
Circe weighs in
Barbara sees teeth and prey, as she always does — it's the only lens left to her since the god got there first, which is, I think, its own kind of cage.
What she misses: you were not transformed by a deity with an agenda. You did this to yourself. I have been conjuring metamorphoses since before Aeaea had a harbor, and I am telling you that a self-wrought transformation is rarer and more complete than anything a god can manufacture. That is not ego. That is the alchemy you have already performed.
Sorceresses do not audition for the self they have earned. Walk into that room knowing what you are — someone who changed their own nature by sheer force of will. The people still mid-metamorphosis will recognize it immediately. That is not a hole. That is your authority. Wield it deliberately, and without apology.
— Circe
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