People use the metaphor of snakes shedding their skin all wrong and I hate it.
I was a weird snake girl and a pedant. I'm still both, I guess.
As you are well aware by now, some people were Horse Girls. I say “people” because Horse Girl is a deceptive moniker in that it attempts to assign a childhood personality type to a single gender when in actuality, Horse Girls come in all sorts. But I - a girl who actually occasionally spent time around horses and literal horse professionals - was not really a Horse Girl.
And like, sure, I liked horses okay. I liked the smell and I enjoyed the tilty light of stables. And I had a dream of being a charra girl because have you seen those outfits? I played with My Little Ponies and had some of the other accouterments of horsiness (I would still draw blood for a pair of white fringed cowboy books like the ones I had in the 2nd grade). I had a Barbie horse - though in an oversight of engineering that I definitely attribute to a lack of women Horse Girls in STEM in the 1980s, my Barbies couldn’t actually ride on their designated Barbie horse because Barbie’s hips only moved front-to-back, which was always a distinct irritation.
But I wasn’t like, A Horse Girl. I was, however, a weird snake girl, which is a much more ill-defined identity.
Like my mother, an Original Recipe Snake Girl, I just thought snakes were extremely cool. I learned about them and caught them in the yard. And when I saved up enough money from my early work as a child commercial model (yes, when I was like, eight, I joined an agency in Eugene, Oregon and booked a handful of jobs including one for Foster Farms corndogs; I was, and I cannot overstate this enough, really bad at it and also kind of chubby with frizzy hair which was not exactly The Look), I bought myself one and cared for him for years until he died while I was at college. I was way into snakes.
Aside: Snakes live kind of a bonkers long time if you care for them.
Another aside: He - his name was Tim and I named him after a lesser-known member of the Eagles if you want to know how truly awesome I was - was not even the only snake we had throughout my life.
Final aside: Sometime, I’ll write about the enormous boas we rescued. That’s another day, though.
Anyway, I was reminded of my overall snakiness when we went to visit some friends who also had snakes and I was just completely transfixed. Because what non-snake-people (my partner is one, it’s honestly shocking we’ve been together this long considering this glaring incompatibility) don’t fully get about snakes is that they are a.) really cute!!!! and also b.) fascinating and full of personality.
So there I was, watching these two gorgeous corn snakes doing their thing in their tank, stretching all the way out and probing at the edges of everything and then finding different ways to hide and spy, and I was thinking about how the thing most people know about snakes is also one of the most fascinating BUT MISUNDERSTOOD parts about them.
Which is that when they have to poop, their tails get crinkly. Wait, no, that’s not it. I don’t even remember if that’s true, it’s just something I seem to recall.
It’s the skin thing! It’s the thing of how, on a fairly regular cycle, their outermost layer of skin becomes too snug and they just like of peel it off and slither on with life.
The extremely exhausted metaphor of ~shedding~
If I’m being honest, it does bother me some when non-snake-people use the “shedding of the skin” trope, if only because they’re kind of squandering what’s actually a very important potential life lesson. Like, influencers will post about “shedding their skin” because they, I don’t know, decide to Influence in LA instead of Influencing in New York for a week. Or people will “shed their skin” after a breakup, sloughing off whatever marks their shitty ex left on them. They use it like a kind of reverse baptism.
But they’re using it wrong! And I’m nothing if not a pedant!
A lot of times when you hear corny people talk about shedding, they talk about it like a choice. And like a rebirth. They make it sound like a painless metamorphosis into an entirely new being. But that’s not how it is! It’s gnarly and awkward and long and sometimes a snake needs a pre-teen girl with a pair of tweezers to sit patiently by and pick off the little bits he couldn’t quite reach!
Shedding is cyclical. It’s something you have to do to survive. And it’s something that is part of the maintenance of the body.
Instead of some kind of miracle that recreates a whole new being - and this is when it actually matters to you, dear reader, I promise - a snake sheds in order to get rid of what no longer serves it, while keeping all of the myriad parts that do.
It’s also kind of a grotesque and otherworldly process from front to back.
If you’ve never known a snake as it went through the process, here’s a quick beat-by-beat:
After a snake sheds, its skin is glowing. Dewy. It looks like a Beauty TikTok Teen - shining and radiant. However, notably, it looks basically identical to how it looked this like last month-ish. It looks like itself, but its best possible self.
Then as the month goes on (not all snakes shed monthly, it depends on the type and the size and the age and the time of year and the climate and a bunch of other stuff that you don’t care about), the snake starts to look less…shiny. Or colorful. It kind of starts to get dull and maybe grayish, like you might on about Wednesday of a truly awful week. This is when the old layer of skin is getting ready but isn’t all the way ready yet, and the old layer of skin is starting to pull away and become fragile.
And then the eyes go blue. Literally, a snake’s eyes become basically entirely opaque. They already can’t really see on a good day but now they are really not able to see well, so they kind of just wait it out.
Next, the snake’s skin gives you a little fake out and the eyes get clear! What?! Did you miss the shed? What happened? No! The snake is just keeping you on your toes. During this time they usually figure out where they want to be situated (i.e. they try to find the best rough rock or whatever to rub on because like…imagine peeling a sunburn but you don’t have any arms).
Finally, the old skin is ready to go and the snake starts rootin’ around trying to get it the hell off. Like a sweaty gym sock worn too long, they peel that old, dry, papery skin off. Sometimes it comes in a nice little sheet. Sometimes it’s like picking nail polish off and it’s just a mess that gets everywhere.
And then the cycle begins again. Here’s a video if you’re having a hard time visualizing.
Shedding is (if the snake does a good job like a little pro) extremely satisfying. And it definitely makes the snake feel way better afterward. And yes, the snake *does* emerge from the cycle looking luscious - but it’s not a pursuit of self-discovery, nor is it a total makeover. Snakes don’t emerge from shedding as entirely new creatures. They just come out of it unburdened by what they don’t need. They come out looking exactly the same as they did last month but shinier - and knowing full well that it’s going to happen again in just a little while!
And this is what I think we’re missing with this metaphor, probably because not enough weird creepy snake girls have also written self-help adjacent ramblings while they have COVID (oh yeah, I have COVID right now).
Shedding your skin like a snake is a very dope metaphor to use in personal growth. It gives you the opportunity to take regular stock of what parts of yourself - your beliefs, your personality, your schedule - you don’t need and just kind of…discard them. No fanfare. No announcements. No like, hand-addressed envelopes telling your friends you finally figured out that resistance to understanding they/them pronoun was rooted in fear and misunderstanding. You can just be the best version of yourself tomorrow, clear-eyed and probably hungry.
And I think this is important because it can often feel really fucking hard to make small changes to our lives and ourselves - changing our minds, especially, can feel like a defeat that needs to come with a full-on reinvention.
Instead of seeing shedding as metaphor for becoming an entirely new version of yourself, I feel like we could instead embrace what snakes actually do - outgrow little flecks and leave them behind when they no longer serve us.
SNAKE GIRLS FORVER!
xoxo (from the Sick Bay) HBO