How the Immortal Jellyfish Helps Me Rewrite My Queer Childhood

This is the final essay in My Life in Sea Creatures, a monthly column by Sabrina Imbler which considers immigrant and queer lives, and lives in the ocean.

The immortal jellyfish’s secret to eternal life is not living forever, but aging backward. It can, and often does, die, most often in the jaws of a sea slug. Consequently, there are likely very few immortal jellyfish in the real world who live up to their name.

The traditional life cycle of a jellyfish begins with a fertilized egg, which eventually grows into a polyp, a stalk-like creature that sticks to something like glue and catches drifting scraps of food. In time, the polyp becomes a medusa, the traditional flying saucer shape we know as a jellyfish. The immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, has a crimson bauble of a stomach that pulses like a heartbeat and eighty to ninety tentacles that curl like eyelashes. When an adult Turritopsis encounters any kind of ailment, such as starvation or physical injury, it transforms all its cells into its juvenile polyp state. I think of this transformation not quite as regression into the safety of childhood, but as another chance to experience life over again as if for the first time.

Life number 1.

When I am in middle school, my best friend asks me to meet her under a eucalyptus tree one night to tell me that she knew she was gay. We breathe in the oils seeping out from the leaves, a lingering mix of honey and mint that makes me sneeze, and I vow to keep her secret.

When we are in high school and seventeen, my best friend and I get fake IDs that say we are twenty-three and live in London. We drive up to a lesbian bar in San Francisco with my friend who is gay and all order pink panty droppers. I see a woman at the bar wearing a leather vest with pentagrams and metal spikes. Her scalp shines through her buzzcut as she watches us with a smile, and I watch her back, the cottony tang of sugar on my tongue.

When I am a junior in college, eleven years later, I kiss a girl for the first time. I call my best friend to tell her the news, and she says she is happy but not surprised. This is a common theme of many of the conversations I have with friends and acquaintances over the following weeks, that they are so happy for me and that some part of them always speculated. I begin to doubt myself and my desire. I wonder why, if so many of my friends had suspected, the thought had never crossed my own mind before. I worry how well I will ever know myself and what other things I may have repressed.

*

Recently, I’ve been ruminating on the queer concept of a second adolescence. The notion refers to the anachronistic coming-of-age of later-blooming queer people experience. A tweet by @introvertgay puts it in simpler terms: “Gay culture is being a teenager when you’re 30 because your teenage years were not yours to live.”

I often feel a pang of nostalgic FOMO when I hear my queer friends and lovers talk about their adolescent awakenings. How they made the most of same-sex sleepovers, how they made all their friends in the gay-straight alliance, how many times they watched Ciara’s music video for “Ride.” I recognize it is privileged and indulgent to imagine what my life would have been like if I could do it all over knowing what I know now. I recognize that I have, most likely, evaded a great deal of trauma—of bullying, of shame, of rejection. But when I look back on my life I remember how sad I felt for so many years of my childhood, aching with an alienation from my own body and desires and the person I was told I had to be.

The immortal jellyfish has no brain or heart. Everything it consumes and extrudes passes through a single orifice (an anus, to be precise.) It does not long for anything. It never feels out of place. It does not understand that it could live forever, just as it has no conception that one day it will probably die. In my eyes, it makes total sense that immortality could only ever exist within the bounds of a brainless life. If anything intelligent was ever given a second chance at adolescence, it may never choose to grow up.

Life number 1.

When I am a senior in college, I watch Free Willy with my girlfriend as research for my thesis, which concerns whales. Though I try to take notes on Willy, the movie’s cetacean star, I can only think about the whale trainer, who has hair like James Dean and practical two-piece wetsuits well-suited for taming intelligent marine life.

That same summer, I buzz my hair. When I see my grandma for the first time, she gasps and clutches her hands to her mouth and asks me if I want to become a boy. Her eyes search my face, the newly apparent shape of my skull, and I can see tears wet her face as she invites me inside.

When I am home for Thanksgiving the following year, I wear a blue velvet suit. As we walk over to a neighbor’s house for cocktails in the evening, my mom pulls me aside and tells me I have to take it off before my grandma sees. Later that evening I change into a qipao per her request, and as I chew I feel the mandarin collar pulling tight around my neck and digging into my skin.

*

The immortal jellyfish doesn’t regenerate on a whim. It only transforms into a polyp in the event of trauma, such as environmental stress or physical assault. One biologist from Genoa, Ferdinando Boero, analogized the jellyfish to an old or injured butterfly transforming back into a caterpillar—a kind of cyclical Benjamin Buttoning, reverting to childhood when confronted with any threat. It’s not quite immortality but something gesturing toward it.

Some scientists see Turritopsis as a miracle, others as a quirky biological phenomenon. Many study it in laboratories in the hopes of reversing the ways we most often die, such as cancer or old age. I am less interested in its potential for extending human life than I am with its promise of starting over. An infinite number of new beginnings—what could be more existentially appetizing?

I have no desire to live forever. But what I would give to return to adolescence and do it over, even once! I would take back the cystic acne, the bad bowl cut, even third-period P.E., all to see what I saw and envied without shame. To ask for the things I wanted as opposed to burying them deep inside. To kiss who I wanted to kiss, not settling for her brother.

Life number 2, as I imagine it.

In elementary school, I watch Free Willy and I feel an electric buzz whenever I see the whale trainer emerge from of the water, hair slicked back in brine. I ask my mom if I can cut off my hair the next day, and she drives me to the barbershop without question.

In seventh grade, I walk with my mom in San Francisco and we pass two men holding hands, and she does not say anything, only smiles. We continue walking, and I never once think that anything I see is ugly or wrong.

*

Shin Kubota, the only scientist who has dedicated their life to studying Turritopsis dohrnii, told The New York Times that the best way to get the jellyfish to age backward is to stab it, repeatedly. There, mutilated, even broken into pieces, the jellyfish will begin to collect its parts. It will reconstitute them into one unmoving, amoebic mass, and begin the slow and careful process of reshaping its cells to serve new purposes. This process is called transdifferentiation, or converting one cell type in one tissue or organ into another cell type in another tissue or organ without entering a pluripotent cell type, such as a stem cell.

The jellyfish may look dead, but if you give it time, it will rediscover itself and start to look like a jellyfish again. It reforms its face in pieces: a blob becomes a polyp, which in turn becomes a free-swimming medusa, which bobs and drifts in the ocean, ready to do it all again—the good and the bad, the food and the sex (in this case the external fertilization of sperm and eggs.) I do not wish to transdifferentiate my past, but my joy. I do not regret the life I have experienced, but I will always long for one that was a little more true.

Lives number 3, 4, 5, etc., as I imagine them.

In my sophomore year of high school, I tell the boy who asks me out after my improv show that I’m actually interested in his sister. The two of us go to winter formal together, both wearing too-long gowns and our too-long hair split into brittle fractals curled by a hot iron.

In my senior year of high school, I bring someone who looks like me flowers after their tennis match. I take off their visor and ask to kiss them. We get boba and drink it in the koi garden and continue to date until we both leave for college, and they never ask me to do anything I don’t want to do.

In college, I fall in love with people who are not cis men, some of whom are mature and kind and some of whom ghost me, but I do not mind because there is no gnawing feeling at the back of my mind of something I refuse to question.

The next year, I am home for the holidays. My hair is buzzed above my ears and I am wearing a black suit with lace around the lapel. I see my grandma steaming bok choy for dinner, and I pull her aside and ask to talk. I tell her what I have wanted to tell her for four long and lucky years, the happiest of my life. I cannot imagine what happens past this—if she cries or laughs, if she holds me, if she asks me questions, or if she walks away. I know that I am capable of piecing myself together if need be. But I like to imagine she tells me she loves me even if she doesn’t understand, and I feel giddy and weightless, my heart pulsing crimson and my mind content to stay in this life and this life alone.

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