e8=Q

In chess notation, it marks the moment a pawn crosses the board and becomes a queen.

But I’ve always thought that little equation contained an entire philosophy about transformation.

This is an entry about the crossing, the capacity it creates, and the strange autobiography of a queen who remembers moving one square at a time.

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

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For as long as I can remember, there's always been one tattoo that I have wanted more than any other. I won't even say almost any other, than more than any other, more than the tattoos I already have inked on my body, right? And why do I have other tattoos and not the one that I have always wanted before I even got those? And it's because for some reason I have always felt like I needed to earn this tattoo. And I know that sounds really weird and we'll get into it, but I've always felt like I needed to earn tattooing this on my body. And of course, I've yet to feel like, or I hadn't historically felt like I met the criteria to put that on me. So I'd never gotten it, but I know exactly what it looks like. It's two tiny chess pieces, one on either side of my rib cage. So on one side, a pawn, and on the other side, a queen. That's it. No chessboard, no words, no explanation, just a pawn on one side of my body and a queen on the other. As if the journey from one to the other has to pass through me, pass across my chest, across my heart. And I've wanted that image on my body for years because I've never thought of pawn promotion as just a clever rule in a board game, right? I've always thought that it contained an entire philosophy. And players of the game have actually reduced that philosophy to a beautiful little equation, really, notation. The notation after which this episode is named, and that is E8 equals Q. Now, if you play chess, you probably already know what that notation is depicting. If you don't, don't worry. We will talk about it ad nauseum here, right? But before we get into that, the thing to know is that there is something very unique about the pawn in that it is the only piece on the board whose capacity isn't fixed at the beginning of the game. And after one full year, that is to say 52 official entries of keeping an audio journal titled Dear Sovereign Self, I think that I finally understand why I've always wanted that tattoo. And not even that tattoo, why I've always wanted that journey of the pawn drawn across my heart. So for this entry, I want to talk about the pawn and I want to talk about the queen, but most importantly, I want to talk about what happens in between those two. So first you need to understand there are six kinds of pieces on a chessboard: the king, the queen, the rook, the bishop, the knight, and the pawn. And every one of those pieces begins the game with a particular range. The rook can move any number of squares horizontally or vertically. The bishop moves diagonally. The knight has its weird little L that it does. The queen can move in almost any direction as far as the board allows. And I don't even know why I'm saying almost there. The queen can move in any direction as far as the board allows. And the king moves in any direction one piece, sorry, one space at a time. And those capacities are fixed. A bishop can spend an entire game crossing the board and it will never unlock the ability to move like a rook. A knight can survive 30 moves and it will still move like a knight. That is to say, every piece can change its position on the board, but only the pawn can change its range. So now let's talk about the pawn, because the pawn begins differently. It is the smallest piece, usually the least valuable, although that thinking is a mistake, but this isn't a gameplay strategy episode. So it is typically the least valuable in gameplay. It moves primarily in one direction, one square at a time. And I say primarily because there are instances where it is moving to capture another piece where it can move diagonally, but that is not relevant to where we're going in the philosophy of this. Just if you've never played chess, want to throw that out there. Okay. So it moves primarily in one direction, one square at a time, the least range, and the slowest moving. And yet the pawn is the only piece on the board whose capacity isn't fixed at the beginning of the game. I said that, and this is what I mean by that. You get the pawn all the way across the board, and something extraordinary happens. Its range expands. It can become a queen. And I want to be really precise about the philosophy I'm pulling from that because I'm not saying the pawn was secretly a queen all along. I actually think that ruins the metaphor. The pawn was a pawn. There was nothing shameful about being a pawn, but it had the capabilities of a pawn. It could not move like a queen, but was just secretly choosing not to because it likes the scenic grout. Like it could not simply declare that it had queen range and expect the rules of the game to accommodate its self-concept. It could not command the board like a queen. It was a pawn. It had to move. It had to move its little ass across the board. And that movement changed what became available to it. So where every other piece begins with its movement capacity already assigned, only the pawn begins carrying the possibility of a capacity it does not yet possess. Every other piece begins finished. Only the pawn begins unfinished. And I think that's why I've always been so intrigued with pawn promotion. Not because the pawn finally discovers that she was powerful all along, but because she wasn't powerful all along. The journey didn't simply reveal who the pawn always was. The journey created someone the pawn could not have been without the journey. Right. The other thing you have to understand about the pawn is that its transformation is painfully sequential. And I use that word intentionally. I use both words intentionally, both painful and sequentially, because the pawn is surrounded by pieces that can skip squares. A rook can move several spaces at once, a bishop can sweep diagonally across the board. The queen can pretty much fly, right? And the pawn watches all of this happen while moving forward one square at a time. And I have spent a lot of my life deeply annoyed by that particular feature of being a pawn because I've spent a lot of my life wanting to skip steps. I've watched people seem to move through life like rooks and bishops and queens. They can see where they want to go, assuming the path is clear, they just go there. Meanwhile, so much of my own life has felt stubbornly sequential. I can see the square, I can see where I'm trying to get. Sometimes I can even see somebody else standing there and still one square, then the next, and then the next. And the maddening thing about the pawn is that there is no mechanism in the game for skipping that sequence. The pawn cannot look at E8 and say, okay, I understand the assignment. I'll meet you there. It cannot borrow the movement of the rook because the rook's path looks more efficient. It cannot move like the queen because it knows queenhood is possible in its future. It cannot borrow experience from future squares. It has to cross. And I think I've spent a lot of my life believing that if I were smart enough, strategic enough, ambitious enough, perceptive enough, I should be able to figure out how to skip at least a few of these squares. Like surely I can optimize this. Surely I can find the shortcut. Surely understanding the lesson before I get there should count for something. And sometimes it does, uh, but not a chess. But there are some capabilities that only accumulate sequentially. There are things you can understand intellectually that you still do not know how to do. There are things you can see somebody else doing that you do not yet have the range to do yourself. There are things you can know are coming and still not be ready for them until you have occupied the squares between here and there. That's the cruelty and the genius of the pawn. Every square matters because every square is part of what makes promotion possible. Not symbolically, mechanically. You literally cannot promote without crossing the board. And I want to be careful here because I don't mean that every terrible thing that happens to you happens for a reason. I hope that isn't at all what you are deriving from what I'm saying. I don't believe we need to make suffering holy in order to make use, you know, of what it teaches us. Some squares did suck. I won't lie about that. I would not revisit them. Even though they were enriching, I would not revisit them. But when I look back across my life, there are capabilities I have now that I could not have gotten by simply understanding that I would eventually need them. I had to practice them. I had to live them. I had to occupy the square and then move to the next one. That's what I think I misunderstood for so long when I watched other pieces fly across the board. I thought the advantage was getting there faster. But the pawn's transformation depends on the fact that it couldn't. Because E8 doesn't simply reward the pawn for arriving. The crossing is what made the pawn capable of becoming something different when it got there. Capability accumulates sequentially. You cannot borrow experience from future squares. And sometimes the square you are most desperate to skip is carrying something you will need when you finally reach the other side. Every square matters to the pawn. Which brings me to the part of the notation that I think is the easiest to overlook. The equal sign. Right? E8 equals Q. Not E8 wants to be Q, not E8 is manifesting Q, not even E8 deserves to be Q. Equals. The notation is describing what is now true on the board. And I absolutely love that because promotion in this sense isn't permission, it's recognition. The pawn does not arrive at the other side and submit a compelling case for why someone should finally take its potential seriously. The crossing is the case. Reality has changed. And because reality has changed, the language used to describe the piece has to change with it. Reality renamed the pawn. That's what the equal sign means to me. Identity follows reality. Reality doesn't follow declared identity. And I think there's something deeply clarifying about that in a culture where we're constantly being encouraged to announce who we're becoming, claim it, name it, step into it. And sure, there is value in being able to imagine yourself beyond your current circumstances, of course. But there are also identities you cannot affirm your way into. There are capacities that have to become true. There are things you have to learn. There are weights you have to become capable of carrying. There are decisions you have to become capable of making. There are rooms that you have to learn how to move through. There are versions of yourself that only exist on the other side of having actually lived. And when that transformation is real, eventually the description becomes inaccurate if it doesn't change. That's promotion. So now that we're talking about promotion, about what happens after the pawn makes that journey across the board, let's bring this back to sovereignty because the crossing creates capacity. But plenty of people undergo transformation without becoming soft. Hard things happen to people. People accumulate skills, people gain power. None of those things automatically equal sovereignty. The pawn crosses and acquires range. And when I say sovereignty is crossed into, I don't simply mean that the pawn crossed the board and became more powerful. The crossing expands what you're capable of, yes. But expanded range by itself is not sovereignty. And chess actually gives us the perfect way to see the distinction. Because once our pawn reaches the other side of the board, there can now be two queens standing on it, right? Same range, same range, same capabilities, but two completely different relationships to how that capacity was acquired. The promoted queen embodies sovereignty because her expanded range is the consequence of her own crossing. And that distinction between the queen who began with her range and the queen who crossed into hers is where this metaphor gets really interesting to me, at least, and to whomever has made it to minute whatever of this entry. Right? So to me, this is where the idea of the promoted queen gets really important because there is already a queen on the board. She begins the game powerful. She begins with extraordinary range. And I want to be careful here because the promoted queen is not better than the original queen. She is not more deserving of her power. She is not more legitimate. They're both queens. They have the same movement, the same range, the same capabilities on the board, but they do not have the same autobiography. The original queen has never known the board without queen movement. The promoted queen has. The original queen can look across the board and understand every square she could reach. The promoted queen can look back across the board and remember when she could only move one square at a time. The original queen has seen every square. The promoted queen has lived every square. The original queen knows the board geographically. The promoted queen knows it autobiographically. And that distinction matters to me because the promoted queen doesn't just know how to move like a queen. She remembers what it was like when she couldn't. She remembers limited range. She remembers obstruction. She remembers being the smallest piece on the board. She remembers watching pieces move in ways that were literally unavailable to her. And then she remembers the crossing. One square, one square, one square at a time. Until the rules describing what she was capable of were no longer accurate. There's a particular consciousness that comes from expanded capacity accompanied by memory, not superiority, memory. And if I'm going to spend the rest of my life becoming more capable, and I certainly hope I am, I don't ever want increased range to make me contemptuous of the squares where my range was smaller. I don't want to look back at earlier versions of myself and call them weak because they couldn't make moves that I can make now. Of course they couldn't. They hadn't crossed yet. And I don't want to look at someone else's one square season from the comfort of having options they haven't developed yet and confused my range with their worth. Because I remember. I remember what it felt like to move one space while it seemed like everyone around me could fly. I remember looking across the board at lives I could imagine but could not yet reach. I remember wanting to skip squares. I remember thinking certain positions said something permanent about who I was. And now I know better. Position isn't range, and range isn't worth. But the promise of the pawn is that range can change. And maybe that's why after one full year of dear sovereign self, I still think the promoted queen is the best symbol I have for sovereignty. Not because she won, not because she escaped being a pawn, not because queenhood was secretly her birthright. Because she crossed. And there's something else I love about that. The pawn begins the game already surrounded by pieces with more range than she has, right? The queen, the rook, the bishop, the ninth, they all do. Pieces capable of movements that are simply unavailable to her, and then she crosses the board one square at a time, hopefully survives. Because we say one square at a time, but that's a treacherous journey, right? And then she makes it. She makes it all the way to the other side and looks around, and the rook is still a rook, and the bishop is still a bishop, and the knight is still a knight, and the original queen is still a queen. They didn't fail to transform, it didn't need to. They began the game with the range their role required, but the pawn, the board didn't need to become different for her life on it to become different. She just needed to be different. And I think that's what I've been trying to put on my ribs all these years. Not a pawn on one side and a queen on the other because one is lesser and one is greater, but the space between them, the crossing, the evidence that there are movements available to you now that were not available to you when you began. And that doesn't make the piece you started as inadequate. It makes the distance between them meaningful. So if I ever get that tattoo, it won't be a symbol of the queen I became. It will be a record of the fact that I was changed by the distance between the two. And maybe that's the distinction I've been trying to articulate for 52 entries. The sovereign self isn't the self you uncover, it's the self you participate in creating. I did not spend this year peeling away enough layers to discover some fully formed woman who had been there all along. Some of what I am capable of today did not exist a year ago. Sure as hell didn't exist five years ago. It had to be built. More importantly, it had to be lived. It had to be crossed into. So the journey didn't simply reveal who the pawn always was. The journey created someone that the pawn could not have been without it. And there's one last thing about the promoted queen that I can't stop thinking about. She kinda has a strange problem. And because by the end of the game, she is indistinguishable in capacity from a piece whose biography looks nothing like hers. Put the original queen and the promoted queen next to each other and watch them move, same range, same capabilities. Nothing about the promoted queen's movement tells you that there was ever a time where she could only move one square at a time. Nothing about the ease with which she crosses the board now tells you what it took for her to cross it the first time. And if you entered the game late, you wouldn't know which queen began there and which one had traveled the entire board to become one. The crossing has disappeared into her competence. And maybe that's why her memory matters so much, right? Because eventually the evidence of what it took to become capable of something may no longer be visible in the way that you do it. Other people may only ever meet the version of you who can move this way. You are the one who remembers when you couldn't. And I think that's where I want to leave this first year of Dear Sovereign Self, not with another answer with one more question, because you know I love my questions. So I'll leave you with this. When the evidence of your crossing disappears into who you've become, what keeps you connected to the person who had to make that journey? When no one can see the pawn in the way that you move anymore, how do you make sure that you still can? A tattoo, perhaps? Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.