some lessons learned

Well, it’s been a minute since I was here.

I was really busy with work and now I’m back in an ebb state. Such is the name of the game of being my own business.

There are a few things that have come to mind in the past couple of days that I’ll just list out, because it’s hard to tie them all together (maybe I need more coffee–working on that!)

Poverty is isolating and terrorizing. And so much of this blog is just me reacting to poverty. And, I won’t be ashamed of that any longer. Meanwhile, white men can make oodles of money off of the poverty narrative. This thread is full of how poverty can really fuck with your head and your overall well-being. I couldn’t read too much of it because I related too much. But at the same time, I’m comforted that I’m not alone in these feelings. 

Companies really don’t care about you. I know that and that’s one of the reasons why I dug Fight Club so much (toxic masculinity aside). It really got to that Gen X core of life being more than things and possessions.

This week, there were massive layoffs at digital publishers BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, as well as at publishing conglomerate Gannett and whatever the fuck Verizon Media Group is (formerly Oath, including Yahoo and AOL).

About 1,000 media folks lost their jobs with more to come since BuzzFeed couldn’t get their shit together and stave off the rumors of layoffs. So now, there are people who are having some shitty weekends while waiting for news. BuzzFeed is probably preparing for a merger with another group call Group Nine, which specializes in…wait for it…video. 

I just had something similar happen to me last night, as if the Universe wanted me to embody this fact. I was expecting the cut, but couldn’t really put my finger on why. Thursday night, I could barely sleep because I felt I had already lost it.

Prophetic intuition can sometimes come as a form of fear.

The only other time I’ve felt like that about a job was almost 20 years ago. I was freaking out about getting laid off at a crooked personal injury law firm. My colleagues thought I was being paranoid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I learned later that the powers that be couldn’t find me on Friday to do let me go. So I was let go on Monday.

Sidenote: I really have to start honoring my intuition and not doubting myself.

So today, I feel…free and happy. I am repeatedly repelling any shame or resentment. I don’t have to do work I hate like that anymore!

I’m constantly shutting down the typical internal conversation of what went wrong, of what could have been done better, of why this is happening now, of the shitty email that was sent. All those thoughts are unhelpful when acceptance of this new reality makes it so much easier to move on.

I did the work because I needed the money–that’s all. In one Facebook group I’m in, a colleague had posted that they had also gotten this work but decided it was too much and wondered how to get it. And they were right, it was too much. But, it kept me afloat for three months, and I’m really grateful for that.

But this month was incredibly hard for some reason. Part of it was allergies (the pollen count is high right now down in Central Florida). Part of it was doing other work. But maybe my heart had finally checked out of the work I was doing. But I felt like such a snob.

I kept having this conversation with myself about how I needed to be grateful and honor this work. I know I can be elitist because of my background of being a doctor’s daughter, of going to an elite university, of having a master’s degree.

America can make you feel so entitled to things you should have, and I don’t mean basic needs (America does the opposite of that with the basics). I should be further along in my life. Why am I doing this terrible survival work?

But I needed to pay some bills and without a car, this was what was in front of me. So I did it.

Yet the nagging feeling, that I was just felt like some replaceable cog in a wheel, lining someone else’s pockets, only grew and made me feel terrible. I never felt any real connection to this group. It doesn’t seem like they can hold quality people, but they don’t really provide that much support. I only was spoken to when I was wrong.

And I wonder if all these veteran journalists, editors, producers, videographers, etc. now feel the same way, like a replaceable cog in a wheel. They were doing a lot more important work than creating content for who I imagine are bored retirees. But with all those layoffs, 1,000 people could form their own newsroom right now, and a really good one.

So, to sum it all up:

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Capitalism is a dehumanizing affair, and it doesn’t belong in journalism–or in most places. And if corporations are people, then they lack a lot of empathy (as do most people, sadly).

Despite life being full of suffering, we must find joy in life. So the season finale of The Good Place, the only American sitcom that I can stand, was on Thursday night. And the ending made me cry because of all of the shitty things that happened last year in particular. If you haven’t watched it and you’re a fan of the show, go watch it and then come back.

Eleanor asks Janet, the all-knowing android, what the meaning of life is, if it’s just full of pain. Janet responds that if she told her, then life would just be some stupid machine. Life would lose its mystery. Since life doesn’t really make much sense, when we find someone or something that does make sense, it’s miraculous. And it’s those glimmers of happiness that we should strive for as we embrace the suck of being human.

I remember saying this to a friend in an email a couple of months ago because I had heard this same message in a podcast about leaving evangelical Christianity. Life is suffering, so when there are moments when we’re not suffering, we should savor them.

Those insights made me cherish the people I had in my life. It made me feel lucky and fortunate, not abandoned and alone.

It’s funny, when I left social media for the holidays and Marie Kondo’s Netflix show came on, I came back to so much xenophobic snark about the concept of what sparks joy for someone.

Clearly, Americans don’t even understand this concept, and a few people have said as much–specifically that we’ve been trained to believe that things bring us joy. So when our houses are full of shit we don’t even use, Kondo’s gentle suggestions about how to store and sort through what you need and don’t need felt like indictments.

So joy…is not happiness or exuberance or giddiness. It’s deeper than that. For me, it has to do with connecting to your life purpose and your essence, the things that make you really you. Deep satisfaction with who you are and the life you have.

And yeah, sometimes it’s hard to find that when your basic needs aren’t being met and you’re treated like some object that has lost its use. But after last night, I felt a new sense of determination to find real joy, even in the midst of loss. I can’t wait for the perfect client, place, friends, relationships or time.

And the time is now. It is always now.

So what’s deeply resonating for me and who I am is working with people who honor my time, talents, and efforts. I want to be with people who are thoughtful and kind. I want to live in a place where my life matters and where I can be useful. 

None of that is happening right now, and honestly, I know that’s a lot to ask for from humanity. But I must commit that I will die trying to find it. There’s no other option besides just giving up completely and dying. My life has to align to these values or I will wither inside.

And, that’s a process. I sometimes think at the end of writing something, whatever lessons I’ve learned from the process of writing will somehow just be permanently imprinted. 

But then life happens, loss happens. Something doesn’t go my way. I screw something up. Taking it so personally is suffering. And I don’t need to suffer any more than I already do.

Anyway, this blog is, in essence, me trying to remember what life for me really is about. And it takes a lot of keystrokes and conversations to remember and to keep remembering that I am not even the poverty I live in nor the people I don’t have in my life.

I am so much more, and I find it hard to find the right words to say what that exactly is besides the word “me.”

Not knowing isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. So now that I don’t have this soul-crushing client anymore, I feel more space opening up. All the people, places, and things that left, that didn’t work out, that I messed up–now there’s space to explore what I do want. 

Until maybe this morning, I really was exhausted by the question, “So now what?” I don’t know, and that’s not a problem. It’s how life is.

I know there are a lot of obstacles in my way towards being what I deem to be a financially stable, well-loved person, and they’re ones I don’t really think about.

But then I think about how so many people have stable lives because of their race or gender or good looks or wealth–very arbitrary, meaningless things. Despite the meaningless, immoral riches of billionaires who decide the fate of people they don’t even care about, despite all the noxious -isms that are on my back and blocking my path, I still have to try to figure this life stuff out for me.

It’s tough because it’s been a very lonely road and the further along I walk, the less people walk with me. That’s also by design, it seems, and something I’ll get into in another post. 

But I don’t necessarily know where I’m headed. For example, right now, it’s a brisk 57 degrees outside, and where I was thinking I’d be living now has wind chills in the negative 50s.

I was telling my writing accountability partner this week that I hate fumbling around to figure things out (she hates it, too). That’s what I’ve been doing since I left grad school. Going on five years of fumbling.

Doors open and close without warning. People appear and disappear. We grow older and hopefully wiser. And that’s (part of) life.

And I know that wherever I’m trying to get to, as soon as I “arrive”, another journey of fumbling will begin. My hope is that it won’t be as hard as living with an inconsistent income and that better people stick around for that journey.

So in between here and there, it’s just more reminders to myself to hang in there, to see the good, to find the silver linings when I can, and to be kind to myself when it’s too painful to smile or see anything redemptive of a FUBAR situation.

I can finally see how my resilience is a blessing. I can see how I’m rebounding more quickly from failures and setbacks. I’m already starting to forget what happened last night and soon, I’ll even start seeking failure and rejection out as learning experiences and ways to move forward. That takes some inner strength and wholeness that I haven’t really had before, but it’s being developed.

My hope for you is that you journey well and have the best traveling companions, that you don’t grow weary when you journey alone or come upon obstacles, and that you become stronger and more whole with each step you take.

Godspeed.

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true success

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

I had my weekly coaching session with my business coach yesterday, and it was a humbling experience because I felt like I had run out of runway to take my life in the direction that I have wanted to for so long.

My writing business has taken a while to recover from losing an anchor client back in April. So for going on five months now, I’ve been trying my best to get a new one. Technically, this anchor client would be my coach: we barter writing services for coaching services.

But I have tunnel vision–no, myopia, about this goal.

And that’s a typical Capricorn–get that money!

But I am miserable.

And it’s not just because of limited funds. It’s that life has become about this one thing, and the rest of me is resisting–and rightfully so.

Last week, my coach and I talked about scheduling my time better (something that came up around this time last year). And I didn’t do anything about it last week because somehow time got away from me. 🙄

I dealt with the pressure of time pretty well last year. I was having these low-key panic attacks over writing, waiting until the last minute to get things done. I sought out an astrologer, we worked on those issues, and then I had more structure.

But then I slowly got out of the habit of having structured time to do the things I want and need to do.

Being so driven for one thing has made me dull. What am I outside of this one goal, outside of what is, or isn’t in my bank account?

I’ve quoted Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club before, but this quote really reminds me of what I am.

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

This individuation from old coping mechanisms–chiefly delaying gratification to the point that I never get any when tasks are done–it’s painful, but it’s also one that makes me laugh because this is when I feel like the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

Coping mechanisms work until they don’t. I’m not sure how long I’ve been running on fumes, but I’ve reached the point that effort alone isn’t enough. Working hard isn’t getting me anywhere because I feel terrible and self-defeated about it. It’s an inescapable ouroboros of misery, a leminscate of terror.

When I reach out to people about business opportunities, it almost feels like I am tossing coins in a fountain, just wishing for something to come back. But I’m putting in much more effort and intention in every email and contact request I make.

Why can’t I give myself any credit for that skillful effort?

Sure, I can rewind back to how my parents were hypercritical of me, how they rarely gave me praise for any good I did. Their brittle view of their little girl and firstborn was one that already interfaced with my unyielding, intense, and, at times, cruel way I looked at myself.

Yet my “inner mean girl” never seems to be hurling insults and epithets at me–well, not that often. It’s more that she withholds any credit, any praise, any celebration of success. If I do celebrate, it seems stupid because it’s not the big win. That’s all that matters to me.

And what an empty life that is. It’s not self-discipline. It’s self-deprivation.

No carrots, just sticks.

Business is actually picking up, but I am acting like I’m going to go through my own personal recession again. The fear keeps me on this treadmill of terror. I keep running, running, running…and getting nowhere. I’m lost in a labyrinth of longing and loss.

I’m just tired, sweaty, and sore–and for all the wrong reasons.

And to my credit–having a successful business isn’t for some deep personal reason. I’m still doing this because there aren’t any other options right now. This is it. This is about survival. I am committed, whether I want to be or not–but I want to be.

What’s interesting about all this, too–this is all happening in the background. It’s subliminal messaging I’ve given myself probably for my whole life. It worked for a while, being this driven and merciless to myself.

But not anymore.

My coach asked me what success looks like–without this big win that I’m obsessed with.

It was laughable but ultimately sad because I didn’t think I was that successful.

My coach pressed back with questions: well, what about finishing your client work on time? What about following up on emails from prospective clients? How many people did you reach out to last week?

The problem is a lot of what I do just ends up disappearing into the ether of time. I don’t keep track. They are just tasks or events that occur, and I move onto the next.

I can only seem to congratulate myself for tough wins, like when I finished this project over the weekend that seemed to be mired in doubt and confusion from the client. So I just decided to finish it and hope for the best.

The client accepted the work and gave me a 5-star review. And here’s the GIF I used to celebrate:

I celebrated that win on Twitter today, but according to my coach, I should be celebrating much more often.

And back to how I grew up–we didn’t really celebrate much of anything, not even my birthday after a while.

But I am tired of feeling like life is a slog when it comes to my everyday life. If life is about the journey, not the destination, then it’s time to start acting like that. It’s time to start embracing the bulk of my life.

So my homework for this week is to schedule my time so I can start doing more of the other things I love–like tarot and astrology professional development, writing professional development, and journal about my work day.

Astrologically, I realized today that there’s a lot of restructuring (Saturn) and healing (Chiron) that has been going on in my life for the past few months. It’s uncomfortable, painful, and even embarrassing sometimes.

A lot of old hurts and wounds are being drawn to the surface for healing. But the timing isn’t quite right yet. But that’s OK. Healing is still in progress.

What’s funny is that so many times as I’ve been working to get to a place of OK to better, I always think–now the real healing is going to begin. I’ve finally arrived! But there are always layers, layers which have served as protection for a battered and weary heart.

The healing journey is never-ending, but it does get easier, because eventually there are less layers, even if we accumulate new hurts and wounds along the way. And also–we accumulate wisdom and other therapeutic tools to keep us safe and to help us heal more quickly.

This time, I’ll say again that this seems like I’m in the inner chambers of all that I’ve endured and what’s befallen me…and letting the weight of all the years just all fall off of me. I wish it was some dramatic reveal, like a slinky evening gown that I could shrug off.

And that’s because I’m impatient. And rightfully so. It’s been a constricting time–not only by circumstances, but my own almost grandiose ambitions and expectations I have for myself.

I hate to glorify suffering, but I can at least see some semblance of sanity woven through the last six years of my life. It’s like what I said last time, how my heart has expanded with empathy. I feel so much more connected to my fellow human beings because I’ve been so much closer to my dusty existence than the loftier life of the mind.

I didn’t have to choose that empathy, though. And I didn’t all the time. Sometimes I chose bitterness and entitlement–and sometimes I felt those choices were unavoidable and inevitable. Even still–choice or no choice–I want to choose differently now.

And failing over and over, but still rebounding and trying again after each failure–sure, that’s part of my journey as a double Capricorn, trudging up and sometimes falling down the mountain. But so is triumph, the mountaintop view.

That brings me back to what I believe success is. It’s not the just the glittery, glorious triumphs, the accolades, the praise and the parades.

It’s the gritty rebound.

It’s picking yourself up out of the mud and trying again. It’s letting people help you get up again. It’s helping others get up and keep going.

So it brings tears to my eyes to admit this to myself for the first time: my time in Florida has been extremely successful, that my life is a glittering, glorious success.

It’s time to feel good, and proud, about that.

—

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the weight of being too flexible

I’m trying to play catch-up here, from the three posts I didn’t write from July 22nd to August 5th.

This is post #3.

It has been a time.

Like I said in a recent post, a lot of it was working. And I wrote about one particular thing that’s still unfolding in my life for my $10+/month patrons on Patreon. Almost 5000 words of personal examination which may be mixed with copious amounts of sunny-day optimism.

Besides learning that I am really a human after all, I’ve been learning even more (always more) about healthy boundaries and what I tolerate from others.

And the two are related.

I was talking to a friend today about how having gone through a lot, my limits of compassion are wide–but maybe a little too wide. And that can cause me to overextend myself, to start taking responsibility for things that aren’t mine (to take care of).

This is definitely #CapricornProblems and this tweet from astrologer Annabel Gat sums up the dynamic I have within myself.

a capricorn will encourage boundaries or steamroll over them

— Annabel Gat (@annabelgat_) August 9, 2018

Sometimes, I’m steamrolling over my own boundaries.

One thing I’m learning is that although I can see through most bullshit, it’s necessarily my job to clean it up. At best, I should point it out. But that’s it.

There’s a bit of a fear as I start to really keep these boundaries and shed this extra weight of other people’s problems and issues that rejection will happen.

It’s certain to happen. It’s happened before.

There’s a certain situation that I’m going to probably get some major clarity on by the end of the weekend that’s in this realm of dividing my stuff and theirs. And what pains me is that it’s the repetition of a particularly painful pattern with people that I have to stop–where I keep taking more of my fair share of responsibility to make a relationship work or happen at all.

And people keep letting me take their fair share. But I am tired.

What’s been hiding out and fueling this pattern is a fear of being alone…but also a fear of being really seen–and then, rejected.

Sometimes, I feel like my perceptive gifts end up backfiring on me.

Seeing through to who someone is so easily doesn’t mean they can see themselves in that same way. Seeing through situations and being able to solve them doesn’t mean it’s my job to solve them.

And one way I have to keep learning these is in relationships, of all sorts. In all my 40+ years, I’m surprised at how much more I have to learn.

How do I deal with this tension of perceiving, my willingness, and my caring?

You’d think after living with this guy and giving him one too many chances, I would have learned.

But I love people. And I love the human potential. I love when lives are transformed and when I’ve been the catalyst of those changes. And I love when people have sparked positive change in my life–well, most of the time.

If I really love people, though…then I have to also love those immaterial barriers that keep us separate–our free wills, specifically.

Lately, I’ve been learning how pedantic and know-it-all I come across sometimes. Meanwhile, I see myself just sharing some information.

🤦🏾‍♀️

What’s cool though is that all the grace and compassion I give to others freely, I can give to myself. I’m starting to accepting things like that I talk too long to people I care about. I told my friend today that I gorge on people like I’m some emotional zombie. 🧟‍♀️

But there’s still that fear…and it’s a common one. I’m “not enough” or I’m “too much” for people. So then I will mitigate risks. I’ll meet people more than halfway.

It’s like how I have hypermobile joints, which used to make me look like a circus freak because I used to be able to take my arms and pull them all the away around my back.

But hypermobile joints makes one more susceptible to strains and sprains. And I’ve been in physical therapy way too many times for my shoulder, knee, and ankle.

So sometimes, you can be too flexible.

I was just making a joke on Twitter about how fixed zodiac signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius) are hard to convince and are hard-headed in general. And I don’t really have much of that energy in my own natal chart.

Maybe there’s something I can learn from that naturally inflexible?

Even me writing about this semi-publicly is strange, about the secret people pleaser who adores humanity. I naturally have an all-business, misanthropic exterior, so to let my mushy homebody personality out is bewildering.

But here she is, like some lost, lovesick puppy! 🐶

I’m too old for this shit, for hiding parts of myself…

They say as you age that you start to care less about what people think. Here’s something that Death Cab for Cutie’s frontman, Ben Gibbard, who is about to turn 42 on Saturday, said about aging in this Noisey interview:

At that point in my life I was probably focusing more on the people who didn’t like me than the people who did like me, which is all part of being in your 20s, right? There’s that saying: You spend your 20s thinking everybody’s talking about you, you spend your 30s wondering why nobody’s talking about you, and you realize in your 40s that no one was ever talking about you. So for me now, I realize how super-sensitive I was that people didn’t like me. Like, “Oh, Pitchfork doesn’t like me, a weekly said something mean about me.” Looking back on it now, who fucking cares?

So, what if I started to consciously care less about rejection? It’s hard because self-acceptance does not occur in a vacuum. Gibbard went on to say that he focuses on those who bring positivity in his life, and I’ve been leaning towards that golden path lately–sheerly and merely out of necessity.

Part of the process of finding who is on your team is finding who is not on your team. To fully accept that no matter how I contort myself, I cannot please everyone.

Everyone can’t be on my team.

And this is all conventional wisdom, but when it starts to crop up in your everyday life, it starts to look like it’s not all that obvious–it’s not common sense.

It could be the Capricorn nature of conquering everything. But people aren’t meant to be conquered. D’oh!

So out of weariness, I am just trying to find out who is on my team.

So maybe, during Leo season,  I can let the same sunshine that falls on other people fall on me. Maybe I don’t have to cower in the darkness of my fallibility. Maybe I can be bolder and stand up for what I really believe in–maybe with fear, but with bravery and courage.

It’s really the only way to find who is truly for me.

P.S. A great parting thought about letting people do their own healing work from the IG account @mindfulmft: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmR74JqAe6S/?taken-by=mindfulmft

—

If you liked what you’ve read, I’d love your support as a patron on Patreon. Tiers starts at just $1/month. I blog about things that I don’t post here.

If you want to give a one-time gift or monthly gift, hit me up on Paypal.

Thanks for your support!  💘

human after all

Source: Revolutionary Self-Care

Well, it’s been a minute.

I owe you, and me, three blog posts.

Today, I finished writing this fantastically long post for my $10+/month patrons on Patreon. It took days, throwing away drafts, revising–what I call real writing. So I’m glad. It’s about some really good things that have happened to me last month, which explains some of my absence.

What I can say about that is holding space for something that may or may never happen is never as good as letting go and opening up space for greater opportunities.

Unfortunately, you get the really bad things that have happened to me story. But there’s still a lot of growth, and it won’t be as down in the mouth as I have been historically.

And, for once, I will make this short.

Last month was really busy with a client doing work I used to do back in the day in my research days.

But since June, I had been consistently screwing up with data fidelity. I’m a recovering perfectionist, but this was becoming an expensive issue for my client and a perplexing situation for me.

I’m used to not only doing a good job–I’m used to excelling. I didn’t go through living in a hypercritical household with two narcissists as parents for nothing.

So when I kept trying to correct this problem, but getting the same result, I was in a state of insanity.

Admittedly, my client threw me in the deep end of their operation, and I thought I was swimming well, with some instruction, but not that much.

I thought I didn’t need it, and I didn’t even know what to ask to solve the problem.

As I started to sinking under continual screw-ups, including one that they didn’t catch for weeks, I realized that this wasn’t entirely my fault. And I’m used to taking on too much blame.

The client is super smart, the kind of smart that will skip over steps because they assume everyone knows what they know.

Last week, after I screwed up for umpteenth time, we had a terse conversation which I was still so confused why things were still a mess.

I was told that they would be in touch.

It took me two hours of my own time to figure out why things were a mess. It was something that would have taken less than 2 minutes to explain.

I told the client what I had discovered, apologized for the frustration, appreciated their patience and understanding.

I believe that phrase “I appreciate your patience and understanding” is what set them off, because it seemed like this wasn’t a big deal.

The ultimate consequences was hours and hours of work I did had to be redone (this was an error that my client didn’t catch after spending weeks with the data) and that I was constantly pinging people twice.

And that was spelled out in an email in reply to mine, 8 days ago, as if I didn’t know those things. That felt a bit insulting because I had spent the weekend before feeling terrible about the errors because of those very things listed.

I left the email laying there until last night. I knew I needed to sleep on it when I read it, because I felt like the client emotionally vomited all over me.

You’re to blame, you’re to blame, you’re to blame.

But I knew this wasn’t completely true.

I also knew I didn’t want to work with someone who couldn’t rightly see their own fault in the matter, that they were too busy to be bothered to look over my work, that they wanted me to take on more responsibility than I had been trained to take.

I talked to a friend about what to do, and he wisely advised me not to burn bridges–which I was ready to do.

He gently told me about how football (soccer) coaches will bring on some hotshot player for millions of dollars, but then he doesn’t perform. And then that player is sold to another team for less than what they had originally purchased.

I don’t think I’ve ever screwed up, knowingly or unknowingly, for so long and cost people time and money.

But it’s not unusual. It happens all the time, just like that football example. It just doesn’t happen to me–until this summer. First time for everything, right?

And I had been relying on that income to help as I grow my own writing business.

I then talked to my business coach who told me to not even address all the heated emotions.

She told me to offer a solution which I would be paid to create: a standard operation procedure manual (SOP) for what I had to do.

So going back and forth between my friend and my coach, I came up with a pithy email that was sent at midnight last night. I know it was read, but it hasn’t been responded to.

Whether I get a reply or not,  wheter the I know I did the right thing.

• I took responsibility for my part.
• I didn’t reply immediately with a blowtorch email.
• I consulted wise counsel.
• I offered a solution.

While writing this post, the client emailed their reply. They said thanks for the offer, they were trying to get a report out which has gone through some changes, but it doesn’t make sense to them at this point.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

iTried.

I haven’t worked with that client going on two weeks, and I feel a lot better. And more writing work has started to trickle in.

I feel supported and I feel at peace.

The growth of accepting when I’m wrong, but consistently wrong–it was such a huge, painful growth spurt for me.

And my identity as some perfect android shattered. I couldn’t get myself out of this mess that I had help in creating. I found the limits to my alleged perfection.

I became human last month. And I’m grateful.

I feel emboldened to ask even more questions than usual.

I feel freed, period. I am free to be fallible, to be imperfect, to not ace it at first try.

I’ve always been the reliable one, the smart one, the strong one, the resilient one.

But this summer, I became pretty ordinary. And the humility was so necessary.

Who can live under such pressure to perform flawlessly every day? I thought I thrived under pressure, but not sorta kinda set up to fail pressure.

At the very least, I learned that although I did gain some pleasure from doing work I used to do years ago, I’m much happier writing and reading astrology and tarot.

It was and is so great to have two people in my life support me, take the flamethrower out of my hands, and give me some options that didn’t involve tearing myself or my client down.

I don’t have to villainize myself into a complete failure. I can forgive myself instead.

So now, I think of my inner child who has gotten so much succor and strength from being “the one,” the star, the leader, the brain, the local Old Faithful. But now, she can finally find her rest and comfort in being her full and fallible self.

She doesn’t had to be it all and do it all for anyone, and especially for herself.

 

—

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squirm, squirm, squirm

It’s a long, cloudy, and tired Sunday.

It’s also, besides the creep’s punctuations of chronic smoker’s cough, a quiet afternoon.

This week, I’ll be taking a big leap faith that I’ve ever taken–and I’ll talk about what that is when I return. I’m not scared or apprehensive, but I’m not curious or hopeful.

I feel neutral and sober, tinged with a bit of swirling, ineffable disappointment (and I wish I could talk about that more openly. But I just at least wanted to mention and honor it).

This week, Uranus wraps up its seven-year-long transit in Aries, with all the upheaval and loss and discomfort that’s been brought to my home. And boy, am I glad. This sojourn into darkness has been transformative, but I’m not yet sure who I’ve become.

This uncertain, unpredictable planet moves into Taurus on Tuesday, moving into my sector of children, creativity, and romance. I am excited about that, but I also feel so tired.

Still, despite my soul’s exhaustion, I wanted to mark it with this long-awaited momentous occasion with an exploration into a possible new life.

And for right now, I don’t have much to lose, nor do I have all the answers. I just have months and months of signs, pointing me in an unlikely direction.

What’s strange about all this is how my faith in the Universe, and myself, has deepened through this strange season. There has been confirmation that this is the way to go.

I actually did a reading about this and was surprised by what I saw, mainly because it was so positive. I basically asked what was this week going to look like.

 

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This is from the Psychic Tarot app by John Holland.

Overall, that there are three Major Arcana cards means that this week is definitely significant.

The first card, Rejoice in Celebration, is traditionally known as the 3 of Cups. It’s the party with your friends card. I hope that will be happening. This card has been stalking me a little bit lately, and I’d love to have something to really celebrate, with friends.

The second card, Harmony, is traditionally known as The Lovers. I think that’s partly literal as the picture shows, partly harmony with everything, and partly about choices I need to make.

The third card, Wisdom, is traditionally known as The Hierophant. One of the things I’m exploring does have to do with higher education. But this could also be about finding my group of like-minded people (as the app suggests). I believe it’s a bit of both, overlapping.

The fourth card, New Beginnings, is traditionally known as The Fool. This is card, with the number 0 marks the beginning of the journey through the Major Arcana, which ends with card #21, The World.

I’ve seen The Fool come up a few times. The message here is pretty literal. I am searching for a new beginning, and the Universe is affirming this will happen.

Even if you’re familiar with tarot, the fifth card may be unfamiliar to you, the Heart Chakra. It’s unique to the Psychic Tarot, which has cards for all the chakras, from the red root chakra to the fuschia crown chakra.

This card reminds me that this journey will be lead by my heart. If you look at the first two cards, the color green is prominent. In the Harmony card, the hands pressed together are surrounded in a glowing green.

It seems that my heart will definitely get involved with people–known and unknown–in a really affirming, positive way this week. ETA: This tarot reading from Elizabeth Harper this week seems to echo the reading I did for myself.

Then why do I still feel so sad?

Because the distance between this reading and my current reality seems impossibly far and wide.

Enter my leap of faith (a phrase, which, by the way, stalked me for a while, too).

It could also be that today, in the final two days of this horrendously humiliating Uranus in Aries transit, I can finally cry about how hard it’s been.

There’s space to let the grief in and out.

Things right now are really bad, and that’s been a long-running theme–one I’ve become eneverated from.

It’s been strange, though. I have these moments where the awfulness of my life’s circumstances doesn’t drown me anymore. I can see myself apart from it all, not identified with my circumstances.

Even as I’m sad now, I can say that there’s still a bit of separation. I really am not my circumstances. And it’s taken a lot of work to get here, for me to be able to say that and believe it.

Yet sometimes, the absurdity of how bad things are really takes my breath away.

I still really can’t believe that I live with a racist, mentally ill, leathery bag of bones who makes my soul’s flesh crawl in disgust. And that it’s been over a year of this insanity, in my own home.

If I wasn’t so disgusted by this, I’d write it about it more, because it’s a really fucked up story, one that could only happen because people enable this terrible person.

I have no idea how I’ve made it here and have kept my sanity…except I’ve been in absurdly awful places before. Yet I only started going to therapy this past February because I knew I needed to leave, that this place wasn’t going to get better.

But really, I cannot wait to never see this house or that person ever again. Yet sometimes, it feels like I will never leave…

Still, my resilience astounds and frustrates me.

I ask myself and the Universe those really useless, unanswerable questions: What have I done to deserve this? Why is this happening, still? What am I doing wrong? 

And as that reading shows, I’m not doing anything wrong. I can show you reading after reading, from me and from others, which show a way out of this goddamn mess.

Still, as I squirm in this straitjacket of a chrysalis, as I feel exhausted from pushing out this new life (just one more good push, love–you can do it…)…well, that’s it, really.

I have to keep going.

Yet today, it feels good to stop for a little bit, to rest, to have some self-compassion for myself, to let myself cry over the rejection, the silence, the frustration, the abuse, the neglect, the confusion, the going without, the isolation, the drudgery.

The not-getting-my-way.

There’s no point in appearing to be strong–and maybe there never really was.

It’s been peculiar this year, to find this newer me emerging: to have a deeper faith that this stretch of my life’s journey wasn’t a waste, to be lead by unrelenting signs, to feel my heart break more deeply without having it break me completely.

It’s strange to be able to hold all these disparate emotions and experiences, and know, really know, that it all belongs. I didn’t think this was ever possible. It’s a new level of strength and maturity that I’m so grateful for.

This Tuesday, there will be a new moon in Taurus. The moon is exalted, or the guest of honor, in Taurus. So this new moon, along with Uranus in Taurus, will be a very potent new moon, especially for making dreams and desires into physical reality. Taurus is an earth sign, very sensual, all about the five senses.

What I’ll be doing this week will be planting seeds for a new beginning and a new life.

Soon, I’ll rise from these ashes, reborn. Until then, I will mourn what never was, what could have been, and what used to be…so I can make way for the spark of life, burgeoning inside of me, waiting to be released.

—

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