Recorded 11.12.2024. As stated in my post about recording no. 1, this audio also has a video to accompany it if you’d prefer to see my face. Watch or listen, whatever brings you joy.
This one is my favorite. I’m still decoding its magic in all honesty. Editing the audio and cutting the video was healing for me. There’s something about seeds you can eat.
This is also the last audio pre my Welcome Back post. The period is like a quilt I’m slowly stitching together.
Thanks for listening/watching <3
Transcript
Went to bed at midnight because I was watching James Baldwin videos, particularly the one with him in Nikki Giovanni, which is interesting. You should watch it if you ever get the inkling too. I was trying to get to bed at, like, 11 latest, but I was up until midnight doing that. Oh, because I was just so in it. I was just crocheting and watching that.
And then I woke up early this morning, earlier than I thought I was going to, but early. And then I wrote. I wrote for, like, a bit like, hour and a half for, like, 2,000 words just going for it. I haven't been writing as consistently as I used to since I started working. I used to write, (moving my stuff around,I used to write, like, every day for at least an hour or two, usually after my morning pages. So imagine 3 pages of long-form handwriting, whatever. And then after that, I'd get my laptop, and then I would start writing. I would start doing my real writing for the day. But the way I was able to do this was because I would write pretty much the same way that I was writing in my morning pages.
Morning pages are free association writing. Good for the brain. I highly recommend trying it. Look into it. I'm not gonna explain it to you.
It's very good for the psyche because I think it allows you to let yourself breathe in this very… The space that's dedicated to just letting yourself breathe in a way that I think we're not always the best about letting ourselves do. And it's very helpful. It's helpful for everyone, but especially if you're a creative, which everyone is to some degree. But, like, if, like, creating this thing that you do, like, you've you're dedicating your life to this stuff. You should be doing morning pages, to be quite honest with you.
But I used to do that, and then I do my writing for the day. And my writing would range from being a couple pages of similar free association style to me writing, like, 6, 7 pages of stuff similar to this morning, depending on the day. I'd have bangers. I'd have things that weren't bangers. And then, eventually, when I started Substack, I would pick my favorite pieces from that week, and I would share those on my Substack.
Hence, the Art of First Drafts. I have not done this really since, like, April, May, but especially not since July. It's hard. It's not an easy practice to write every day in that way, especially because you're really putting yourself in a very particular mindset that can be hard to, like, move in and out of to then go out the rest of your day.
Right now, I need to hop into editing, and I'm struggling because when you do this, you are excavating some stuff within yourself, and you're also essentially channeling. And even if you're not woo woo like that, like, you still are a part of that process. It's tricky, and I was writing about the stuff that I've been talking about a little bit here as well, where I've been feeling—
So much stuff to do. I'm throwing out these squash seeds. I was gonna roast them, but I just don't care. I don't care to, or maybe well, let's see if they're still good-ish. Maybe I'll try. Yeah. They look a little they look a little off. I'm also intrigued by the idea of roasting them.
Let me trust my gut. Okay. I'm gonna throw them away. Oh, I feel so bad, though. You know?
I feel… It's funny. You don't feel bad when you throw away, like, bell pepper seeds, but for some reason, it's like I feel like I'm depriving myself of an experience that could help me, like, grow or something. But even sitting in the fridge in a container for, like, a week. If I won't cook them… Yeah. Let me cook them.
Yeah. I'm not even gonna pull up instructions. We're just gonna pray. We're gonna pray that I figure this one out. Yeah.
I need to order more tinfoil. Menial stuff. This morning, I was writing about what I've been talking about. I mean, I realized yesterday, which just feels so silly, and I still haven't been able to articulate in my own brain because it feels like too much. But I feel like I may have realized yesterday that, like, I may be traumatized, like, genuinely and not in, like, this really passive way.
And I think I've struggled with it. You know why? It's cause I had a conversation with one of my friends years ago. Isn't that funny how that works? I had a conversation with one of my friends years ago.
We were talking about trauma, and the friend that I was talking to objectively has experienced a lot of trauma in their life, indisputably so. And when we talk about trauma, in Western psychology at least, we'll often talk about the idea of big T, little T trauma. Big T trauma tends to be trauma that, the general basis is that your life is threatened in some way or your safety is threatened in some way. So things like assault, murder, witnessing such traumas, and things like that, being in a war zone, like, these really extreme situations where, like I said, your life is being threatened in some way, which is why childhood trauma is tricky, I think. Because kids, in their understanding of what is a threat and what isn't a threat is warped because you're a child, you know?
Think about what's considered the end of the world for a kid. The end of the world for a kid could be things that range from not getting to go to, like, Disneyland or something to getting beat, you know. And it's just it's not consistent is what I mean. And I feel like, it's something that when I had that conversation with my friend all those years ago, in my head, it was like, well, okay. I probably have not experienced trauma then because I can definitively count on one hand the amount of times that I felt like I was going to die.
And it made big sense that I would have felt like I was going to die. There have been other instances where I felt that way, and it was the more anxiety-ridden, irrational version of that, but very few instances where the trauma makes sense. When we look at the idea of trauma though, in terms of a less non or a more non Western lens, or even looking at trauma in terms of living under capitalism, living under white supremacy, and that kind of thing. I feel like there's almost a trauma that's inherent to being a marginalized person in the society that we live in, that then gets mirrored in the trauma that we experience interpersonally and in our own lives. And that's something I've been reading about or listening to.
I've been in my audiobook era, my self-help audiobook era. I've been reading about that in Who Is Wellness For? this week. Since post election and me having to call out at work, because I look so not mentally well, and so on and so forth. And that's essentially what the thesis of Who Is Wellness For? is for. Is the idea of, a, wellness has been co-opted by capitalism and then distorted to fit the goals of capitalism.
And then, 2—again, who is wellness actually for? Is it addressing the people that need it most? Which is people who are marginalized under our system.
Resting on the tinfoil. So I take these seeds. It's tricky. It's a tricky, tricky thing. I guess I've never in the same way that when I was also younger in, like, high school and whatnot, doing things like diversity council, which was a group that was started at my school to address issues we were having with not even, like, diversity in the school. I actually went to a surprisingly diverse high school for Kansas. Like, there were more people of color at my high school than at my college in Los Angeles, like, statistically speaking.
I still find hilarious, but, you're hearing the plopping of the seeds. Feels like a metaphor. Yeah. I was doing diversity council in high school, and whenever we would, like, go to schools or do panels talking about racism and our experiences with racism and whatnot. I always felt really weird about it because, in my head, I hadn't really experienced racism in the classical sense of, just overt, discrimination and abuse.
But I definitely had in a more microaggressive sense because I had been in things like gifted programs growing up. And I also didn't like, I didn't grow up around a lot of black kids, let alone other black girls. I think there was, like, one I can count, like, on my hand how many how many black girls I had in my classes growing up. Like, let alone black girls that look like me or that I felt like I could relate to or you know? And then also TV, and so I didn't really process my own isolation.
I internalized my isolation as the result of me being who I am, and that happened to be why it was so hard to be a kid in that space and not fully acknowledging the reality of what it probably was like or how it was affecting me being the only, like, black girl in a lot of my classes and how even, like, the reprieve of having, like, a black teacher for, like, a semester or even one other black student or, like, one of my friends that I am still, like, in contact with from high school. But then we were, I think, yeah, the only 2 black girls in our accelerated learning program, whatever you wanna call it. Things like that. Small, small things like that that you don't process how they probably are affecting you. And also being a neurodivergent as well.
It's like, Jesus Christ, dude. You know? It's so much. It's so much. And I never considered that all of that plus the more classical form we think of was trauma may have been traumatizing, may have been traumatizing and felt isolating and may have had a negative effect on how I carry myself through the world now, to the point that I'm currently feeling.
Like, the consequences of it, the amount of, like, health issues that I've had over the past few years going through school and having to navigate, like, the amount of times I've had, like, some sort of mental break that's, like, taking me out or just, like my ability to handle stress now is so fucked. Like like, I can handle, like, I can handle life-threatening situation. I can handle s**t getting real real, you know, s**t getting scary, but I can't handle small stresses very well. It takes so it takes the same amount of energy out of me because my brain is so fucked in processing that stuff and I haven't really acknowledged that well. And I don't know why I'm now picking up on that now with the election and things and whatnot.
And I wonder if part of it was feeling that isolated feeling again of, like, I don't even know how to describe it. You know? It makes me feel crazy. It makes me feel, like, gaslit a little bit. But I'm now kind of in a space where I think I have to prioritize healing myself.
And in that process, it may look like working with people and organizing in the sense of helping people who are organizing, but I don't feel like I have the capacity to be active in those spaces right now. And that's, a lot to sit with at once. The fact that it kinda came up all in one big swoop. And the hope is that you can, like, get it all done in one big swoop and get over it. And then it's done, it's over.
You can go back to your normal life. But the issue is that my normal life is probably also killing me. So I need to figure out what I gotta change bit by bit by bit by bit, and it could take the rest of my life to figure this out. I'm also in my 12th house here right now, if you're familiar with astrology. If you're not, we have profection years according to astrology.
Everyone has a birth chart. When we think about birth charts, we often think of our sun sign. Now people know about their moon sign, their rising sign. But in our birth chart, we also have houses. We have all the signs in our birth chart because of this because you will get all the signs in your houses.
And the sign, depending on what house it's in, will characterize the house and how it plays out in your life. And then where your planets are in your chart, which houses they're in and whatnot, will kinda tell you how these planets will express themselves most often. For example, I have my Venus in my 10th house of Taurus. So my 10th house, which is related to public image, career, purpose, that kind of thing, is being expressed in a very Tauran way. Grounded, Earth energy, creativity.
Taurus is under Venus or ruled by Venus as well, so there's a sense of, groundedness, things feeling a bit more acclimated. There's not as much tension versus me having my Saturn and my Jupiter in my 11th house. There's a back and forth here. Saturn is restricted. Jupiter is expansive. And Gemini that likes to move very quickly, but then is forced to slow down. And we're talking about community as well. So everyone has all these houses, and then our profection years mirror these houses. They may tell us which which it they tell us which of the house themes are going to be emphasized during our year, and they go in moments of 12.
I'm 23. I'm in my 12th house perfection here because it starts as soon as you're born. So you do your year 0, you end at 1. Now you're in your 2nd house perfection year. Does that make sense? So as I'm moving towards 24, I'm experiencing my 12th house perfection year. And 12th house is the unseen space. It's related to Pisces because the houses have the signs that they're natural in. So Aries is first, Pisces is last. So if you wanna understand what the houses represent, knowing your signs will help you. Tenth house naturally is in Capricorn. Capricorns are diligent workers. That's why it's associated with career and purpose. And that outward dimension whatnot and hard work because Saturn: restriction, discipline, and so on.
This is really calming. I think I needed to do this. I'm still putting down these seeds if you can't hear it. There's so many of them. This reminds me of pomegranate seeds a little bit. I love cutting pomegranate seeds just because I feel like it's such a nice practice in patience and mindfulness. Although the last pomegranate I cut up was so easy and fresh. It was honestly quite nice to just get to the point because I cut it correctly, but this is also similar. Yes. Profection. Yes. I'm in my 12th house profection year.
The hidden, the unseen, the intuitive, and I'm also a 12th house Cancer because that's where my Cancer placements are. My sun and my moon are in the 12th house, which sometimes makes it to where it's hard to feel known because so much of you is unseen. It can feel harder to connect with people as well. You're very much in, again, that very, like, woo woo intuitive, esoteric space, but it's very moon energy. The unconscious, the subconscious coming up is emphasized here. And I remember a few months ago as this year was starting, I was like, this feels so 11th house-y still. It's like the thieves around community in relation to community, that kind of thing. You know? Relation to the world around you, and that kinda thing. And then the vibe shifted, and now I'm in it.
And I'm like, “Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness.” And, again, this happens to us, like, every 12 years. So, theoretically, when I was 11, I was experiencing something similar. I don't remember what it was like being 11.
I just remember, going into middle school wasn't the most fun time for me, and that's about all I remember about being 11. It's just a lot. It's a lot to move with. And I have therapy today. I'm gonna have to explain everything. And I was talking to my roommate about that yesterday about how annoying it is to have to explain yourself to a therapist even though that's, like, the whole point of therapy. But yeah. So many seeds. It reaps so much. There's something there's a metaphor in here. I'm telling you.
I love a bread and fish moment. I often ask for that. It's one of my favorite prayers is a bread and fish moment. You'll never cease to be surprised when you ask for abundance to be showed to you, in that way. It's a very beautiful exercise in trust and opening, allowing the simple to be made. The seeds are in the tray. I'm gonna take a picture so you can see it.
They’re good. They’re yummy!
Thanks for reading Alive & Fragile! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe