As part of an experiment, I wanted to share a series of one-card readings and make a reinterpretation of the card to match. First up is Queen of Cups, who came out alongside the Tower. I was a little confused at first, but it became clear as I did the initial reading why she wanted the “mask off” energy emphasized. She was so serious that I didn’t record the first version of the reading, which I didn’t realize until I went to hit stop.

This audio is the second version, equally as honest, and coincidentally catches me actively integrating the lesson in real time.

The next morning, after re-reading Savannah Brown’s essay “on astral projection” via Patreon, I found a comment recommending Letting Go by David R. Hawkins. Within the first chapter, I realized that the practice Hawkins was outlining could be distilled into exactly what I say in this reading. I’ll report back on how I enjoy the book, of course.

I share this to say that this message moved quickly to find its way to you. I made all the graphics in less than a day, which is rare. You’re getting this post less than two days after I had the initial idea for “daily” pulls. I’m not surprised because it is an idea we need to return to, especially during an intense week like this one. I’m fully aware of the mirroring Scorpio energy of our queen and the Monday full moon (who’s still taking casualties).

I hope you feel held by this realization like I have. If you’re listening to this, I sense it found you exactly when it needed to. It even came in a bite-sized 7 minutes (the original was half an hour)!

“She's not interested in your games, your stories, your lies and beliefs around what your feelings mean. She just wants your feelings. She wants to sit with them. She wants to hold them. She just wants to hear you. That is what the Queen of Cups is about. […]

Having an emotion doesn't make you automatically honest. But allowing yourself to feel an emotion is the most honest thing you can do for yourself. To sit with an emotion for all it is — sit with a feeling of frustration or awe, resolution, or expansion, or tightness, or whatever — for what it is,[and] it not be disturbed by these ideas around it is revolutionary. […]

She wants your mess. She wants your snot, your tears, your core. She wants it all. She wants your depravity. She wants it. She wants your elation, your hyper, your hyper hyper-feeling. She wants your hyperness. She wants you to open up and be free with her. Freedom with her is feeling without filter, no performance, no dimming of the self, none of that nonsense. You’re just going to feel in whatever way it comes up. You'll say stuff and you'll do stuff and it is what it is and she's just gonna hold it with you and she's gonna say “Okay, okay.” You're crying and you don't know why? “Okay.” How often do you need to hear from someone that it is okay to just be?”

I hope you like it, because I definitely want to do this again. If you’d like the transcript, let me know and I’ll update the post.

Thanks for reading Alive & Fragile! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Circa 11.27.24

You know when you call for an answerit leaves wet prints outside your door.Shoes soaked with the ocean,crawling through riptides of What if,Maybe tomorrow,Better left to someone else.

In its haze of fatigue,back slouched against the good couch,we sigh in unison at its arrival:11:59.Just before the pumpkin returns.Reality in the shape of fall squash.

The sun rises quickly as we slumber together.Arms and legs tangled,nerves swimming with possibilities.The answer brushes my hair,whispers sweet somethingsuntil the sun drags me awaketo wait for more answers to come.

My current definition of grief has changed. It is no longer only mourning loss. It’s not about purging or metamorphic growing pains. Grief announces the presence of difference. Grief comes after the change arrives. Sometimes you grieve what you have gained: burdens and ideas of the world that do not belong to you, the beautiful home you thought you wanted, the freedom you had promised your younger self you’d take no matter the cost.

Grief is making a bed to lie in. Sometimes it is made for us, in fact often so, by time and circumstance. Grief is the only response to the absurdity of evolution. The way life ebbs and flows with little to no rhythm.

As I was putting this series together, I unintentionally completed my grieving ritual. I listened to old ideas run stale, cut the fat that no longer belonged to me. Only two of the six audios I originally edited made it to your ears. I was a little ashamed of my lack of follow-through until I accepted that this was a part of the process. You have to let things fall away when you create. Grief is essential to make anything because change must happen in creation. You must love the initial seeds and accept that some may never see themselves bloom.

I say all this knowing that Grief, big and small, feels like this foreboding force threatening to drag you underneath water as some sick retribution for your past life sins. Unfortunately, Grief is simply evidence of a change. It's our attachment to what was being felt fully, and there’s no shame in the various ways it will find us — death, heartbreak, dissonance, existential dread, and many, many other forms.

I hope this small series has helped you. I hope you’ll come and meet me on the other side because there is so much more waiting for you.

Thanks for reading Alive & Fragile! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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.

Recorded 10.29.2024, about a week or two before I wrote Welcome Back. I decided on top of the edited audio log, I would edit a vlog style video to go with it. You can watch or listen, it makes little difference to me. I wanted to capture the feeling I get whenever I watch and listen to vlogs.

This is the first video I’ve made in awhile that feels like an accurate portrayal of me and my life at the moment, or at least a moment in time.

Consider this a concept overture, canvas priming, other poetic ways of saying overview.

Thanks for listening/watching <3

Transcript:

Side note. I'm putting away the dishes, so there'll be a bit of clinging.

I've been thinking a lot about intention, and I've been thinking so much about f*****g everything, dude. It's becoming, like, unbearable how much I'm thinking all the time. And sometimes I'll have days where I kind of just break down, and by sometimes I mean every other day at this point. And I'm trying to accept that I'm kind of in a flux period.

For context, I'm not a crier. I'm not really a crier. I'm also not someone that I consider to be a very emotional person. I'm not like a robot or anything. I got over that era ages ago, but I definitely… I just realized what I just said, and it doesn't really make sense without context, but you're not getting any. But I also kind of am still someone who intellectualizes how I'm feeling. But I've also worked quite hard over the past year to stop doing that because it became so detrimental to me that I have started to have, like, a lot of physical symptoms of what happens when you pent up so much stuff. So I highly recommend not doing that unless you wanna have, like, unexplained stomach issues, issues with muscle tension, and all sorts of fun stuff that, like, isn't really easy to figure out and cure easily over time. Just take care of your brain.

And one of the best ways you can take care of your brain is just letting things out and whatnot. But the thing with me is that I hate that s**t so much. I hate it so, so, so, so much. It drives me crazy. So I'm kind of left in an impasse at the moment where there's a lot of things I want to change and do, but I also feel very stuck. But I also am so hyper-aware of every single word or thought coming out of me because I'm so overly aware of how powerful all of them are. And I'm someone who has gotten really good at training my brain to look at life a particular way because I'm someone who has struggled with that a lot in the past, with not having a lot of control over how I'm perceiving the world around me. That being said, it makes it hard to string thoughts together when you are someone who is too good at stringing your thoughts together, if that makes a lot of sense. Like, I've become someone who's very good at creating a narrative, which makes sense. I'm a writer.

It's what I do, ideally and eventually for a living. But right now, I can't really be the full author of my own story or at least not in the conscious way that I'm used to. I have a lot of subconscious processes that are at play right now, and I've been wanting to document them because that is the kind of artistic work I tend to do. If you look back, and I'd suggest that you don't. But if you look back at years years of my work that I have released publicly through blogs and podcast episodes and visuals and, honestly, music, if you're very astute and good at researching.

You'll notice that a lot of my work centers around kind of this process of existential inquiry and what I call bloodletting, which is my funny way of explaining the process of just letting all the feelings pour out in a way that almost feels nonsensical, but then rings very true and accurate. A lot of my more recent poetic work is like this. Right now, I can't do either of those because bloodletting, again, my term for it, is so much, and there's almost too much blood right now for me to be gushing in a way that I'm comfortable with. Because even when I am very open and honest with how I'm feeling, it's in a way that's still comfortable for me because I understand it, and I can curate the lens that's being put through. And, again, you create a very specific narrative around stuff in yourself and etcetera, etcetera.

Inversely, I can't existential scavenge with you because I don't know what's going on. But I'm so intrigued by what's happening, and I find it deeply fascinating that I wanna document it. And I've been struggling to figure out how. So this is another pursuit. I've been trying to figure out the best way to document how I've been feeling and what I've been experiencing, all the deep sense of frustration and confusion that's kind of sitting in my body all the time at the moment.

I have a feeling today is I'm gonna cry again. And if not today, probably tomorrow. I can hear it in my voice, and I can feel it in my eyes and in my body, just grief. There's this perpetual sense of grief, and I kinda feel like an open wound, and I also feel like a really gnarly scab. I feel like a hard shell, and I feel just so soft, and it's too much antithesis in one space.

Sometimes I sit in moments like these, and it genuinely feels like my life isn't real or that I am not myself. The terms into modern psychology for this are depersonalization and derealization.

(I'm sipping tea if you are interested in the clinking. It's a blend of herbs we had gotten for what was it? End of summer. We had an end of summer dinner party, and we had gotten herbs to smoke for it. It was very fun, and the tea is very good.)

But as I was saying, in modern psychology, the terms for this feeling are depersonalization, derealization, all under this umbrella of disassociation or dissociation, which I struggled with habitually for years now. But this feels very different than the dissociation that I'm used to because usually dissociation, I've come to understand, is my brain's way of protecting me from stress by kind of putting me in the space where I have to go autopilot, where as right now, it kind of just feels so deeply distressing. Like, I'm stuck in this box that is my life, and I can't break out of it.

And I also have to do self determination things of taking purposeful action and making purposeful changes or sticking to purposeful routines or values or whatever to where it feels simultaneously like nothing matters or holds real value that I'm giving it, and also everything matters and holds all the value. And I don't know how to hold both of these truths simultaneously. Again, antithesis. So much antithesis all bound into one perpetual feeling. And I imagine that you'll only get to hear maybe half a quarter of what this was.

And it probably won't be very long, but, I kind of need this. A lot of my art ends up coming back to when I need to do it, which is so funny because I was thinking the other day about the audience and performance, saying yesterday about this, in the line. And the best performances really only come out of not caring about your audience, which is so ironic. Antithesis. And right now, I'm kind of in in this place where I feel like someone needs to hear this.

And I feel like that person might just be me. I need to hear it, and I need to hear it documented and placed in a way that makes sense to me. And maybe listening back to this will help me feel seen or understood in some way.

“Our bodies are flashlights toward our ancestors” - Fariha Róisín

I’ve been thinking hard about the person I am — I don’t know who that is and who I’d like to become next. This idea I'm playing with right now, this sense of impermanence, is because of a bit of an “ego crush” I had recently. “Crush” instead of “death” because my ego prevails but she is mangled, different. She’s hypercritical and scared of what I’ve done to her. I am scared too. I am scared of this hard-to-see other side we speak of because I know it is not the one often promised. Still, I know I can change things for the better. I’m deciding which tools to use first.

Starting backward, I was listening to a lot of Baldwin last night. He comes to me in times of crisis, likely because he sits with crisis so beautifully. He handles the warped nature of humanity with a surprising amount of grace. It is not controlled, but with the grace of a dancer flowing with the music no matter how chaotic or aggressive it rises and falls. It’s not an easy style of living; it’s one of surrender that he seems to hold with him philosophically. I find myself drawn to revolutionary types obsessed with integrating the failing of our world with daily living. I’m finding this is tricky to sit in union with. I am not an activist type, at least not in the way I imagine them to be. I hate protests: walking in the street, no sense of direction, surrounded by people, the overwhelm of movement. Protests are exhilarating in a similar way to running, feeling what the body can do when pushed up against the limit lovingly until you must slow down to a jog.

I am not an activist. I’m a little thinkfeeltank in my room, crying on my yoga mat because there are still children dying in Gaza and they average around 5-9 years old. I oscillate between crying for myself and the world these days. I felt this strange sense of derealization the last month (starting around the year anniversary) that broke around early November (the day after the election). I’ve been scrambling to decipher the pieces for meaning since.

“This world is fake,” Bisan Owda said once. These words are pebbles embedded beneath skin between tendons and bones. Little cancers.

How can one live in a world that exists in this way? Naturally one must die. To literally die would be easiest, the light sleep of escapism for the rest of time. I think it’s funny Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pretty much any spiritual faculty you encounter frown so highly on self-murder. They are obsessed with staying in a world they detest so much despite the joint understanding that the world is a playing field for gifts in the beyond as if the threat of suicide’s aftermath is enough to keep anyone from tapping out early.

I used to dream about killing myself all the time as a teenager. As a kid, I couldn’t conceptualize the notion. I’d spend my nights researching each method in detail, the logic, the symptoms, something about Google witnessing my macabre enticing me. I wished for a hand to reach out from my screen and push me into a reality worth living for. Ironically, I stopped over contemplating death after 2016. I had a future to plan for. College and leaving my parents and all.

This notion of “we’re all going to die” right now feels a bit like Vanessa Hudgens's 2020 Coachella video to me. As if any of us have ever been exempt from death. So if we will all die some way or another, and self-murder is off the table — plus the urge to kill one's self is always a rallying cry to not only survive but to thrive elsewhere — then what does it mean to live right now?

I kept seeing these “wake-up call” declarations after Trump’s re-election. It was the stats of the popular vote and all the demographics backing him, many surprising and unsurprising. I got so angry I wrote a little rant on my story at 7 AM, the day after my mental circuit breakage.

About a week later, I understood the wake-up call for some may not have been “the system is broken” but just how broken it was. For me, the wake-up call was, “No one is here to save you. You are alone”. This is a lie of course. But my mentally ill brain wasn’t reacting to the election. It was reacting to the election and the one before that, and when Trayvon Martin passed, and that feeling I’d get in my house when my dad would start yelling a little too loudly.

No one prepares you for what happens when the thorn stuck inside of you is pulled. It's a leakage that unearths not just your hurt, not just your trauma, but the trauma of the lineage before and the world around you. I don’t see this election as a moment in time at all. I’m seeing a seemingly endless cycle of human suffering chosen over and over and over again.

I was watching Spirited Away on Wednesday after I left work early because I couldn’t stop crying without warning. I was broken inside in a way I did not yet understand. My only memory from 2016 was coming to school and hearing about the Yee Yee Brothers terrorizing Latinx students at my school while my Republican classmate oscillated between smugness and embarrassment at the glorified clown becoming president. How was I supposed to know I would care this much about the results? I still can’t say how I feel about it all.

In Spirited Away, there’s a scene where a supposed stink spirit comes into the bathhouse, his smell so revolting it scares the staff. Chihiro, renamed Sen, is tasked with cleaning him. She tries utilizing the best in-house herbal washes, making not even a dent of progress in cleaning. As she swims around, she finds a thorn in the spirit’s side. The bathhouse bands together to remove the properly stuck thorn. When she pulls, a string of pollution is released, freeing a river spirit that gives her a gift as a thank you. I didn’t realize at the time that I was watching a message, one I had completely forgotten from the first time I had watched it eight months prior:

The current theme is release and I have yet to explore what that means — releasing the past, present, and future. Maybe a release of what we thought was. Release being the process of purging, letting it all go, every weight every burden. Laying down weaponry and extra supplies. Release the birds that fly into the sun, wings melted, wax collapsing into the sea.

Release a neutral stance of being, regenerative and destructive all at once. I pulled the Ten of Wands last night and it talked about letting go of burdens that were never ours to begin with. So where do I put the generational trauma, the stray desires for fame and power, the need for validation and radical acceptance? It’s all lost inside of me, fragments of the sludge coming up during a breakdown or a fallout. I imagine the thorn being pulled out of the river spirit in Spirited Away, and an endless string of debris and memory lost inside of it. So much pain, so much history.

In my James Baldwin diving last night, I watched the first half of his talk with Nikki Giovanni. It’s notorious, with one of the quotes most famous to me coming from Giovanni.

Watching them, I realized how they both circled around the points the other was making, too determined to be understood. Writers are obsessed with being understood. It’s what drives this form of robust communication — all these words just to convey the nuances of the human condition.

In their discussion of the relationship black men and women have with each other — a conversation that is still killing us to this day — you see a split not just from a gendered perspective, but a generational and philosophical one as well. Baldwin articulates the reality of the black man during his time; the abuse sustained during the day that threatens one’s manhood. That anger is then transmuted and taken out against black women, the only group “subservient” to them. Giovanni counters that a) Black women of the 70s are not willing to be so docile and that b) Black men shouldn’t feel so comfortable acting out with so much vitriol. Giovanni wants a man to be a man and to show up as he is nothing more, without abusing others in the process. This is a reasonable and rational request. Baldwin argues that her request is noble but unrealistic because these are imperfect humans we’re talking about. Men are driven by a desire to provide and be treated with respect, two things black men struggle to do under the restrictions of white supremacy.

To me, they both carry very important ideas. We need to have empathy for the conditions we are experiencing. To act in a theory space only ignores what drives humans to act the way they do. To ignore the sense of powerlessness Americans feel just so you can jump to a solution faster is unrealistic. It’s trying to live a healthy functional life without addressing the trauma living inside of you. It’s trying to exercise when your broken foot still hasn’t fully healed. We jump the gun in an effort to reach perfection without realizing how much we leave behind.

Inversely, to accept human tendencies with no criticism is ludicrous. We are not enslaved to our humanity. We are not subservient to fear and insecurity even under a system that encourages us to be. Imagination is key to revolution big or small. The child’s ability to imagine a beautiful life away from a parent who terrorizes them will keep them alive much longer than succumbing to the fear being embedded in their psyche. Imagination drives us to grow and evolve. Any limitation to how we could be is a disservice to ourselves.

I say all of this because I have been taking a break and working inside out. I am pulling out the wreckage to understand how we got here — how I got here as it is one and the same — and working to imagine where I want to be.

What’s been getting me down is knowing I cannot escape this journey. This samsara of suffering must be dealt with head-on — I see no other way to prevail. So I will no longer imagine escapism, feel the “joy” in the illusion of being “elsewhere”. Because wherever you go there you are and I am not a safe place to be right now. I’m not evil or good just this middle ground to cultivate a different thing entirely. I don’t know what that will look like across the world. I cannot solve it on my own or with my friends just yet. I have to dig inside for the light and follow where it leads.

If there’s anything I can say right now it would be I’m committed to learning for myself and forcing myself to not isolate in this journey. So I’ll share it with you. I’ll share it and talk to people about it and branch out. I’ll see where I land despite it all.

And I know you will join me too.