I’m starting with a story, which will soon reveal irony.

The last time I felt like an epistemological imposter was when I abandoned Cathar’s Corner. This podcast, which had been my light and love for two years, quickly evaded me. Attempting to give life insights week after week as if I held any essential truth made me feel like a fraud. It was easier when I had the hubris of a 19-year-old.

This stalling kept me away from creation for about a year. Today I run into that same feeling, that sense of deep misguidedness. There are layered “reasons” for this, but as I sit with myself (something I’ve been avoiding), I see that the urge to disappear is an extension of a fear I’ve been toying with for a while.

Control freak is a cartoonish term for the much more grounded phenomenon of hyperfixation on safety. I cannot fully rest. I haven’t rested in many years. The closest I got to it was the summer before my final year of college. In the middle of a cloud of chaos, I brought myself back to earth using a flurry of meditation, dance, breathwork, long walks, occasional friend outings, and long communions with tarot. I was searching for anything to handle the shadow of panic that was threatening to take me over. I was eating too little because I earned too little money. My dear mother had just been hospitalized. My friends and I were recovering from a catastrophic fallout which led to more catastrophic debris. Life was not good.

But I had music and my new deck of cards I had ordered off Amazon after researching for days on end if the magick of tarot would be a dead fish in corporate-driven waters. I focused my anxieties on surface-level issues and my brand new mystic-centered internship. I kept making my podcast. I committed to being okay enough.

I still love the music from that summer. Less so specific songs or artists but the feeling of euphoria I committed to. I was so determined to dance despite it all. When I look at that girl now, I feel so alien from her despite feeling so similarly. I don’t understand how she held it all. She was carrying so much and made it appear like light work. She turned it into light work.

Yesterday, I went to LACMA on what is best understood as an artist date, albeit it wasn’t intended as one. I am home too much these days, and I spend each week planning my escape routes so I don’t drive myself crazy. I took myself to the museum, a 45-minute ride away (because connections take forever in LA), to flee my enclosure.

In the contemporary art section on level 2, after wandering through the exhibit centered on indigenous art, is a room showcasing Andrew Thomas Huang’s most recent film on loop. The Deer of Nine Colors is a Buddhist Jataka story that was adapted before in 1981 as an animated short. Huang’s interpretation integrates his artistic skillset of filmmaking, puppetry, and animation into a hauntingly mystifying 24 minutes. I wish I could transmit the experience of watching this project on three projection panels to everyone on Earth. It was mesmerizing.

A major theme of the short is returning to self through both the confrontation and dismissal of past narratives. Our protagonist — a Thai trans woman — through assistance from a doctor, taps into her past life as a deer. By the end of the short, she ends her ability to revisit this experience and transforms into the Nine-Colored Deer.

Yesterday (the same day), beloved content creator Savannah Brown shares a video about intimacy. She explains the misconception of intimacy, often seen as disclosure of one’s past or internal understanding of oneself, instead suggesting that the moment created when people come together is true intimacy. In that moment (which can be an hour, a lifetime, or anything in between), anything can happen. There is no need to interpret how we are experiencing each other. The story gets in the way of a moment’s vibrancy.

Two days prior, our Uber driver to West Hollywood Pride passes around wellness cards with different sayings on them. As I always do when a deck of cards is presented to me, I shuffle them to see which card the universe will give. “The pitfalls of thinking reside in interpretation rather than observation.” Our driver has us all read which card we got, and we discuss how we feel about it. When I reveal mine, she comments that I don’t seem like an overthinker. You, dear reader, know better.

Towards the end of The Deer of Nine Colors, our protagonist prays to a deity for help in escaping the loop of nightmares she has about her past life as a deer being hunted. This feeling of being nothing but prey is what haunts the film. The deity suggests that she learn her own name, not wait for an outsider (represented by the doctor) to name her. The name she’s looking for can be found by confronting the demon inside her that she tries to run from. We, as the audience, come to understand this as her past because once she releases it, she discovers her name is Love.

This idea of names as containers for the many stories we tell ourselves reminds me of Spirited Away, a film that has become a motif for me over the last few years. A primary point in Spirited Away is how names are used to trap people in servitude. If you forget your real name and only remember the one given to you, then you can be trapped under contract and therefore in the spirit world forever. If you remember who you actually are, then you will walk free.

The following day after the museum, I dedicate myself to cleaning. Whenever I deep clean the bathtub, I reward myself with a bath to christen it. This bath would serve the dual purpose of reward and therapy for the ache in my tailbone, coincidentally the home of the root. In my hot bath, I shut my eyes while waves of neo-soul blanket me. The bliss of the moment makes my chest ache, so I hold it. I hold the top of my sternum and let my body shake like it does when I cry.

Inside of my chest, I imagine her lying there, curled away when it becomes too much. I imagine she rolls against the edge, letting her cheek press against it, trying to touch the other side. She is probably four or five years old. She remembers every single thing that’s ever been felt in my body. She holds it, waiting to let it go. That is why she sleeps, letting dreams clean the residue of her heart for her.

I hold her in my palm and let her cry, somewhere tucked away from even myself. I sit and drag my fingers over my ribs, imagining the pain being held by other parts of my body. Hold it, arms. Hold it, legs. Hold the love that is too heavy for her to carry. At some point, I remember to ask for help and start speaking to what I know to be God. I raise a hand, let some of the love inside of me leave my body to return to its home, to cycle through the ether. I pray for her. I pray for my body. I pray for every love in my life. I pray for the Earth and the Sun. I pray for every being on the planet and beyond the planet. And I imagine the web of love binding us together. I imagine it moving like a vortex, like wind patterns, ocean waves, the rings on the sides of trees, the blood moving inside my body.

I rise slowly as the bath drains, my body adjusting to the lack of heat and pressure. I focus on the smoke crawling away in the air from the incense stick. It pulls itself toward me, shaping itself into the head of a deer.

I try not to draw clean conclusions. What I can do is notice how it felt to walk to the park the next day, passing people dancing, running, smiling, playing in the last bits of sun. I remember watching this light pull through the trees and hit skin like a supercut, music buzzing in my ears. Music pulling me closer, holding me, bringing me inside my body. To feel everything. To reach out, touch.

I sense a season of letting go of an old name to make space for a new one to form. This cannot come to life under the heavyweight of expectation or interpretation. It’s a very human quality; labeling and storytelling are tools of containment that can be freeing when we’re meant to occupy them. For now, I must resist it. All I can do is wait and see.

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