“I must recall, recall, out of the stuff is writing made, out of the recollected stuff of life.” - Sylvia Plath

Life hasn’t been bad, it’s just been new.

But a new I vaguely recognize, a new that’s not totally unknown, a familiar kind of new that doesn’t annihilate the essence of who I am.

There are five planets in retrograde as I write this, which, if you believe in the language of the stars as I do, makes it an excellent time to rummage through the attic of your own life. I’ve been doing a great deal of that lately, trying to remember where I’ve felt this particular kind of newness before. The circumstances have changed, of course, and so have I, but there’s something about the woman I am becoming that keeps reminding me of someone I used to know.

I wake up at 6:33 a.m. and open the door and the windows, letting the green love of the jungle in. I brew myself a pot of tea and return to my bed, which has become a fortress of pillows now, one under my legs to comfort my lower back and two behind my head. I luxuriate in free time, nowhere pressing or urgent to rush off to. No clock to punch in. My whole day belongs to me.

I read Plath’s journals until I find myself in her words. It’s so strange how that happens, how books and chapters and specific sentences find me as if to show me clearly what I am living now, as though someone who lived and died long before this morning could reach across time and put a finger on the very thing I have been struggling to name.

My heart and soul have never been more at ease in the unknown. The days blend like time and logic in a dream.

Am I the best or worst I have ever been?

I keep asking but can’t decide on an answer.

Perhaps because I’m both, like that time thirteen years ago when I decided to stop pursuing a career in the legal field and do what I enjoyed, and I broke up with my best friend/boyfriend with the trust fund, and rented a furnished bedroom in a stranger's house, and worked at a spa and a farmer's market and a museum, and learned how to survive on $30 for two weeks of groceries and started writing about everything— a spider's web swinging violently over the bath, or the night I ate a fucked-up edible at a party for staff members of a weed dispensary and brought a white dude with dreadlocks back to my place after he suggested we'd fuck in a hammock in the basement where he was living, his brother's bed-hammock hanging beside his separated only by a makeshift curtain made out of a thin bedsheet, his face without shame when he pointed it out to me, so free was he.

It was the first time I left the confines of a box I thought was destined for me and I had so many stories to write because finally, I was living.

But lord, what a difficult life I'd chosen for myself.

I made little money and had a lot of bills to pay. I was still new in town and had no friends, and my kitchen was a two-burner hot plate, a microwave, and an electric kettle in the closet of a bedroom. Every time I tried to use two appliances at once, the fuse would blow and I’d stand there in the dark, carpeted floor under my feet, laughing at how ridiculous life had become.

I could’ve stayed with the man who loved me. He would’ve given me everything I needed.

But then I wouldn’t have known for myself what it feels like to try, to be on my own and discover what I could do when there was no one else to do it for me. I wouldn’t have known the woman who could cook lentils so delicious they’d make you moan, who was discovering her own pleasure and had very little patience for a tech bro named Trevor from Nebraska who was intimidated by her vibrator, and who started collecting tattoos and piercings and dressing like the wonderfully eccentric creature she was becoming, thanks to the treasures she unearthed at Goodwill.

I think of that girl now and feel an almost unbearable affection for her. She was hungry for everything, for the ridiculous and the beautiful, for the chance to make an absolute fool of herself and come home with a good story to tell. She wanted the whole bloody business of being alive. She had no plan other than to do what she loved and she was frightened, of course she was frightened, but she was willing to make a mess of her life rather than spend it wondering what might have happened if she’d had the courage to live it.

I love the way she spun gold from shit and made an adventure out of circumstances that would send a more sensible person running back to the comfort of what’s known. She had no idea what would become of her, how many times she would have to begin again, what she would lose, or all the extraordinary art she would make with her own two hands. She was twenty-seven, smoking a joint in bed, listening to jazz, writing the recollected stuff of life, and making the most of whatever the day had given her.

Thirteen years later, I am here again.

I am her again.

There is tea now, and books piled around me, and the jungle coming through my windows. Sometimes there's still jazz playing, sometimes there's still a joint, and the woman who once stretched thirty dollars across two weeks now stretches her days across the uncertainty of an artistic life she has chosen for herself.

There are still questions I cannot answer, decisions I cannot logically explain to others, and mornings when the distance between the life I imagined living as a forty year old adult and the one I am actually living feels completely absurd.

But I know this woman.

I have loved her before.

Perhaps thirteen years from now, I will look back on this morning with the same affection, remembering the tea growing cold beside my books and the woman who had no idea what would become of her, but who kept making art anyway.

Perhaps the best years of our lives are sometimes the ones we have the hardest time explaining while we’re living them.

For now, the windows are open and the whole day belongs to me.

And I am, still, wonderfully, terribly

free.

What if you could see this chapter of your life a little more clearly?

If you’re navigating your own season of uncertainty, I’d love to explore it with you with the help of tarot. I use tarot as a tool for self-awareness rather than prediction, illuminating the energies and patterns shaping your present so you can navigate them with greater clarity and intention. Drawing on over a decade of tarot practice, my work as a priestess, and my background in somatic practices, each reading offers intuitive guidance grounded in deep reflection and your own inner wisdom.

60-minute tarot & spiritual guidance session · Online · $100 USD

Book a Tarot Reading

I don’t remember exactly when tarot cards stopped being just cards.

I only know that over a year ago now, I pulled the Page of Cups from the deck and wondered what would happen if instead of just reading the card, I brought it to life in a photoshoot.

I had been studying and reading tarot for over ten years by then, long enough to know what the books said and recognize the shorthand of a card before I’d even finished turning it over. But knowing that the Eight of Pentacles is a card about devotion to the craft is different from spending three days cutting circles out of cardboard and painting them gold because some part of you has become so devoted to bringing the vision into reality that printing eight pentacles would defeat the entire fucking point. Somewhere between the cardboard, the paint, and my aching hand, I began to understand the lessons from the card much more intimately, like it had gotten into my body.

So I kept going.

Then last month, after my Eight of Pentacles reel sort of went viral on instagram, I realized this strange little experiment had become a project of its own and I started calling it Living Tarot. Over the span of 7-14 days, I would pull a card, leave it out where I could see it, meditate on it, and write about it. Eventually, an image would begin forming in my head and I would handcraft whatever props, wardrobe, and set design items needed making until I could step in front of the camera and become the archetype myself. If you’re interested in learning more about this process, you can watch this video I created on how I bring tarot cards to life.

Then I pulled The Empress.

I knew her, of course. She’s the beautiful woman sitting comfortably in a garden with a crown of stars on her head while everything around her appears to be having an orgasm. She has become one of those archetypes invoked whenever we want to talk about abundance, sensuality, fertility, receiving, and the divine feminine. I had invoked her myself plenty of times over the years.

What I had not done was dress as her, step inside her tarot card, and see what happened.

The afternoon I went into the garden to photograph the Empress, I was on the second day of my bleed and feeling exhausted. I had chosen a spot that looked beautiful but gave me almost no room to move. I sat where I could, arranged the dress, tried to look languid and abundant, and took photo after photo in which I looked like a woman trying very hard to look languid and abundant.

Eventually, frustrated, I abandoned the location and relocated to another part of the garden where the afternoon sun was still falling across a long piece of wood repurposed from a fallen tree. It looked almost like a chaise, a perfect spot for lounging. I poured myself a glass of wine, pulled a red hibiscus from the tree, and let the sun hit my skin. As if suddenly drunk with beauty, I reclined under the sun, hisbicus in hand, admiring the impossible redness of it.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I stopped trying to perform the Empress and began to embody her, at which point I was able to capture her in the photographs I was taking.

Looking back, it seems almost embarrassingly obvious. I had been trying to create an image of pleasure and abundance while denying myself any pleasure in the making of it, and treating the afternoon like another task to complete.

But the Empress was having none of it. If I wanted to enter her world, pleasure would have to be part of the process.

It was there, stretched beneath the late-afternoon sun with wine in my glass and a red hibiscus in hand (a flower ruled by Venus, by the way— the same planet that rules The Empress tarot card) that I began to understand what she had been trying to tell me.

My life at the time did not look particularly abundant by any definition I had been taught to trust.

Six months earlier, I had walked away from a steady job that made sense on paper and which gave me the kind of things I could point to when somebody asked how I was doing and would prefer an answer that can be measured. Now I was bringing tarot cards to life using primarily cardboard, paint, and willpower, writing short stories about spending Saturdays with Saturn and my first novella on the wild woman archetype, and watching my savings disappear as I tried to build a life around the things I loved without knowing whether those things would ever agree to pay me back.

By most of the measures I had relied on for years, I had less.

Yet I was happier. Much happier.

I didn’t quite know what to do with that contradiction. I had spent most of my adult life thinking of abundance as money and security that I could accumulate as evidence that I had finally “made it.” I assumed the feeling would follow the circumstances. Instead much of that evidence was gone, and I felt richer in my own strange, financially uncertain artist life than I had when I possessed clear, identifiable markers of success.

It made me wonder what, exactly, I had been defining as abundance.

I had also been thinking a lot about the act of receiving.

The word seemed to be everywhere lately, always preceded by an instruction: Open to receive. Expand your capacity to receive. Become available for what you desire. I liked the sound of it, and I also suspected I wasn’t as good at receiving as I was at giving. So I did what I was taught to do, which is to try and figure out how to become better at receiving.

Sitting there in the garden, I opened my journal and began to write, hoping the answer would drop in through ink.

I don’t know how else to explain what happened next without making it sound weirder than it was. I wasn’t trying to channel anything. I didn’t close my eyes and summon the Empress, and there was no moment when the air changed and I became certain something mystical was happening. I began to write, and then I kept writing until the garden on the page began to mingle with the one around me and the Empress began speaking to me.

I smelled her before I saw her, something green and sweet, like a fig broken open beneath the sun.

When I turned, a woman was walking barefoot toward me.

She wore a long ivory silk dress that moved against her body as she walked, loose and luminous. Gold bracelets knocked softly against one another at her wrists. Tiny white flowers were woven through her hair, so fresh I wondered if they had opened there. In one hand she carried a fig split down the middle.

I knew immediately who she was.

She came close enough that I could see the wet center of the fruit, then held half of it toward me.

“Eat.”

That was the first thing the Empress ever said to me.

I took the fig from her hand as she sat down beside me. For a while, neither of us spoke. The fruit was warm and sweet against my tongue. I ate it slowly with eyes closed as the sun warmed my skin and leaves danced above us in the breeze.

When I opened my eyes again, the Empress was watching me.

“You have been hungry for a very long time,” she said.

I almost laughed as my mind immediately began to assemble evidence to the contrary.

She raised one eyebrow, as if she could hear the argument forming in my head, and said:

I know. Already you want to tell me why you are not hungry. You want to explain that you ate this morning, and surely other people need more than you do.

You are so quick to make a case against your own appetite. It’s really extraordinary.

An animal does not become ashamed when hunger moves through its body. It doesn’t wonder whether it has earned the right to eat. Hunger comes, and the body answers. But give a woman a clever enough mind and she can spend twenty years explaining why she does not feel what she feels.

You learned that a good woman should need very little. That she should be grateful for what she is given and careful about asking for more. She may have desires, certainly, but they should be reasonable ones, preferably desires that make life easier for everyone around her. And God forbid she should want something simply because it would delight her!

At first, it happens innocently.

You discover how warmly the world receives you when you are easy to accommodate, how often needing very little is rewarded. And because you are a creature who needs other creatures, you learn to negotiate with your own hunger and ask whether a desire is practical before asking whether it is true.

You learn to wait. To make do. And after enough years of this, you become so accustomed to overriding your instincts that desire arrives and you barely recognize it.

But the body is, thankfully, remarkably patient.

You can ignore it for years and still, one afternoon, something sweet touches your tongue and you remember you have appetite. And not only for food, but for your own life.

That is how pleasure begins to undo what you have been taught and returns you to your own experience.

Pleasure is also far more powerful than you have been led to believe, because a woman who begins to notice what feels good will eventually notice what does not. The body that once whispered more is the same that will one day growl enough.

My conversation with the Empress unfolded in that space where time loses meaning. When I got up and left the garden, I had several pages of notes and no idea whether I had been sitting there for fifteen minutes or an hour.

Heart still echoing with her words, I began thinking about how there have been periods of my life when I could endure almost anything as long as I could explain why I should to myself. A job could make me miserable, but if it paid well, I would hang in there. And it didn’t matter how tired I was, if there was still work to finish, I’d drink some caffeine and push through it. My body would say no and instead of listening, I would prepare a PowerPoint presentation for why it should reconsider.

I got very good at this.

Good enough that I lived years inside circumstances my body had already asked me to leave, my mind making a very convincing case for almost anything out of fear of what actions the truth might require.

But the more time I spent doing things that made me actually feel juicy and alive, the less convincing my old explanations became. Once you’ve spent a Wednesday morning making art on your balcony surrounded by nature while birds sing around you, it becomes considerably harder to tell yourself that the dread you feel every Sunday evening before you have to return to the office the next day is just what adulthood feels like.

This was the Empress I hadn’t understood when she was still sitting safely inside the deck. She paid attention to what moved toward the sun.

And once I started paying attention too, I noticed how often I was barely present for the things I claimed to enjoy. I’d taste something delicious while reading a message, or walk somewhere beautiful while mentally composing a list of what needed doing when I got home. Sometimes pleasure arrived and I was already halfway into the next moment before I realized I had missed it.

Which eventually brought me back to the question I’d been carrying around to ask the Empress, which was essentially how to become better at receiving. More specifically, I asked her: How do I increase my capacity to receive?

She laughed as if my question was a joke.

I had expected her to pause thoughtfully, perhaps offer some ancient feminine wisdom about opening myself further to abundance. Instead, she found the premise of my question genuinely funny.

When she finally answered me, the conversation went somewhere I had not expected.

I’m going to leave what the Empress said next in the full channeled transmission I recorded (more information on that below), but I will say that her answer made me realize there was an assumption I had never bothered to examine buried in my question, which is that something in me needed expanding before I could properly receive my own life.

I have been thinking about that ever since, mostly because I had been so certain I knew what the problem was.

I thought I needed to become better at receiving because this is how I have learned to approach what I want. If I’m not experiencing enough of something, there must be some internal machinery that needs adjusting. I must then find the blockage, change the belief, build the capacity, do the practice(s), until finally one day after much travail, I become the woman who can have the thing she desires.

There is something comical about realizing I had brought this same ambition to receiving and found yet another way to place what I wanted on the other side of a better version of myself.

The Empress made me wonder what would happen if, for once, I stopped doing that.

And that’s the question I want to leave with you, too: how much of what you are waiting to receive is already here, asking nothing of you except that you let yourself have it?

Maybe it’s something you once wanted very badly, or maybe it’s so ordinary now that you have forgotten there was a time when you did not have it.

Maybe it’s a small pleasure you keep rushing past because you are busy tending to the larger life you hope to build, like lifting your face to the afternoon sun and feeling it on your skin for a few breaths.

Whatever it is, may you remember that you don’t need to improve yourself in order to have it.

And when life places something sweet in your hands,

eat.

The Empress and I stayed in the garden much longer than I’ve brought you into here.

What came through that day became The Empress: An Archetype Embodiment Experience, a 20 minute channeled transmission from the Empress accompanied by embodiment and journaling practices for exploring pleasure, abundance, and desire in your own life.

Meet the Empress

This is an offering to move through slowly. Listen to the transmission somewhere you can be undisturbed so you can have your own encounter with the Empress, then return to the practices and journaling prompts whenever you feel called to spend a little more time with her.

At first, I thought he would put me to work.

I imagined Saturn like a drill sergeant, barking orders before dawn, demanding discipline through sweat and strain. I expected punishment. Exhaustion. A long list of things I wasn’t doing well enough.

But that isn’t how my Saturday with Saturn began.

Instead, he had me make the bed (like I always do), take my vitamin D3 and magnesium supplements (bones are his domain, after all, a fact I’m surprised I remember), and prepare an inviting space on my balcony where I could learn from him while appreciating the surrounding nature.

I plucked two flowers from the hibiscus tree in the garden and put them in small glass vases, lit incense, and placed crystals where the light could reach them. The early morning sun filtered through the leaves in soft gold ribbons as the smoke of sandalwood curled upward like it had somewhere important to go.

“I’m starting to like this Saturn guy,” I thought to myself. His presence today felt reverent and devotional.

But it hasn’t always been this way between us.

For three years Saturn walked beside me, ever since he entered my sun sign of Pisces in 2023. During that time, it seemed he took much from me. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say he revealed what could no longer stay. I walked away from a career I had worked tirelessly to build when the work stopped exciting me and I could no longer see opportunity for growth. In the months that followed, I also moved abroad and ended a romantic relationship and friendships I began to see mistook my generosity for something to consume. Piece by piece, the life I had spent years constructing came apart, and with it went much of what I had been taught to recognize as success.

Saturn seemed less interested in what I had lost than in what I was going to do with the time that remained. He asked me to give structure to what I love, to give myself deadlines, to choose certain days to focus on certain tasks and keep track of hours, minutes, and seconds. He had me get very specific about what is truly important to me and protect it from any and all interference.

I began to understand that devotion also required refusal. Every hour I gave to one thing disappeared from somewhere else. There was something comically appropriate, then, about learning that Saturn rules the middle finger, as if loving something enough to devote myself to it also required developing a sacred fuck off for whatever kept pulling me away. If I said I was a writer, then I had better write.

“You float too easily,” Saturn once said after watching me spend a day micro-dosing psilocybin, re-arranging my altar instead of my life, and filling pages in my notebook with ideas I loved too much to ever test. I was an expert at falling in love with potential then, likely because it asked nothing of me yet. I was endlessly inspired but rarely anchored.

“You must find something worth laboring through. When you do, and you stay devoted to it until the end, time itself will begin to move with you.”

He looked away, letting silence stretch between us until it grew uncomfortable, then spoke again without looking at me.

“Everything you desire will be yours if you can show me you are serious.”

Somewhere along the way, I grew a tenderness for him. I realized Saturn wasn’t cruel but devoted, a distinction I had very little experience with.

My father is a Pentecostal preacher with enormous hands and an answer for everything that eventually circles back to God. You did not talk back in our house. A child who forgot this might feel my father’s palm find their face, leaving behind a red mark that stayed long after his hand was gone. There were also belts and shoes, if the grievance warranted it. So as I grew, I learned that masculine authority was something you obeyed, something I feared and braced myself against.

I learned something about the feminine, too. The women around me ironed clothes, cleaned houses, tended children, and anticipated needs. I watched this flow of devotion from the feminine toward the masculine so consistently that for a long time, I mistook it for the natural order of things.

What I had never known was devotion flowing the other way. A masculine force using its strength in service of the feminine. One that would keep the hours, hold the boundary, make room for what wanted to come through, and protect what was tender. The masculine moving for me instead of against me was unfamiliar territory inside my psyche.

So that morning, seated at the beautiful altar Saturn had instructed me to build with my own hands, I looked at this stern old god who had been teaching me about limits, responsibility, and time, and finally asked the question that had been waiting beneath so many of our lessons:

“How do I get the masculine to move in devotion to my creative feminine?”

He did not answer right away.

Saturn rarely does.

Instead, I felt time sharpen. A few seconds beneath Saturn’s silence could feel strangely long, as though time moved differently when he was deciding whether you were ready to hear what he was about to tell you.

“Don’t be late for your own life,” he said at last.

By life he did not mean existence, but the moments that make one grateful to be alive- the work that nourishes even when it exhausts and the effort that gives something back, if only the promise of what might grow from tending it daily.

“Choose the discomfort that builds something lasting,” he instructed. “Not all suffering is equal. My role is not to protect your feelings but to teach you that actions have consequences—”

And before he could finish, my mouth was already moving.

I knew this part. After three years of him saying the same sentence with the same grave patience to me, I practically had the speech memorized. My lips moved silently alongside his, slightly out of sync, like a child mouthing a parent’s lecture from the backseat.

“—and that you choose which ones you live with,” he said, eyes sliding toward me just in time to catch me mimicking him.

I closed my mouth and pressed my lips together, trying not to smile.

He noticed, of course. Saturn notices everything.

But he said nothing. He never does when the lesson has already landed.

“True self-love is not indulgence, child. It is endurance in service of what you are here to make. Someone has to teach the hard lessons.”

He tilted his head slightly then, one silver eyebrow lifting in a slow, unimpressed gesture toward Jupiter who lounged nearby, generous and glowing.

I saw him suddenly in my mind’s eye: white-haired and bearded, a cloak spun from light slung casually over one shoulder and an eagle perched beside him. In his palm rested a box tied with a perfect golden bow.

“A present for you!” he boomed, holding out the box and winking at me as through there were nothing in the universe he enjoyed more than giving gifts.

I squealed.

“Not now. Get a hold of yourself!” I said aloud, briefly aware of how completely unhinged I must have looked, alone on my balcony at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, scolding myself for getting distracted from a conversation with Saturn.

When I returned my attention to Saturn, he looked as unimpressed as ever.

He stood before me as I’ve always imagined him: an elderly king with hair like moonlit ash, draped in heavy dark robes. A farming sickle rested in his hand, as capable of harvesting as it was of cutting something down. His face was partially veiled, and his feet bound, as if even he must obey the laws he governs.

Time itself seemed to look through his eyes.

Tick.
Tock.

He did not threaten or explain. He simply observed.

The job I complained about but returned to every morning. The art I said I wanted to make, then found a hundred excuses not to. The alarm I kept snoozing. The book waiting for me to finish it. The hours I could lose to my phone while insisting I never had enough time. The people I continued giving my attention to long after I noticed how depleted I felt around them.

tick. tock. tick. tock. tick. tock.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

He wants to know but never asks.

He waits.

At some point I looked up and the light had moved across the balcony. The incense had burned to ash and the bright yellow hibiscus flowers had closed softly at the altar’s edge. Five pages of my next book lay beside me, real and weighty and undeniably born from this day. My body was tired in that satisfying way it gets after being used for something with purpose. My breath was deep and steady.

“Work can be pleasurable,” I realized, surprised by the pride glinting in my own eyes.

After that fateful day, Saturday with Saturn became a ritual for me. At the time, I was working full-time at a law firm, usually from two in the afternoon until ten at night, so Saturdays were one of the few long stretches of time that belonged entirely to me. Every Saturday, I prepared a beautiful space, fed myself well, and gave the entire day to listening and creating.

I had asked Saturn how to get the masculine to move in devotion to my creative feminine, and it took me until dusk to realize he had been showing me all day. The masculine kept track of the hours, held the boundary, and made sure I ate while the feminine wandered, listened, imagined, and created. Neither had to overpower the other.

And slowly, Saturday by Saturday, the ideas I had carried around inside me began acquiring weight in the physical world. I would write a few pages one week, a few more the next, until eventually a book began taking shape.

Saturn said nothing as night fell, but he didn’t need to.

Time, at last, was working with me.

The Practice: Saturday with Saturn

This is a weekly practice and you don’t need to feel inspired to do it. In fact, you likely won’t be and that is perfect. All you need is something you love enough to give your undivided attention.

1. Choose the work.
Before Saturday arrives, decide what project you’re giving the day to. Bonus points if you let it be the thing you've been saying matters while continually giving it whatever scraps of time remain.

2. Prepare your space.
Clean your workspace. Make the bed. Put flowers on the table. Light incense. Make coffee in the good cup. Bring out whatever makes the space feel sacred enough for the work you're asking yourself to do.

3. Give Saturn your time.
Choose when you begin and when you stop, ideally at least two to three hours. Put your phone away and protect those hours like you would protect an appointment with someone you deeply respect.

4. Work on your craft/do the actual thing.
No more researching how to do it, reorganizing your supplies, or making another Pinterest board about it. Write the pages. Paint the canvas. Send the pitch. MAKE THE THING. Do it whether it feels easy or not.

5. Feed the person doing the work.
Cook yourself something delicious that you love. Go outside, stretch, and rest when you need to. Remember that discipline doesn't require making yourself miserable.

6. Stay with it.
Even if it’s slow and frustrating and nothing impressive happens.

7. Repeat next Saturday.
Saturn loves a return customer.

That’s it. The point isn’t inspiration, but consistency. Some Saturdays will give you five pages, while others may give you a single sentence. The practice is giving the work somewhere to find you either way.

With love,

Perhaps you need an archetype of your own to talk to…

My free Embodying Your Archetype guide + worksheet will help you choose one, get to know them, and invite a little of their energy into your actual life.

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“New life requires a period of gestation where nothing is visible from the outside.” — Glennon Doyle

For all the times I have begun my life again, I have never once stopped to ask how to care for the woman who gave birth to it.

I’ve left jobs, moved across oceans, walked away from relationships, and reinvented myself often enough that starting over eventually became part of my identity. It never occurred to me that every beginning leaves behind someone who is exhausted from birthing a new reality.

This realization arrived disguised as a dream (with eight planets in Pisces, my subconscious has never been particularly subtle).

Two days had passed since I’d given birth and I was walking through the house of a childhood friend, trying to remember how postpartum women are supposed to live.

Could I eat sushi? Was I meant to stay in bed? What was I allowed to do now?

The questions felt strangely urgent, as though I had forgotten a crucial set of instructions everyone else seemed to know. I woke up certain that I had recently given birth to something and that, whatever it was, it required a kind of care I didn’t yet understand.

At the time, it had been a little over a month since I had left a job at a law firm where I’d been working for over a year.

On paper, it made very little sense. The position was stable and I did not have another job lined up. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had begun organizing my life around survival rather than aliveness. I stayed in the position because I was afraid of what would happen if I let go, even though I knew the job had already taught me what I needed to know, which was mostly how to stay devoted to my art while having heavy demands on my time and energy. I had also come to realize that many of the professional structures I had spent years moving through asked for a version of me that could tolerate a level of depletion I no longer wished to normalize.

The morning after my last day, I boarded a plane to California. Over the following two weeks, life seemed determined to remind me who I had been before I became so serious.

I traveled to Big Sur with two girlfriends I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. We got massages, soaked naked in the baths at Esalen, and as the sun disappeared into the Pacific, I guided them through a meditation. When we opened our eyes, one of them looked at me and said, “A.P, this is exactly what you need to be doing with your life.”

A few days later an old college roommate who is studying astrology unfolded my birth chart over the dinner table and described a life that sounded more like recognition than prediction. "You're a mystical warrior," she said. "You're here to live freely."

In all my life I had never felt so seen.

That same night, I got lost walking through the San Francisco fog. By ten o’clock, the streets had all but disappeared and I could barely see a few feet ahead. I had no cell service, no internet, and a downloaded map that insisted I was somewhere I wasn’t. I eventually found my way, but I remember thinking afterwards how strangely symbolic the experience had felt, as though I had spent the evening practicing what it means to keep walking when you can no longer see where you’re going.

When I returned home to Brazil, I did what I have always done whenever one chapter of my life ends: I threw myself into the next one and buried myself in writing an ebook and creating resources for an arts nonprofit. Every evening stretched toward ten o’clock as a completed task became permission to start another.

My body, in its infinite wisdom, interrupted the pattern.

I fell ill with a virus and a week after symptoms vanished, exhaustion stayed. For weeks, I slept ten hours a night. Initially I thought I was recovering from post-viral fatigue, but now I’m no longer convinced that’s all that was happening.

It was as though I had become deeply intolerant of force overnight. My body seemed to reject anything that asked me to harden against myself.

Heavy lifting at the gym became vinyasa yoga on the balcony. I stopped reaching for fabrics that sculpted and compressed my body and started wearing clothes that gave it room to breathe. Fitted tops gave way to oversized T-shirts and lacy thongs to soft high-waisted cotton briefs. Even my taste in television changed. Baking competitions, old episodes of Friends, and stand-up comedy replaced the thrillers and dramas I once devoured.

Gradually this same instinct found its way into the rest of my life.

Productivity for its own sake, rigid routines, diets, online dating, and the endless performance of staying relevant online all fell away. I no longer wanted every opinion reaching into my nervous system. My phone spent most of the day silenced and face down.

My world became astonishingly small.

I made post after pot of homemade soup for dinner. I carried cups of tea back to bed each morning and read for an hour before doing anything else. I spent afternoons on the balcony singing to trees, reading in the hammock, writing in my journal, painting, sometimes crying, and sometimes praying for guidance as I made the strange passage between who I had been and who I was becoming. Every Saturday, I bought myself a bouquet of fresh flowers at the local market for no occasion other than I wanted something living beautifully beside me while another life assembled itself inside my own.

During this time I couldn’t stop photographing windows and thinking about portals, which inspired me to paint vines around the doorway of my bedroom and an eight-pointed star underneath the nearby lantern— a symbol I would later learn has represented rebirth across cultures for centuries (of course).

Without planning, I began rearranging my life around gentleness and turning my home into a place that could hold the person I was becoming.

I thought I was still recovering from illness, but really, I was recovering from birthing a new life.

It wasn’t until I began reading about postpartum traditions around the world that the answers to the questions the dream posed started to come to me. Although separated by oceans, languages, and centuries, I kept finding the same instinct repeated across cultures:

Protect the mother.

In Latin America, the first forty days after birth are known as la cuarentena, a period during which female relatives nourish the new mother with warm meals and care for the home.

In China, the practice of zuò yuè zi— “sitting the month”— encourages weeks of rest, warming foods, and freedom from ordinary responsibilities so the body can replenish what birth has taken from it.

In parts of India, sutika kala surrounds the mother with massages, herbal baths, nourishing broths, and the steady presence of women who understand that bringing life into the world has cost the mother something.

The rituals differ, but the wisdom is the same.

Somewhere, long before we had productivity apps and inspirational quotes about resilience, we understood that one who has given birth cannot simply stand up, dust themselves off, and carry on as though nothing extraordinary has happened.

I found myself wondering what would happen if we extended that same tenderness beyond motherhood.

What if leaving a relationship deserved forty days of gentleness?

What if walking away from the job that kept you in survival mode wasn’t immediately followed by the pressure to know what comes next?

What if setting a boundary with someone you loved or choosing sobriety required recovery?

What if every ending that demanded courage also deserved a season of protection?

We celebrate the leap and congratulate the courage it takes to choose the life that frightens us, but no one speaks of the necessary recovery that follows giving birth to a new reality and the strange tenderness of walking through a world that looks the same while knowing you have completely changed.

We love stories of transformation but we aren’t taught to honour the fragile days immediately afterwards, when the old life is gone, the new one hasn’t quite found its footing, and the person in between is exhausted from straddling both.

Maybe this is why so many mistake recovery for failure. We assume that if we’ve already taken the leap, we should be able to run. But no one expects a woman who gave birth yesterday to sprint.

Since this fateful dream, I’ve understood that my soul is in a season of postpartum care and, consequently, have started asking myself a different question.

Instead of: “How quickly can I rebuild?”

I’m opting for: “How faithfully can I care for the woman who is rebuilding her life?”

What follows aren’t rules or prescriptions, but the kind of care that has helped me mother parts of myself still learning how to live inside a life I worked so hard to create.

If you have recently given birth to a new version of your life, I’d like to sit beside your bed for a while and tell you the kinds of things about caring for myself postpartum that I wish someone had whispered to me.

Play this song, then read on.

REST

No one stands beside a new mother’s bed reminding them that someone else has already answered three emails, launched a business, or posted consistently on social media that week. Yet somehow, when we give birth to a new version of our lives, we deny ourselves that same compassion and understanding.

It is time for rest, dear one.

Something inside you has already done the difficult work of being born, you don’t have to earn it.

You don’t have to prove that leaving was the right decision by immediately becoming extraordinary.

You don’t have to justify slow mornings or afternoons spent staring out the window, reading novels in bed, or wandering without knowing where you’re headed.

The life you’ve just brought into the world will still be there tomorrow and nothing precious is being lost by you moving gently.

Quite the opposite.

Some things can only find you at the speed of a nervous system that has finally remembered it is safe enough to rest and has stopped bracing for what comes next.

LET YOURSELF BE INEXPERIENCED

New mothers are not expected to know the reason behind every cry or why the baby won’t sleep. So why, then, do we expect ourselves to move through a new chapter with the skill and confidence of someone who has lived it for years?

Every new life is a clumsy thing. It wobbles. It reaches before it knows what it’s reaching for. It startles itself. It falls asleep in the middle of the day and wakes at strange hours. It doesn’t know its own rhythms yet.

And neither do you.

Of course your new life feels awkward and you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve never lived it before!

You’ve never been the person building this business, writing this book, asserting these boundaries, waking up sober, or beginning again after grief. There is no former version of you to consult because this version has never existed.

So when you fumble (and you will fumble), don’t mistake it for failure. You’re just living through the awkward, unglamorous part of transformation—the part every meaningful life requires and not enough people talk about.

One day you’ll move through this life without thinking so much and you will forget there was ever a time when every decision felt uncertain and every step required courage.

But that ease will only arrive because you kept living long enough for this once-unfamiliar life to become your own, and not because you finally figured everything out.

PROTECT NEW LIFE

One of the things that moved me when researching postpartum traditions is how fiercely the relationship between mother and child is protected. The world doesn’t disappear, but it learns to wait. Visitors come briefly, hands are washed before holding the baby, and nothing is considered more important than the bond forming between mother and child.

It makes me wonder why we do the opposite with our own new beginnings.

The moment we choose a different way of living, we begin inviting everyone else’s opinions into something that has barely taken its first breath. We ask people who have only ever known our former selves whether this new version of us makes sense and explain decisions before we’ve fully lived them.

If learning about postpartum has taught me anything, it’s that not everyone deserves immediate access to what has just been born.

Some dreams need to be held by you alone before they are shared.

Some decisions need to become sturdy inside you before they’re tested against someone else’s fears.

Every new life deserves a season in which it is known intimately by only you. A season where it is sheltered from explanations, performance, and the pressure to prove that this beginning is worthwhile.

Hold this new life the way a mother holds a newborn.

There will be time for introductions later.

For now, let it learn the sound of your voice before it has to answer to anyone else’s.

CHOOSE WHAT NOURISHES YOU

One of the many questions a new mother asks after giving birth is whether her body can digest what she’s consuming. Is it nourishing? Will it support her healing? If she’s breastfeeding, will it nourish the life that now depends on her?

I think every new beginning deserves the same question:

Will this nourish the person I’m becoming?

The people, stories, habits, and places that once sustained you may no longer fit the life you’ve just brought into the world.

Don’t mistake that for ingratitude.

We don’t feed newborns steak because it’s nutritious. We feed them what they’re capable of receiving.

Offer your soul the same kind of care.

Pay attention to what it begins asking for.

Maybe you find yourself craving long walks instead of crowded gym classes. Pasta instead of salad. Poetry instead of productivity books. Silence instead of another podcast.

Maybe you buy acrylic paint and a canvas despite never having painted anything in your life, or you start learning pottery at 43, or spend an entire morning lying on the ground like a star fish finding shapes in clouds because your body refuses to do anything else.

It doesn’t have to make sense.

New life has its own appetite.

The most nourishing thing you can do now is feed it what it needs without having to understand it.

LET YOURSELF BE CARED FOR

After giving birth, a new mother is not in a position to politely refuse meals, helping hands, or offers to hold the baby while she rests. She is exhausted and still healing. Her body has done something extraordinary, and for a little while, she simply cannot do it all alone. Receiving care is part of how she recovers.

Every new life deserves the same generosity.

If someone extends a helping hand to you now, let them.

Don’t rush to insist you’re fine, or you can do it all yourself.

Maybe you are, maybe you can, but now is not the time to prove that.

There are seasons when allowing someone to recommend your work, pay for a meal, offer an encouraging word, listen to you cry on the phone, remind you of your gifts, take you somewhere beautiful when you’ve forgotten the world is beautiful, or simply believe in you before you fully believe in yourself is what allows new life to survive.

There are seasons when another person’s encouragement becomes part of your nourishment and their faith carries you until your own returns; seasons when accepting help isn’t an admission that you’re incapable, but an acknowledgement that you've been doing something unimaginably brave.

One day, you’ll be the person preparing a meal for someone else, or sitting beside another soul in labour, reminding them to sleep, eat, or keep going.

For now, let yourself be loved in the places where you've become most determined to be self-sufficient.

The life you’ve just brought into the world was never meant to be carried by one pair of hands alone.

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SEE YOURSELF WITH KINDER EYES

There is a strange moment for every new mother when she catches her reflection in the mirror and, for just an instant, doesn’t entirely recognize the person looking back.

Her body tells the story of what it has carried. Her skin, her softness, and the scars that remain all belong to someone who has crossed a threshold from which there is no returning. She cannot ask the mirror to give her back the woman she was before birth.

Similarly, every rebirth asks us to learn to love an unfamiliar face.

It isn’t easy to do because after profound change, we often measure ourselves by standards that belonged to the life we left behind. We miss the version of ourselves who pleased more people, needed less rest, was more social, gave more freely, and seemed able to carry everyone else’s burdens without complaint.

You might reach for clothes that once felt like you and realize they no longer fit quite right, or hear yourself speaking and wonder where that steadier voice— the one that says no like a full sentence— came from. People who have known you for years might begin saying “you’ve changed,” as though they can’t quite decide whether it’s a compliment or an insult.

They’re right.

You have changed.

That is what crossing a threshold does.

There may be days when you ache for the person you used to be simply because you knew them for so long, or find yourself reaching for yesterday’s reflection without realizing it no longer tells the truth.

That’s alright.

You are allowed to miss who you were and still know you don’t want your old life back.

There are new forms of beauty that only become visible after a rebirth, like the beauty of a boundary held without apology, for example, or the beauty of speaking more honestly than politely. There’s the beauty of leaving what diminishes you, and the beauty of choosing a life that finally fits, even if other people no longer recognize you inside it.

Spend a little time becoming acquainted with the person in front of you now.

Notice what new life has transformed in you.

The way you no longer abandon yourself to keep the peace.

The way your laughter arrives from somewhere deeper.

The way your body has become a place to live instead of a problem to solve.

The way you carry yourself like someone who has stopped asking permission to exist.

You may not resemble the person you once were, but who you are now is someone who survived a long and arduous transformation that took courage and strength.

May you look at your new self with love long enough for that to become beautiful.

A small note.

If you’re in the tender, bewildering days of beginning again and would rather not walk through them alone, this is the work I do.

I mentor artists, creatives, and people in seasons of profound transition and help them build lives that feel more like home without abandoning themselves in the process.

If you'd like someone to walk beside you while you build the life that's asking to be lived, you're warmly invited to book a conversation with me below.

Book a Mentorship Conversation

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion

A terrible stillness has settled over me, like clouds crowding out an autumn sun.

For days now, I have devoured Plath in bed and left the sheets strewn about, the wild animal in me at last getting its way.

A week of illness has left its residue everywhere. Half-drunk glasses of water on the nightstand. Tea gone cold. A bowl of broth abandoned beside the bed. My body is technically recovered, yet something in me remains horizontal.

Speaking does not interest me. Neither does being mindlessly entertained by television. Even eating has lost its usual glimmer. Instead of reserving pancakes for Sundays like a sacred sacrament, I make them on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday like a daily bribe, waiting for the sweetness of carbohydrates and honey to revive something bright and virile within me.

Nothing stirs.

By the fourth day I begin to suspect I’m not hungry for food at all.

I linger in bed and wonder if the bell jar that once closed in on Plath has lowered itself over me, too. In a bid for relief, I try singing loud enough to shake something loose, but no voice comes.

It is as though I have nothing to give.

Not even sound.

The skin beneath my armpit flakes with two-day old remnants of deodorant. I scrape it away absentmindedly and feel an irrational relief, as though I am shedding a scent that isn't mine and with it, a version of myself that spent a great deal of energy appearing fresh, capable, and in motion.

The truth is I have not been in motion at all.

There are creative projects waiting to be finished. Emails I should answer. Laundry gathering in small geological formations around the room. Entire futures that seem to depend on my ability to get out of bed and achieve.

And my mind, officious little tyrant, chastises me for each one left undone.

Why can’t you just get it together?

It begins its inventory at 6 a.m. sharp, then raises a string of catastrophic consequences for my rebellion against mindless productivity: I miss out on the job opportunity. I have no income. I lose my home. I end up on the streets. No one can possibly love me now. I perish penniless without a legacy tied to my name. It is as though I never even existed.

It’s all very dramatic because the mind loves escalation. Give it one unanswered email and it will construct a tragedy in five acts before breakfast.

Ordinarily I might argue back, but lately I haven’t had the strength so the accusations pass through me unanswered, like weather moving across an empty field.

Winter has arrived and its dread feels worse when the sky is overcast without rain.

Rain is merciful. It gives sorrow a costume. Cobblestones shine black and umbrellas bloom like bruises as people hurry from one shelter to the next with their heads bowed, praying to avoid the wrath of the sky. The whole world appears burdened by something invisible, and no one asks questions when you are burdened, too.

Nobody expects radiance from a woman listening to water beat its little fists against the window. Nobody asks why the laundry remains undone, errands go unrun, and messages remain unanswered. The weather has already supplied the reason. It has made an alibi of itself.

But an overcast sky without rain offers no such mercy.

It is only gray refusal. A withheld sob. A ceiling lowered over the day without the relief of rupture.

At least when it rains, my bed feels like a cocoon instead of a coffin. The blankets gather around me like damp earth around a bulb waiting out the season and the roof absorbs the weather’s grief and repeats it softly above my head. For a few hours, the world and I suffer from the same condition.

There is comfort in such company.

Comfort, however, is not the same thing as relief.

So I go looking for medicine.

I weigh twenty-one grams of raw cacao on the kitchen scale and heat it slowly until the kitchen smells faintly of cinnamon and earth. Once the cacao melts into velvet, I carry it to the edge of the old trees and drink it slowly with the aid of a tiny silver spoon that glints in my hand.

Memory begins to enter through the mouth then.

I am five years younger, seated beneath amber lights of a fine Italian restaurant in Denver with an ex-lover that broke my heart fifteen months prior, that same silver spoon carrying sweetness toward my mouth. It will be stolen before the evening ends, as if some part of me knew I was leaving empty-handed and needed evidence that I had been there.

To this momentous dinner where I secretly expected my ex to humble himself before me and beg for forgiveness, I wore a white cotton blouse with billowy sleeves that hung off my tan shoulders and which was held in place by a single dramatic bow tied at my back. I paired it with a white wrap skirt trimmed in ruffles, also fastened by a single bow at the hips.

The entire outfit looked as if it might come undone at any moment.

This was not an accident.

I ordered pasta, ate the complimentary bread and butter, and washed it all down with two cocktails. For dessert, I insisted on tiramisu and pretended I was not calculating, in some cold corner of my mind, the calories I would have to burn later to compensate for that momentary affair with pleasure.

Every mouthful arrived with an invoice.

I had become skilled at deprivation. Skilled, too, at answering it with extravagance.

Back then I believed love was a trade one could learn by apprenticeship. The carpenter I loved built cabinets and coffee tables. I built shrines.

I made excuses where there should have been accountability and fabricated hope where there should have been acceptance. I treated inconsistency like mystery and emotional unavailability like depth. Every tenderness he lacked, I supplied from my own stores. I poured and poured until the well mistook itself for a bucket.

By the end there was scarcely enough water left in me to wet my own lips.

Somewhere between the main course and dessert, the man I will always love said he was sorry for how he ended us. I remember the peculiar ache of hearing the words I had wanted for so long finally arrive after they were no longer capable of changing anything.

An apology is a strange thing.

You spend months imagining it will unlock some hidden door inside you, only to discover the room remains exactly as it was.

Across the table, I could feel him trying to crawl backward in time through the portal of a restaurant we visited when we still called each other mi amor. And I, a libra moon dressed in my little arsenal of bows, wanted nothing more than to believe love could be revived if staged beautifully enough.

How easy it is to mistake longing for hope.

How easy it is to settle for crumbs when one is starved of love.

But there was no going back and rewriting the ending.

I had not learned that yet.

So I returned not just to the restaurant, but to the carpenter, to mi amor, to the version of the story where love was merely lost and not gone; to the possibility that enough desire and sincerity might persuade two people back into a future that no longer existed.

I let romance persuade me to give him my body, my heart, my love, as if it were the last time, knowing all along I would do it again.

Every bit of it.

I would reorder every meal, recreate every date, steal the teaspoon again, and ask the same empty mouth to feed me.

Now I sit, silver cucharita1 in hand, 7,550 kilometers away from the past, spooning cacao into my mouth hoping its medicine will reach an ache I have been unable to name.

But the cacao does not cure me.

Just like the pancakes, the fine dinner, the cocktails, the apology, the body of the man I loved did not cure me.

It could not.

I was asking sweetness to do the work of grief.

When the ritual ends, the memory fades and the spoon rests empty beside me.

Only my pen moves, dragging its black needle through the white cloth of the page, left to right, until stillness begins to bleed and a story appears where there was once only an ache.

The wound does not heal, but it stops roaming.

Suddenly it finds itself trapped between margins, pinned there by ink like an insect, and for the first time all week, I’m able to leave it there on the page

and walk away.

“There is so much life in one’s life.” — Clarice Lispector

I am living through a particularly untidy season of my life.

It’s not outwardly catastrophic, but internally everything seems to have been pulled from its drawers. The contents of me everywhere.

I leave the books I’m reading open face-down as if in the middle of an argument with them. I answer messages three days late with too much sincerity. Some nights I fall asleep certain of who I am and wake feeling slightly rearranged. There are receipts at the bottom of my beach bag from cities I no longer belong to, folded between poems written on a legal pad, loose sunflower seeds, a postcard from Greece, and a sketch I made of myself sitting in nature while trees bent inward around me. Lately I think my entire life has begun to resemble that bag — too many selves colliding in one space.

Even my desires seem to be arriving faster than I can organize them. And I don’t mean the kind that make a woman seem wise or admirable from afar.

I mean the sudden desire to wear red lipstick and walk through town dressed like the main character of my life. To turn a shirt into a dress simply because I want to feel warm air against bare legs and have the hem threaten a scandal each time I move. To meet a Frenchman for a drink at 10 p.m. on a Saturday even though he is leaving town the next day and nothing enduring could possibly come of it. To stay awake with him until 4 a.m. anyway, inside a room with the windows open, sweat cooling on the body, because he looked at me and said with frightening sincerity: I want your entire night.

And to give it.

To give something of myself. Not because I am careless but because I am tired of withholding my aliveness and experiencing life indirectly from behind walls.

I mean the desire to stop treating pleasure as something that must justify itself through meaning. To eat fruit at the beach so slowly it begins to feel like a religious experience. To take psilocybin alone in nature and spend an entire afternoon wordless among trees, feeling the mind loosen its small clenched fist around the world.

To get a little drunk with a friend and wander empty streets at midnight singing badly without softening the sound for strangers. To stop apologizing for joy that takes up space. To stop editing oneself down into digestible pieces. To say fuck it more than no. To be unwilling to keep refusing experience in order to preserve some polished idea of who I am supposed to be.

To become less interested in being good and more interested in being alive.

For so long I thought adulthood meant becoming increasingly consistent and certain, but I’m learning there is another kind of maturity entirely. One that is alive and asks a woman to become more permeable. More honest about her hunger. More faithful to whatever inside her still trembles at beauty, at risk, at touch, at the possibility of disappearing for a moment into music or sex or saltwater or silence.

Beneath all this unraveling, something animal has returned to my body and I have begun to suspect that vitality has very little to do with stability.

I see now the time I spent mistaking numbness for peace was simply because nothing was disturbing the surface. I knew how to perform coherence then. I knew how to make my life neat and legible. But it’s tragic, isn’t it? The way a life can become terribly organized around its own avoidance and one can spend years being admired for a personality that was assembled primarily to prevent rupture.

Rupture has come anyway. Only now it feels less like destruction and more like a reckoning.

It arrives in strange forms. A sudden inability to participate in conversations that exist only to distract people from themselves. Listening to co-workers speak about weekends the way medieval peasants must have once spoken about heaven and feeling— beneath the humor of it— a genuine horror at how much of adulthood has been organized around waiting to feel alive again.

Someone tells you to “hang in there” at a job that is quietly eroding their spirit and you suddenly understand how much modern life is built around the normalization of deadness and the performance of coping that keeps people from having to admit they’re wasting enormous portions of their lives adapting to conditions that wound them.

And beneath all of it, your own inner life begins refusing silence.

You sit in meetings answering emails and smiling at appropriate intervals while something much older and less manageable starts surfacing from underneath the architecture of your functioning. Perhaps memory, rage, heartbreak, grief, or desire. Perhaps all of them at once. The body begins interrupting the story the mind constructed in order to survive and something ancient breaks then.

Or perhaps something ancient finally refuses to break again.

Grief changes shape, too. It starts to feel clarifying instead of just catastrophic. I grieve the woman who believed achievement could protect her. The woman who collected validation like gold stars because she had not yet learned how to generate her own sense of self-worth. The woman who mistook being desired for being seen.

Even ambition begins to shed its skin. There was a time I desperately wanted success, convinced it would save me somehow. I treated my life like something to optimize toward the future, always arriving mentally before I had fully inhabited where I already was.

Lately I find myself wanting different things. More mornings that unfold slowly and more time spent beside oceans and inside conversations that make me forget to look at my phone. There’s less performance and striving, and less of the peculiar violence of spending one’s entire life preparing to live it.

I have also stopped watching the news and flooding my nervous system with information that leaves no room for thought. Too much media now and I begin to feel estranged from my own instincts, as though the soul itself has an immune system and mine has become intolerant to artificiality and fear-based messaging.

There are days when I would rather sit silently beneath a tree than consume another opinion about the state of the world. I have stopped handing my attention out indiscriminately like loose change because the older I get, the more I understand that attention is valuable currency and a form of prayer. We must learn to yield it wisely.

And perhaps the deepest rupture of all is this:

I can no longer intellectualize myself out of feeling.

For many yers, I survived by translating experience into intellect before it could fully touch me. A part of me thought that if I could explain it quickly enough, analyze it cleanly enough, then perhaps I wouldn’t drown in it. But over time interpretation became a kind of barrier. A way of remaining untouched and slightly removed from my own existence.

Something in me can no longer tolerate that kind of distance.

And so life has become sharper lately, more embarrassing and beautiful. I cry more easily now, but I also laugh harder. Sex feels less performative and more real. I find myself moved by small things I once would have rushed past entirely. Now a woman laughing with her whole being can undo me for an hour and there are moments walking home from the market at dusk when the world feels so painfully alive I almost cannot bear to participate in it casually.

This is what happens when you stop living life from a distance— you become more porous.

You start to feel everything at its original volume. Beauty enters too quickly. So does loneliness. Music and poetry become unbearable in the way honest things often are.

You learn that aliveness doesn’t mean becoming more certain of yourself, but being willing to remain in contact with what cannot be resolved neatly. To stop rushing to explain yourself before you have fully felt what is happening. To let contradiction exist. To let longing exist. To let the questions remain alive inside you instead of sedating them immediately with productivity, irony, self-improvement, distraction, or certainty.

I feel more alive these days not because I have found answers, but because I have stopped anesthetizing the questions.

There is a peculiar intimacy with life in allowing myself to exist without immediate resolution. To resist turning every experience into a lesson and every wound into a thesis. To simply admit I am changing faster than I can explain.

For now, that is enough.

More than enough, actually.

It feels like the first honest thing.

If this piece stirred something in you, perhaps there is a reason.

I’ve been offering 1:1 tarot + coaching sessions for women navigating seasons of transition, reinvention, grief, desire, creative awakening, or the strange disorientation that comes when your old life no longer fits but the new one has not fully arrived yet.

Together we explore the questions beneath the surface:
— What part of you is asking to emerge?
— What have you outgrown emotionally, relationally, spiritually?
— Where are you still abandoning your own instincts?
— What would it look like to stop living from a distance?
— What kind of life is trying to happen through you now?

These sessions are less about prediction and more about returning to the body, intuition, desire, truth and listening closely to the deeper currents moving beneath your life.

You’ll leave with:
✧ a personalized tarot reading
✧ grounded insights + coaching
✧ practical integration for the season you’re in
✧ an archetypal lens to carry forward into the next cycle

1:1 sessions are currently $111 USD for 60 minutes.

If you feel called, book through the link below:

schedule your session

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