Emotional Motion Sickness: an Eclipse Season Postmortem

The avoidance of grief, the fetishization of shame, and the repair that can only happen in community.

Hey friends,

We made it! To the end of eclipse season, to the end of Mercury’s retrograde period, past the final Scorpio south-node eclipse. We won’t have to witness the scorpion shedding her skin again until the year 2040. I, for one, am relieved.

Hello from the other side, where today’s Taurus new moon shines like a beacon of hope. I may write a separate article about this new moon and the powerful, optimistic energies of the beautiful now. But I thought this powerful eclipse season deserved a reflection, a post-mortem (as we call a post-incident retrospective in the tech world). A moment to see what deep truths are rising out of the ashes.

Phoenix rising from the ashes in Book of Mythological Creatures by Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch (1747-1822)

An Eclipse Season Post-Mortem

I know I’m not alone in feeling the wild intensity and the suddenness of the past two lunations: the Aries solar eclipse on April 20 and the Scorpio lunar eclipse on May 5. Their effects have been lingering. During the last new moon, the solar eclipse, I was knocked out in bed for days with a strange mystery sickness that made me sleep for up to 18 hours at a time. Solar eclipses, with the moon (the body) covering the light of the sun (the mind), are all about paying attention to the wisdom of the body, and that wisdom told me to slow the fuck down.

During the last full moon, the Scorpio eclipse (which was opposite the erratic wildcard planet Uranus in the sky), I was knocked out in a completely different way. Like all my astro-guides had been saying would happen, events that transpired on that eclipse were sudden, unexpected, dramatic, and volatile. Lunar eclipses, when the light of the sun and the moon are both blocked by the earth, are all about paying attention to the interconnectedness of our lives here on earth, the systems and networks that are larger than our individual bodies, emotions, minds, and individual wills. This eclipse shoveled that message out in spades.

My own astrological report on the last lunar eclipse emphasized that it would be a time of letting go of something, releasing something, excreting something… so we wouldn’t have to carry the weight of the world on our muscles and bones.

Let go, let go, let go, I said.

As if letting go would make everything suddenly feel lighter.

What I didn’t acknowledge enough is how much heavier it feels in the body when we let go of something -how much weightier everything seems to feel on your muscles and bones, at least in the direct aftermath of a release. Releasing something- a thought pattern, a physical place, a relationship dynamic - that has been a deep part of you for a long time literally feels like carving out an organ. With a spoon. It’s bloody. It’s a mess. It doesn’t heal quickly.

Even if that organ was a vestigial one, one that is no longer serving you, no longer able to stay a part of you if your path forward is to have room for newness… it still creates a massive hole. A hole that seems almost impossible to fill.

Knowing exactly where we stand within a larger web of family, community, and society, as the other nodes of the web shift and reconfigure around us is… so hard. Knowing when to back away, when to lean in, and when to stay firmly in place as the web of your interrelations sways and bends and breaks. The process of interdependent change takes so much energy, so much presence, so much paying attention.

In the aftermath of the eclipse’s acute life transformation, I felt like I was tumbling in a washing machine. Or…. being absorbed by the sea. A song, Motion Sickness, by Phoebe Bridgers came on a shuffled playlist one day in the car last week, and it hit me hard. Over the past few days singing it loud has been one of the only things that has made me feel grounded, one of the only things that has held me within the conflicting and paradoxical and swirling emotions I’ve been feeling, all at the same time. Not because of the exact lyrics, per se, but because of the sentiment of emotional motion sickness, and the breath that it takes to rock out along with Bridgers’ voice.

I have emotional motion sickness…. somebody roll the windows down.

I’ve talked to many people about this eclipse, and it has resonated far and wide that letting go was most certainly the theme. Letting go of people in death, in breakup, in moving away. Saying goodbye to houses, to homelands. Releasing jobs, careers, ways of being. Letting go of “how I thought things would turn out”. Making room for more nourishment by getting rid of the old, the stagnant.

Release can feel satisfying, and almost everyone I’ve talked to has made active choices to release what they did this eclipse season. But this particular shedding, for many, seemed to go deep, to hold the paradox of how painful it can be to do something that is ultimately good for us. Over his past month, I’ve gone deep into the questions:

When a snake sheds her skin, does it hurt?

Is her new skin tender to the touch, as she slithers along the rocky soil?

How long does it take to feel normal again? To thicken the skin?

and..

Why does letting go feel so painful?

Every one of us experiences loss. All of us experience times in life when we know we have to make a tough choice, a choice that we really don’t want to make. We all experience moments where we regret a choice we’ve made in the past. We all experience the urge to blame ourselves for something, and then shift to blaming the world- blaming everything else besides ourselves - and then return to blaming ourselves again. We all feel badly for pain we’ve caused others at one point or another.

These so-called “negative emotions” - regret, blame, guilt, shame, and grief- are largely avoided in Western/American culture. There are hardly any containers, aside from confidential conversations behind closed doors, to deal with these feelings. And the individualism within the ever-present American Dream places the eradication of these emotions solely on the person dealing with them. Letting go of something- by choice or by circumstance- feels painful because it is something that we must do all alone.

Digging to the bottom of how we really feel, even within a therapeutic space, is incredibly challenging. From my experience, this is mostly because of how lonely it feels. To acknowledge our own guilt, our own regret, our own shame, our own grief, is often times the same as acknowledging how alone we really are. We get off a call with our therapist, our socially sanctioned place to talk about these “negative feelings”, and we are left only with our pillow, our blank wall. Maybe our dog or cat, if we’re lucky. We have gotten to the root of the pain to begin to heal, but we are forced to heal in solitude, to be strong enough for ourselves, to step into the role of being single parents for our wounded inner child.

Throughout history and across cultures, there have always been spaces, times, rituals, and ceremonies wherein people heal collectively, and hold space together for grief and shame and guilt. And although it is not fully absent within all American families and communities and regions, there is a distinct lack of communal cultural value placed on community care, collective repair and healing. It is against the ideals of industry to spend time on this pursuit, and thus the burden of “figuring it out” is handed to the psyche of each individual- which often leads to “stuffing it down until it erupts”.

Letting go brings up feelings of guilt, shame, and grief, and- at least in my experience- the lack of education on these emotions leads to a lot of confusion about what they actually even are.

Below are some musings of mine from the depths of the days following the Scorpio eclipse; attempts at clarifying this muddy water. Note that these are personal thoughts- I am not a trained psychologist, and am more than happy to be called out/ corrected on anything that I may be wrong about.

A bush viper slithering out of its skin. Shutterstock

The difference between Shame, Guilt & Grief

Guilt: a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc.

Shame: A painful emotion caused by the awareness of having done something wrong or foolish. The intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

Grief: the anguish experienced after significant loss.

Let’s start with the most misunderstood of these emotions, and the most taboo: Shame.

Shame is a recognition of a pattern within ourselves that we can’t unsee. A part of us that we wish could be better than it is. 

Shame is the personal recognition of a pattern of behavior that, somewhere along the line, our bodies, our intuition, or our communities/society has told us is wrong. Shame creeps in when we begin to know, deep down, that we don’t want that behavior, that part of ourselves to be in control as much as it is. 

Shame is different than guilt. When we’re feeling guilty, it is often about something we can change, something we can remedy, something we can repair. Feelings of guilt can inspire course-correction. We can take an action to absolve our guilt, to respond to the feeling. Reparations, reaching out to apologize, showing up with care. Taking responsibility for our actions. It can take time, but we can show up to make amends for things we feel guilty about. We have institutions, courts of law, to help decide guilt and administer retribution.

Shame is deeper. Feelings of shame typically don’t inspire course correction- they usually inspire tearing ourselves down from the inside. Shame oftentimes stems from something that we did or was done to us in childhood, from a time when we didn’t have as much control over our responses or our own safety.

The childhood stem of shame tends to branch out into more and more examples of the same behavior or response pattern throughout our lives. This is especially true when we are not conscious about the roots of our shame, about the things that we wish we could change about ourselves, about our specific way of responding to a crisis. 

When something external triggers our shame, it’s because we’ve done something to actively repeat a pattern that deep down we truly don’t want to repeat. Or maybe we’ve responded to something in a way that we don’t want to respond.

The Branching Shame Tree Within Us

When a person or a circumstance points a pattern of behavior out to us that we’re ashamed of, instead of feeling guilty (ie. responsible) and saying something like “I shouldn’t have done that”, our bodies instead react by activating that whole entire tree of shame that lives in our bodies. Lighting up branch after branch of memories where we have behaved in the same exact way in the past. Starting from the branch of the current moment, we travel back through all the other examples of when this pattern has shown up in our lives. Last year, 5 years ago, 15 years ago, 30 years ago…and down into the stem of where it started, likely in our childhood. Back to a time when we had no true control over our environments, when we were just trying to protect ourselves.

And if we’re being honest, most of the time our shame doesn’t stop with this childhood stem either- it goes deeper, into the roots of our families, our ancestors, our lineages- things we have even less control over. 

This whole tree of shame can get activated really quickly. We do something we believe is wrong, and we’re embarrassed about it, and then within seconds we’re operating as if we have no control of it- as if we’re children. Sometimes the tree gets activated and we disassociate even further back from the present moment, to a time before we were even born. The stories created in our mind at that moment tell us “My actions are hardwired. They are completely out of my control. There is no way to change them. It’s just how I am”.  Our shame tree tricks us out of our agency, out of the control we have within our adult lives. It tricks us out of our belief in ourselves, our hope that we could change, transform, or let go.

And because it’s a pattern where we believe we lack control, the places where shame exists within us are oftentimes the places where kink and fetishization does too. 

The Fetishization of Shame

This shame tree is the home of that classic little cartoon devil on your shoulder. The one who pops up in moments when you’re angry at yourself, feeling defensive, and whispers in your ear, convincing you to come with him, to trust him - because it’s easier that way.. and because it’ll be more FUN! He says hey, this shame tree doesn’t have to make you feel so bad! It could be our playground, instead!

Because it feels SO BAD to recognize a longstanding pattern of pain, trauma, or something we no longer align with in ourselves- and because once we’ve seen it we can’t unsee it- we follow that cute little devil and say yeah! That shame tree inside of me is actually pretty cool! Like, fucking amazing actually!

We then tell ourselves that our partners are wrong, our families are wrong, our communities are wrong, or society at large is wrong for ever making us question this amazing pattern, this gorgeous tree that branches inside us. My family is rigid. My community is not even mine to begin with. Society is prude, too moralistic, too judgemental. Fuck that fake little cartoon angel on the other shoulder. They’re full of shit!

We fetishize the pattern inside us that made us feel so bad, and tell ourselves a story that everyone else is wrong. It’s their fault. All men. All women. The government. Capitalism. Socialism. Religious society. Woke culture. Whatever. We tell ourselves that we are cutting edge, ahead of our time, or, on the other side, the only moral one left. That traditional society is full of shit. Or that modern society is dangerous. That we are on the forefront of truth, of aliveness. 

And then we feel better. Sometimes our shame tree chills out for a bit. Sometimes it requires that we add another extra branch or too in its honor, to prove ourselves to it as a sacrifice. We feel like we have an ally in our tree, this branching familiarity within ourselves. We feel a surge of self love, self acceptance. We feel better… for a little while. 

The more branches on the tree, the harder it is to avoid hitting your head

But our tree is bigger now. And because it has more branches extending out into the world now, it is more easily tripped on, more easily triggered.

We get triggered because we still cant un-see, can’t un-feel, the parts of us that our truest, most authentic selves in the present moment- wish to be better. The parts of us that we wish to be more aligned with the love we know is possible. The parts of us that we wish to be better than our scared little child selves were, better than our families were, better than our ancestors were. 

And then something in the world- some perceived judgement- sets us off again. 

This cycle goes on and on. Throughout our lives. It branches through our family trees. Through generations, centuries, millenia. We cycle from the deep, embodied recognition of some personal quality we wish to be more aligned, to justification and defense of that same quality, for the chance to relax and just chill out with our own personal demons.

When these hangs get to be too much, but we still don’t believe it’s possible to change ourselves, we flip over and cycle through disassociation. Through habitual use of alcohol, marijuana, drugs, tv, scrolling, video games, sex, travel, work. Through depression. Through disconnecting from our families and communities of care and from ourselves, putting on a smile and distancing ourselves from relationship. 

The Shadow Side of Storytelling

It is SO HARD to break a cycle like this. But there comes a time when what you’ve seen to be true, what you’ve felt in your body, truly cannot be unseen, cannot be un-felt. 

Humans are all really good at telling stories. Thats what we do as a species. And most modern therapy is set up to listen to us tell stories. The most gifted storytellers among us, the ones who are able to evade the potential help of talk therapy for the longest, are often the ones with the most shame to justify to ourselves. 

For most of human history, there have been spaces for stories to be told within community- spaces where each person’s tree of shame, and tree of accomplishments, and tree of hope- could be shared in a larger orchard.

Today we tell our stories into private, confidential spaces. Therapy can be like a confession booth. A place to get something off our chests into the void so that we can more healthily go back to our lives. Sometimes through therapy we’re not always adding a branch to the tree. We’re stopping the growth of shame, defending ourselves a little less, not needing to hang out with the devil on our shoulder to reinforce our justifications. 

Sometimes we are such good storytellers that our therapists or confidantes will corroborate our stories, give us a little extra justification, be that third party pouring one out for the homies as we sit at the dock with our cartoon devil accomplice. 

I have had a therapist tell me, in a time of deep depression, that I am “one of the most self aware 20-somethings” she’d ever met. I used this to stop going to therapy and justify that it was my friends, my family, society, the rest of the world that was messed up. It wasn’t ME. (Pro tip: this didn’t help my depression). 

I’ve been seeing my current therapist for 3 years, telling her my stories, and only very recently have I begun to have “breakthroughs” in the sense of allowing my embodied feelings to take precedence over my mind and quiet my narrative for a moment. 

Body-time vs. Mind-time

From my experience, the body - the gut-brain and the fascial system and the peripheral nervous system and the heart- the body works on a verrryyy different timescale than the mind. And the mind gets verrry frustrated with this timescale. As an avid storyteller, my mind will start telling me about the urgency of figuring something out in the moment. And that urgency will feel SO true. 

I will be the first to admit that it is much much easier to recognize another person’s shame. Especially when we’ve been hurt by someone. I can think of nothing more satisfying when I am hurt than to highlight another’s shame tree, to justify their behavior to myself somehow. So that I can maybe change them, from the stem or the root, so they don’t hurt me again. 

But we all know we can’t change other people. So we have to look within.

Gently Pruning our Trees of Shame

Shame is a recurring pattern of a quality that lives within us - and beyond us and long before us. In order to heal problems within our communities and families and heal ancestral wounds, we first have to start with trusting ourselves.

First, we must trust that this behavior of ours that we are no longer aligned with did in fact serve us at one point in time. It stemmed from our fundamental desire to protect ourselves, to keep ourself safe, or to protect those we love. We must trust that we were born innocent - that we may have inherited a pattern that protected one of our ancestors that we see now is wrong- but that we did not do anything wrong when we were too young to know any different

Second, we must trust our present-day inner knowing about how we want to be better than what came before us. Trusting the desire to be more aligned with our own truths. Trusting that it is worth it to start gently pruning our shame trees, even if that process will bring up pain, and require strength.

What does it mean to trust yourself?

Trust: Firm belief in the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. Continued actions over time that lead to an increase of feelings of safety and connection.

I like this definition, that trust is a series of actions that build safety and connection between 2 or more beings, or even between 2 or more parts of ourselves.

The hardest part about shame is that we often times couple the parts we wish to improve within ourselves with the parts that we are proud of and admire about ourselves. That coupling is part of the justification in our stories we tell. “I can’t stop (doing some harmful behavior), or else I wouldn’t be able to (be as good at work, be as compassionate, be as creative, etc)”. This erodes our personal trust in the part of us that desires to be better, because it goes up against a different part of ourselves that gives us positive feedback.

A big part of pruning the branches of the shame tree is uncoupling those parts, making them distinct from each other. Another piece of pruning the shame tree is accepting all these parts of our past that have made us who we are. But if our pattern is hurting ourselves or hurting others, the pruning can’t stop with self-acceptance. The next piece is being brave enough to express the “negative feelings” to others so that you can be held in family, in community. Many people stop at self acceptance, and then something is voiced from their partner or family member or friend or boss or whoever that calls that self-acceptance into question, and we go back to another cycle of loneliness, defensiveness and disassociation.

Midjourney’s response to the prompt “Community Care” :)

The bravery of feeling feelings within a community of people

The community piece is so important in the process of finding alignment with our true selves. Feeling feelings within community of people you care about and have vested interest in, not relegating feelings and honesty to a black box or a zoom screen. Heart to hearts, not mind to minds, are the conversations that open up that bridge of connection and safety so that trust can exist.  ‘Feel it to heal it’ and ‘the only way out is through’ are relevant phrases here. 

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes finding trust with ourselves comes after finding trust and connection with others. We are social animals. We need teams. We need families, clans. When we seek brotherhood or sisterhood with the cartoon devil on our shoulder, or with someone we don’t trust deep down, or with our long-dead ancestors, or with our transactional therapists, we do build some trust with ourselves- enough to get through our days- but not enough to feel deeply interconnected with life. 

Facing our fears of being witnessed in trying

It’s hard to find that trust and connection with others by being vulnerable around our shame because the shame body seems like an unbreakable chain. An un-changeable personality trait that can be confirmed by our memories with countless examples. Showing other people even a slice of that pie is…. embarrassing. So we keep it a secret, which makes us feel disconnected. We know that if we admit to our past patterns, and also admit to wanting to be better, and then we try it and we fail, it will be beyond embarrassing. It will be humiliating. We tell ourselves that’s it would be so much easier to keep trying in secret, or to stop trying entirely. But this backfires, because hiding our shame and pushing our guilt or embarrassment deeper inside is harmful to us because it is ultimately deflecting responsibility to something we know deep down we are responsible for.

Facing our fear of being perceived in trying to be better is the strongest thing we can do. To allow others to hear us, to see us: our dreams and fears and desires for ourselves, our lives, takes strength. To let someone we care about see us try, even when we are embarrassed. Because everything we do, absolutely everything, takes practice. Especially being a better human. When we let people witness us try, it is risky, but there is the possible reward of having cheerleaders and water-bearers along the path.

Sometimes we find someone with a similar secret to share our secret with. This is a beautiful connection, but if it stops there with a single person, there is a lot of pressure on that connection to hold the secret. It can become codependent, and can add to the cycle of justification by having a single co-conspirator. Community is necessarily larger than that. We cant thrive alone, or even in a duo, forever.

Letting people around you in on shame and embarrassment often times makes you realize that you’re really not alone. That a lot of other people out there have similar desires, wants, fears, regrets and fetishes.

Once your shame, your fetish, is not a secret, there is room for connection. With connection, there is room for safety. With a sense of safety, there is room for letting go, knowing you have support in grieving what you are letting go. And with letting go, there is finally room for something new to emerge. A branch of a different tree to grow. Room for transformation.

A pedestal is a place where witches are burned

The higher we put qualities associated with our shame up on pedestals within our own minds, and the more we fetishize them in solitude, the more we set them up to be burned at the stake, taken down in flames, by others. The more we idolize our tree and cast it in gold, rather than seeing it as a living organism that needs pruning, the more we set ourselves up for disconnection from our deepest desires. 

Personally, I have kept some of my people-pleasing behavior secret from others because I worry that they will think I’m not strong enough, or I’m a pushover. I’ve kept some of my true interests and desires secret from people because I worry they will think I’m stupid, or I’m irrational. So I pretend that my behavior is all good, tell myself that I’m avoiding my own truths because I’m compassionate or I’m adaptable. I tell myself that if I didn’t hide myself and my desires and my passions, then I couldn’t be compassionate with others or adaptable in situations. The self expression that I wanted to be better about became coupled with an attribute that I deeply valued, respected . It became black and white.

The internalized notion of selfless compassion, then, became a fetish, an idol up on a pedestal, far above the messiness of connecting with another in truth, above the risk of not being accepted. Me and my cartoon devil homie clinked glasses at feeling misunderstood for our false moral superiority, for our secrecy. And this secrecy worked for me, until the pretending and the idolization led to real feelings of disconnection from people I love, and the disconnection led to pain and deep feelings of aloneness. 

I know others keep their money troubles secret from others, because they worry that others will think that they’re not able enough, not hardworking enough, not committed enough. The self protection/defensiveness comes to the rescue with a story that abundance is not present because the whole system of earning money is fundamentally flawed, capitalism is flawed, and so in order to get money they must be a slave to a system they don’t believe in. Poverty and lack then become fetishized in some ways. The binary takes over, and the secrets and the storytelling work, until that same feeling of loneliness and disconnection from others takes center stage. 

I know others who keep their sensual desires, or their sexuality, secret from people because they worry that others will think they’re not moral enough, or that they’re dirty, or desperate. So they keep their desires a secret, sneak around to fulfill them, and tell themselves that they’re keeping it secret because society would shame them. And the secrets and the shame itself become the fetish. But ultimately, if not shared, the secrets most often lead to disconnection, self-judgement, and more feelings of shame. 

Another highly prevalent secret that I - and many of us - keep is the secret of insecurity. The shameful secret of not having all the answers, of not being 100 percent certain about everything. This stems from being doubted and contradicted as children, not listened to or trusted by our parents or those closest to us. The shame of being told that we’re wrong, and not being supported in our efforts to try is often met with the absolutism of having to be right in adulthood. The truth with a capital T becomes the fetish, the thing that is more important than connection with others. If we pretend to have it all under control and keep our curiosity and ability to say “I dont know” a secret, then other people’s questions become triggers that light up the whole tree of shame. 

Shame is not a verb

No one else can ‘shame’ us. I don’t think that shame is a verb. Other people, or collective society, can tell us their opinions of how they think we should act. If we don’t align with their opinions, we will feel that misalignment in our bodies, and we have the ability to let their opinions roll off. And If we resonate with their opinions. we will know that in our bodies too. We will feel the vibration of our own truth that activates the tree within us, and we won’t be able to let it go. The more we practice discernment in knowing the difference between how we truly feel when someone tells us their opinion, the more we can know ourselves and give ourselves love. This is the power of using our voices. This is the power of healing in community. 

Sometimes society-at-large is bigger than community, and established rules, laws, governments, and institutions make keeping secrets truly justifiable. This is the case when the perceived life-or-death fear of our inner child extends to the present reality because an institution threatens their livelihood in some way. The strongest people I can imagine are people who are aware of this real and present danger, and who still don’t keep secrets of shame that would internally destroy them. People who still engage in community, still open themselves up to vulnerability and sharing their truth and their fears and their regrets, despite being in danger. These are the people who deserve our utmost respect and the deepest care extended to them.

For me, having a child whose future I deeply care about was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to trusting my inner self to to escape the cycle of shame, justification and disassociation. This began my path; there are many escape routes from the cycle. It does require finding people you care about, places you care about, futures you care about enough to risk being seen trying. To risk being seen failing. To risk being seen feeling.

Facing the shame tree…. decorating it, and climbing it

The further along in life I get, and the more time I spend giving attention to my body, my breath, my feelings, (and the less I am able to consume substances or travel or party or distract myself, thanks in large part to becoming a mom) - the harder it is to ignore my shame tree. 

On some days, I am emboldened by my ability to look it in the face, sing to it, breathe to it, laugh with it, care for it. To actively prune the branches down, and to recognize that maybe some branches, and the stem, and the roots will always be inside me, and that’s ok. Some days I am able to give the child in me that was alive when the stem sprouted from the roots some tenderness, some deep, loving care.

On other days, some person or event takes me down a long and branching path of confirmation bias about how I am not strong enough, smart enough, or good enough. Those are the days that I want to disappear into bed, run away to a far-off country, or make up a story of justifications for all the reasons I am a victim of my own circumstance.

But because I have done a little pruning, and allowed myself a glimpse of the feeling of self-care, self-love, and community-care, I know that there is more on the line now if I continue adding branches to the tree. There is more motivation to get out of the victim mentality and runaway shame spirals. I’ve developed practices to regulate my nervous system, and now I stay a shorter time in the cycle of justification and disassociation than I used to. I have the desire to show up, to practice and be witnessed trying, to move through the birth canal toward another way of being. 

And so I speak. I reach out. I write. I sing. I share my feelings, and don’t try to over-explain them with stories that keep me tied to the past. I’m ready to leave behind the fear of being seen in my messiness and imperfection, the need to keep it like a secret. I know that pruning the tree of shame through these methods isn’t the same as trying to ignore it or cut it down, but rather allowing more space for curiosity around the branches that are already there.

Cycle-breakers and communal fetishes

Love your shadow denim jacket, painted by me.

This may also sound counterintuitive, but fetishes themselves can be sexier when shared with people whose futures you care about. A fetish, an idolization, a tingle of pleasure, is an empowering way to communally break the larger, outdated social contracts that are no longer working.

We have to work together and play together to take our power back. Cycle breakers are coming out of their closets, along with their skeletons, all around us. We’re doing it by listening to our bodies, to the earth body and celestial bodies, to our children, who by their nature are embodied. Cycle-breakers are connecting with these wisdoms, rather than the narrative of disconnection, of divide-and-conquer, that we have been fed so long by people who want to control us. 

The kinkiness, the fetishization, the “trauma tingle” that many of us feel as a defensive reaction to a prescribed, vanilla, ‘normal’ life… that is not a bad sensation that needs to be squashed. There are many unfair judgements and societal norms that need to be torn down and recreated.

I believe that by feeling the truth of your feelings, the roots behind your shame, and by sharing them - with those who you want to trust and who you want to trust in you - you are creating a new reality. A new normal, a rainbow-pistachio-cacao swirl normal, one not prescribed but co-created. One that creates spaces to hold and care for the universal emotions of grief, sorrow, regret, and guilt. One that doesn’t require pushing things down until they erupt. One where life can get messy without a fear of bleeding out. One that fetishizes honesty, beauty, openness, sensuality, and love. 

Out of the eclipse portal we arrive: battered, bruised, and hopefully a little bit more connected to our deepest truths. Onward we go.

I’ll end this with a quote by a wise soul. Until next time.

Rarely, if ever, is any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

- bell hooks