Tag: mental-health

The daphne, tulips, magnolias, and daffodils are incorrectly all at once.

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Thursday: A place with six pools, 4 in the dark and silence ringing from a bowl. Two hot and one cold. One cool, and one a replica womb. The one heavy with minerals. Hours in spirit. Too-delayed eating and then singing. As good of a day as I’ve ever had, aside from thick exhaustion and sleeping on the day bed and sleeping in my bed-bed with the sun on my hand.

Friday: I sing out, good morning blackbirds. I’m low on their favorites, so they get small, shelled seeds. They are grateful but begrudging. Virtual therapy then and my ask to start future-casting—mapping onto my body what’s possible and good so to not slide into known pain cycles or let others lick and raw their way into mine. I sit with a pillow. That’s the therapy, feeling the unfamiliarity of comfort and its cartography in my body. What it feels like to have any comfort and be in a state of soft-pressed ease. Then after picking at the worst task to 95% completing I hit two walls I need others for and call it a day. Walk out to the trees and petal-ed, profane season. Then rest and reading, and rest and rest.

Saturday: Is lost.

Sunday: Not sleeping and then sleeping late and staying in. A walk, the library, we got handed a cat by a neighbor who was trying to walk to lunch but their cat was following them the whole way so we took it back home. This may have been part of Saturday, I don’t know. The child made pumpkin bread while we talked, listened to music, and I cleaned the kitchen. Reading, sleeping, astrology meeting. Then not sleeping, my own revenge bedtime. I don’t think revenge bedtime procrastination is actually that prevalent. I think people with issues going to sleep and waking up are people for whom going to sleep and waking up or being awoken were always incredibly dangerous.

I think about all the ways to show my child things. How I can make a diagram of how life will pull you over and over to where you are supposed to go, like a drain’s force, and fighting it will only leave you depleted, tired, calcified in a life and character you’ve actually outgrown, a discombobulated wraith of yourself.

How pain teaches better than almost anything, much in the way cutting a branch off forces the tree to push nutrients into unexpected places and grow differently than it would have, becoming a new iteration.

Or how a bad partner will begin to cloud and muddy you, and a good partner will boundary and propagate you.

Or how we adopt personas we believe we actually are, but they aren’t. Just an avatar trying to keep us safe somehow, a skin that can be peeled off, a performance of a defense we confuse as our identity, but it really just prevents truth.

I think of how to show these with timelines and curves, Venn diagrams, bar charts. Simple comic panels that make it all feel-able and digestible, something that can create a visual memory reference that can be felt in the body.

I started making my child a binder of things to know how to do, so that they never ask a woman how to do something without learning how to do it first. I watched a video of a man teaching boys how to grocery shop and his first instruction is to call the wife to ask what kind of milk, not to use their eyeballs and read the milk already at the house and note it before they go. A whole crew of boys who will be so surprised by the divorce papers.

In this binder I’m making are simple recipes, how to clean a bathroom and kitchen, living room or bedroom. How to separate and launder clothes. How to read clothing tags. Now I can say: please clean the bathroom and the process runs itself. Next we will get to knowing when a room needs to be cleaned without having to say something.

Randomly, I put into the binder how to research and buy a washer and dryer and the right kind to buy. The child is many years away from shopping for these. But I think we are both so aware of the window of time we have with each other, no conversations ever feel like they can wait.

There’s always some amount of urgency in our bond. It’s built into our charts. We relish each other in a way of just being fond of enjoying being together. It feels like we don’t want to waste a second on discord or errata. We value each other actively. It always feels like our window is slowly closing. There could never be enough time together in this life.

I attribute it to, in part, my child’s sun and moon seated at the start and finish of Libra, enclosing my Pluto, which is a point of catastrophe in my own chart. My child’s sun and moon enrobe it loosely. It’s ease and peace for a planet that is death and cataclysm. That dialect of death Pluto bears is always there.

My best friend and I have this as well. Her Pluto is extremely prominent. We have both spent our lives feeling like death is at our heels, and interacting with it more than once as death situations and near-death experiences. We speak regularly about if we die, what the other should do. We can both feel it in the other, even if it is actually far away. We live in proximity.

The other reason I think this comes up between my child and I is that along with our fondness and blatant like of the other, I don’t think we’ve spent that much time incarnated together. While our spirits may have been close in the numinous for many millennia, I don’t think we’ve experienced incarnation together for very long. I only have one inkling of a memory with him when he was my mother, and it’s one of the weakest past life memories I have.

And, in an incarnation where I have so much heavy karma with so many, it’s a gift to have a place of light and joy and like and ease. The relationship reiterates what love is when it’s aligned in two people and there isn’t fear or defense or reactivity. It’s joyful, quiet, easy, and respectful. It leaves everyone room and doesn’t crowd or demand. Needs are easy to meet because it’s so valued. There isn’t co-dependence ego. Just the honor of bearing witness to each other and the joy of mutually liking the other person.

Interestingly, I’d say the way I learned how to be loved is by my aforementioned best friend. Before her, I hadn’t known any unconditional love, love without an agenda or ego, being projected upon, or with consistency, bravery in relationship, lack of reactivity, centering of communication and thoughtful response, and unapologetic investment. Which is funny to think about because now it’s proven that in that environment, that’s exactly who I am as well. I had never had the opportunity or skills until this last decade. In the early years if our friendship I was always waiting to see her turn, negging, centering ego, or use passive aggression or blame and lack of accountability, but she never once did or has. She has never exploited vulnerability. I always say jokingly she’s the best boyfriend I ever had. She built and installed the bar. I’m now totally allergic to drama, petulance, inability to communicate, fear of honesty, and harm.

It’s interesting that these two people, with whom I share profound Plutonian bond, would be the people with whom love comes so easily and freely, especially since Pluto’s infamy comes in part from abducting Persephone and forcing her into the underworld – an origin of the perpetrator/victim narrative. And, it’s interesting that these two are both almost exclusively air placements. Air, where I myself have only 1 placement, Pluto. I feel like I anchor their chronic spinning or give it form it can struggle to otherwise shape. And they in turn lift me from seriousness and emotional tesseracting.

Pluto in favorable synastry creates value and rareness, like a mythic ore.

retrospect/uncircumspect

MKAster

I had this sitting in drafts for more than a year, from when I was mentally measuring how far I had to get from myself, from certain parts of myself, and how the parts of myself I moved into were about a different dialect of survival than I had previously known. I also had a risky curiosity about defamiliarizing the self, elected a brand of punishment for what I perceived as a failure, and a wonder about what remains of the self in elected abandonment and alienation.

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The mutability I conduct necessitates an identified frame that provides a measure for how far I can recede or expand myself, otherwise, the expansion or contraction will simply continue to unspool. And even when it exceeds or shrinks, I was previously too often taken by the movement itself to stop or cease. The momentum became a curiosity, and the effect it had on others was a way to try and please, achieve, and stretch myself, but often meant self abandoning for the interest in witnessing another’s subsequent movement or action, or an outcome I was simply interested in seeing if I could create. A sort of energetic Stretch Armstrong for the sake of it. Again, a curiosity. And probably an excess of creativity.

And, being this mutable, this Sagittarian and Piscean, while the editions of myself that have unfolded over decades have differed somewhat, I know why ages 32-40 were such a stark shock to this life. Why I elected as much. And I knew even then, why I abandoned most of the core of me, occupying my own perimeter, filling in the radius, and abandoning the center aside from a thin, exposed shimmer of the soul; like a cat clinging to the walls of its own room. I know exactly why but it doesn’t make the image or experience any less of a shock to measure from this distance and time. Or, the toll upon my body any less extreme. You can abandon your body for your mind, or your mind for your body, but you will still be charged either way.

I’d occupy the center in potent, technicolor iterations for short times to find out if I was still there. I remember showing up for my dissertation in work coveralls and MAC Ruby Woo lips, pale as a candle and fine fissures throughout from the work. Leni asked me what it meant to write it and I answered incandescent, crying, but in an exhausted cry. Weak, thin tears that made no difference to the state I was in. Like waking up a moment from sleep during a recent grief and realizing you were crying in your dream anyway. But I left there and shut the door. Returned to my own perimeter, stepping over much of myself on the way. A way to live around the mess of wounded, abandoned, and writhing sentience and only access the creative force. Extract the marrow but ignore the meal, unable to occupy my own body in a way that could allow the pain to quarter for a moment.

Between the ages of (I argue) 37-50ish we undergo tremendous Plutonian destruction and then resurrection. Some will get through this period still needing to cling to the fabricated identity of themselves they had hewn in the Saturn return in the late 20s to early 30s. And while that’s the first blush of our adult selves, it isn’t made to carry us through a whole maturation. That’s where Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune go to work in the mid ages. We’re meant to mature by aligning back to our soul and this incarnation’s goals, and then making new choices from that point — in partnership, friendship, work, values, vision, and faith — that better fit our primary self that was born into this life, and that many of us had to fight to keep sight of.

If the mid-life transits (or, the mid-life crisis), which everybody must pass through and is arguably the hardest point of any life lived as long, is the appearance of urge for the unlived life, or, we are led to the door of our unlived life. We can watch as some surrender to it, some choose to fight it and fail, and some are cataclysm-ed and then transformed by it. It tries to reset us to where we’re supposed to be, a jolting realignment, breaking all the ways built on false soil, and where we had ‘notions’ about ourselves or moved too far from our truth.

When I was younger I sometimes took far greater risks than I could afford, and getting as away from my core self as I could was one such way. Generally it turned out fine, resulting in remarkable or rare experiences that made good stories, shaped me for the better, or became important self-secrets, but when it did not, it really did not. And it’s this mutability, coupled with the most sensitive of nervous systems, which should have been protected and sheltered at first by family, and then later by myself. But I didn’t come to that realization until a decade ago and then hurried to push everything away to methodically and deliberately titrate — in a way that’s inherent to me but was not previously allowed — what would be allowed to come in.

If we are individuals who didn’t have families that at least partly fostered and honored our individuality and singular needs and curiosities, we had to steal glimpses of ourselves in far smaller ways, lifting reflections from where we found ourselves most illuminated, even when it was only a spark, suspicion, or resonance.

There are mundane moments in life from when I was young that have stuck with me. Non-remarkable, quickly passing moments where I could feel my soul stretch and breathe before needing to take cover again. One was at a zoo field trip. It was a bright day and warm late spring weather and I had finished eating lunch on the grass outside. My friends had gone in to rejoin the group but we still had time. I realized that nobody who knew me was around. And my family had no idea where I was. And I felt elated to just be out in the world, unknown, and free and alone. It was a tremendous feeling of liberation. Of just being a living breathing thing in the world, energy connecting with other energy. I thought of leaving to experience more of that feeling but couldn’t figure out where I would go.

And another, ice skating on a frozen pond in the winter among tilting, dead, soft yellow prairie grass in winter. I was with my best friend and we were off the side of a pretty busy road. Her mom had just dropped us off and we trotted through the collapsing grasses to the pond and laced on our skates. Two young girls just skating on a frozen pond alone with no sound but some distant cars and wind and a time on a watch we should be ready to leave by.

I knew who I was in museums, in the city, in nature. I knew who I was alone, in rooms, with music, on the floor, at the movies, and especially on paper. But all of those moments were extremely fleeting, mocked, judged, or prevented. Life was in service to the fabricated identities and the terminal fragility and immature violences of others.

It’s impossible when living in a war zone of abuse to figure out who you are. Who you are will not get you fed or seen. Who you are must become a survivalist specializing in the ways that will hopefully generate the least pain on any given day.

When life opens up and becomes more or less your own, it takes years if not decades (and some are never able) to stop magnetizing the same landscape that was lived in. If you are a boxer, you find people to box and situations you have to fight. But if you want to love somebody, especially the self, you have to unlearn that fight. You have to know when you need or want the gloves, and when to keep your hands in ice. And if you are growing in that way, you will need the gloves very infrequently if at all.

I don’t know when I was farthest from myself and pressed into all of the strange secondary aspects of myself, living around my own light. I know I wore a lot of colors, I ate food. There was less blood, and blades. I oriented myself to an osprey nest. I befriended the snakes in my yard, I otherwise let almost my whole life out on contract to others. But I found this piece of writing and I think this was pretty close. By age 38 I knew I had gone too far past myself, and simultaneously, had collapsed in on myself. I knew I was the negative space of myself, hesitant pencil marks and clear surface making my shape. I knew by that age I was going to have to die or resurrect. Eventually, I’d do both, in both literal and spiritual ways.

“And it always felt like I have this unknown deal that’s hard for me to keep.” That’s it. Some part of me knew what I was doing, the cost, and that I was going to keep doing it a while more. It was a costly exile. And a permeating, shocking, fathomless, saturated birth and return after.