Things have felt heavy lately. Trudging. That’s just late February, I guess, when winter’s been dragging its heels and we’ve had a few flirtatious brushes with spring, enough to remember that it’s coming. Soon. A surety in uncertain times. The sun sets after 6pm now, and it won’t set earlier than that until November. I’ll take the win.
I have noticed I’ve been hesitant to show up to the page. My journalling practices have fallen by the wayside lately, have waned like the moon, or maybe like a planet with an orbit askew — swinging around close and then flinging out wide for a while. It’s okay though, it really does feel like being in my body is the medicine for this moment. Being here, keeping it local, living within arm’s reach has felt like the medicine I need. So I’ll work from here, unleash what emerges from the rusty tap, see what happens.
I recently finished On Our Best Behavior, Elise Loehnen’s book about the seven deadly sins and how women are socialized to carry these burdens. My god, it was great. Her Pulling the Thread podcast is, admittedly, the only one I listen to with any degree of consistency.1 Her ability to slow down and weave in narrative threads, historic threads, personal threads from so many far-flung sources, to treat the esoteric with rigour and practicality is such an inspiration.
It is frustrating, to realize I am drawn to these complex things that are difficult to distill, that need lots of space for the distilling process. I have LOVED distilling things in the past — it’s the thing most people forget is at the heart of good strategy and, especially, good naming. The act of taking a set of ideas and condensing them into (often) a single word to represent the seed of something larger. That can act as a container for the vision and ongoing contributions of a person, a team, an office, a company.
But I have found myself drawn to things less concise, to processes that keep changing. I keep a malleable and sprawling and unhurried space these days. I keep my garden rambling, so to speak, rather than neat, tidy, efficient, productive. So, yes, frustrating, to focus in close for a while and then fling it out wide, letting the wake of it change me rather than looking right up close, being intimate enough to study its pores. What do I learn from softening my eyes and stepping back and taking in more context? I see more of the whole and less of the particulars, maybe.
I also suspect I feel frustrated often — by the limits of language, by myself, by the world, by the systems we live within — because I have a helluva lot of unnamed anger onboard.2
I joke that my inner rebel is the keeper of my best ideas. She is wily and teenaged and prone to shucking off systems, structures, even self-designed ones that are intended to move us towards the things we hold most dear. Anything I build for myself, I build with the intention of breaking it down again. The component pieces must be useful. My journals are binders. My filing system is a veritable warren of interconnected Notion databases I’ve cobbled together via latenight Youtube tutorials. My art practice these days is collaging. Let’s chop it up and keep it loose. These elements are all engaged in a dance with each other, magnetized by one another, at a distance but slowly coalescing into something greater than the sum.
I have only recently come to understand my experience of working, for much of my adult life, as a traumatic one. Corporate environments are inherently traumatic to a lot of humans, especially highly sensitive ones like me. My gifts — in being able to sense into the emotional undercurrent of what’s not being said, make that subtext into text and guidance — have been used to extract value and consolidate systems that perpetuate harm. That cause me harm. That cause you harm. That harm our interdependence. That harm our home, this world, by chopping it up and spitting it back out. That see pieces of utility and benefit instead of the interconnected whole.
I did so under threat of false urgency, under the dangled carrot of prestige, of influence, of someday-safety. I did so hunched over my laptop, sitting at my desk in a grey shoebox over my lunch hour, or with eyes still-swollen after I had sobbed in the bathroom, or long after the sun had gone down; in airports, in coffee shops, in the back of a cab on the way over to the client meeting. I once had a couple of senior directors edit the presentation I was about to lead at Google while we sat in the lobby, and nearly had a panic attack as I brought each slide up, one by one, not knowing what was coming up next that I’d have to defend. Disconnected from the whole flow of what I’d meticulously crafted.
When I tune into what that felt like, what that still feels like inside the home of my bones, my cartilage, my skin, I feel a tidal wave of rage, like a sea swelling, boiling, blistering as it crashes up against the cliffed edges of my body. How could they? an endless part within me howls. I know I am not alone in this experience, that it is the norm at many workplaces. How can they?
The more uncomfortable question that continues to lurk is, how could you? How could I let this happen? How could I abandon myself in this way, to go through the motions of creativity and curiosity and care, pulling up from the well over and over and over while running myself dry, for what? If the first question is waves crashing against cliffs, this one is an eddy, holding me fast and rarely letting my head get above water.
This rage is my responsibility too. Yet I don’t let myself get angry, for fear of rocking the boat. I don’t let myself acknowledge how curdled I still am in a world that feels acidic. I keep circling this topic here, in these essays, because its energy is still active within me. I keep circling this topic because writing is a form of work, and I am asking work to soften, to gentle, for real this time. It’s pretty normalized now to become indifferent, to make a meme about the callousness of the system, or to call earnestness “cringe.” I am nothing if not earnest, if not bursting.3 It hurts to care, to be called towards meaning and contribution, and to know it’s been used as a tool against me, by me.
Unwinding it starts here, close in, by owning what’s within arm’s reach. By owning the ways I’ve been failed and the ways I’ve failed myself. By looking at the thing and naming it, as muddy and sprawling as its name might be. It’s healthier, though it hurts. The alternative is corrosive and energetically depleting. I can’t keep it churning anymore. My love is needed elsewhere.
I am here, writing to you because I like keeping a date with the moon, this time full and bounteous and bursting in the house of Virgo. The last full moon before eclipse season. What came out of me here was unexpected and messy. I kept polishing these words, thinking, how can I tidy this? How can I make it more manageable? Yet in revisiting what I wrote, it is simply true, and unresolved, and human, so I’m hitting publish. It feels bad but good, that vulnerable good-bad that I’ve learned is a good tell that there’s something of value in sharing it.
Virgo is concerned with restoring wholeness, with systems, with the remembrance of an ideal. Resmaa Menakem’s beautiful work in somatic abolition has left me with this wisdom of re-membering — of remembrance as an act of restoring part of ourselves to ourselves. We need ways to remember, it’s human nature to forget. Virgo remembers, as an act of devotion. Virgo remembers, because rage is ours too. Virgo remembers, as an act of homecoming.
I wish I were a podcast person, I truly do. There is so much incredible work happening in this medium and so many podcasts I love, but I listen to one a week, at most? It might even be one every two weeks, if I’m honest, while I catch up on my laundry folding. As someone who works in words, with words, reads a lot, talks a lot, is currently digesting what I already have, I need LESS input. Podcasts are the easiest cut, tragically.
My Aries moon would agree.
Aries moon says, now you’re getting it.