Hello dear ones,
I’m coming to you from LA, where I’ll be living until the end of March! This is maybe one of the wildest things I’ve ever done, and I wanna tell you more about it.
But first, some reminders/FYIs:
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The past few days have been filled with panic. What have you done?!?! my home-and-stability-loving Cancer sun screams at my exploration-and-change-loving Sagittarius rising. A few days after I returned from LA at the start of November, I was on a video call with my two besties and I was sobbing. Edmonton welcomed me back home with a brutal -30C (-22F) and snow everywhere. Getting off the plane in my converse sneakers, I was not prepared. Back at home, I let it settle in that I’d be living alone another winter in Canada during a global pandemic.
As everyone continues to lift their precautions, mine have stayed largely unchanged: if you’ve been in an indoor public space, unmasked, in the three days leading up to our plans, then we’ll need to have a masked hang. I’m still not going to bars, restaurants, the gym, or any space that would require me to be unmasked in a room full of strangers. I’ve already had COVID twice, even as someone who has been taking all of the precautions, and I’m terrified of adding long COVID to my chronic illness list.
My besties, knowing all of this, and knowing that I’ve got a beautiful community of humans in LA, asked me if spending some of the winter here might be possible. There, I could spend time with people outside, and not feel the isolation of another Canadian winter. And so I started to think about what would need to happen to make this vision happen. I asked my ex if he would take the cats, found places I could stay for long chunks of time, and then I booked my flights. LA HERE I COME!!!! was the vibe.
In the days leading up to boarding my flight, for what will be the longest stretch of time I’ve ever been away from home, the vibe was different. My anxiety was through the roof. My brain was spiralling on all of the things that could go wrong. What if no one wants to hang out with you? What if you have a fight with [insert all of your friends’ names here] and you end up wandering the streets of LA all alone? And you don’t even have your cats with you! What if they get sick while you’re gone??? — and on it went.
I’m deeply greateful for the anxiety trifecta that is ativan, great pals to process with, and the feeling of self-trust that I’m able to tap into in these moments. Making this big a move would not have been possible for me a few years ago. But deep down in me, past all of the terror and anxiety, I know that I’m being called to be in LA for the next bit of my journey.
I am here, much like the Fool in the tarot, stepping off the cliff and into the unknown. My tarot teacher, Lindsay Mack, has taught me that the Fool’s wisdom is that they know that the ground they could choose to stand on is no more or less stable than whatever it is that lie’s beyond the cliff’s edge. The ground could literally break beneath us at any moment. Of course, this truth is something that my trauma brain knows. At one point, my life was stable. I trusted in the ground beneath me. Then my mom got sick, then my dad, then [insert trauma after trauma] happened.
One aspect of self-trust is being able to look back at all that we’ve been through and say “I survived. I did that.” It’s being able to look at yourself and know that you can do the scary thing, you can take the leap of faith. And so, as I sat in the airport, waiting to board, I spoke that that scared part of me and said “You got this. Because you will be there to catch yourself if you fall. No one can take that away from you except for you.” And then, like Bambi, you step onto the ice and hope for the best.
The annoying thing about the things that scare us is that the main way they become less scary is to do them. Here’s a writing exercise that I do with folks when I teach my Writing Trauma and the Body workshop.
Set a timer for 2 minutes.
Make a list of your fears; start small with fears that do not hold as much charge for you. If you notice that you have the capacity to list some higher stakes fears and want to move into that, great. If you don’t, also great.
Pick one of the fears on your list and use it as your writing prompt.
Look up the word that represents your fear in an online etymology dictionary and write it down.
You’ll use the word’s etymology as your writing prompt.
Did you know that the word fear used to mean "calamity, sudden danger, peril, sudden attack," "harm, distress, deception” and it wasn’t until the late 12c that it took on the sense of "state of being afraid, uneasiness caused by possible danger.” To put the fear of God (into someone) "intimidate, cause to cower" is by 1888, from the common religious phrase; the extended use was often at first in colonial contexts.
The reason I suggest this is 1) I LOVE WORDS; and 2) it can be an entryway into writing about something that feels scary.
For folks in the US, today is Martin Luther King Day. Instead of posting an inspirational quote, taken out of context, I’d like to suggest backing and/or sharing this amazing book project by my friend Carolyn Collado.
Answering the Call of the Ancestors: A recovery guide in times of reckoning and revolution is a book based on my lived experience as a queer, trans, non-binary, neurospicy, two spirit, Afro-Taino human recovering from intergenerational substance use struggles, codependency, people pleasing, and perfectionism. This book is meant to support those who want to shed the ways the histories of colonization, imperialism and systems of oppression inform how we relate to ourselves, to each other, the divine, and to our planet. In validating and contextualizing how my life and our lives are informed by the history of colonization and systemic oppression, this book points us towards ways we can recover ourselves from the impact of these histories and systems.
A mix of memoir, history, and supportive practices, Answering the Call of the Ancestors provides a roadmap for how we can dismantle systems individually and collectively. This book begins with some history and context for how we got to the present conditions, moves into practices intergenerational impacts of colonization and racial capitalism, and ends in unpacking the challenges and the hopes of living in these times answering the call of our ancestors for healing and liberation.
I hope this book can be a companion for all of us who are working to free ourselves and the collective from the history and systems that have harmed us and our ancestors. We have it within us to answer the call of our ancestors to dismantle these systems and dream into being freedom beyond what they imagined for us.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you! Reminder that you can become a paid subscriber here.
Also a Cancer sun and Sagittarius rising. I understand the pain!