There are seasons of life where it feels like there is always “something”. There’s always some setback, some roadblock, some unresolved trauma or some new trauma to process.

Sometimes those seasons last so long you wonder if life has always been this way.

I’m in one of them right now, and it’s like I can’t remember the last time I felt peace for longer than a week at a time. There is always something demanding my attention, draining my energy, forcing me to untangle the threads in my brain to make sense of the mess that continues accumulating on my plate.

In my early-20s, I made a friend who was nearly twice my age. She also seemed to be a person who always had “something” happening to or around her. One night, over a drink, she told me, “Here’s my advice: Deal with your shit now. Otherwise it’ll deal with you.”

It felt ominous, like an initiation into a secret club of worn down women. Because I knew she was right — if I did not confront my pain and anger and grief, it would eventually confront me.

I say that to say I’m in a period of personal reckoning right now.

Again, lol.

This newsletter was initially mean to be a guide, I guess. How to keep going when the going gets tough. I wrote an outline that talked about boundaries and self-compassion and blah, blah, blah.

But here’s the reality: I have no idea.

It feels impossible to go through the motions of a typical work day. My entire my mind is preoccupied. All I’m thinking about is this next chapter and how desperate I am for it to be a little softer, a little quieter, and how distrustful I am that that will be the case.

So I hope you’re okay with me freely riffing a bit today. No teaching or pitching — no real purpose other than to scream into the void and maybe connect on a deeper level.

Childhood gives us “core feelings”, apparently.

I read this article yesterday about how a lot of us harbor a “core feeling” from when we were children. It continues to show up throughout adulthood until we face it directly.

To be honest, I take anything in Psychology Today with a grain of salt, but this resonated. Because I knew my core feeling immediately: fear.

Not to get all “Dear Diary” on you, but I realized that I have never named “fear” as something I experience regularly. I am comfortable naming things like anxiety, worry, or overwhelm. But fear is new. And as soon as it occurred to me, it was so obvious how consistently this has been present in my life.

It’s why I’ve repressed so much of myself. It’s why I do my best to avoid attention. It’s why I don’t rock the boat or say anything controversial or demand space for myself. To be open and honest puts me at risk. That’s the story, anyway.

Naming the feeling has helped.

It reminds me of the first time I saw a therapist as an adult. I’d picked up some destructive habits and described the feeling behind them, again, as “anxiety”. But as I explained more, she interrupted me to say, “You know, it sounds like what you’re describing is anger. How does it feel when you reframe things that way — that you’re angry?”

Blew my mind. It had never occurred to me that I was, or could be, angry. I’d never had anger modeled for me in a healthy, constructive way. And, yes, what I was feeling was anger. It was rage. And at the bottom of that rage was grief.

I suppose this isn’t universal, but I think we often underestimate the way language impacts us.

As someone who considers themselves first-and-foremost a writer, I try to be intentional with the words I use. But that isn’t as easy or obvious with our internal monologue. We learn how to use words to effectively communicate with others, but I think when it comes to the way we communicate with ourselves, it’s mostly a process of unlearning.

Unlearning the words other people have used to hurt us. Unlearning the way we were taught to speak to ourselves. Unlearning these deeply ingrained feelings that lead us to shrink.

What I mean is: I think having the words to express your reality is important. And sometimes that looks like a process of elimination, and pulling out all the shit that your reality isn’t.

Creating safety is our nature.

I also saw a TikTok the other day that’s been helpful:

What is better than strength and power? Safe space… Human, you create safe space. That’s your magic. That’s your nature. You create safe space… That’s the miracle — creating safe spaces for self and one another.

Maybe that doesn’t resonate with you, but the idea that is our nature to create safety feels so profound to me. I know that safety is a need, but I’ve always seen it as something we seek instead of make. This feels obvious to me, too, after hearing it — that our magic is in our empathy, action, and softness toward each other and ourselves. To actively build spaces — physically, mentally, spiritually — where we feel secure, connected, free.

It makes me wonder how we can bring more safety to our work.

I’ve been working some shifts at my dance studio over the past few months, and I think they do this really well. There’s something about it, as a physical space, where you know you can leave your problems at the door or you can bring them in and feel as deeply as you need to.

Part of it is the ambiance – lavender candles, low lighting, music playing throughout the building.

Classes start with each person in class introducing themselves and sharing what they’re grateful for. Some nights it’s a quick round-robin of variations of, “Hi, my name is Victoria, and today I’m grateful for the weather.” Other nights, people share that they’ve recently left a long-term partner, or that their children are struggling, or that they just don’t feel very at home in their body right now.

Everyone gets time, attention, and support according to their level of comfort and need in that moment.

It’s really special.

I don’t know how we bring that into digital spaces. Can we be asynchronous and intimate at the same time? I think that’s one of the core questions I’m trying to sort through lately.

No answers yet, but if it is in our nature to build safety, I trust that that extends into each area of our lives, no matter where we are or what we’re doing. I think we can turn ourselves into places of safety. Something to chew on.

Tarot as a tool to prompt reflection.

A new wellness-collective-spot-thing opened near me this past weekend. The owner of my dance studio invited me to a “yin yoga and sound bath” workshop at their open house. I’ve never done yin yoga or been to a sound bath and I figured, ya know, why not?

It was relaxing, but honestly not my thing.

But! It did give me the opportunity to sign up for a discounted Tarot reading.

I’ve had my own Tarot deck for a couple of years, and I reference it once a month or so. I haven’t taken this course, but I love Susannah Conway’s products, and it sounds like she approaches Tarot the same way I do — as a starting point for conversations with myself. A way to connect with my subconscious and prompt deeper reflection.

So I wasn’t sure what to expect from a reading with someone else.

Spoiler: It was incredible.

Although I approach Tarot pragmatically on the whole, I do feel pulled toward certain questions, cards, and meanings. I know when something “feels right” to my intuition. And I was surprised that this translated with another person, with cards I wasn’t familiar with, in a space that was new to me.

She asked me to choose from a collection of decks, and I was certain about which I wanted immediately. It had monster-like characters, and imagery a bit more violent than a traditional deck. She told me it was her “chaos deck”, and my immediate reaction was, “Perfect.”

We shuffled and she pulled three cards. Her interpretation was spot-on for what’s happening in my life right now. She identified the main characters and her explanation of the past and present representations felt so accurate that I got chills.

My brain buzzed with each clarifying card.

Not because she was literally reading my future — although, I’ll be honest, I become more and more a believer every time I do a reading, even on my own — but because her message, “real” or not, dug through the slime that had been building up over the lens of my mind.

I wasn’t trying to think through or process anything; I was letting the message come as this stranger saw it.

It wasn’t a fix, but it was a tool. And I guess my point here is that sometimes you need a prompt. Sometimes your brain isn’t going to make the connections on its own. Sometimes you need to hear the things you know from someone else in order to truly believe them.

Sometimes, the weird shit helps.

That’s all for today.

I know this is, like, a pretty sporadic and melancholy article. I really am okay — or working to be. I have a good toolkit and support system. But I wanted to say hi. Share what’s happening on my end. Reiterate that this is human and normal and we don’t have to pretend it isn’t to make other people more comfortable.

And on that note, if the going is getting rough for you too, remember that these seasons really do pass. You have a 100% track record of getting through the bad days.

Cheers,
Victoria