the paths that unravel your truth
& why choosing them can be scary (but necessary AF) 🧶
If you’re reading this, congratulations! You survived another eclipse! How are you celebrating yourself? What are the biggest lessons you learned about the relationships you’re in or the ones you want to call in? How are you tending to the most important relationship in your life: the one with yourself?
This season always heightens my propensity for being unhinged, but this year has been a little different. Historically, I’d sink into spirals that kept me in a state of creative purgatory: yearning to make art, vision-boarding my ideas, creating business plans, but ultimately being too terrified to move past the “pre-production” stage, upon the crippling realization that my vision would be subject to public consumption and criticism. Vulnerability! Yikes! If I held a funeral for every unfinished draft from my lifetime, I’d wipe out my local florist’s supply and then some — which is great for my florist but bad for my will to stop self-sabotaging.
Eclipses mark a time for letting go and shedding old ways of doing things…of course only if you so dare to look within the hollowest depths of yourself. Sorry to disappoint the darkness escapists, but that’s where the juice is, babes! The fact of the matter is, nothing stays hidden forever and the more internal clutter I accumulated, the harder (yet more necessary) it was to excavate to get to that sweet center. This is the ~unraveling~ I’ve yapped about before re: my The Artist’s Way experience but if you’re sick of hearing my takes, may I suggest diving into our beloved swamp goddess Doechii’s YouTube documentation of her own journey??? She attributes the book to the release of Yucky Blucky Fruitcake (and I feel like I don’t need to tell you how this story continues but here’s a link). In her vlog from Week 11, she reflects on success and growth as a artist:
Expansion is necessary so you don’t contract…and in order to expand as a creative, you have to be willing to be a beginner, and start something new, and try again.
This all requires daring to fail. She goes on to say, “I wanted to start working with my errors, and not fearing mistakes because the passion could be lying in the mistakes.” If that isn’t a dang word…
The eclipse has been forcing me to excavate my fears of failure. “Failure” is why I stop myself from hitting that dreaded publish button. “Failure” is why I stopped singing in public ever since bombing an audition for a college production of Pippin which I didn’t even want to be in anyway!!! I’m soooo not bitter!!! “Failure” is why I put off everything that forced me to look closer at the shame of being this type of quitter. It’s not fun, but this practice of unraveling my fear of failure has required me to cultivate absolute safety, both internal and external, which is something I’d been lacking my entire lifetime — but also the very thing that helped me trust in myself, eliminate the entities that were unhealthy for me, and show my work. It’s one of the scariest things I’ve had to admit to myself about this process: the sheer vulnerability it takes to peel back every layer that makes your story yours and yours alone. Media and constant content consumption make it so incredibly easy to pine for stories we wish were ours, but that’s not how life works (believe me, my once closeted gay ass has tried!!!) and that’s not what our souls want, either.
So what do our souls want? A dear friend recommended the book Many Lives, Many Masters last year and it could not have come into my life at a more perfect time. In it was the overwhelming message that everything we choose to not face in this life will absolutely carried over into our next. You don’t need to believe in past lives to know that everything is still energy and so much is wasted on fear, worry, anxiety, stress. I underlined this sentence: “You must get rid of the fear. That is the greatest weapon you have.” The decision to choose faith over fear is where my chapter of unraveling began and will continue to reveal itself in new ways the more I keep going down that path I’ve avoided for too long.
a few things that are inspiring me to get over my fearsofbeingperceivedinanartisticandgayway.edu:
Willow being an absolute Gemini moon while breaking down Run!
Kristen Stewart’s greasy mullet in Love Lies Bleeding (I am now rocking one and will not apologize for it)
The pure medicine of Astralogik guesting on the Cultural Kultivators podcast
This tender wlw moment from Love On The Spectrum
Martine simply breathing, but especially on StraightioLab
Imogen Heap doing this magical spell (where I swear FKA twigs came a little bit)
Speaking of…Imogen Heap was right when she said, “there’s beauty in the breakdown.”
This isn’t a song I think about often and my sincerest apologies to Frou Frou for that. I was a freshman in high school when it came out, so, imagine me as an awkward 14-year-old who traded in her uniform of oversized boys’ windbreakers for ill-fitting flares out of fear of looking like a lesbian (in hindsight that choice probably accentuated the fact I was, in fact, a lesbian). While I didn’t have a single clue of what a “breakdown” was, the internal ones I had about literally looking like a lesbian were as constant as the times I had to pretend liking someone from a boy band, while I was secretly lusting for everyone in Play (I know, my taste was impeccable). I let the lyrics rupture my through my iPhone the same way the once did through my corded Y2K Dell desktop speakers:
So let go, so let go, jump in
Oh, well, whatcha waiting for?
It's alright
'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
Going back to Doechii’s expansion vs. contraction as an artist, my own journey has revealed that in every surrender to a breakdown, a newer, more aligned path to creating what my soul desires is presented to me. The only requirement is to let go, le-let go of the fear, jump in, and find beauty in the breakdown!!!
Gatekeeping is for losers so I’m going to share a metaphor from my therapist that helps me re-direct those ever-intrusive thoughts that block my expansion: to think of them like paths. The ones that are well traversed through, with barely anything blocking the trail, are thoughts associated with self-depreciation, self-loathing, shame, distrust, jealousy, annoyance, everything and anything that pushed me to a place so beneath myself that I couldn’t recognize who I was anymore. All of this ultimately stemmed from fear, public enemy #2 (you should all know who #1 is).
Conversely, the paths less traveled in my mind are the ones covered in gravel, swarming with wild beasts, and lined with trees that have branches extending out to you like arms ready to snatch you up as you traverse through the woods after an Evil Queen orders your death by huntsman for being born “the cuntiest of them all” and, yes, Disney has deeply traumatized me but I am absolutely rooting for Rachel Zegler and her only. As you may have guessed, this is the path synonymous to all beliefs of success and self-love that many of us have been taught to disregard under the patriarchy and white supremacy. So, every act of choosing yourself is a radical step in creating the path that they so dare us not to walk on because it disrupts the status quo, which, surprise surprise, is rooted in fear! Hate her! But fear is also a lesson. Fear gives us data. And her, we love.
So, I’ve been collecting data about myself. Keeping track of what was making me sick, what environments and people were wrecking my nervous system, who made me feel unsafe to express myself and take up space, etc. Mirrors can be so deceiving (shoutout to every dressing room at the mall), but they also offer insight to truth. Whether it’s a literal mirror you’re facing or how another person is reflecting their energy to you…it’s all data. I had this quote saved but forget where it’s from (apologies to the author):
Truth is the medicine for our soul, the knowledge of absolute goodness.
It is a scary path to choose, which is why many, including myself, have refused the trek. What I had to realize was the more I kept choosing the paths that steered me from my center/my truth, as in ignoring my calling to make art and be gay (I will make this a t-shirt one day), the more sick and depressed I got. Sometimes, we have to choose certain paths out of survival and that’s ok, that’s life. The thing I’ve had to learn about survival mode is that it is not sustainable, but alas we are presently living under very fascist conditions and the path to freedom seems bleak. Maybe I’m delusional, maybe I just have heavy Pisces placements, but we absolutely have the power and freedom to envision* what we want our lives to look like, devoid of capitalism.
* I suggest exploring my friend and comrade JL Umipig’s prompts for Decolonize 30 for 30 to get your creativity flowing
At the top of the year, I participated in another art show, which would mark my third in the span of 6 months and I need everyone to know this was absolutely not part of the plan!!! It still takes everything in me to not put art in quotation marks and that is my cross of insecurity to bear. Just a couple weeks ago, I made my vendor debut at godz rising’s spring event in the Castro and I actually made multiple sales??? It is taking everything in me to not hit the delete button for fear surrounding self-promotion and not include a link to my Etsy where subscribers to this newsletter get a special discount using code SUBLOVE at checkout you are very welcome. 🛒💖
It took a looooooooot of brain power and journaling and sobbing into my own arms to reverse course and choose the paths that feel right — like an immediate “yes” — to me. We see this saying all the time in our social media-therapy-talk world, but what does a “yes” actually feel like? If you’re like me and got used to ignoring your body’s response to a “no,” it became pretty damn hard to distinguish when my heart wanted to truly say “yes.” It took some time, but I learned that a “yes” for me is like a spark I can’t ignore. A pounding in my chest that feels like my younger self signaling my present self to take the plunge. A “yes” is just as much of a love letter to yourself as a “no,” bringing you closer to the things you desire and further away from the energies that give you eczema in weird places and hormonal acne (speaking from personal experience). Your body will know it’s a “yes” because you feel like you have no other choice, because everything chosen up until this very point, as necessary as it was for your growth, just isn’t cutting it anymore. So, get those shears and get to scissoring (hehe), it’s pruning season.
✍️ journal prompt: what does a “yes” feel like for you? how can you say “yes” to yourself more often? what does that look like?
“In coming to this threshold, the edge of the unknown, which is scary and exciting at the same time, we start to find a path — a new direction, a way forward.”
John Welwood
For those divas in San Francisco, I’ll be part of the Asian American Women’s Association and Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s exhibit for Brown Palms, Yellow Balms: Reinventing Caregivers of Color starting April 24! They’ll be exhibiting my installation “Walang Hiya” as part of its virtual gallery. No, I’m not freaking out. 😊