I spent 38+ years performing and playing out hierarchical roles. I created them inside myself and outside myself.
I internalized capitalism and binary thinking so deeply that when I saw it, it knocked me into the ashes. For many moons the idea of being perceived, sharing, reaching out to people, making photos, being part of anything, having friends, replying to texts, looking people in the eye or being looked at brought me physical and psychological pain.
I learned fast that I had to take my time eating the ashes. When I forced it I got physically sick and it took days to recover. So I called myself an introvert. I was embarrassed to be alive, to be flawed or to be anything at all. I yearned for death. I forced 1500 of my followers to unfollow me, I left groups, I buried a business.
I ate the ash, went to the river, to the kitchen, to books and bonfires and to the study of my own dreams. I made a private college of me, of what felt renewing where I studied and continue to entertain only what I feel “is” and can not be earned or easily subdivided into isms.
This unlearn-learning has been embarrassing and hardperfect. I am more genuine to myself in it, more made of magic and contradiction, a crone’s mess, a loss of gains, a non dualistic undulation. I’m not arrived at something I just am.
This so-called shadow work isn’t over either! It fucking happens when it does and like my period each month I’m like, “LOOK AT ALL THIS BLOOD! I FORGOT THIS HAPPENS!”
Like the season cycle itself, the expansive experience has a quality of feeling singular, no matter how acquainted I am with it it feels like the first time. It sheds and illuminates and brings me deeper to me, and to what’s on the other side of these embarrassing, miraculous gifts of cringe.
Hallelujah! 🌻
gifts of cringe
in EATING ASH