a confession 🫦
on self sabotage, grief, and learning the difference between the two.
This post was first written on June 26th, 2023.
I had big plans for this Substack this month – I’d write about my Level 3 experience, graduating from Astrology school, hitting 50 subscribers here (welcome!!!!), and a myriad of other things.
Instead, I was met with death, grief, and a near-debilitating crises of faith.
My grandmother’s tumor burst the week before my Level 3 weekend. I received the frantic phone call from my dad as I was grocery shopping in preparation for the insane timezone-marathon I was about to pull.
I dropped everything, nearly incited a hostage-negotiation situation with the dry cleaning lady, grabbed my Dress™️, and rushed home. After visiting my Ma Ma in the hospital, where she was cranky but lucid, I came home feeling much better. I was able to complete the weekend and graduate as planned. 🥹
Last week, the day after Father’s Day, I got yet another frantic call from my dad.
“Ma Ma isn’t waking up,” he said. “We’re calling an ambulance.”
Again to the hospital we went. This time around, the situation was a lot more dire. Ma Ma could barely breathe. She was hooked up to a dozen machines. She’d lost control of all her faculties. The only thing we could see was her one unseeing eye, blinking back at us. Squished between two hospital beds, a cacophony of sound all around us, we said our last goodbyes.
. . . It’s been almost two weeks, and Ma Ma is still hanging on. But she doesn’t have much time left. Being in this twilight zone of waiting is excruciating. ꩜ I fear I have been using it as an excuse — to put off the scary things, the things I actually want to do, the HARD things that can move my practice forward.
This newsletter today is me, trying to write my way through that.
Self sabotage is something I am, sadly, intimately familiar with.
It was the song of my twenties; the unyielding melody that punctuated all my career successes. Each time I am on the cusp of the next level-up, I freeze. I fall into a cycle that, on the surface, seems fairly innocuous: I tweak, and tweak, and tweak, and spend some time thinking, and then tweak again — and it’s fine, right? Spirit of experimenting, and all that. But see, that’s the thing: I never actually commit. And because I never put things in writing, set things in stone, I have nothing and no one actually TYING me to that decision. And then, I flounder. I give in to the darkness, as Shawn says.
And it’s fine and good and easy to fight off the demons when you’re at the top of the world and everything is going swimmingly and you’re getting booked out a whole MONTH in advance . . .
But then, the inevitable dip comes. And instead of just moving forward with life, you start to make a home in that valley. You wonder why the Sun never comes out, why you’re possessed with dark thoughts, why you’re changing your copywriting and prices by single-digit numerals, and refreshing your booking page a hundred times in the last 30 minutes . . .
You think if you can just find that one thing, the ONE thing that will tell you: everything is fine, everything is going to be OK — you’ll stop.
A sign? A message? A sale? Some sort of external validation?
But the reassurance was never going to come from outside of you. Because the answers lay within. It lay in the hard, the grit, the choosing to stop worrying yourself sick if you are “worth your new prices” and “making it up to your community”, and instead focus on RE-BUILDING YOUR SELF ESTEEM.
Do you know how self esteem is built? Through two things:
Choosing to do hard things, and
Ignoring everything that tells you otherwise.
That’s it. And I will be honest with you, dear friend — I have NOT been doing the hard things. I thought I was doing hard things.
But they weren't the right hard things.