The Pattern
On stars & structures, & seeking secure & authentic self in a broken world
I don't test people and sabotage my relationships. I just feel the need to deeply self-isolate in order to feel safe. There's a difference.
I just turned 33. It's funny just turning 33 and identifying a deeply corrosive pattern in your attachment that you will almost certainly not resolve before your fertile years are over and it's too late to form the type of bond that can create a secure family of your own. I live with the family that I have now: Insecure, broken.
It's the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of knowing that if you don't sever contact with your family at some point, you will likely be trapped in their cannabalistic toxic codependency forever. When I was young, I thought that getting a job, paying rent, and starting a life of my own would be sufficient to break the curse, but my 20s was gradually learning that this corrosive codependency lived inside of me and recreated itself in everyone I met. I felt constantly and relentlessly lonely, and was terrified of the very thing that I craved so badly, which was to be close to people. To be seen by someone in devastating vulnerability, and be loved and accepted by them, only to be reminded over and over again that I was weird, irregular or damaged in some way that people inevitably came to sense by some manner that I had no awareness of, and to reject me. This pattern repeated itself across every aspect of my life: Personal, professional, academic, and romantic.
After I got date raped trying to get over a messy breakup just a few short months before I was scheduled to start my nursing program, I spent 2 years chasing an ADHD diagnosis while being dismissed by people who were not qualified at all to tell me what the constant gnawing emptiness, inability to focus and lack of academic success was attributable to, who tried to inform me I was merely depressed or in burnout. I'm not sure exactly what I was supposed to do with that information, presumably fuck off and move back in with my parents, or find a nice man somewhere to impregnate me, neither of which I truly saw as options. Eventually I was given my ADHD diagnosis, alongside PTSD, generalized anxiety, and r-OCD. I've done therapy off and on, and although sometimes it succeeded at reassuring me or making me feel superficially better in the short-term, I've had difficulty measuring if it was actually making a difference. I've also done a lot of microdosing magic mushrooms, which doesn't tend to make me any more normal or well-adjusted, but does tend to make me feel more adventurously creative and happier. Magic mushrooms are hands-down the best treatment for depression that I've found. Tripping on magic mushrooms in my current living situation is almost prohibitively difficult, but I'm at the point where I'm getting desperate and might try it anyways.
I think I might use some of my birthday money this year to buy a Honeycomb almanac. Astrology continues to explain the vibe shift, my own moods and world events, better than any modality I've found so far. Venus in Pisces represented a painful period of growth and transformation for me, which was surprising because Venus is normally exalted in Pisces, but my Pisces moon in the 8th house always produces these types of dark challenges. The 8th house is occulted: It symbolizes the transformational relationship of birth, marriage, death, and other types of life contracts. Jupiter was also retrograde in Gemini, and as the ruler of Pisces, this regressive motion and need for reminders of previously learned painful lessons gave Venus in Pisces a dark bent. Now that Venus is in Aries, a fire sign, people are ready to be passionate and selfish again. Aries, the ram, a cardinal sign, represents taking initiative, being headstrong. Venus, beyond just being about romance, is also about where we draw our passions, our values as they apply to the earthly realm.
I'm also thinking of doing some sort of writing challenge. One of my followers on Twitter keeps a count in their handle of how many long-form things they've written, an idea that I love, because I have an obscene wordcount in half or three-quarters full finished articles in my notes app. The problem is that my writing is messy, self-referential and confessional in ways that are a) difficult to neatly divide into finished pieces where it's clear where the thoughts therein should end and begin, and b) require an amount of courage to follow through with publishing that I cannot summon consistently.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't know what type of character I'm trying to play here anymore. I feel a sense of relief when I open the blog of someone who's well-regarded within the online community that I find myself in (the same cluster of communities which recently produced a series of radicalized murderers coming to light in the news, but that's neither here nor there), and find that it's a vomitaceous mess of their own confessional neuroticism, not always kind or flattering, and often quite trivial. I find this comforting because it's extremely relatable, and soothes that not-always-quite-rational anxiety that lingers in the back of my mind that everybody secretly hates me.
I like doing things like spending $70 on stickers and Washi tape for my bullet journal and buying astrology planners because these things bring me joy and gives the feeling of structure to my life and to my day that might be somewhat illusory in reality - another product of being a Pisces moon is that most of the time, I'm delusional, living in a reality of my own creation that corresponds very little to whatever's going on outside. This fact is frequently weaponized against me. Sometimes I still fantasize about leveraging what few unadmirable feminine-coded skills I have in order to try to get a normal job and rejoin the real world again, but refining a resume and acquiring references have always seemed like a degrading humiliation ritual that precedes the greater humiliation ritual of having and keeping a job. Acquiring references would either involve colluding some of the few and tenuous connections I have to help me lie about stuff again, or having some difficult and painful conversations that I don't particularly want to have, with narrow hopes of success.
There may not be many real jobs or much of a real world left anymore, is the constant reminder of the news that the algorithm feeds me daily. I'm witnessing a court procedural over whether it is legal for a neoreactionary political party to dismantle a country's entire government and sell it off for parts. The parts are being sold to a billionaire illegal immigrant after campaigning on a platform of deporting all the illegal immigrants. Fascism is when the ordinary people, the average citizen, is under attack. The sense of confusion and overwhelm that comes from looking at the news isn't a bug, it's a feature. Fascism is when an open mockery is made out of common sense, that things mean what should be self-evident that they mean. I'm watching the entire world be gaslit in real time. I wish I didn't have to live through so many historical events. I sit behind a computer screen and watch AI take all the jobs. In the back of my mind I'm sure someone assumes I write all my articles with AI just because I'm generally supportive of artificial intelligence's possibilities for improving our daily lives. With this, comes a secret thrill of permissive freedom. If everybody thinks I write all my articles using AI, then nobody will read them, and I can say whatever I want!
When I signed into my old account on Honeycomb, I saw that the last time I'd ordered one was around almost exactly the same time of year, a 6-month planner starting in March 2021.
I wish the past didn't feel like a foreign country I don't want to return to. The present remains an uncertain, liminal dream between now and an unfathomable future. Maybe if I watch the stars, where our ancestors say we come from, I can scry where we're supposed to be going.