Reflection on the heels of a Return

How do you sum up 15 years of dying? Of metamorphosizing as something familiar yet unrecognizable? How do I express the many ways I have surprised myself with how vivaciously I live life? I’ve been trying to find something to mark the momentous occasion. When Pluto leaves my 1st house of Capricorn where it has built many homes and torn down even more, this is the only time in my lifetime I will experience this.

In 2008, I could’ve died. I did die, a death that has invited me to choose a more well-meaning life, but a death just as painful. And here I am thriving because I chose to compost instead of spoil. I find it hard to think back on who I was 15 years ago. It almost feels like a completely different person. A person who wanted everyone to like her. Would do anything for friends, and more often than not used her seductress energy to get what she wanted, though her mind would suffice. I won’t say that person isn’t me because when I see where I have grown, I feel so deeply connected to her. Like I must push forward for her because she went through hell to get me here. 

So today, I find myself every bit of the woman I so desperately needed and deeply admire. The greatest asset has been how firmly and securely I am within myself. I know how to fully listen to the sound of my own voice. I also don't feel that anything must be proved to anyone else. The only person I am here to prove anything to is myself and my child; for the sake of showing her there isn’t anything she can’t do. 

And here I am, almost 30, done and been through a whole lot I couldn’t know anything about. I got locked up, got into sex work, had a baby, got married, mom died, got divorced, and found my way back to myself, whole, with a lighter load and some scars. Somehow the gravitas of life didn’t suffocate me. It did however wake me up to the power I have over my own experience here. That things don’t roughly have to happen to me, I can make them work for me. Here, I have spent the last 15 years alchemizing. Making all this pain and suffering mean something good in my life. Anyone who has ever done alchemy knows it’s not the lofty fairytale magic experience the name suggests, alchemy is painful. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, pain is a part of the process. Once I realized that, I found a way to be comfortable in the pain, kinda like giving labor, you find ease as briefly as you can grasp it. 

The thing they don't tell you about comfort in pain is the familiarity of good pleasure becomes foreign, obsolete even. That you will struggle with good things. Holding them and not breaking them because the shards feel more common. I am still learning how to resist the impulse of destruction simply for the sake of fire. I became good at playing with fire but the water was always something so easy to drown in. Coming out of this 15-year stint in my 1st house, I am learning to be like water. To flow and only overtake when cleansing is necessary. How I can both be in control and in the currents of the stream of life. How that stream can widen or become narrow as needed. The malleability of life and how to bend and not break. And even if I split I can come back to the body of water, myself.