Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of the universe. The state of our species and the species we live amongst. Whether the Earth is in danger or just waiting to flick us off like fleas. Whether there’s really anything we can do about that, this, anything.
I’ve always had a pretty intense existential streak, and while there is a percentage of me that plays pollyanna optimistica, it is this part that often takes up most space on the stage. The other day I found a journal entry during a low point of my struggles with food, and it rung with this existential, purposeless tone. After reading it, I honored that it is of course my own struggle, but found myself wondering if what I am feeling with food is indicative of the soul loss of many of my species. And whether those who struggle with food issues, in emergency ways, are canaries in the coal mine rather than disordered weirdos. There again is my pollyanna optimist.
“February 17.
I am full. I hate this feeling. Fullness. Why? Most people want to feel this, but me? I hate it. Because it means I don’t HAVE to eat, that I have to wait for a long time to feel hungry again. It means I don’t get to eat for a while and if I don’t HAVE to eat, if it isn’t the most necessary thing…what else do I do with myself? Everything revolves around controlling my food so I can eat as often as possible with the least discomfort of this fullness. Moderating everything so I am hovering around emptiness. Everything. What the hell would I do with myself if I wasn’t so focused on this? It really is a question.
It is why the vision quest was a good practice, and a terrifying one, for me. Ironic! For a restrictor! Being with myself for a day without the focus of food, oh the incredible grief that comes! Sitting in the vast desert, wishing and wanting to be inspired by something else but only finding silence and sadness. Grief. Wishing for a vision to come, but…nothing. Feeling abandoned by my own soul. And the same silence, this sense of purposelessness when I’ve been in treatment, sitting with my feelings of fullness, waiting for something else to inspire me, to take my mind off of this hounding obsession, a bigger purpose. I’ve put myself through treatment over and over again to find that, and all I’ve found is nothing. Whether hungry, or full, there’s just this vast empty desert of purposelessness.
At least when I’m hungry, I know I need to eat. I know I need to go get food for myself. So I keep myself as near to that as possible.
Some people I know only eat once or twice a day and that’s also amazing to me…what do they do with the rest of the day without food breaks to bring purpose to their the day? I can’t really imagine. It is so important to me. And I’ve MADE it important…like emergency important. It’s my “issue” so I have to eat, or I have hypoglycemia so I have to eat little bits every few hours for my blood sugar, etc…but is that true? Are these all just elaborate stories to make eating more important than it really needs to be?
I often wonder what it would be like to just eat and move on. Move on to something I am more passionate about, something I enjoy more than eating. I wish I had that. But nothing compares to the comfort I get from eating. Nothing. Is that ok? Is it just my passion, food? And if so, how can I make that a fun thing rather than a tragic thing? Where I’m like Pippin enjoying his Elevenses? Or the kitchen witch?
I love food so much. It is kind of ironic that I struggle with restriction when this is the fact, but here’s why: restriction makes it okay to eat. Restriction makes it NECESSARY to eat. Do you understand?
Somewhere I got the programming that it is not okay to just want to eat all the time for the joy of it, beyond what I need for survival, but if I am restricting then eating is necessary, important, urgent. There’s something too about feeling an undeniable signal from my body, undeniable direction, that I treasure. Nowhere else do I feel this clarity from my body in what to do with myself. When I am hungry though, when I am starving, I know exactly what to do, the most important thing to do to survive.
What life would be like if I had an internal guidance system that told me exactly what it wanted in other areas, too. If I had inner direction that was so strong to focus me on tasks, I wonder if my need to have hunger as my direction would fade? Hunger is really the only clear conversation I seem to have from my body…where I know what it wants, where I know how to decipher its messages. Otherwise, I’ve not a clue what my body/soul is communicating to me most of the time, what it really wants and needs or what it wants me to do with my life, in this big, overwhelming world. Everything, besides the clarity of hunger, is so cloudy, murky.
And there is of course the shame of making this my purpose, when so many people don’t even have enough to eat. Layer on some of that and it is a wonderful soup to be swimming in. But I cannot pretend it isn’t true for me. It is blatantly and embarrassingly clear.
I hope someday I find some other purpose. For now it is the reason I have for getting up in the morning, what makes going through my days tolerable. To have to create hunger to have to feed myself. And as someone who has walked the line of death in that struggle, it is always somewhat of a dramatic issue. My own little dramatic issue. Or is it ours? Yours?
The ironic truth is that as a restrictor and controller of food, I definitely live to eat. Do you understand? It is astounding to me, the energy spent in this, and the paradox. And that there seems to be nothing else. Maybe someday I will find out how to eat to live, a purpose beyond hunger.”
*I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I am not looking for advice or sympathy, more for a dialogue about the parallels to soullessness in our society and what we do to feel any sort of purpose within it. The extremes we go to to find something, to feel something, to be involved in something important. Do you understand?
For lack of an idea of what to share with you in my weekly post, my tarot deck wanted to help :} The card that came forward to share about was Knight of Wands. Let us unfold this card to see what its teaching is for me…and perhaps you…today.
In this card, we have an armored Knight on their steed, passionately galloping into an unknown future. S/he carries a flaming wand aloft and into this, determined and confident, ready for anything.
S/he often carries the energy of impulsiveness, s/he is often one who will take action for the sake of taking action, not necessarily because it is what is truly aligned to take. Bored and frustrated with the current situation, the Knight of Wands will travel, move, start a relationship, do something drastic just to get the energies moving. Sometimes this is wise, often it is not. The Knight has much valuable energy but needs to find ways to balance this drive with listening, patience, grounding. To make sure their energy is not wasted, or to prevent a decision from being made that is unwise and cannot be undone.
At this time, I can relate wholeheartedly with this card. Inside, I have a Knight of Wands raring to go…to make some sort of major change. It’s not enough that there is so much upheaval in the world today, strangely. There is this part in me that feels the need for change and wants it NOW.
Like the Knight of Wands, I am feeling the need to move, shift, burst forward out of the monotony. I have several offers of places to move, even though where I am isn’t the most ideal but it’s not all bad. Struggling whether just because these offers have come really means it is time for me to move. There are many things in my life at this time that feel stagnant…and I am raring to just change SOMETHING. It does seem like it would feel good, to just do something to shift this sense of urgency inside.
Yet I know enough about my sensitivity to get that perhaps I am feeling the collective—pissed, frustrated and raring for action in a new direction than the stagnant one it has been in. Perhaps it has nothing to do with me, and so me taking it personally and making some drastic move or job change wouldn’t be wise at this time. This is where listening, patience and breath come in handy.
What about you? Can you relate with this figure? Are you feeling frustrated and making rash plans to change things, anything, to just be out of stagnancy? Is it a wise, grounded decision? How do you know? Are you breathing, listening and balancing your passionate fire and desire for change?
Have you heard this one before? Has it been a way to help you navigate your life direction? I’d love to hear, both what your childhood joys were as well as if you followed them into your life’s work.
I can share that ever since I found out that college + degree + well paying job does not = happiness, my aim has been in exploring this concept to find a more fulfilling way to earn income and invest my energy. I have followed pretty much all of my childhood joys:
*playing music (with cardboard cutout instruments and gogo boots!)—>being in a band, recording an album
*working with animals—>becoming a recreational therapist specializing in animal assisted therapy
*playing in the forest—>taking people on medicine walks, teaching about/working in herbalism
*watching horror movies and novels—>working with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett at his Fearfestevil Festival (this was SO great :})
*watching witchy and fantastical movies—>working at fantasy fairs and festivals, working for priestess/witchcraft organizations
*building forts and rehabbing abandoned houses—>building my own caravan trailer and helping to rebuild hostels and retreat centers
*eating yummy food—>traveling and working in kitchens with amazing and magickal chefs
All of these things I have explored fervently, they were often the only compass point in my times of darkness. In these times all I could do was to ask myself which childhood joy I hadn’t explored and to make it my goal to experiment with that. And woo, have I learned a lot, grown a lot, from that process! My inner kid certainly appreciates it.
But now, I am kind of at the end of the line, having tried and exhausted all of these things and wondering…now what? After one has done this exploration, what then? I incorporate a lot of these activities in my hobbies and free time, yet I yearn for a career that satisfies my deeper soul. That includes these passions in ways I haven’t imagined, or better yet, that involves something I don’t even know about yet.
After the publishing of my memoir, Food Memories, I started to wonder more about this, about stepping more fully into the world with my soul work. In the book I discuss my thoughts about living with a restrictive eating disorder, about my struggles with the concept of linear recovery, about the hope and despair I have gone back and forth with when trying to live up to the mental health system’s definition of “full recovery.” I started to wonder if my particular struggle was my unique gift to offer others–to provide a place to be “imperfect” in the recovery world and still acknowledge and work on healing within oneself. A place to honor the darkness rather than diagnose it, and to see what occurs in this cauldron of holding.
But it terrifies me that this is an irresponsible offering. It terrifies me that I will keep people from fully healing by encouraging the exploration of this perspective. It still terrifies me that I will hurt rather than heal.
I think this is my ego talking, and I am thankful for its wariness. But I also feel it is holding me back from my next leg of offering what my soul truly wants to offer in the world. I have spent many years in the dark shadows of what the mental health system deems as “healthy,” having to wake myself over and over again to the possibility that I am under some sort of unhelpful spell that disempowers me. That the terror of claiming my imperfection is healing too, and that it is actually the exact task for my growth and service to others. This is what I attempted to do with my book.
Yet now, as I contemplate how to work in the world, I find myself interacting with old systems, creating resumes to try to seem appealing to them, and it is challenging me to my very core. Do I really believe in the health of my imperfection? In the ability I may have to help others with my experience? In the face of the typical requirements for these treatment facility jobs, I find myself wondering if working for the traditional systems is really not in my best interest. That instead, I am to incorporate my childhood joys, and my life lessons into a coaching based offering to others. To work for myself…in service to others? Terrifying.
I am exploring both routes. To give respect to that little inner child who is waiting for me to create a more aligned life for us, as well as to give respect to that part of me that kind of wants to charge into the traditional systems and shift them from the inside. My inner child isn’t really into doing the latter, so perhaps that’s a sign. And who knows, I may find out that the System has changed and working within it will teach me in powerful and fulfilling ways.
As always, my agnostic fence sitting is helping me explore them both with equal curiosity. And some frustration and a whole host of other uncomfortable emotions, honestly. But hey, I’ve been gifted this life, and somehow have landed in a body and climate where I have so much to be thankful for. So I’m using it as best I can, and I hope both me and my inner girl can find a way to rock it together.
Tell me, how about you?
~Food Memories, by Reagan J Lakins (ISBN-10 : 1689839074), is now available through Amazon and all major booksellers. To my surprise, you can even order it from a little bookshop called BookWoman in Texas and they get some of the proceeds to stay functional during the pandemic!
Today I sat down at the computer, wondering what to write and quite frankly wondering what to do with my life. Yes, one of those days. Since the release of Food Memories, I’ve been half waiting for magickal things to happen, and half trying to detach from outcome. I’ve been feeling a soul pull to “change in big ways” but as for any direction or vision, it’s just crickets.
So as usual I am balancing the tension of the opposites–between naive hope and bitter despair. It’s usually from this place that I reach for divination. Could the tarot have anything to share with me about this quiet aftermath?
Today I received Eight of Fire/Wands.
As is often the case, I snort “Really??” at the cards. This is usually followed by, “What the hell is THAT supposed to mean??” I get frustrated, and distrusting. But then, Something tells me to chill.
I wait. I look. I write. I listen.
Sitting here, trying to understand. This card usually represents fast moving matters, sometimes air travel, but always a sense of things galloping forward without obstacle. The exact OPPOSITE of what I feel right now in my life. Again I ask, “What could this possibly have to say about my situation?”
Silence. For a moment. I breathe. And then I hear, “Things change instantly. You know this. One moment you are sitting on the curb daydreaming, and the next moment you are swept up by a life-changing event. Remember? How many times this has happened to you? This is the energy of this card, and the possible way that things will unfold very shortly. It is not a card suggesting you to wait for incoming rapid movement, but to snap out of your lamenting that things will never change. Shortly they will…prepare for it. It may look calm, silent, stagnant now…but this will not last for long. Be prepared.”
Hmm. This message feels wise to me. As I have a skeptic-in-residence in my head, I will never put all of my eggs in the tarot advice basket, but it does help to hear some sort of advice within, instead of just silence.
To prepare. Okay. Preparing has been something I’ve felt called to do lately–work on my resume, pack most of my belongings to be ready to move. Everything seems to be wanting to change, and the only thing I can do is prepare. Now I see how I have been stuck in the place of lostness, instead of trusting in the ever-changing nature of life. Things always change. And often it is clear what to do when that time comes. I am grateful for the moments of pause I am being given before the rapid shift comes. To prepare.
I look back at this card and I can’t help think of the recent fires sparked by lightning all across California. In an instant, things changed, lived changed, some lives lost. I think of the silence and stillness that those who are disrupted might be wishing for right now. And how, if they’d known what was coming, could have used the time to prepare.
So I shift from frustration, to gratitude. Gratitude for this notice, gratitude for this time to get ready. Even if the cards aren’t predicting anything, I know that life can change in an instant.
Understanding, I prepare. For the Eight of Fire, swift movement…for the ever changing nature of life. Thank you.
~The image above is sourced from Tarot of The Spirit, by Joyce and Pamela Eakins.
~This poem was recently published in a women’s literary anthology! If you’re interested in all of the other amazing reflections on this timely structure, check out Death: Deep Reflections from The Sisters of The Holy Pen, ed. Pamela Eakins at:
You know how weird it feels to wake up on the day of your birthday and feel like nothing is really drastically different, despite the utter impossibility of the new number you now inhabit? That’s how I’ve been feeling this past week, not because it was my day of birth, but because it’s the “after” of choosing to press publish.
As mentioned last week, it was unexpectedly quiet after doing so, aside from my internal revelations. And this past week has been similarly quiet, a few emails from friends and colleagues cheering me on for my accomplishment were all that seemed different than my pre-published state.
My original plan was to let this book float out into the universe and to see what happened, without engaging in the weirdness that is marketing. And I’ve kept to that, aside from alerting chosen friends and those involved along the way (including you :}) with the completion of the goal.
In the relative silence of this choice, I started to wonder about that plan, whether I should be doing more to encourage my book’s success in the world. Again I picked up sassy marketing books, contemplated entering contests, sharing about the publication with social media. Again I balked. Something, at least right now, doesn’t feel right about it. All the advice screamed, “Get on it now, or your book will go unnoticed! Pre-launch and post-launch are perfect times to run a book giveaway!”
Ugh.
Yet with these suggestions ringing in my mind, all I could envision was my book as a very small baby, and what it might feel like to be marketed and sold to the world, social media, etc. And of course this made my skin crawl…an obvious reaction with that re-frame. I also thought of my new-born vulnerability and how crazy it still feels to have my soul out there to be read by anyone. Do I want to gather millions to ogle at that? Um..no. I for one don’t even want most people to know I’ve had the baby! Do many new parents face this conflict?
Herein lies the strange and complex journey of following the soul’s guidance to do something scary, sometimes kicking and screaming whilst doing so. Whereas what a writer should want is many readers, I am the opposite, at least in having the desire to find them. I am open and willing to be seen by those who somehow find the book, but to call attention to it en masse does not feel right. Am I making a mistake, letting my book die on the vine? Who knows. All I know is I feel like puking every time I look at marketing material.
I’ve been going through pictures from my mother’s recent passing, and in them I found one of me as a child on stage with my mother. I’m in a blue and white polka dotted bathing suit, and there’s a sign behind us, “Tri-county Beauty Contest.” I’m probably about four years old. She has a marvelous bouffant hair-do and is dressed to the nines. It brought me pause to think that she did that, enrolled her four year old in a beauty contest, but the age span made me think. Perhaps it will be when my babe is four years old that I will feel ready to bring her on stage to the wider audience. Who knows?
For now, I’m letting it be. I’m enjoying the silence, although a little uncomfortable I’m doing it “wrong.” I’m gazing at my babe poised on my ancestor altar, amazed by it. I’m waiting. I’m asking for its journey to unfold for the greatest alignment of all concerned. I’m holding it, and my vulnerable self, like a baby not yet ready to face the screaming, blaring, honking, critiquing world all at once.
This blog seems to be a safe place to show her off, in a non-smarmy way. To share about the process of her in-utero growth, the ups and downs, and finally her birth. I’m so grateful for that, for you who make it here to read. Thanks for being the small community that I can share her with.
Some part of me thought mountains would shake, arrows would fly towards me, or some other crazy result would occur from doing such a thing. But that Wednesday morning after pressing the button, things were pretty quiet ((aside from the entire West Coast burning around me–prayers all around)).
What did occur was a series of internal earthquakes. The first rippled through as I stepped out of the shower post-publish. I suddenly realized:
I just completed a major life goal. Something I committed to doing before I die.
Waves of pride, and amazement, flowed through me. And then, a powerful surge of wanting to volunteer somewhere! I was a bit puzzled by this reaction, but then thought how it made sense. I’ve been spending the last however many years plotting, crafting, writing, anti-socializing, editing, etc to get this task done, and now there was a well of energy being released for a new use. So I’m working on that.
The next boom that happened was the realization that I had taken a step to finally become visible. My words, my story, the fact that I struggle with eating and body issues, my ideas (and I’d like to think teachings) about all of that–these are all now able to be seen by the public eye. For so many years I have kept these things hidden from everyone save for a few trusted souls. Now for all to see? How terrifying…and exciting. A few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to hold this possibility. A few years ago I was still in too much of a Hermit mode, alchemizing. But now, it feels right.
The last boom (at least for now) was an image of my ideal reader, in my mind. I had to draw her, and I do hope she is out there reading somewhere, being comforted by my words. Here she is :}
If you are her or know someone like her please do check out/share my book page with her…I want this book to find her! Again the link is: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B08HSLZ1TD
As always, I am ever so grateful for your time and attention. Hope all is well with you out there in these crazy, crazy times.
Letting Go 