Aka “what else am I posting besides these messages?”

When I started this blog in 2011, it was meant as a means of recovery after trauma. I needed to reclaim my voice and stay in touch with this way of processing ideas that both challenged people but also helped them feel less alone. An attempt at a polished resilience that I didn’t really feel. Sadness was dripping all around me, but here the cracked makeup and imperfections were accepted if only as a prop for internal healing. This space has seen not just my recovery from those originating traumas, but the reverberations of what it has meant to heal and connect, but also contract and delve deeply.

This blog has been a semi-intentional dumping ground for my thoughts, my dreams, and my big-picture insights. I shared enough on here, oversharing at times. Enough that I always found myself having a reflexive period where I pull back to lick imaginary wounds of rejection and regret after seeing stats go up on the site. That retraction back into the comfort of my silence is what has left promised series unfinished, like Surviving Your Tower Moment unfinished.

That doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate the successes I have. Sharing the Messages of Divine Love has helped me feel less afraid of sharing these shards of my mending heart. If I could lend you my kaleidoscope vision for just a minute, to see what I see – the ever-changing beauty of the world – perhaps you might walk away having seen the beauty I witness in you as well.

But after two years and countless hours, I’m also seeing how I’ve been hiding myself in those messages. I’ve gotten away from the core purpose of this blog – as a goddess of all truths sharp and sweet, I have forgotten to show you that tempting space between the two. This is why the Messages will be living exclusively on Substack as I bring out more of my true voice here.

The current state of things

In a lot of my advertising for my business and services, I say that I’m a “healer, writer, and educator” but it’s been hard for me to justify the “writer” part because I don’t feel I’ve been writing that much – or rather, I haven’t been showing you MY writing for a while, only pouring into the 1500-2400 words/week readings that I post, doing double duty here and on Substack. I have whittled the process down to 3-5 hours (assuming WordPress and Substack are playing nice), but it becomes such an all-consuming task sending out marketing reminders that I end up neglecting my other writing – blowing all of my creativity out that window.

Meanwhile, on Patreon, I find myself making lofty promises that a combination of issues (primarily ADHD) have interfered with my ability to deliver. That only compounds guilt locking me into a self-defeating pattern of avoidance. Content doesn’t flow well when creativity is blocked by shame. If anything, the content becomes more insular, self-centered, and pointedly self-important and I become obsessed with perfection. So inevitably after I post it and I then find another typo or error, I just want to crawl back into myself to “figure my shit out” before I ever let my writing be seen again. I squash the passion I have for the subject matter into small little pieces, never quite catching the flow of it to finish what I started.

I am proud that I’ve been able to deliver the Choose Your Own Card Adventures and previews for patrons – but the problem has been and always will be the fact that I straddle too many lines, too many intersections that I often feel stuck with indecision weighing over me. And when it isn’t indecision it’s self-judgment and derision. “No one wants to read that anyway.”

This was certainly the case with another unfinished series I started on Substack about ancestral healing and unraveling my Catholicism. After re-reading it, I found it to be embarrassingly self-important and so it’s been hard for me to hook into that passion again, even though everything in my heart tells me I need to write it. Not because my story is the important takeaway, but because I hope in sharing it, you might see your ancestral connections differently.

However, in the effort to run this business, I let strangers’ marketing advice dictate my voice rather than my voice dictating the marking strategy. While being self-employed has never been great in the capitalist sense, it has offered me the freedom to use whatever accommodations I can to ensure my services are better aligned with my calling than ever before. It wasn’t like this when I was in private practice as a mediator. Even with my husband recently out of work, I have never felt so comfortable and supported in all my life as I have these past few years.

So while the new writing on this page has been slim, I know it’s been because I’ve been building foundations of healing, extracting the remaining value left of the old systems I was in – like law & public policy – and pumping that into the vision I am creating behind the surface with my book (that I still am actively writing). While I am sufficiently busy, engagement has been so low in all corners of my work that it’s hard for me to tell if I’m making any progress at all without guilt invading the analysis.

Enter the Empress

Over the past year, we have endured immense changes to our household and family structures. My kid graduated high school and moved out two months later, pursuing some life-affirming experiences before deciding on school. My niece died of COVID last October, which shattered the last bits of trust I had for old definitions of family. The structures fell and my heart fell with them. I went through the motions with Dia de los Muertos – too many new faces joined the framed photos of my grandpa and dad. Even now, I can feel the bile inching up my throat as I choke back bitter sorrow. I haven’t felt like the Queen I once declared myself to be.

It wasn’t until January, during a planned research trip to Albuquerque for my book, (and a side trip to meet Aleks Paunovic) that these events started shifting a new me into place. Now my third trip to my “homeland” of New Mexico (where my ancestors have been since the 1700s – and before that Guanajuato), I had avoided visiting Chimayo because it was so laden with emotion and expectation. But because my character goes there in the book, I needed to see and feel the place for myself to let the magic of that space flow through my veins. I felt it the Friday we went there, with humble offerings and vulnerable prayers. I felt it when I got a hug from a solar plexus main character. I felt it through my drive home through the San Luis Valley into La Veta – familiar to my whole family.

The shift was immediate and noticeable – the ancestors had hitched a ride home with me and were shifting my life to uncover the most sensitive wounds that I kept selfishly guarding and denying. How could I become the Queen if all I did was doubt myself into oblivion? It’s only today that I’m starting to see the magnificence of this fated healing.

Soon after my dad’s sister died this June I was hit with reminders of my painful past. I could no longer neglect to examine the depths of why I was so overprotective of my heart. It had already been a humbling six months, but mid-June was like a boss battle for the liberation of my soul. A field test that finally forced me to release old ties and shake off the fear of enforcing my boundaries. The emotional toll has been exhausting but I know it’s because the changes are resonating so deeply that I now know how to share it with others.

It culminated on June 25th, the anniversary of my vision, where I was led to a space of reverent power where I called in my ancestors, guides, ascended elders, chosen family, spiritual sisterhood. With their help, I finally summoned the courage to make a decision, spoken as if I was issuing a judgment from my throne, that rippled throughout my life. I truly entered my Empress phase and took the place I was always meant to be in, especially now at 45.

A blip on the map

On 7/7 we were smacked with news that my husband was getting laid off. His income justified the financial burdens of me stepping away from my job, healing my broken spirit, mending my strained body, caring for the elders in my family, and finalizing my dad and grandpa’s estates.

I know more about myself than I did the last time this happened. Knowing I have ADHD symptoms layered within my complex trauma has given me a context to start unwinding all the anticipatory, anxious shame that drove me into spirals of self-sacrifice. Having words like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria to describe why I feel such pain when I encounter even the potential for public humiliation, no matter how distant the possibility.

In the past that meant defaulting to turning down my voice, making myself smaller than I really was. It also meant overworking to prove my worth, to. It meant hiding behind a persona, not giving myself permission to exist as I fully am, despite the number of ways I was encouraging others to. Now at 45 years old I am much more grounded in my role in life which makes me less available for people-pleasing. It feels good, even if it feels unfamiliar. This year has been about removing some of the filters that prevent me from feeling safe being more open and public.

The old me would have worried about how my public persona might influence getting or keeping a job. But now, I’m starting to see how giving up this hard work isn’t worth any job no matter how lucrative or stable. As such, even though I have submitted some applications to help the family bridge the gap between jobs, I’m convinced that only those opportunities that are truly right for me will come through. Any new job has got to fit into my master plan. It cannot be an anxious response to the momentary disruption to our expected security. Revising the story so that this is simply a speed bump on the road to essentially doing what I’ve been doing: coaching, writing and connecting. If that ends up being for an employer, so be it, but I will be uncompromising with my worth and freedom now that I’ve won it all back.

Almost as if the universe wanted to test my resolve, just a few weeks ago it dropped a video that got over 1 million views on Facebook. That kind of public exposure was terribly triggering for me – and yet, I withstood it, even if I didn’t choose to read all the comments. And while I can’t control some people’s children or how they view me, I can control how much of it I allow to influence how I view myself. I can also control where and how I spend my energy – even if that means taking a day or two for turning off my brain to process my triggers rather than trying to push past it all the time.

I am walking into this New Moon in Leo with the vengeance of a resilient and glittering brujera Empress who will not be satisfied with only showing up as part of herself. Those who are ready for radical acceptance and resilient love will know how to find me – and those who cannot exercise the simple empathy of seeing what I share in its most compassionate light and those who don’t ever need to feel the warmth of my healing power.

What matters most to me is that we make room for people to show up as their authentic selves – so the only promise I will make is to share my truth, my flaws, my joys so that you might recognize yourself in the mirrors of my life and see the sharp and the sweet within you too.

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