Funky Little Blue Pills

Pluto is calling

TW: drug use, ED, mental health, emotional abuse

I’ve been wanting to write for awhile and haven’t been able to find the words to express the many, many things that are moving for me. This will be a long one, so thank you in advance for hanging in there.

2024 feels so potent already, so full of promise AND fear for everyone. I love astrology as a dynamic language and potent tool for growth and general navigation, as it provides such interesting insight not just on a personal level but collective as well. Pluto, our friend in all things destruction and renewal and deep transformation, has been in Capricorn since 2008 and won’t be in that sign again during our lifetime (we’re talking 270+ years). Pluto finds its way into Aquarius this Saturday, Jan 20th. I bring this up because as I reflect on 2008-2023, it feels like I have lived so many different lives, and 2024 already feels like a new life forming again.

My depression came slamming into the room like the Kool-Aid man in the fall of 2008 as I entered college. I started using weed and alcohol in near constant rotation to escape the way I felt, which I didn’t understand at all, and to continue masking as the loud, funny, performer girl I had grown up as. I fell in love, deeply and obsessively, for the first time with a boy I met at Walgreens and would go on to pour all of my energy into him for five years. During that time, 2008-2012, I also slept around as much as possible to try to convince myself that I was valuable and wanted. I was prescribed Adderall to manage my ADD, which was a new diagnosis that I received but was given literally no information about, and that funky little blue pill also joined the rotation of self-preservation tools. As I moved through college in a complete fog I somehow managed to perform in no less than three or four shows a year - an insane amount of time and work - while alienating myself from my family more and more and creating tension with friends who saw me self imploding and doing nothing about it. I was not a good friend during that time. I was selfish and erratic and I really had no idea how deeply my behavior was hurting myself and others.

I dated so many people who were just as lost and confused and angry as I was, so you can guess how dysfunctional those relationships were. I brought all of them home to meet my family way too early and without any care for how much stress that put on my loved ones. I canceled plans with friends if I thought there might be a chance that a guy would call and I skipped important family events for the same reason. I stopped talking for awhile, I dabbled in psychedelics, I developed an eating disorder, the list goes on.

I’m reflecting through all of this because it gives such an important perspective on just how much changed in the following years of Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto’s influence on my self actualization forced me to self destruct over and over and over until I hit rock bottom. Rock bottom for me was lying in a heap of my clothes on my bedroom floor, stoned out of my mind and sobbing because I could not physically get up to attend my finals and knew I was going to fail several classes. There wasn’t one specific thing that happened that caused me to dig deep inside myself for a way out, but a handful of small things. It was my mom telling me she wasn’t going to give up and neither should I. It was a new friend handing me a deck of Sacred Path cards with messages about personal responsibility and shadow work and the inherent value of each person in a collective web of love and authenticity. It was learning that my brain is a separate entity with all of its own thoughts and opinions and that I have other drivers available for my experience of life. It was discovering meditation. It was working on farms in Europe without a phone. It was being accepted into a conservatory program in San Francisco and living with a friend who woke me up every day by saying “You’re the best and so am I, kid. Let’s kick today’s ass.” (Thank you, Sparks).

I did in fact crawl of depression in 2012 for awhile, only to be thrust right back in when I rushed into an abusive relationship and moved across the country thinking I could fix his abuse by living close by so that he could see I’m not a “lying, disgusting slut.” As you can imagine, this really did a number on me. I won’t get into the rest of those details, but six months later I moved home and began to attempt repair. I got back into meditation more heavily and pulled myself up enough to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I tried to date, still couldn’t choose healthy partners, and in 2014 moved myself to Nashville for the first time and landed my first corporate job as a treatment consultant for a national drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. Nothing half assed, I suppose. Right into the trenches. But something clicked there for me, and I discovered that I had a gift for meeting people in their pain and helping them believe in love and health again.

I ping ponged for several more years, though. I moved to Chicago, which triggered my depression again, moved back to Nashville 5 months later, kept dating unavailable people, kept denying myself my own love, kept overindulging. Got my job back with the rehab and then left again a year later (we’re into 2017 now) to move home to Michigan. I worked for a naturopath, and then a dance company, and then for a large hotel downtown where I was bullied mercilessly by the staff. I discovered the Psychosynthesis Institute and enrolled in their nine month coaching program and integrated years of trauma and fear, then began coaching others. I was bypassing a lot and I still had so much to learn about personal responsibility and anti racist practices and collective liberation, but I don’t regret those years of Rose House. My messaging wasn’t always the healthiest as I learned not to bypass, but it all taught me how to hold myself and others accountable and how to be more tender and forgiving. It helped me to fine tune my intuition and develop my extra sensory gifts so that I could offer very specific guidance to the folks who came looking for it. Then the pandemic hit and as we were all consumed by fear I took solace in throwing myself into my business and took it full time. My sister threw me a 30th birthday party and I cried and cried because the years where I didn’t think I’d live to 30 still felt so close. I moved back to Nashville for a third time and my business grew and I fell in love with a few more men who weren’t right for me and I still didn’t know how to advocate for myself.

I went through a horrible breakup at the end of 2021 and then went to visit my childhood best friend in NorCal where she brushed my hair and made me tea and we dropped acid and sobbed and expressed our love and our hope. I learned that I had been reserving a piece of myself for a romance I hadn’t found, and was keeping myself from getting close to others by withholding so much of my love, so I came home and slowly let that newfound revelation change my life. I let that love out and I let it grow and transform me. I made new friends who lit up my world. I started having heart to hearts with strangers again. I moved home to Michigan to be with my family and finally repair that relationship once and for all. I met the love of my life and then my best friend of twenty years broke up with me. I found my dream therapist and started taking antidepressants. The breaths are coming easier and easier.

And now here we are. Pluto is a motherfucker.

I am no longer that deeply insecure, self abandoning, resentful, scared girl. At least not full time. She’s still in there and I take good care of her.

I’m so proud to be alive and I can give and receive love with fullness and I’m taking classes in all sorts of fun subjects just because I can. I’m moving my body and trusting myself and asking for what I need and saying no when I want to. I live in a light-filled house in the woods with lots of birds and my sweet Cowboy by my side and I am happy.

Eighteen year old me would barely believe it.

These next 20 years or so will bring so many more versions of you and me. They’ll bring job changes and death and birth and magic and catastrophe. And though we won’t be able to prepare for most of it, I hope you’ll accept the invitation, whatever it may be at any given time. I hope you’ll trust yourself to move through your grief and revel in your joy and always remember you can hold both of those things at the same time. I hope you’ll be absolutely amazed by the entire thing.

Cheers.

I love you. Til next time.