At first I considered doing a total overhaul of Talaria—changing the name and branding and about page—but I don’t want to build my next project on top of a corpse; I want to birth something new.

I think that my original vision for the FEWL Diaries, “a creative outlet for me to play with the role of the galactic field researcher….that aquarianly-detached, gemini-motivated reporter who’s just tryna spread the news about what they see goin’ on,” was an early echo of the vision I hold now. It was too early, ahead of its time, ahead of my personal schedule. I needed 2025 to build my writing practice, to use writing to heal, and to gain clarity on exactly what my function is in the world. FEWL didn’t turn out to be what I’d anticipated, but it was what I needed.

Now that I know myself as walking the path of the Visionary and have writing anchored firmly into my routine, I feel ready for an expansion. A new adventure. A fresh start.

So, let’s start!

I’m launching a new Substack called The Visionary’s Field Notes. In it, I will do what I discussed in a previous post: provide commentary on the societal structures that we see crumbling around us; offer insight into the energetics behind these big shifts; muse about the new paradigm that is coming into form; suggest ways that we can both prepare for and help create the new world; and share snapshots of the future that I’ve gathered from dreams, visions, and shamanic journeys.

Not the galactic field researcher trying to share what they see happening; but the visionary, looking beneath the surface and beyond the present to help you orient yourself during one of the most profoundly transformative times in human history.

I’m also going to give the monthly collective energy updates a whirl, but they will be free for the first several months to (1) make sure that I actually enjoy doing them, and (2) give you a chance to see if you gain anything from them—“try before you buy.”

Since Talaria is now dead, everything on it is free! If there’s ever been anything in the archive that you wanted access to / lost access to once I put it behind a paywall, it’s all available now. (I personally love some of the earliest, 2022-era audios—like this one—if you wanted to check them out.)

I may swing back to Talaria, and specifically FEWL, if there comes a time that I am overcome by the urge to babble about myself again, but between Visionary’s and another super-secret-super-fun TBA writing project that’s in the works, I suspect that I’ll have my attention elsewhere for a while. I will, however, cross post from Visionary’s for the first few uploads to make sure that my readers here know I’ve started a new thing.

Well…. There’s no need for me to be mushy-gushy; nothing’s getting deleted and in fact Talaria will now be more accessible than ever. So I’m just gonna leave it here!

Thanks for being on this ride with me. See you on the other side ;)

xx Lizzie, with Gratitude and Blessings

Part 2 of the Winter Dreamland series, with an important update at the very end!

4. Dreams that Change Over Time

This discussion is going to build upon the previous two types of dreams (#2 Karmic Dreams and #3 Dreams that Reveal Psychological Transformation), so make sure you’ve read Part 1!

If you are diligent about keeping a dream journal — a practice I cannot recommend strongly enough — you may begin to notice that certain dreams or themes repeat themselves. This may happen obviously: the exact same dream coming to you again and again; but less obvious are dreams that tell the same story in different settings. For example, you might have a dream that you are trapped in a small box, followed by a dream where you are locked in a mansion and cannot find your way out. Both of these dreams, while completely different on the surface, tell the story of stuckness and seeking escape.

Sometimes, as is often true for nightmares, the dreams will repeat themselves and stay relatively the same (in this case I recommend following the advice given previously for Karmic Dreams). What’s fascinating is that other times, the nature of these dreams will begin to shift. This shift reflects a change taking place within the psyche — one that is happening over a longer period of time than the change reflected by the 3rd type of dream.

To continue with the box/mansion example: perhaps your dreams began with you feeling hopeless, resigned to your fate, sitting in the darkness and waiting for something to happen. Next, you might find yourself attempting to make something happen on your own, punching the walls of the box or hunting through the mansion, determined to find a way out. Finally, you have a dream of escape: you break through the box or find the front door of the mansion and claim your freedom. The succession of these dreams shows an evolution in your psyche from feeling stuck, trapped and powerless to owning and wielding your agency.

It is important to note that, in my experience, these dreams do not come back-to-back, but are gifted to us over a period of time — the period of time it takes our psyche to make these substantial changes. Hence the importance of keeping a dream journal, so that you can identify these patterns as they are spread out over months or years!

What action to take with these dreams depends on where in the process you find yourself. If you become aware of the pattern midway, it might be beneficial to help usher it along. For example, if you catch on to the “stuck” story once your dreamself begins looking for a way out, you might want to ask yourself where you feel stuck in your waking life; acknowledge your desire for greater agency, choice and freedom; or tap into the determination that you felt running through the mansion and apply it to a circumstance in the physical world where you could use the same energy.

If you become aware of the pattern after it has reached a resolution, it is often a time for celebration! Continuing our example, you might reflect on where in your life you feel newly empowered or freed from prior constraints. Perhaps nothing noticeable has shifted in your external reality, and this dream of escape is foreshadowing events to come. Thank your subconscious for telling you freedom is possible and giving you the confirmation that you already have within you whatever you need to make change in your life.

If you notice the pattern midway and then the resolution dream comes, allow yourself to feel excited and proud: you have just bore witness to a huge internal shift, and your attention has likely helped the process along. A new chapter — a new way of being — has begun for you and you are aware of it. Many people sleepwalk through their life without noticing these periods of energetic restructuring, but not you! It is truly a gift to be granted a front row seat to your own evolution. Feel empowered by your deep connection to your self.

Example: The dream-theme I am about to share came to resolution five days ago, and only this morning have I fully received its message.

In all the dreams these many years that I have had of driving, I felt wildly out of control. Behind the wheel I was powerless, frightened, unable to make my vehicle do what I wanted it to do. No matter how hard I hit the breaks, I couldn’t slow down; no matter how forcefully I pulled the steering wheel, I couldn’t change my direction. Dreams in which I was driving felt more like I was on a roller coaster: strapped in for a wild ride that I could not dictate.

I didn’t recognize this pattern on my own; rather, it was a dream that came to me this October which brought the pattern to my awareness. In the dream, I was brought somewhere that looked like a security room with many small TV screens arranged in rows on the wall. Each screen showed me a different dream in which I had been driving uncontrollably. I remember the surprise that I felt in the dream — what I was seeing rang so true, but how had I never noticed that before?!

Upon waking I consulted my dream journal and, sure enough, I found the evidence that confirmed I could not drive in dreams.1 I was fascinated by this revelation and even more so by the way it had come about. Two more dreams have come since then to complete the story my subconscious was telling me.

First, I had a dream in which I was stuck on a golf cart with Donald Trump. We were driving on the highway and Trump was in the driver’s seat, whipping recklessly through traffic. I feared for my life. At one point I grabbed the steering wheel from him and demanded that he follow my instructions, lest we crash and die. With his mild acquiescence, I managed to get us safely into a parking lot. I remember being astonished in the dream that I had successfully steered a vehicle, something I’d evidently not been able to do before.

Next (just a few nights ago), I had a dream in which I was driving away from my old college campus. This dream was starkly different from all the others because, for the first time, I was in complete control of my car! There was no panic and no chaos. I deftly pulled out onto the main road, even managing at one point to back up a long distance after spotting a hazard ahead. In busy traffic I drove confidently and skillfully, finding shortcuts, making sharp turns, and beating traffic lights with expert timing.

I didn’t understand the significance of this evolution of my dream driving until this morning, when I read the following passage from the Katha Upanishad:

“Know the Self as lord of the chariot, the body as the chariot itself, the discriminating intellect as the charioteer, and the mind as reins.

The senses, say the wise, are the horses; …

When a person lacks discrimination and his mind is undisciplined, the senses run hither and thither like wild horses.

But they obey the rein like trained horses when one has discrimination and has made the mind one-pointed.”

For many years I have been practicing Presence, disciplining my mind to stay in the Now instead of being pulled this way and that by my senses. And, even though I was unaware, my dreams were documenting my journey.

The dream with Trump symbolized a landmark moment in which I decidedly took control of my “chariot” from an unruly, destructive force (my sense-obsessed ego nature); the final dream reflected a crossing of the threshold in which I am now more in command of my mind than ever before.

I haven’t felt the same since I woke from the successful driving dream. For anyone unfamiliar with the practice of Presence this might be hard to understand, but I am now filled with the sense of calm and peace that only comes from a subdued mind. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly had changed at first, but this revelation from the Upanishads has made clear the nature of the transformation that occurred. Time to celebrate!

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5. Dreams that Free Psychic Energy

As I wrote in Part 1, the images that we carry with us from the dreamspace into waking reality are rarely a literal rendition of what occurred during sleep. Rather, we bring back symbols — figures that represent our unconscious journey in a way our conscious mind can comprehend.

Carl Jung, father of analytical psychology and an inspiration for much of my dreamwork, had a visionary take on these dream symbols. He saw them not as static images but as dynamic entities capable of carrying psychic energy from our unconscious to conscious mind, allowing us greater access to our own vitality.

We humans are complex and multifaceted beings. When we suffer a trauma or learn through childhood conditioning that certain traits are not allowed, we hide bits and pieces of ourselves away in our unconscious — aka our “shadow.” The parts of ourselves that get hidden, either because they hold onto pain we cannot bear or because we were taught that they’re unacceptable, remain full of vital energy. This energy is lost to us so long as it remains out of reach, i.e. out of our awareness.

Shadow work is a wonderful tool that we can use to prod around our dark, unconscious material. By identifying where we feel holes in our wholeness, we can reach out a hand to the parts of ourselves that were relegated to the shadow, and with love and patience integrate them back into our conscious personality.

Shadow work can be tricky since it requires us to find and then face things we did not know existed within us. Luckily, we are not in this alone! Through dreams, we can have aspects of our shadow delivered right to our doorstep, neatly wrapped and with a bow on top. In my experience, when shadow aspects are delivered this way they are immediately integrated, and all the energy they carry is reintroduced to our system without our having to do anything at all.

I’d like to emphasize that, despite its negative connotation, shadow is not a bad thing. All of your untapped potential, forgotten happiness, and repressed desires live within your shadow. The key to living a full and vital life is being able to bring this shadow material out of its hidden place so that you may know all of yourself, re-united.

When you have one of these dreams, you’ll know. You’ll wake feeling as if something has been unlocked or released inside you, and have more energy than you did before. This dream is a gift, and the only thing we need to do in response is have gratitude.

Example: For a while I was really struggling to forgive my mom for things she allowed to happen during my childhood. The state of non-forgiveness that I was in (for a long time!) was incredibly draining and stressful. I wanted to forgive her… but I couldn’t dampen the rage fire that burned so hot within me.

One night, I had a very simple dream. The dream was mostly black, with a single spotlight illuminating an image in the center of the frame. The image was of me, my mom, and my little brother sat at our kitchen table. We were playing cards by candlelight, something that we had done every night in the power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

Nothing happened in the dream; it was more of a picture than a movie. But the energy that the dream carried was potent: it was the forgiveness I was looking for.

I awoke with tears in my eyes and a fierce feeling of love in my heart. There was no thought, no reasoning, no explanation needed. Something within me had been totally rebalanced, and the fire that threatened to consume me had been put out.

Retrospectively I see that in my anger towards my mother, I had pushed much of the love that I had for her away. I’d pushed it away so far that I couldn’t find it again — that is, until this dream brought it back to me.

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6. Dreams that Answer Our Questions (Dream Incubation)

Dream Incubation is the art of focusing on a question, problem, etc. before sleep and asking your dreams for guidance.

There’s not too much to say about this one since it is so self-explanatory, but I do have an important piece of advice: If you are going to attempt dream incubation, write down your question before falling asleep! Too many times I have skipped this vital step and, upon waking with a vivid dream, I cannot remember what on earth I requested the dream for.

My new practice is to start an entry in my dream journal with my line of inquiry before I fall asleep. Then, when I wake up, I write the answering dream below it. This might seem very silly, but I regret all of the dreams I’ve “wasted” by not being able to remember exactly what question they were in response to, and I want to save you from making the same mistake.

Practicing dream incubation might be one of the best ways to start a dream practice if you do not have one already. It trains you to recall and record your dreams and teaches you, very quickly, that you have access to more wisdom within yourself than you know. Pick a problem or point of confusion in your life right now, and give it a whirl!

Example: Several years ago, I quit my job very suddenly and with no replacement lined up. There were many moments of confusion and despair as I sat in the void, waiting for whatever was next to materialize and mourning the security that I’d left behind.

It was during this liminal time that I began to deepen my dream practice. I started biphasic sleeping2 and got serious about keeping a dream journal, hoping that a stronger connection to the Otherworld might provide some solace for my worried heart.

One night, after a particularly difficult day, I asked my dreams to give me guidance to dispel the doubt that I was having about my ability to manifest something new. This was the dream I received:

I’m standing outside a house with an inspector who has come to see (and judge) how much work I had done. I am nervous before we walk inside, since I have no idea what to expect. Nevertheless, I lead her to the basement, and what we find there surprises me.

In the basement is a group of women sat at several different tables, working silently but steadily. They’re each tending to vibrant green and quickly growing succulents in small pots. They do not stop to address the inspector but continue their quiet diligence as she walks around to judge their work.

I tell the inspector that I wasn’t the one who grew these plants — she was here to judge my work, after all — but she didn’t seem to care. I didn’t have any shame about the succulents being grown without my awareness, although I couldn’t begin to explain to the inspector how all this progress had occurred.

This dream confirmed something important for me: there were things going on beneath the surface of my life that I was completely aware of. Progress was happening, even if I couldn’t see it taking place.

This was a seemingly small dream, but it bolstered my belief in myself and allowed me to have more patience while my creation was manifesting. A few weeks after this dream I was offered a new job, one that would give me more than I knew I was looking for, simply by going to a renaissance festival with my partner. It was almost as if I’d done nothing at all… ;)

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Thank you for reading Part 2!

In the final installation of this series, I was planning to talk about dreams that allow us to test alternate pathways; visit other realities; and discover the underlying mechanisms of our reality.

Unfortunately, in true Manifestor fashion, I’ve since lost my interest in continuing this series. But — if dreamwork has caught your attention, I encourage you to do more research on and experimentation with these things yourself! The list of books that I left in the footnotes of Part 1 are a fantastic place to start.

The power of dreams will always be something that I’m exploring in my personal life. But in my professional life, I’m being called toward something different right now. The 2026 changes that I spoke of in my last post have turned out to be greater than I realized. I’ll share all the details with you real soon, so keep an eye out for another message from me!

xx Lizzie

I am dropping by quickly in between my series on the Types of Dreams to share a couple of things with you:

First, I want to say thank you.

My main goal for 2025 was to rekindle my writing practice. With seventeen posts this year and counting, I’d say that I’ve succeeded!

Thank you for being here, and being a readership that I can lean on. Thank you for keeping me from feeling like I’m shouting into the void. Thank you for your likes and comments and feedback, and for sharing some of yourself alongside me.

Whether it’s been updates on my current life or an unpacking of my childhood, I’ve spent a lot of this year straight up just writing about myself. I want to thank you sincerely for giving me the space to explore and create my own reality. When times were tough it was grounding, and writing about my past was more healing than I can express. Thank you for letting me be selfish; I hope that even in my most introspective moments there was something on the page (screen?) for you to gain as well.

That said, this year is coming to a close. As is often the case during winter, I’m getting glimmers of what I want to create in the year to come. So, without further ado…

Some plans for 2026! (Hold very loosely ;)

I’d like to start pouring some energy into the paid tier of Talaria (which you can access for just $5 a month, or enjoy a 7-day free trial). As of now, the paid tier consists of all my audio uploads except the Vestalia series, which will remain free. But all of these posts are now over a year old, leaving my paid tier feeling stale and irrelevant, and I want to change that!

The vision I have right now is, starting January 2026, to upload one energy update a month for paid subscribers. These might be writing or audio or some combination of the two — I haven’t decided yet. I’m also playing with the idea of oscillating between “timely” and “timeless” updates. Timely updates would be forecasts for each bagua season (Fire in February; Thunder in March; Earth in May; Mountain in June; Water in August; Wind in September; Heaven in November; and Lake in December). For the remaining four months, the updates would be timeless — not forecasts per se, but an open-ended conversation with the Divine about whatever it wants us to know.

Like I said, I’m playing with the idea of that structure. If a different form makes me happier it’s allowed to evolve. But energy updates, in one way or another, are something to look forward to!

For all subscribers, Talaria will continue to be writing-centered — although, beginning with the Dream series, I’d like to start recording voiceovers so that you have the choice to read my writing or listen to me read it to you! (Make sure you have the Substack app downloaded to access this feature.)

Instead of focusing so heavily on myself, next year I’d like to begin writing in a way that embodies my newly unearthed career archetype: The Visionary.

While I’m still fine-tuning and solidifying my definitions, right now I would say that the calling of the Visionary is “to translate their intuition about what is emerging before it is visible, helping others to orient themselves.”

If you know me, you know that I see huge transformation coming to our world (especially as we cross the threshold of 2027). Recently I’ve been faced with the heartbreaking fact that, although I hold this vision always in my mind, I rarely express it with the conviction and clarity that it deserves.

I am determined to change that.

In 2026, expect more writing about the future of humanity and the planet we call home. I might provide commentary on the structures that we see crumbling around us; offer insight into the energetics behind these big shifts; muse about the new paradigm that is coming into form; suggest ways that we can both prepare for and help create the new world; or share snapshots of the future that I’ve gathered from dreams and shamanic journeys.

I’m not quite sure what embodying this archetype will look like, or what it might demand from me… But I’m eager to find out! I hope you are, too.

Thank you again for being here. Have a very happy New Year & I’ll see you again real soon <3

xoxo Lizzie

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Personally, I love the winter. Winter invites us to slow down, to turn inward and reflect, to recharge and prepare for the bright new year to come. Winter is full of mystery, an often melancholic time when our motivation loses its sharp edge and our goals fade into obscurity. It’s a time to let go — of heavy baggage, old stories, things we no longer need. A time to surrender what we’ve spent the year (or perhaps our lifetime) cultivating, to make space for something new.

Winter is also the time for dreams. Enveloped by external darkness, we are encouraged to befriend the darkness within us, to plunge into the inky depths of our unconscious and swim alongside its formless residents. They have gifts for us, if we are brave enough to draw near.

I’ve spent much of this year — and much of the past three years — learning how to work with dreams. When I thought about how I wanted to end this year’s creative cycle on Talaria, the idea to discuss dreams came to me. I wanted to offer something practical, something that could be taken with you into this season of peak yin, as I disappear into my own private dreamworld and wait for the next path to reveal itself to me.

Below, I will share some of what I’ve learned from my years of personal experience and several books2 I’ve devoured about the nature of dreams, in the hopes that you might use this wisdom to enhance your own dream life and enjoy a deeply nourishing and internally adventurous winter because of it.

First, an attempt to answer perhaps the most important question:

What are dreams?

One thing I’ve learned from reading the material of various dream masters is that there is not one single way to define a dream, or the dreamspace. Every person, religion, and occult sect has their own way of perceiving and explaining this phenomenon. So instead of trying to give you the right answer to this foundational question, I will give you my answer as it currently stands, with the understanding that even this will continue to evolve as my own dream life does.

To dream is to imagine: to project the amorphous and unmanifest internal state outward so that it may be perceived, experienced, known. I believe that we are always dreaming, whether we are awake or asleep.

When we are awake, our internal state is projected onto the dense, slow physical reality, creating the appearance of stability and consistency. Awake, our consciousness is also captured by the ego, with all of its expectations and guardrails. Our ego has its self-image to uphold and demands a level of security that generally does not allow for much surprise. This is why our dreams, while we are awake, do not tend to be very “dreamlike.” Events follow a linear, predictable order and, unless we learn to detach from the ego, we find ourselves strolling through familiar corridors of reality for our whole lives.

While we sleep, however, the dream experience is very different. Freed from the constraints of both physical reality and the ego, our consciousness is able to access entirely different realms of information.

Without an ego, there is no sense of self to uphold, and so we might experience being someone (or something) wildly different from who we know ourselves to be. I might become an emperor from another time; a character in my favorite movie; a member of another species; or even a version of myself that is too frightful for my fragile ego to consider while awake.

Without the laws of physical reality, time and space become infinitely navigable. I can go anywhere in the universe, and appear there at any time; I can even visit sectors of reality that have no physical manifestation, existing only in the realms of the unseen. I can travel into the depths of my own psyche, finding the monsters and treasures that normally lay hidden in the shadow of my ego. And everywhere I go, I may run into other beings who are happy to share their guidance and wisdom with me.

As our consciousness begins its return journey to waking life, much of what happened during sleep is lost — at least to our egoic awareness. I believe that the entirety of our sleeptime experiences are brought back with us, but our ability to remember depends on our mind’s ability to comprehend. If we do not have the categories of reason to hold our consciousness’ fantastic flight through the ether, we will come up blank. We fall asleep in one day and wake up in the next with nothing but empty space in between.

If, however, our imagination is strong enough, our adventures during sleep can be translated into symbols that remain with us upon waking. These symbols will not be a literal depiction of what our consciousness was up to, but they need not be literal to carry accurate, useful information. When we become skilled in the recall of our sleep dreams we unlock vast reservoirs energy within ourselves. We become aware of things that were previously hidden; open to possibilities that were once unfathomable; healed in parts of ourselves that used to be untouchable; and aware on an entirely new level of the malleability of the spacetime in which we live.

I believe that the better we are at dreaming while asleep, the better we are at dreaming while awake. In other words: the better we are at dreaming, the better we are at living.

It is in this spirit that I share with you nine different types of dreams, how to recognize them, and how to use the information that they carry to their fullest.

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Nine Types of Dreams

The dreams on this list are not mutually exclusive. Like all things in creation, dreams do not fit neatly and perfectly into labeled boxes. These “types” are presented for the purpose of getting you better acquainted with your own dream life and increasing your dream discernment. And to be clear, these are not the only types of dreams — not by a long shot. These are simply the types of dreams with which I have the most experience, and feel the best equipped to tell you about.

Let’s begin with the most mundane and scientifically accepted of them…

1. Dreams to Make Sense of the Day & Consolidate Memories

When I was earning my Psychology degree, there were only two acceptable ways to view dreaming: either as a byproduct of random synaptic firing during sleep, or as a way that our brains make sense of the things we experienced during the day. (I guess none of my professors were very keen on Jung.) Seeing as humans have found innumerable riches in the content of their dreams since the dawn of our species, I am reluctant to buy into the first leg of reasoning. The second, while incredibly boring and limited, does hold some truth for me.

These are the kinds of dreams you have that replay things you’ve already seen, usually very recently. If you fall asleep with the TV on and dream that you are in the show you were watching before bed, that dream falls into this category. So too do dreams that rehash the events of your day: you find yourself back in the argument you had with your friend or — god forbid — you progress through your work day all over again.

These dreams can be exciting if whatever was on your mind before slumber was exciting — who doesn’t want to fall asleep watching Harry Potter and dream that they are a wizard? — or stressful if you are sucked back into an event that had you rattled. In the case of the latter, I believe that the point of these dreams is to help you process something that you struggled to process while awake. Maybe the argument with your friend left you angry, and replaying it in your dreamspace allowed you to say some things to them that you would never say in “real life.” Because of your unconscious processing, you might wake up feeling better than the day before.

There isn’t much to do with these types of dreams, which is why I find them boring. However, if you find yourself having dreams of the same event over and over again, it might suggest that you are struggling to process it. It might be beneficial to meditate on the event while waking, see what thoughts and feelings arise, and take the action(s) you need to process the event consciously.

Example: I fell asleep with a DnD show on recently, and dreamt that I was a member in the party. It was an episode I’d seen before, so I knew when I woke that my dream was a direct copy of that episode’s adventure — but with me shoved into the plot. It was fun to be along for the ride! But I’d rather sleep in silence and see what my unconscious comes up with on its own.

2. Karmic Dreams

Sometimes when we sleep, our consciousness focuses intently on an aspect of our karma that needs to be worked through. Here I am defining karma as a kind of knot in our energy field; something we are unaware of that keeps attracting the same misfortunes in our life, or keeps us otherwise stuck on some sort of behavioral hamster wheel. Karma is not shameful or punitive and we all have our lot. Dealing with our karmic load is what frees us to truly be ourselves instead of remaining trapped in a loop of reactivity and victimhood, but by its very nature it is not usually comfortable to face. Untying karmic knots usually requires a sacrifice on the part of our ego, which it is loathe to make. However, when we are asleep and unburdened by the ego’s guardrails, our karma may be explored more freely.

These dreams often show up as nightmares. Symbols charged with fear leap out from our unconscious and chase us down, demanding to be reckoned with. While these kinds of dreams can be incredibly unsettling, painful, or even horrifying, they reflect a part of ourselves that needs our loving care.

We can work with karmic dreams by asking ourself what is being represented by our nightmare. What are the emotions that come up during these dreams, and how do we feel immediately upon waking? What symbol(s) in the dream are we most disturbed by, and what meaning might it hold? Is our dream asking us to change or face something? Once we have some answers, it is helpful to take some sort of action to bring peace to the disturbed part of ourself. This action might be physical (e.g. altering some aspect of our life as the dream suggested we need to), mental (e.g. meditating or journaling about what the dream stirred in us) or symbolic (e.g. performing a ritual to acknowledge the dream’s content).

Example: This summer I had recurring nightmares that took place in the childhood home in which I was abused. In these dreams, the house was inhabited by myself and the people I currently live with — people whom I trust and love and feel unthreatened by. Even though there was no danger present, I spent the entirety of these dreams severely paranoid and frightened. The dreams got so bad that I started to sleep with the lights on. Eventually I realized what the overlap of people from my current life and a haunted place of my past was trying to tell me: I was carrying around the fear and pain of my childhood, and projecting it onto the safe, secure circumstances of my adult life; I was safe in reality, but felt no safety in my body — the home I could not leave.

To remedy this, I sat in meditation and visualized myself walking through each room of the home I grew up in. I gutted the contents of each room and replaced it with decor of my own, slowly and purposefully reclaiming my inner space. As I did so, versions of me from all ages of my life began to inhabit the space: five-year-old me sat in one end of my sunroom playing their favorite video games, while an older version of me occupied a rocking chair by the window and got lost in a book; various teenaged versions of me gathered under blankets in my newly psychedelic living room, where I supplied them with some weed, an incredible array of snacks, and non-stop reruns of Rick and Morty; my mom’s office became a room for arts and crafts, with a closet overflowing with supplies and areas dedicated to painting, drawing and writing; and so on. Finally, I went outside and pried the numbers off the top of my front door, replacing them with my birthdate: 311.

I haven’t had a nightmare about the old house since. And after this meditation, I felt an ineffable sense of peace within myself. I go back to this inner space often, checking in on my childhood selves and reminding them that they are safe and protected. The ghosts of our past are gone. (I actually made a playlist to reflect how I felt in my new-old house. Listen here if you want — it’s a vibe.)

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3. Dreams to Reveal Psychological Transformations

One of the most wonderful ways we can use dreams is as a looking glass into our deeper psychological processes.

The content of our subconscious is always in flux with different bits of ourselves morphing and merging, seeking greater wholeness. But our awareness is often limited to a shallow perspective, merely able to notice the side effects of these transformations as they ripple to the surface. When these effects are pleasant, one might feel content remaining unaware of their cause; but when surges in the deep dredge up things that make us uncomfortable, it can be helpful to know what is really going on.

Oftentimes a bout of melancholy (or anxiety, anger, despair, etc.) is simply debris from a psychological transformation floating to the surface to be released. Unaware, we can take this discard as its own entity, and struggle to make sense of it or find remedy. Dreams can allow us a deeper, fuller view so that we might take the transition less personally, and release what’s ready to leave us with greater ease.

This type of dream is usually thick with symbology. I can identify this dream if it arises as an answer to any question along the lines of ‘What the hell is going on inside me?!’ When I find myself suddenly plagued by emotional upset, this type of dream will show up to let me know that all is well — I am simply changing. Then I can view the rogue emotions as I would the symptoms of a cold: the natural response to the sloughing off of things I do not need.

Example: Earlier this year I was suddenly struck with an intense wave of sadness. It was a peculiar type of sadness with the texture of my childhood, and brought my mind to very strange places. One night I was gifted this bizarre dream:

I was in a wide verdant field, lush with emerald grass and dotted with various trees and shrubs. I stood in the field, alone except for my car beside me. Suddenly, a centaur with a face reminiscent of my father’s came hurdling in my direction. He had been freshly sawed in half, and was covered in blood as his rear half chased his front, past me and away into the distance. Perplexed, I looked to where the centaur had emerged. Out from a clump of trees jumped an old man with a crazed smile and a shock of grey hair upon his head. The man wore several knee-length sweaters and scarves with no pants to be seen; in his hands was a bloodied buzz saw.

Neither the man nor the centaur seemed to notice me. It was as if I were not part of the scene, but just there as witness. Later I found myself wandering the field, and I came across two more men who, like the centaur, looked vaguely like my father. They both wore a worried expression and seemed to have survived an encounter with the buzz saw man as well: one was missing an arm and the other had a bloody stump instead of a hand.

At first take this dream sounds like it could be a nightmare, and indeed I woke somewhat disturbed by the imagery that had been presented to me. But it hadn’t felt like a nightmare, and quickly I recognized that each symbol in the dream held deep, clear meaning.

Recently before this dream, I had done a meditation that took me into each of my chakras. The field I found myself in was identical to the visual for my root chakra, the chakra that represents our sense of safety. My car, which has always been a safe space for me, was also there to provide both comfort and a means of escape. The centaur is the symbol associated with Chiron, the asteroid which marks our deepest wounding. When I first saw the crazed old man, I immediately thought ‘scientist’ and ‘merlin,’ which led me to associate him with Mercury. And the hands missing from the fatherlike men symbolize our ability to act or influence.

As it so happened, at the time of this dream a retrograde Mercury was joined with my natal Chiron. This dream was the manifestation of that process — Mercury retrograde conjunct Chiron — taking place within my psyche. Mercury was (gleefully) tearing apart the wounding that I had received from my father, the wounding that left me feeling so incredibly unsafe in my life. It was disabling the parts of myself that had been molded by my father.

Mercury was lending its energy to the restoration of my internal sense of safety by eliminating the things I feared which had taken root within me. All loss comes with grief, and it was this grief that I was tasting. With the blessing of this dream that allowed me to know the source of my emotions, I rode out the remaining waves of sadness with gratitude and tender respect for my healing heart.

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This ended up being way longer than I’d anticipated! So I’m gonna share the other six types of dreams in another post or two. Be on the lookout for more writing on the following (in no particular order):

• Dreams that Change Over Time

• Dreams that Free Psychic Energy

• Dreams that Answer our Questions (Dream Incubation)

• Dreams to Test Alternate Pathways

• Dreams of Travel to Other Realities

• Dreams that Reveal the Mechanisms of Our Reality

Sending you all the brightest blessings on this beautiful and potent solstice! Take good care of yourself, be well, and dream well ;)

This one is longer than Part 1! If you download the Substack app, it will save your place so you can leave this essay and return to it as you have time. Also, having the app makes reading footnotes a million times easier :)

Not long after my partner and I moved to Colorado, I got a psychic reading for the second1 time in my life.

The reading was from a witch, and it was meant to be a “superpower” reading, in which she would tap into and tell me about my own innate psychic gifts. When we got on the phone however, our session quickly became focused on other things.

The witch, in her wisdom, immediately picked up on trauma from my childhood that was still rattling around in my energy field, drowning out anything else that she might have tried to listen to.

She asked me about all the yelling and fighting in my house. She brought up my knees which were crying out and signaled that to her that I’d been carrying too much, and was buckling under the weight of it all.

We chatted for a bit and she gave me some magickal-practical advice: get this crystal, blend these oils, take those herbs. She told me to spend ten minutes each of the next three days writing freely about all the things my stepdad did that hurt me, disgusted me, made me furious—then to scream the writing aloud before burning the pages. Finally, she said that my six-year-old self needed me. She suggested that I find a picture of myself at that age and place it on my altar to worship and keep in my heart.

I did all of those things, not thinking much of it besides the fact that I was finally cutting cords with this man who had tormented me for so much of my life. It’s only retrospectively that I can see this was the beginning—an invitation made to a part of myself that had been locked away, forgotten for so long, to make themselves known again.

A few months after this reading, right before my twenty-third birthday, I started having nightmares about a door that wouldn’t close.2

In the dream it was just me and the door enveloped in unending inky darkness. No walls; no rooms to speak of on either side of the doorway; and nothing that I could see beyond the door besides more darkness.

Each time I dreamt of this door I was terrified—whatever the door was holding back could not come through, but I had no way to stop it. The doorknob had no lock, and was in fact missing its latch bolt completely. There was nothing I could do to keep the door from falling back open, spilling darkness into darkness, every time I let go of it; I couldn’t stay asleep forever.

In the days and weeks that followed, I learned what had been held in the void behind that door: memories.

I began to have different dreams unlike any I’d ever had before, dreams that left sensations lingering in my body after I’d woken up.

I had dreams of being trapped in bodies of water with my stepfather and his gruff, ugly friends—men whose presence I had always felt uneasy in—and when I woke I could not shake the dream-feeling of their fingers on my labia.

I had more obviously symbolic dreams as well, like one of my stepfather pushing me onto the floor where I watched helplessly as his darkness devoured my light.

At the time, though I was deeply disturbed and discomforted by these dreams, I didn’t know what to make of them. I was confused. Surely these were just twisted nightmares; the alternative was impossible to consider. But as my dreams of the uncloseable door had warned me, the coming revelations were not something I could prevent. An invitation had been made; six-year-old me was ready to come out of hiding; and something in me knew I was ready to receive them.

The nightmares eventually stopped. And in their wake came fragmented memories, emerging from the darkness and stitching themselves back together before my open eyes.

The first fragment to come back was a short one, a snapshot of a moment:

I am emerging from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. Across the hall from me is my bedroom. And to my left, in his own bedroom, the door wide open, is my stepfather. He is also in a towel, though his is wrapped only around his waist.

Why are we both in towels? Were we just bathing together? The memory glitches—is his towel on or off? I see both in my mind and I don’t know which is true. What remains clear as day is the look on his face as he beckons me toward him. Come here. The memory goes dark.

For a few days, I am left alone with the shock of this memory and the sensations that accompanied it. I can’t see what happened in his room (yet), but I can feel it. I can feel it all over me. I can feel it inside me. Someone make it stop, please, I feel like I’m going crazy. Nobody does.

While I hated the feelings in the moment, they would become my lifeline—the unbreakable tether to my own reality. Because while I could deny or question my confusing, fragmented memories, convincing myself that I’d made it all up, I could never deny those feelings. My body was telling me the truth, and that is the truth I cling to, even in the disbelief that resurfaces from time to time now.

After the nightmares and the memories and the bodily sensations became too much to ignore, I stopped trying to push it all away. I allowed myself to break down, to crumble into the possibility that my stepdad had been even more of a monster than I knew, and with this surrender more puzzle pieces slid into place.

Memories that had been completely in tact but swept to the side my whole life rushed to the forefront with punishing clarity.

I remembered the feeling beyond fear that overtook my body whenever he and I were alone together; the way my viscera clawed beneath my skin, trying to burst free of their containment, any time we touched.

I remembered the hungry look on his face whenever, on the rarest occasion, I’d give him a kiss-on-the-mouth goodnight.

I remembered the time he put his hand on my butt while posing for a family photo. I’d lifted it up to my back, thinking innocently, He must have meant that for Mom. How embarrassing—I won’t say anything.

I remembered the occasions that he’d offered to be my boyfriend, or said that he’d “take me out” and I could be his “little girlfriend.” I remembered the swell of relief that came the last time he’d said it, when I was a teenager and Mom overheard. “That’s weird,” she remarked. “Don’t say that.”

I remembered the strange way that he would tell me “pretty girls like me can get all kinds of favors” if I knew how to bat my eyes the right way. I remembered thinking, Is this the only way he knows how to relate to me? Does he not know any way to speak to me that isn’t cruel or oddly sexual? I let it go; I much preferred his compliments to his cruelty, even if it was unsettling.

I remembered his thundering footsteps as he stormed from my bedroom into the kitchen where Mom and I were. I remembered the feeling of my heart hitting the floor when I saw what he clutched in his angry fist: a story I’d written in bright blue ink about a man who snuck into my room and forced sexual acts on me. “YEAH, YOU BETTER RUN!” he bellowed as I sped past him and up the stairs, locking myself in the bathroom since my bedroom door did not have a lock of its own. (Why were you rummaging through my room that night, Wayne? That story was hidden under my pillow. And why did it make you so angry? Did you think that I’d written it about you?)

None of these memories had ever been lost; if you’d asked me about them at any point I could have recalled them easily. But they were fuzzy, out of context and unconnected to each other, lacking the concern that colored them now that I began to notice a pattern. This might have been “normal” in terms of how Daddy had always treated me… But was it normal in the sense of how fathers should interact with their daughters? I felt delusional—how had I never questioned any of this before?

Alongside the dawning realization of the incestuous relationship I’d had with my stepfather, my history of odd or concerning sexual behaviors suddenly began to make sense.

It made sense that I was hypersexual as a very young child, rooting around the house for things that were “big enough” (I’ll let you read between the lines there) to give me the feeling I sought in my vagina, isolating myself for hours on end in secretive masturbation.3

It made sense that, though I’d longed for a boyfriend, when I actually got one I didn’t want him to touch me. I evaded my first kiss as long as I could and only engaged with him sexually after his intense and incessant coercion.

It made sense that the only relationships I’d had before my current partner were with sexually manipulative or abusive people—people who didn’t care if I wanted sex or not because my body gave them pleasure and by virtue of our relationship it was theirs for the taking.

It made sense that I’d never had sex sober: the only way I could “enjoy” copulation was to aggressively dissociate from my body with alcohol or weed. I’d always thought that I liked fucking while fucked up because it was more fun. Turns out it simply made it bearable.

All of these realizations came crashing down on me within two months of my first ajar door dream. The floodgates had been opened. There was more to my life than I knew. I had to tell someone.

The first person I told was my partner. “There’s no easy way to say this…” I began, “but I think that Wayne molested me.”

He let out a big sigh. “Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah… With everything else he’s done to you, I wouldn’t put it past him.” It was exactly the validation that I needed.

Next I told my best friend, and then my mom.

The conversation with my mom didn’t go well. I was nervous, shaking, all over the place as I stared at her contact on my phone—I was about to tell her that her husband sexually abused her daughter. She had never seemed to believe the violence that he visited on me right in front of her eyes; how would she respond to this long-buried secret? What if she told me I was wrong, lying? What if she didn’t care?

In the end, I stammered my way through the revelation and finished by saying, “I don’t want you to do anything about it, though. You don’t have to divorce him because of this. I’m not asking you to believe me or do anything drastic—I’m not even sure if my memories are right. It was just eating me alive and making me feel crazy to keep holding his secret for him, so I had to tell you.”

I remember her slow response. After a pause that stretched longer than the thousand miles between us: “I don’t know what you want me to do with that.”

“Nothing!” I repeated. (Wasn’t she listening?) “Nothing. You don’t have to do anything. I just had to tell you.”

My mom wouldn’t divorce this man who molested me for over another two years. Technically, she’d never divorce him; he would demand a divorce and kick her and my little brother out of the home they’d shared for the last twenty years, so that he could rot in it alone. And I hope he is rotting.

A few months after divulging to my mom I went no contact with her. I was on summer vacation, having just finished my first (and last) year of teaching, and was getting ready to begin a solo road trip to move back to the East Coast. I wanted time and space to deal with all that I was feeling without the mountains of guilt that rose every time she texted me. I just needed to be angry: at him for abusing me and at her for allowing it.

This pattern of new trauma surfacing and me needing space from my mom to process it is one that would continue for years. Our relationship, once a source of great comfort and pride in my life, was an unexpected casualty of these recovered memories. When I was a kid, I used to wonder what Wayne would have to do to get Mom to leave him. As an adult I’ve learned the sad truth: there was nothing he could have done.4 He was untouchable. In her eyes, everything he did was misguided love, and it was I who needed to change to earn my safety. If I didn’t anger him—if I pleased him enough—then I would be okay.

Earlier this year was the last time Mom and I spoke of him. She said that she felt like she’d failed me because of how she let him “tease” me. I didn’t correct her; I’ve let go of the hope that she’ll ever understand.

The years following my recovered memories were hard, especially when it came to intimacy with my partner.

Now that I knew that, even with him, my use of substances to facilitate sex was a crutch, I wanted to stop using them. But it wasn’t that simple.

With the recovered memories and the sensations alive in my body, I felt dirty. I went long periods of time without wanting to be touched and when we tried to be intimate, I would often begin sobbing and need to stop. Flashbacks shot like lightning through the pleasure, burning it up, and new servings of guilt and shame for not being able to “meet my partner’s needs” heaped themselves upon the guilt and shame of being molested in the first place.

With my partner’s unending patience and adamant reassurance, we were able to work through it. For the first time in my life I could have sex without cringing away from myself or hiding behind drugs. I could ask for what I wanted; I could say yes and I could say no. My body was mine again, and sharing it was actually fun.

It’s now been four-and-a-half years since the door in my subconscious burst open. The road I took to get here wasn’t easy—and I don’t believe that my journey is over—but I’m so happy to be where I am now.

It might not make sense to everyone, but I went through many cycling periods of believing and disbelieving myself. I used to say aloud: “I was molested; I wasn’t molested,” over and over again to test which felt truer. In the end, the feelings in my body pointed the way. As much as they haunt me, they’re a helpful kind of ghost. Nobody can call me a liar with them around—not even myself.

This year of 2025 has been the most liberating so far.

In this time I learned the stories of Clementine Morrigan, Michele Filgate, Kelsey Zazanis, and Caroline Darian. They taught me that I am not alone—neither in the face of my father’s cruelty nor my mother’s willful and self-protective ignorance. Zazanis in particular affirmed for me that I can trust my memories, even if I hid them away for such a long time. What I did to survive is evidence that there was something to survive.

I’ve also been reading Jim Hopper’s website and Healing the Incest Wound by Christine Courtois, which together have helped me ground my experience in a clinical perspective. Their assurance that survivors often repress memories because we have to, and that when memories resurface they may only do so in a fragmented or visceral way, have encouraged me to believe myself. No more questioning; no more self-abandonment; no more seeking proof. The voice in my head that says I’m making it all up to punish Wayne is so quiet that I barely hear it anymore; it no longer makes sense to me.

I’ve also recently started seeing a therapist again. She’s the first I’ve talked to about the abuse in my family, the first to validate that my mother did have the obligation to protect me (and failed it), the first to help me process these things both verbally and somatically. Some days the work is hard, but the liberation I feel once the fog has cleared is always worth it.

Finally, this is the year that has seen me writing about my childhood in a very real way for the first time. Without needing an audience present, writing allows me to express that which I formerly repressed. I get to honor my Small Self and the experiences they endured completely, unfiltered.

Nobody can interrupt me, question me, or silence me.

Almost twenty-two years after that harrowing day and five years freed from that wretched house, I am no longer a victim.

I am a survivor.

My stepdad molested me when I was six, but my memory of the event would be buried in the darkest corner of my psyche, not to emerge for another sixteen years: until I was safe; until I was ready.

It happened just after my little brother was born—the second unwanted addition to my stepdad’s family.

See, when he and my mom met, he let her know that he didn’t want any more kids. He’d already raised the son from his previous marriage to adulthood, and he didn’t want to start all over. Mom let him know that she had a four-year-old and that she wanted at least one more kid. She’d been trying to conceive for about a decade in her previous marriage with no luck, and only got pregnant with me—“her miracle”—after they’d divorced. (She attributed it to some vaginal acupuncture that she endured, which I am simultaneously grateful for and horrified by.) Mom wanted to put her hard-won fertility to use, and grow her young family.

I really don’t know how these two diametrically opposed desires found a compromise, but they did: within a month after their marriage, Mom was pregnant with my little brother, and my stepdad was on the fast track to being a father of three.

I’m not sure what Mom’s second pregnancy was like, but I know that the birth was traumatic. My brother had too much room inside her and was flip-flopping around so much that the doctors were worried he’d get his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. They wanted to induce early labor, but because he kept moving they were also worried that he might end up breach, so they called for an emergency c-section.

My mother, the naturalist, was devastated that she would be forced to give birth in such an unnatural way. I remember my stepdad’s description of how the doctors took all of Mom’s organs out and laid them on the table next to her. I remember being horrified by the staples in her belly afterward. But it was all worth it, because Mom got another kid and I got my first sibling.

Now, this is where I have to start filling in holes and making some assumptions.

I have to do this to protect my own sanity, because if your stepdad molests you for a reason, then there’s something for your mind to hold onto—some scrap of logic and some hope of understanding no matter how small; but if your stepdad molests you for no reason, then the ground falls out from under you and the sky shatters above you and you’re left tumbling, suspended in the darkest void imaginable, alone except for the knowledge that the man who raised you was a vile, sadistic monster, and the fear that you deserved it.

So forgive me for making some assumptions here; I simply must.

I assume that after such a traumatic birth, and with all the things that come with caring for a newborn, Stepdad wasn’t getting his rocks off as much as he’d have liked—if he was getting off at all. He probably felt jealous of how much attention his new son was getting, and resentful of me for trying to monopolize whatever small amounts of affection Mom had in surplus. He was lonely. He was needy. And he was sick.

So one day, when Mom took my brother to one of his wellness visits, he found himself alone with me and his aching needs.

I was the unwanted daughter, the child not even related to him by blood, and I was so young—there’s no way I could understand and I surely wouldn’t remember.

He was almost right.

That day, the day of his most egregious sexual transgression, was right before I turned seven. And for a while after, my brain shut off.1

Looking back, it’s obvious now that his molestation impacted me negatively right away: I went from happy, outgoing and sociable to withdrawn and neurotic; I started to heavily dissociate, frequently needing to be snapped back to reality by those around me; I developed an intense fear of other people (especially men and boys); and my self-esteem began to plummet.

The story my family told—which I readily accepted—was that I was struggling with no longer being an only child. This was also how they explained my explosive “bad” behavior and the escalating violence between my stepdad and me.

Before my brother was born, my stepdad and I supposedly got along fine. Mom has told me stories about how he loved playing with me, how he would sit patiently, letting me adorn his face and ears and hair with gems and clip-on jewelry. I remember these things vaguely; but I certainly remember loving him. I finally had a dad, my family was complete. Maybe back then he loved me, too.

But he turned on me after he molested me. Whether because of his own shame and horror at what he had done, or to throw people off his scent, or to dissuade me from ever divulging our secret, his cruelty toward me began to blossom in this time. He was a rabid dog and my body, mind and spirit were his plaything. It seemed like his favorite thing to do was to find new ways to tear me apart.

For most of my life, this is what I believed (whether I was aware of it or not): I became a bad child after my brother was born. I was the family’s problem child. And what my stepdad told me about myself was true within our home as well as without—nobody loves me, nobody wants me, and I ruin everything. I assumed that anyone who told me differently simply didn’t know me well enough yet to know the truth.

This narrative began to change my sophomore year of high school, when I started therapy for the first time. There, I learned that I had social anxiety disorder (that’s why I was so afraid of people).

I continued therapy in college, where I learned that I was also bipolar (that’s why I was plagued by erratic mood swings and crippling bouts of depression).

I was medicated, and my therapists taught me new coping strategies, and they tried to improve my self-image but couldn’t ever touch the root of my shame. How could they? Bizarrely, we almost never spoke about my family. “My stepdad and I really don’t get along, but my relationship with my mom is great—she’s one of my best friends!” That’s about all I’d share, and then I’d put all the responsibility back on my shoulders: there’s something wrong with me; I’m here to fix me.

My partner—my brilliant, nurturing, attentive, wise partner—was the first person in my life to point out how fucked up my family dynamic was.

We met at the end of 2019 and by the summer of 2020—due in no small part to his ability to make me feel safe and seen—I had ended my relationship with my stepdad, moved halfway across the country, and vowed never to speak to him again.

In that short time, I’d realized (for the first time!) that my stepdad’s behavior toward me was abusive, not “misguided love” like Mom had tried to convince me; and not “for my own good” or “because I deserved it” like he’d wanted me to believe.

In my new separate life, I began learning about complex trauma and its manifestations. I finally started to touch the root of my shame, to attribute it to the way I was treated during my formative years instead of believing that it was part of my natural brokenness. I recognized that my episodes of “social anxiety” were often flashbacks to his abuse, when my body knew that it was not safe to be witnessed (being seen often meant being punished); and that the emotional outbursts of my childhood were disturbing cries for help, not intentional disruptions of familial peace.

And then, safe in my own home, hundreds of miles away from the scene of his crime, my memories started to come back.

A note on Part 2, which is already written and in the process of being edited:

I feel I should warn you that the next part is a little graphic. I’ve heard, but haven’t read more graphic accounts of incest, and for that reason I am a little nervous about what its reception will be.

In the end, whatever I decide to include is very intentional. Part of my healing is about being honest. The depth of my honesty is also what will help others who’ve been through similar trials feel less alone.

The shame and taboo around incest is perpetuated by our inability to talk about it—to face completely the reality of so many children all around the world.

So let’s talk about it, and let’s face it. Together.

xx Lizzie

“If you don’t want people’s pity and attention,” Dave asks, “then why are you writing all this and sharing it with the world? Can’t you work it out in your head, and keep it to yourself?”

I shouldn’t—and don’t—have to justify myself. I’m allowed to be an unreasonable person who does unreasonable things. However, I think that the answers to your questions are important, so I’ll share them.

Why am I starting to write publicly about my childhood?

Because I have to write about something.

I could write about the future of humanity, patterns I’ve noticed across esoterica, the changing of the seasons, or any number of witchy, magickal, futuristic things (as I want and intend to do one day).

But, frankly, none of that interests me right now.

Right now, my mental-emotional life is preoccupied with my childhood. My conviction in my version of the story is growing stronger. Therapy is helping me gain more clarity around the situation and my feelings about it.

A hundred different perspectives that used to be indistinguishable from each other, congealed into one painful, screaming mass, are finally beginning to separate and communicate clearly. And the more this process plays out, the more my relationship with my mother changes, as the realities we inhabit become less and less compatible.

This journey is taking up all the space I have. And, I find it deeply interesting. So this is what I’m going to keep writing about.

For now, anyway!

Because it is part of my healing

—both the writing and the sharing.

The writing is part of my healing because it gives a voice to part of me that’s been voiceless for a very long time.

Even in the recent past, when I’d talk about my relationship with my stepdad, it was almost always through the lens of compassion. I’d talk about how he was traumatized, too, and how my soul had agreed to experience the pain of having him as a father. I stayed zoomed out, acknowledging my pain but never being fully honest about it—especially not the sexual abuse, which has only become utterable in these last few years.

While compassion and an understanding of both karma and intergenerational trauma (which to me are one and the same) are a valid part of the story and things I will always circle back to, they have historically been a way for me to avoid the full truth of my experience.

Taking the lofty stance that “everything happens for a reason” denied the reality of the Little Me who didn’t have that awareness when their body was being violated and abused; when the people charged with the great responsibility of being their protectors were instead hellbent on breaking their spirit.

I haven’t lived in that house or spoken to my stepfather in over five years now, but it still feels frightening—like a betrayal—to tell my side of the story.

Little Me was never allowed to have their own opinion of what was going on. The gaslighting from Stepdad was intense and immediate, and Mommy always made sure I knew that what was happening was love, and sometimes people just show that they love you a little differently, a little harshly.

By writing about my childhood—not the story my parents tell about it—I am literally putting the pen back in my hand. I am saying, “Here you go, kid. I’m listening. What do you have to say?”

Besides giving Little Me a voice, the writing is also a part of my healing because of the voice it provides for all the other parts swirling around my head.

It gives voice to Dave, who means no harm yet is doomed to cause it if I cannot separate him from my Self. Writing helps me make that separation.

Writing brings order and clarity to the many parts, with all their jumbled contradictions, that constitute my psyche. It helps me begin to make sense of an extremely nonsensical situation. It gives me agency and helps me feel calm.

After the writing, the sharing is a part of my healing because it is how I honor all these voices—especially that of Little Me.

The sharing is how I say, “I believe you. I am willing to take the risk of telling the whole goddamned world your story, and they might do all the things we fear they’ll do, but you are worth the risk. I will stay by your side and carry your flag because I love you, and I believe you. Your story should have been told a long time ago; I won’t make you wait any longer.”

Because I believe that it is valuable to others.

The story of my childhood and my adult journey of making peace with it is valuable simply because it is one of the innumerable Stories of Humanity. It is valuable because it exists just as I am valuable because I exist.

Whether you relate personally to my story or not, there is undoubtedly something you can take from it to improve your quality of life, or deepen your well of compassion for your fellow man.

The sharing of my story is also valuable because it’s not a story we hear often enough.

I am so grateful that conversations about sexual trauma post the #MeToo movement have become much more commonplace. People share their stories of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and even rape much more freely than I’ve ever seen before. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous taboo around childhood sexual trauma—and that is especially true in the case of incest.

It is only through reading the work of Michele Filgate, Clementine Morrigan, and Kelsey Zazanis—other writers who’ve survived incest—that I’ve begun to feel less alone, less crazy, and empowered to begin sharing my own encounter with this devil.

To me, it’s important that I share my experience so that there is one more touchstone, one more place of grounding, for anyone else who is feeling lost in how to come to terms with this particular flavor of betrayal.

I hope to write not just about the incest itself, but of the way that my life changed after; the shame and fear and confusion that it stirred in me; the way it impacted my sexuality and my relationship with my body, with boundaries, with my mother, with men; how I’ve struggled with amnesia, and how I’m learning to trust the memories that resurfaced after years of being blank; what it feels like to remember things about your childhood that change… everything.

So, Dave, thank you for your questions. I know that above everything your goal is to keep me safe. I love that about you.

But I’ve got it from here. You can stand down, soldier. I promise—I swear to you—that even if the worst of the worst happens, if we get death threats from strangers on the internet, if they show up outside our house with pitchforks and picket signs calling us a liar, I’m not going anywhere.

I’ll always have your back.

Life is so heavy lately. I’m so heavy: my insides feel like dough, my emotions are lead.

I see a planet shining outside my window against the dim morning sky, but I don’t recognize it. Is it Venus? I don’t know where she is right now; I don’t know where I am (the fog is heavy, too).

I’ve been smoking every day recently, trying to hide from my leaden emotions since I cannot seem to move them.

Trying to hide from myself.

Some days I wake up angry, others wracked with guilt. Today I awoke sad.

As I grapple with my childhood, trying to weave a coherent and honest narrative, it feels like a thousand voices inside me are fighting for the mic. One of the loudest these days, as I challenge him now more than ever, is a part I’ll call Denial Dave. Alongside the sadness, the grief, the confusion, and the emptiness, Dave is always there to tell me that I’m overreacting.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he says. “I think you’re exaggerating. You’ve made a lot of this up.”

It’s impossible not to believe him at least a little, but I still push back.

Made it up? Why?

“For attention, of course. You always want attention. You want people to feel sorry for you, and you’re a liar, a manipulator, so this is what you do.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

Dave and I share a body, we share a mind; my memories are his and his are mine.

Before Dave had a name, I thought he was the voice of my stepfather living like a parasite in my mind (he’s told me all the things that Dave does, of course). I would yell at this voice, tell him to shut up and go away. He was unequivocally wrong—I didn’t want to listen to him.

But last night I realized that Dave is not a fragment of my stepfather, but a part of myself that sought survival through assimilation. For Dave, he was never siding with my abuser, he was agreeing with my parent, trying to make sense of our world then just as I am now.

Dave is not evil; but I do think he’s wrong.

Instead of yelling at Dave or shunning him, I try to negotiate.

Okay, I say, what if Stepdad molesting me is off the table? What if we ignore the nightmares and flashbacks, the sensory memories that live in my body, and agree that I’ve made it all up? Even if we erase all of that, he was still sexually inappropriate with me. No stepfather should offer to be his stepdaughter’s boyfriend, or call his stepdaughter his girlfriend.

Dave mulls it over, a pressure in my head; a lawyer weighing evidence.

“Inadmissible,” he says. “No one’s going to believe that. You have no proof. You’re pulling things out of thin air.”

The negotiation continues.

What if I drop the sexual abuse altogether? Do I then have the right to feel upset about all the other abuse?

I remind Dave of the choking and chasing and threatening and screaming, the shoving and throwing and kicking and hitting. He sighs.

“I just think that other people had it worse.” He reminds me that I was housed and clothed and fed; that we went on vacations and enjoyed the beach; that most of my college was paid for; that I wasn’t miserable one hundred percent of the time, so it couldn’t have been as bad as I’m making it out to seem now. “You remember laughing and playing, don’t you? Does that seem like an abused child to you?”

I don’t know what to do with Dave, since he doesn’t seem remotely interested in updating his narrative to include my adult point of view.

But I remember that, though it seems to be the opposite, Dave exists to protect the part of me that’s hurting—the sad, confused, angry, grieving Me.

How old do you think I am, Dave?

“Seven.”

The age when all hope was abandoned. When Mom was too busy with a newborn to notice how horrible things were getting between her husband and me. The year I don’t fucking remember anything, because I had to forget to survive. There was Dave, doing his job: deny, deny, deny. (A lawyer in more ways than one, it seems.)

I try expressing to Dave that I’m not seven anymore, that it’s twenty years later, I don’t live with my parents, and everything that he’s denied is actually causing Little Me quite a bit of harm. Now, the denial is not adaptive assimilation, but destructive self-oppression.

I have to listen to Me.

Dave’s terror flashes through my body, and I understand why he won’t budge. From his perspective, the entire foundation of reality falls apart if he lets go of his narrative. “Nothing bad happened” because Stepdad said so; but also because Mommy didn’t save us (there must have been nothing to save us from); and because we wouldn’t be here right now if it had (there’s no way we could have handled it).

Maybe Dave needs as much comfort as Little Me. They are two sides of the same coin: one barring the flood gates and the other the flood itself.

This talk with Dave happened after therapy last night.

When I realized I’d said all I could in the moment, I put on Shrek and snuggled up with my Winnie the Pooh teddy bear, doing my best to comfort the Little Me just trying to feel their feelings and live with their reality uncontested. Dave was there the whole time, contesting, sometimes loud and sometimes soft.

Dave was there this morning, too, telling me that it’s a little ridiculous to wake up sad, and I should really get over it unless I want the whole world to mock and then shun me.

His presence is an eye roll, aggravated and dismissive.

Believe me, Dave, I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to be torn between shutting the fuck up like a good little girl and finding my way (messily, clumsily) to an honest reflection of my childhood.

Writing this has revealed another fear of mine that lives within Dave. What if I’m honest, and I share, and I weep, and I fall apart… and The World says what my parents said: It’s actually not that bad. There’s worse things in the world and you’re the problem for making a mountain out of a molehill. You just want people to feel sorry for you. You just want pity and attention.

Dave was trying to protect me as a child, but he’s also trying to protect me now.

But I don’t want people’s pitiful attention. I just want to give Little Me what they always yearned for, but which felt unattainable: a voice to speak their truth, and someone who believes them.

CW: mentions of child abuse

☉11° Leo | 33.5 | 08-03-25

☿ 07° Leo (Retrograde)

it’s been a really long time since i’ve sat down to write, and that’s okay; i needed some time to recharge by doing nothing.

it’s hard to believe that a mere two months ago i was still putting the final touches on my Saturn Return course—that project which has been the main focus of my year thus far. i really pushed myself to accomplish this feat, and learned so much about so much in the process. one day i might share something expounding on what this course creation taught me; for now here’s one important lesson, excerpted from some jumbled writing that i spilled out last month:

… not a single thing went according to my precious plan.

i started recording my classes about a month later than i’d hoped to, in a different space and different medium than i’d intended. i didn’t have the house to myself on recording days like i thought i would. my bosses decided to hire four new people for me to onboard and train, dashing any expectations that i had of conserving my energy at work. technology became a bit of a demon, breaking down more the longer my creation process went on.

my self-imposed deadlines came and went, and i’d be lying if i said there weren’t times that i felt like a failure. but i did it. i finished the fucking thing. and i learned so much throughout the process.

i learned how to strike a balance between control and surrender. every single time i created a new deadline to account for strange mishaps and unforeseen circumstances, something else happened to make me miss the new deadline too. finally, i caught the message: to stop imposing my will on the universe. all things happen in their divine timing, and even this course had to follow the Rules of All Things. i had to humbly admit that the entirety of the universe knew more than my little brain ever could, and that the natural timing of things would always be better than the timing i tried to force.

as soon as i capitulated, teeth clenched, and removed any notion of a deadline from my mind, things began to flow. sure, the course came out a month late, but “late” according to whose standards? what the hell do i know? how do i know that this wasn’t the most perfect, ideal timing? i trust that it was.

i feel less pressured to force anything now. i write when i want to write, and somehow i keep showing up right on time. i go to the store and cook my dinner and take a walk whenever i am moved to, and not a moment sooner. my mind no longer gets to decide the timing of my life (although it would really, really like to—it still thinks itself superior) …

true to my newfound trust in divine timing, i haven’t pushed myself to do much since launching the course. the only practices1 that i have ensured maintain a priority in my schedule are movement, eating, and nature: i make sure that i stretch, exercise, or do qigong to connect with my body at least once each day; i make sure that i both have easy access to healthy2 foods and consistently eat them; and i make sure that i get fresh air in my lungs and sunlight in my eyes.

unlike a couple winters ago, when i feared that my lack of creative ambition was a new feature of life, i have not fretted about whether or not i’d ever write again. i’ve waited patiently, focusing my careful affection on my body, making sure that my creative cup was replenished after such an intense outpouring.

and now, after some inspiration from a new friend, the itch is back.

let’s catch up!

two really big things have happened since i last wrote: i realized that my mom is no longer my best friend, and i saw my first Phish show.

i’ll start with the latter, because it’s hilarious.

the show was July 15th, and i have sincerely been referring to my life as “Before Phish” and “After Phish” ever since. i’m a Phish phreak now—something commonly referred to as a phan within the community, although that term will always be a portmanteau of Dan and Phil to me—and i’m loving it.

if there are ever any phisheads (that’s what i’m calling us) reading this, here’s the show i went to.

on the journey that led to me dancing like i was the only human alive on a grassy hill surrounded by similarly uninhibited strangers, i learned some things: it is normal for friends to speak highly of each other behind their backs; self-confidence is integral to manifestation; it’s okay to move your body in weird ways, we’re all super, super weird; & there is truly some divine force watching over and guiding our every move.

(also, that acid has an easier come-up than shrooms, but shrooms have the easier come-down.)

it was one of the funnest nights of my life so far. i feel so lucky that i can reclaim my old mantra—my life gets better and better every year—because it finally feels true again.

here’s to a jubilant life! here’s to freedom!3

now onto to the former… more mom stuff.

my mom hasn’t been my best friend for a while now, but i’m only recently realizing it, and i’m doing so very gingerly.

when my mom was my best friend, it was a point of immense pride. most people that i knew had stressful or complicated relationships with their parents, and none of them were as close as me and my mom were. sure, i’d crapped out in the dad department (three times to be exact), but the relationship that i had with my mother was rare; i’d even believed that it was compensation for the fatherly failures that i’d been subjected to.

my mom and i could talk about anything, and we’d talk for hours. she was the only person in my life that i could speak to about spiritual things, which were and continue to be of great importance to me. i know i was that person for her as well.

whenever we visited we would curl up on the couch or drink tea in the kitchen and quickly lose track of time. even phone calls tended to last longer than we’d planned for.

yes, mom and i could talk about anything—anything except how i experienced my childhood.

from the time i began struggling, this topic was off limits.

when i started to declare at home that i hated it here, that i would be going to college somewhere far away and never coming back once i left, that one day you might not ever see me again, she didn’t understand and didn’t want to hear it.

“how do you think it makes me feel when you say that?” she’d ask. there was no inquiry into what kind of distress i was in that made me want to leave home and never return. instead, i was to think of her feelings. her feelings must always come first, and in some ways they are more my responsibility to manage than hers.

i might be upset, but i must not upset her.

i’ll manage all the feelings for both of us.

this reminds me of what i call The Lawnmower Incident in my personal mythology: the time that mom’s husband—enraged that i did not want to mow the lawn for him and was struggling to get the machine started—picked me up by my throat and threw me onto the ground.

i remember sitting next to mom after she had brought me inside, numb, staring at the fresh dirt caked under my fingernails. she began to quietly sob beside me, and i was confused.

“why are you crying?” i asked. it would have made sense for me to be crying, as i was the one that the bad thing had just happened to. a flash of hope stirred inside me: mom’s husband had done many cruel things to me in the past, and she had never seemed to care. but maybe this time, finally, she understood. maybe this time she could see my pain. i looked to her expectantly.

she burst out, “i’m crying because i have to decide whether or not my marriage is over!”

the faint spark of hope was quelled immediately, and i folded in on myself. i was still alone.

on the bright side, i’d thought at the time, mom might finally leave him. i might finally be freed.

in the end, though, she didn’t leave him. she didn’t leave him then, and she didn’t leave him in 2020, after he called me a sloppy, lazy, inconsiderate bitch while sitting on the couch beside her during family therapy—a one-off session initiated by my sudden moving in with a friend after college graduation; a last ditch effort made by mom to somehow keep the shattered pieces of our family together.

she didn’t leave him in 2021 when i first admitted to her that he had molested me when i was younger, either.

when she finally did leave him circa 2023, i asked her what had pushed her over the edge.4

she tells me the story about how he badly broke his leg in a motorcycle crash in colorado, how he had to be airlifted to the hospital and now walks with a limp. she tells me about how she did everything for him while he convalesced (like she’d done everything for him when he was healthy) and how sour his mood had turned since he’d been cooped up in the house with nothing to do.

she tells me about the day that she saw his self-congratulatory post on facebook—a picture of him riding his bicycle around the neighborhood, under which he exalted himself for all the caretaking she’d been doing for him—and finally realized just how selfish he was.

“i was busting my ass for him, doing everything for him, because he said he couldn’t do it himself. then he goes and makes a post congratulating himself for all the work he’s done to get better? and doesn’t even mention me? well, if you can ride your bike, you can cook your own dinner and go to the grocery store, too. seeing that… it made me realize that he just takes advantage of me, and doesn’t value me or respect me at all.”

mom takes a deep breath and shakes her head to clear it of the horror. when she looks up, something in my face reminds her of the character she’s trying to play.

“and of course,” she says, waving a flippant hand, as if this was a given and didn’t need to be stated explicitly, “you know, everything that he did to you. i couldn’t live with the person who did that.”

part of me feels guilty sharing these stories. one of the honestly wonderful things about mom used to be that she was interested in my art, and she was once subscribed to this substack. but the last couple of times i mentioned Talaria, she didn’t know what i was talking about, so i doubt that her eyes will ever find these words.

and even if they did, to be completely honest, i don’t think it would matter. i have shared all of this with her and more. she has stated aloud that she knows we aren’t as close as we used to be, and i’ve told her that it’s because i have had to adjust my perception of her to align with reality, that i can’t keep her on the pedestal i had her on when i was young.

when i was young, i needed to believe that my mom was my best friend. my track record with dads was so devastating, and the longest-running dad so damaging, that i needed the mental reprieve of an awesome relationship with my mother. yes, my mom—who lets her husband scream at me, spit on me, shame me, alienate me, shove, throw and threaten me—is my best friend. i had to have a safe space somewhere in the story of my life; the alternative was too frightening to consider.

now, freed from the necessity of that perspective, i am starting to see my mom more clearly. i can see that her inability to place my safety above her comfort during my childhood was not the root issue, but a symptom of it.

now, i can see that a certain type of self-centeredness has always been present in her. there’s also always been the subtle air of comparison and competition between us, exemplified by her jealousy during our most recent visit when, after i shared several bits of exciting personal news, she told me it’s not fair that i’m receiving everything she’s been trying to manifest for herself. sometimes it feels like nobody is allowed to be doing well if she isn’t.

all that said…

i’m grateful for the connection that my mom and i had when i was younger, the lifeline that it gave me, the things she taught me. i’m grateful for all of the sacrifices i know she made to ensure that i was always housed and clothed and fed.

and i carry no hatred for her now. no hatred, just honesty.

now, as my own caretaker, solely responsible for my wellbeing, i am allowing my truth to be the truth that i prioritize. i’m seeing my self and my world through my own eyes, instead of the rose colored glasses that mom would prefer i keep on.

i did hate my childhood. i yearned for freedom from that carpeted hell for as long as i can remember, and that’s my truth whether it hurts her feelings or not.

the more i try to be honest, and the more i value my wellbeing, the further away from mom i find myself. each visit reminds me that while i’ve forgiven her for the situation she raised me in, that was just a symptom of something much deeper. something which, overlooked before, is impossible to miss now that she is alone.

sitting with the moon the other night, i came to a jarring realization: perhaps my mom and i have already been as close as we’ll ever be. perhaps i already experienced the golden years of our dynamic, and from this point forward, we will only drift further and further from each other.

when i first moved out in 2020, she made me promise to not abandon her. i did promise back then (even though i think making such a promise to anyone is a crazy thing to do—how could you possibly know who someone might become, or what they might do?) and i am not abandoning her now.

i will not, however, continue to do all of the emotional labor in our relationship. i will not fight for closeness. and i will not cling to a past that cannot be recovered.

our relationship is whatever it is now. i’m open to that changing in the future, but i’ve already spent two decades waiting for her to act like the mother i thought she was. i’m not foolish enough to wait a moment more.

the slow disintegration of our relationship has had unanticipated effects: it’s made room for the meaning of “family” to begin to evolve for me, and for new people to constellate into my life.

i didn’t want to imagine life without my mother’s closeness, but these last few years have forced me to start entertaining the idea.

at least i know now that even if that relationship were to fade away completely, i would still be surrounded by soulmates and true love. i know that i am protected, respected, and cared for, and that my new parent—me—will always have my best interest as their number one priority.

and i know that all things, regardless of how confusing and painful they might be, are always leading me back to myself.

phew! that was a lot to get off my chest. it never ceases to amaze me what a healing force writing can be.

to end this on a more uplifting note, please enjoy some of the things i’ve been enjoying lately: my recent favorites!

✶

SONGS:

• On I Go - Fiona Apple (very related to the vibe of the opening excerpt: “but now, i only move to move”)

• Yours Conditionally - Tennis (i’ve had this—the very first album of theirs that i listened to—on repeat. this was the soundtrack to my summer working in Macy’s shoe department in 2018)

• My Love Mine All Mine - Mitski (the anthem for my newfound freedom)

• Pluck - Suitnop (good dance / energy lift song)

• All of My Love - Led Zeppelin (just a vibe)

✶

PHISH:

• Valdese, Free, Ether Edge, Pillow Jets, Blaze On*, Harry Hood, Chalk Dust Torture, Scents and Subtle Sounds

  • *I actually got to see this one live!!

✶

BOOKS:

• What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About - edited by Michele Filgate (an anthology of fifteen writers’ reflections on their relationships with their mothers. a salve to me lately and an inspiration for this piece)

• The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep - Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (reading and listening to this book! it’s helping me turn all of life into the practice of Presence and Lucidity)

• The Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin (re-reading; my favorite book)

✶

MISC:

• Overcoming Codependency Affirmations - Kinder Records (been helpful in releasing a lot of the guilt i run into when erecting healthy boundaries between me and mom)

✶

from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here <3

be well, & take very good care of your self!

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

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☉15° Cancer | 39.6 | 07-06-25

☿ 10° Leo

an annoying thing i’ve discovered since i started deconditioning is that i’m not as cool as i thought i was.

or, i guess i should say, i’m not as cool as i thought i would be. i’d quietly suspected that all the layers of fear and anxiety and masking were hiding a radically different human than the one i was used to being. turns out, i’m still me; so much has changed and yet not much has changed at all.

when i was younger, i needed to know all the details of a social event before i would attend: who was going? when was the “start time” and when were people actually arriving? when should i arrive? how long would it last? what were people wearing? etc. etc. (can you imagine being my friend lmao)

i also never really felt comfortable while at these events. i never knew what to do with myself or where i fit into the social fabric. things like work or school were much easier—i knew exactly what my role was, where i was supposed to be, and who i should probably talk to. but unstructured social activities? mingling? count me the fuck out.

from the time i started therapy, i believed that if i worked on myself diligently enough, i would grow out of this nagging aversion to socializing. i thought that the anxiety would fall away and i’d transform into the social butterfly that i was always meant to be.

but here i am, more than a decade later, and whaddya know? i’m a butterfly who likes to stay at home.

this isn’t to say that things aren’t different now. they just aren’t different in the way i’d secretly been hoping for.

now, i don’t need every last detail of a social event before i go, but i do still find it comforting. i like to know who will be there and when i can expect to leave. i like to drive myself so that i don’t get held hostage by an inevitably more social chauffeur (nobody ever means it when they say that they’re “leaving after two drinks”). and i still don’t enjoy parties for which i am not in charge of the invite list. i prefer to be at home, or in a comparably familiar setting, with only the people i have deemed safe and their trusted plus-ones.

it turns out that the difference between twenty-seven and fourteen-year-old me is that now when i go to parties, i sit in corners by myself with a regulated nervous system instead of a completely blown out one. my preferences are the same, i’m just not having a meltdown about them anymore.

on one hand, this is quite the bummer.

i’d always longed for a sprawling network of friends, always wanted to be able to enjoy myself in a loud room crowded with strangers and casual acquaintances. to discover that, regardless of how much self-work and healing i do, i will never be that person and that will never be my scene has left me mourning. the person i thought i was deep, deep down wasn’t hidden; they were a fantasy.

on the other hand, this is liberating.

it’s…nice? to find out that i’m a socially awkward weirdo by nature. it was never a character flaw or a manifestation of childhood trauma—it was just me being me.

this is one of the several instances i’ve had recently of realizing that i can’t “heal” myself so much that i become a different person. many things that i thought were broken, i only thought because society had said so. (if you like to be alone instead of with people, you’re antisocial. if you don’t know how to—or just don’t enjoy—striking up surface level conversations with people you barely know and/or will never speak to again, you’re cold. if you prefer to hang out at home, you’re boring.)

but if i take away the societal stigma, then i love being a self-sufficient homebody who reaches out to friends when they feel like it and reserves their energy for people with whom they connect deeply.1

learning about my human design has helped immensely with my self-acceptance: as a Manifestor with Caves environment, more 1 Lines than i can count, and Gates 12 and 40 taking prominent places in my design, i am meant to crave a lot of alone time. i can relax into my natural inclinations confident and guilt-free.

so, what’s the point of all this?

i guess i just wanted to share that we don’t always find what we expect underneath our layers of conditioning. sometimes, all we find is exactly who we’ve been, and the only thing needing an upgrade was our ability to love, accept, and honor that person.

the end. thanks for listening <3

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

P.S. substack is better on the web!

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☉05° Cancer | 52.2 | 06-26-25

☿ 00° Leo

it’s not been a week since the completion of my (very first!) online course, and already i am in egoic no-man’s land.

it’s an odd experience inhabiting a vessel whose identity seems to be in something of a constant state of flux—never fully this, never fully that. almost immediately after i’m foolish enough to believe that i’ve finally landed somewhere, the foundation of my personality is yet again ripped away and i am left being no one.

having been on this ride for a long time, i knew that this ego death was coming: not only have i just finished the largest and most public piece of work that i’ve ever created, but Jupiter has just finished its year-long transit though my first house, making way for Uranus to enter within the next couple of weeks.

i wonder if this is the way all humans experience themselves, though from what i’ve gathered, it’s not. some people seem capable of walking through most of their life with a solid, unwavering concept of self.

to me, a solid identity feels more like a cage that my energy cannot help but free itself from. this past year has been one experience after another to help teach me this lesson: i—whoever that is—cannot be caged.

the last few instances of being forced to watch my sense of self dissolve and slip through my fingers have not been fun. each time i was frustrated; each time felt extraordinarily—almost hilariously—inconvenient. and for all my talk, i was hastening the process along, hoping to emerge as my “new self” as quickly and clearly as possible.

this time feels markedly different.

this empty space where “i” used to be feels like a sigh after years of holding my breath. i feel spacious and unbothered and unhurried, strolling across this bridge instead of sprinting to the other side.

and even as i say that, i wonder if there is another side. if there is, i find myself uninterested in it. knock on wood, but maybe i’ve learned The Lesson. maybe the bridge never ends. maybe the moments of clarity are too brief for my vision to ever be called clear. maybe every time i’ve proclaimed that i finally figured out who i’m supposed to be was, in fact, me loudly proclaiming that i fell for it again, and that’s why those moments of clarity never lasted. maybe the serene peace that i feel now is here because i don’t feel like i have anywhere else to be.

there’s no destination for me to get to. i’m content living in no-man’s land. i’m content being a mystery even unto myself.

and within this, i find a sudden lack of expectation. if i don’t know who i am, i don’t know what to expect from myself; if i don’t expect anything from myself, then i can’t disappoint myself, and everything that i do is a wonderful surprise.

maybe a lifetime spent trying to live up to who i believed myself to be was a lifetime missing the person i actually was.

i write, it feels, at least once a season about my experience of an ego death. this time, i might not bother resuscitating!

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

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this one is even more of a time travel, because at the time of writing it i was referencing an experience that i’d already had a month prior. then i got pulled away from it… and now, nearly four months1 from the original experience, i’ve finally choked it out.

voilà & enjoy! xx

☉20°Aries | 51.6 | 04-09-25

☿ 27°Pisces

almost a month ago, i had an intense experience with revisioning on the morning of the Virgo lunar eclipse.

i’d just come back inside from a failed attempt to see the blood moon. although she wasn’t visible, her electricity pulsed through me, and i lay in the still, quiet dark, thrumming with potential.

as i nestled deeper into my blankets, i was taken by a vision. i saw my younger self, sitting at the kitchen table of my childhood home; i saw the pattern of poverty experienced by my lineage and handed down to me via genetic inheritance; i saw my Self, and the mosaic of desires that drew me into this life; and i felt a rush of information that i hadn’t had access to before.

all of these things blurred together in a mess of color and feeling—i will try to break them apart and put them back together in some semblance of linearity so that i may share the profound experience with you.

when i was growing up, money didn’t make sense to me. i didn’t understand why we had to work (usually for someone else, doing something we didn’t particularly want to do) to earn money to have our basic needs met. i didn’t understand why we seemed to contort our whole lives around this obviously made-up thing. it seemed to cause more stress than it relieved: my parents fought frequently about money; i was reprimanded constantly for things related to money (standing with the fridge or front door open too long, eating too much food, wanting too many things my friends had that i couldn’t have, being a poor saver—i could go on); my mom worked into the night and into a fatigue-fueled depression for money and we still never seemed to have enough.

over time, i grew to hate money. i touted the belief proudly that money was evil, and i wanted nothing to do with it. to this, my family responded as if i were a deranged idiot—money is a fact of the world, they said, so i’d better get used to it. i don’t know what i’m talking about, the world doesn’t function without money, and the only reason i don’t like it is because i can’t handle it. my ideology is hopelessly lost, and i have a dark future ahead of me if i can’t take my head out of my ass and learn how to be a responsible, realistic adult like everyone else.

when i saw younger Me sitting at the kitchen table, all these memories flooded my mind. i was struck by the realization that there was another way to respond to what i had felt as a child, unavailable to the adults around me at the time, but very much available to me now.

what would i have said if i was My parent?

i approached the kitchen table and sat down across from Myself.

i looked into my own solemn face and said, you’re right. money isn’t real, and it doesn’t make much sense. life on earth would be a whole lot easier if Humans knew how to get along with one another, and to trust in the abundance of the world instead of trying to manufacture and control it.

your feelings about money are really spot on, and you don’t even know the half of it! when we’re older, we learn all about the federal reserve and the irrevocable debt that this country is in. we learn about lies and corruption and greed—that lack is quite literally manufactured and that people hidden from our view play with money and the interest on it to manipulate the masses into feeling more or less financially stable, depending on what they think is needed (or, more realistically, what will benefit them the most).

but the adults around you do have a point: this is the world that you live in, and money is very important to live well while you’re here. it doesn’t do you any good, doesn’t give you any power or agency, to shun money and refuse its presence in your life.

anger and confusion flashed across My face. why would i do this to myself?! what the fuck is the point of existing in a system with rules that don’t make any sense—unfair nonsense that i have to align with in order to survive?

i leaned in, cupped my hand to the side of my mouth as if sharing a secret. because you wanted to be a magician.

My interest was piqued: what??

when you know that the rules of a game are arbitrary, you can move outside of them.

you came here—in this realm at this time with all of these nonsensical rules—so that you could experience yourself as a magician and a curse breaker.

you know that saying your family repeats? “money doesn’t grow on trees”? (a transfixed nod.) they’re right, but not in the way that they mean it.

money doesn’t grow on trees, but that doesn’t mean that money is not an infinite and inexhaustible resource. it doesn’t mean that money is not easily acquired or available in surplus. it simply means that it is not an inherent part of Nature—it’s something humans created.

what is natural is value. it’s natural for individuals and groups to place value on certain things: food, safety, connection, beauty, pleasure, to name a few. but somewhere along the line, money was conflated with value; how valuable something was became synonymous with how much it cost.

money today only holds the power that it does because, collectively, we place so much value in it. without our agreement of value, it becomes worthless—mere scraps of paper and meaningless numbers on a screen.

when you know this, you take the power that you’ve projected onto money and reclaim it for yourself. you learn to value yourself deeply, regardless of how much money you have in the bank, and which things are valuable by your standards instead of the mob mentality, corralled by corporate overlords.

i like that… i think i feel less crazy… but i still don’t understand—why wouldn’t i have brought myself into a life where i was “winning the game”?

actually, you have—you’re just not at that part of the story yet.

there’s something more you need to understand to make this all make sense: you are not solely your body, with its history and its memories, its family and its karmic lineage hidden away within your DNA. you are also your soul, the unseen, reincarnating aspect of yourself with its own agenda, which chose this body with the family and lineage that would best serve said agenda.

two of the archetypes that your soul wanted to express this lifetime are the Magician and the Curse Breaker. together, when you wield your ability to dance outside of the seemingly impenetrable rules of reality, you break the chains that have held your family line down for centuries.

the ancestors of your body were enslaved, orphaned, abandoned—torn away from everything they knew to be safety and security and forced to survive against the odds. some of them never had safety or security at all. your ancestors have known such cruelty and deprivation that you have never known, and will never know—because their actions across the generations have slowly but steadily lifted their line into a better space.

and although they are dead, they are not gone; they live on—loudly!—within you. when you experience comfort, pleasure, abundance, and prosperity, they get to experience it through you.

your magick rights the wrongs of generations.

your magick honors their strength and sacrifice and perseverance, gifts them the luxuries that they were denied in their own time.

your magick bends reality; it puts their pain to rest.

i watched My little face, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, absorb this information. it all made sense—I could feel the rightness of it in My bones.

a small smile appeared on My lips, growing bigger and bigger as I realized how much power I had.

thank you.

i got up from the table and gave Myself a tight hug. let your relationship with money be something you decide, not something you inherit. you get to create a brand new legacy for your lineage. and you’re already doing great. i love you.

☉04°Cancer | 52.1 | 06-25-25

☿ 28°Cancer

FUN EXCITING NEWS!

that course i’ve been working on all spring is finally done. waaahoooo! check it out here :)

i’m so flippin excited to have more space for life now that this creative cycle has come to a close. more time to read and write, more time to spend with loved ones, more time to spend in nature, more time to spend exercising or relaxing or cooking or learning or doing literally anything besides course creation.

life is good, good, good!

i’ll be back soon <3

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

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i wrote this (and the second part that is to follow) back in late March/ early April in the midst of an astrological fuckstorm and my resulting mental-emotional instability.

the two entries within this first part are kind of mirrors to each other, so enjoy the put together, rational beginning followed by the not-even-a-week-later devolution into madness!!!

☉11°Aries | 21.2 | 03-31-25

☿ 28°Pisces (retrograde)

i feel like it’s been a long time since i sat down to write. judging by the absence of checkmarks next to all the “writing!” reminders in my planner, it’s been about three weeks. boy do i feel it.

i’m happy that writing has taken this spot in my life: its rightful place as a form of self-expression that i cannot live without. writing has become necessary again, and for that i am thrilled.

so what has been going on since i’ve been away?

well, i spent about half of march somewhat bedridden with an endometrial flare-up. i suspected that a lunar eclipse in my fourth house—the womb of the zodiac—would inspire such a bodily response, so i was prepared (or, yaknow, as prepared as i could be).

the pain left me in quite a mental fog, one that felt exacerbated by the astrological movements: Mercury and Venus beginning their retrograde periods, sliding past dreamy Neptune as it was touched by the Sun before finally entering Aries yesterday.

so i lay in bed, spending most of most days cocooned in my own energy, melting, molting, reconstituting my being.

the Aries solar eclipse was two days ago. spring has fully sprung: flowers push up from the earth and decorate the tree outside my window. the air is warm and seductive; i practice my qigong outside again.

now that the pain is gone, i can feel just how much of the brain fog and mental pressure was, in fact, due to the planets. i am eager for this retrograde period to be over, and for the shifting planets to have their final conjunctions with Neptune, but i am also enjoying the lessons that this energy brings.

i had a birthday while i was gone (hbd to me!) and so i’ve entered a new profection year and have a new time lord. this year my Virgo fourth house is profected, making my time lord Mercury (which also happens to be my chart ruler).1

having a lunar eclipse in my profected house three days after my birthday, and my time lord going retrograde the very next day, has given me a lot to play with. i wasn’t sure how a retrograding time lord would feel, since the last two years (the only years i’ve been aware of profection) have been ruled by the Sun and Moon which never change their direction. part of me was naively hopeful that, because of the strong connection i have with Mercury, i might feel its retrogrades less while it is my time lord. LOL. i know that everything is heightened because of our proximity to eclipse season, but this retrograde is surely packing a wallop.

i’m glad to have experienced my first time lord retrograde right out of the gate, so that i can prepare for this energy better in the future. i had planned to start recording my first online course2 during this retrograde and, shocking no one, that plan isn’t working out.

i also wanted to keep my writing schedule (LOL) and start posting 3-5 tiktoks a week (LOL). lots of laughs to get through every plan i made crumbling around me.

this birthday also ushered me into a Year 5. something i didn’t want to acknowledge about a 5th Year was the necessity of adaptability. i had a plan for my course to be released by a certain date and now i’m being forced to face the reality that that might not happen. it might not happen and that’s okay.

i also had a plan to start a series on tiktok. well, i started it, but i’m sure as hell not finishing it. and that’s okay, too.

where the Year 4 taught me about stability and structure and commitment, it seems like my Year 5 will be teaching me a lot about surrender, acceptance, and openness to change. i’m here for the ride, and excited for what will unfold!

it’s interesting what taking an unplanned three week break from writing will do. i had gotten my stamina to about two hours, and now it’s been 40 minutes and i need to tap out.

i’m grateful to have a space to come back to. i’m happy to be sat down writing again. & i’m excited to share more of my meanderings through this lifetime.3

☉16°Aries | 51.2 | 04-05-25

☿ 26°Pisces (retrograde)

i don’t even know if i’ll upload this.

that sounded dramatic—it’s not because i’m like spiraling or anything. it’s just that i’m high, and i’m at my new desktop (getting used to a new and somewhat impractical keyboard), and i just wanna ramble.

i wanna talk to someone and as my pen pals, well, you’re always available when i need an open ear.

so this retrograde has been… hard. it’s been intense. people i thought i knew have flipped switches and made huge pivots and it feels like everything is crumbling around me. i said that i was excited for my Year 5 but i didn’t anticipate the open-handedness that would be necessary to move gracefully with all of the restructuring that a Year 5 brings.

i also didn’t anticipate what a Mercury retrograde would feel like with Mercury as my time lord, while the season’s eclipses and retrogrades all happened right beside my natal Mercury in Aries.

i’ve been sick for most of this retrograde, beginning the night before and letting up only for a few days last week. after my endometriosis pain lapsed, i caught a bug and have been bleary headed and highly fatigued for days. it doesn’t feel like it’s lifting even now.4

some silly part of me thought to plead with Mercury as my Time-Lord-Chart-Ruler to go easy on me: c’mon, we’re close, right? think you could totally abandon whatever lessons you had planned to teach me and instead help me weasel my way into shortcuts by doing things i know i shouldn’t be doing? no? …ya sure…?

but, all that said—

i have been struggling to write and here i find myself in a situation i never would have concocted on purpose: i’m high (i like to write sober these days); i’m in an unusual spot using unfamiliar equipment (i usually write on my couch with my laptop); and i’m with my Honey (i prefer to write alone).

yet i am writing.

i’m fulfilling a promise to myself that i’ve been struggling to fulfill. i’m breathing life back into myself by engaging with my creativity. i’m allowing the expression of deeply pent up emotions that can only be released via this medium.

this Mercury retrograde, for as difficult and lackluster as it’s been, has certainly showed me that my “best way” isn’t necessarily the “best way”—or perhaps more truthfully, that there is no “best way”.

i’m having fun right now. i feel more than ever the energy that i wanted the FEWL Diaries to carry: me, sitting in the captain’s quarters of my starship, beaming an update about my adventures on earth out to the galaxy.

i’m in the right headspace and heartspace and i never would have chosen this set of circumstances (that were apparently necessary) for this to happen.

i’ve been trying to roll with all of Mercury’s punches like that lately. if something isn’t working, i assume that it’s because i’m meant to look elsewhere, toward another path that i might have missed with my vision preoccupied by what i expect, what i want.

beyond my writing practice, i’m also experiencing intense roadblock energy around the Aries Saturn Return course. i had an idea and it became impractical. so i came up with a new idea, and then it became impractical. finally, i had “thought of everything,” and found myself with a plan that would certainly cover all my bases.

the time to execute the plan swings around and whaddya know… all of the circumstances that i assumed i’d be working with have changed!!! nothing is what i expected it to be. now, at game time, fewer and fewer of my gameplans seem to be useable.

and i just have to be cool with that.

thanks, Self, for giving me all this experience up front. you said, you are walking into your New Year with a hardy understanding of the lessons you’ll be working with, whether you like it or not.

i’m honestly prepared to scrap this whole letter. (i hope i don’t accidentally delete it again lol.)

that’s another way this Mercury retrograde has affected me like never before!

i always pay attention to a Mercury retrograde because Mercury is my chart ruler. never ever ever before have i experienced the level of technological and communicative5 mayhem that i am experiencing now. wtfff????

the traffic, the shitty drivers, the machines breaking, shit deciding to delete itself, off measurements, misunderstandings…

speaking of! one last thing that i want to report on is the strength of this retrograde’s reflective energy—yet another aspect of a Mercury retrograde that i don’t normally experience in such a poignant way.

in the past few weeks, i have had the privilege of seeing the world from every perspective around me that i proclaimed not to understand.6

friends, family, my Honey—every moment of strange, i don’t get it or ugh i don’t know how you can’t see what i’m trying to show you! has found itself resolved.

sure, there are some perspectives harder to swallow than others, but i can see them now. i see how naturally and innocuously people held different viewpoints than me, and i’m so grateful for the insight i’ve gained through the frustration and confusion that preceded it. my own perspective has been refined by the addition of those around me.

okay i’m rambling, word salad-ing, and my tank is hurtling toward empty.

goodbye for now!

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

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☉10° Taurus | 24.2 | 04-30-25

☿ 15° Aries

my little brother was born when i was six, and when my family came over to see him for the first time i was ecstatic. i remember running to greet my uncle at the door, pulling him by the hand toward our living room and saying, “come meet your new niece!”

“nephew,” he corrected me gently. “it’s called a nephew when it’s a boy.”

i can still feel the shame that flooded through me in that moment, white hot and piercing. how could i have been so stupid? i was wrong. and (evidently) i’d never forget it.

does this seem like a bit of an overreaction to you? yeah, me too. but it’s the first memory i have of my Fear of Being Wrong showing up, and this memory has taught me a lot.

the first time i recalled it, i was taken aback by just how painful it had been for me to be wrong in that moment. i was shocked because, up until that point, i had placed all the blame for my Fear of Being Wrong on my step-father and his abuse. but at the age of six, the abuse hadn’t started yet. i was still living blissfully in my IC Leo era: the time of my life when i was utterly adored and treated like royalty by my family. it would be months and years later—when the added pressure of another (unwanted1) child had begun to take its toll on my step-father’s psyche—that his violent nature would rear its ugly head.

so… if the Fear of Being Wrong existed within me independent of my step-father’s actions… who put it there?

i did.

before we incarnate we have a lot of choices to make. some of the most vital ones: what karma do we want to take on and work out, how do we want to do that, and who wants to help us?

why take on karma at all? well, i think of Earth as a place to learn lessons that foster Soul growth. karma on an individual level can be seen as our curriculum for any given lifetime. on a collective level, we also have the karma of Humanity. each one of us incarnates into a specific body which hails from a genetic lineage whose trauma is written into its very DNA. we, as the Soul, choose the body whose genetic karmic load mirrors the lessons that we most want to learn. from another perspective—since each individual Soul is but one facet of the Oversoul of Humanity—we are choosing which aspect of the collective karma we’d like to help clear, benefitting us all. we each take our slice of suffering, our piece of the puzzle, and work together to both evolve our Souls and improve the human condition.

once the vehicle is chosen2, we craft the circumstances of our early lives. what kind of family, community, country, etc. are we born into? what environment can we give ourselves that will give us the best opportunity to interact with our karmic load? in other words: what mirrors can we place around ourselves to remind us of who we are and what we came here to do?

finally, who wants to help us? what other Souls have karmic journeys of their own that will be served by interfacing with ours, and vice versa? who can we place around ourselves to act not only as wise guides and role models, but also as antagonists who exacerbate our pain points so that we are forced to look at them early on?

much of the karmic load that i took on was highlighted by my relationship with my step-father. but, much like the Fear of Being Wrong, he didn’t put that karma inside me. i did. i chose the lessons i wanted to learn in this life, i chose my paths of mastery, and i chose to grow up alongside a Soul who wanted to use their incarnation to explore a different karmic load3: that of poisoned masculinity, a violent childhood, alcoholism, abandonment, death, and what it looks like when all of that trauma goes for a lifetime unresolved. what it looks like when someone carrying that unresolved trauma tries to raise children that they didn’t even want.

our Souls shook hands and agreed to be the catalysts in each other’s wildly differing journeys on the Earth plane. on the Soul level, it was a contract made in Love—even as it manifested physically as hatred and harm.

all of this, which i’d realized before, came crashing back to me in a new way this morning as i sat drinking tea on my front porch.

i’ve been struggling with forgiveness with my mother for the last year or so. even longer, perhaps since 2020 if i really think about it.

i’ve been struggling to forgive her for the role that she played in my childhood: marrying a man who said he didn’t want any more children even though she had a young daughter at the time, and then standing idly by as that man abused her daughter for the next 17 years.

in my struggle toward forgiveness, i kept tripping over blame. i didn’t understand how she could have let such harm come to me. and while wrapped up—blinded!—by the blame, i forgot all i’d learned about my choices, and what role i had played in my childhood.

i forgot that i chose to grow up in that household just as much as she had chosen it for me (if not more!).

i forgot that she had her own karma to work through, that her Soul had agreements with both my Soul and his Soul to do so. that we all had agreements with each other to experience the dynamic that we did.

blinded as i was by my own self-pity and self-righteousness—by my own pain—i didn’t realize that even if she had listened to me, even if she had done “the right thing” and removed my brother and me from that situation… according to karmic law, nothing would really have changed. she would still have been under the spell of codependency (one of her karmic loads) and i would still have been seeking someone to force me into the recognition of my karma. more likely than not, she would have found another man to do the exact same things my step-father did. i would have felt the same pain, and learned the same lessons. or even worse, i’d have been cheated of them altogether and then lacked the opportunities for Soul growth that i so craved.4

the Siddhi guiding our planetary healing this year is the 4th Siddhi of Forgiveness. its Gift is that of Understanding.

when you Understand, you naturally Forgive.

remembering all that i’ve remembered makes it much harder to hold a grudge against my mom.

i chose my life. i chose my karma. i chose the father who’d abandon me; the step-father who’d abuse me; and the mother who’d both love me and let it all happen.

today, i am grateful. at least i had someone in my corner all those years, someone to cry to and someone to hold me, even if she couldn’t ever take away my pain.

because taking away my pain was never really her job anyway, was it? sure, that’s what a mother “should” do—but i’ve been using “should” as a weapon against her for years, and it hasn’t made me feel any better. because should or shouldn’t, the truth is that she didn’t. she had her own story to tell, and i knew that when i agreed to be her daughter. that agreement doesn’t vanish just because the memory of it did when we came into form.

i don’t know how i’ll feel about this tomorrow, or even in an hour! the more i move through this process of understanding and the deeper i fall into forgiveness, the more neutral i feel about the situation altogether. all the heavy, intense emotions fade into an equanimous acceptance, because i see that what is, is.

what is, i agreed to.

what is, is all part of the Plan.

what is, is Life, is Love, is as beautiful and perfect as it is horrific and painful.

what is, cracks my heart open and lets more of Me through.

i cannot change, what is.

and, truthfully, i wouldn’t change it if i could.

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

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☉09° Taurus | 24.1 | 04-29-25

☿ 13°Aries

a brief hello. some transient thought-feelings.

i’ve been caught up—more than i anticipated i would be—in the creation of my Saturn Return course. Mercury’s retrograde took the first three weeks that i’d planned to start recording classes and devoted them instead to reimagining the course from the ground up, forcing me to ditch one idea after the other and continuously pivot in response to nothing working out quite the way i’d expected.

i wrote about this a little last month: how i was experiencing my transition into a Year 5 with Mercury (as both my chart ruler and new time lord1) going retrograde almost immediately.

i don’t know if eyes other than mine will ever see that writing; even i haven’t looked at it since, consumed as i’ve been with getting this course of mine off the ground.

my calendar says the “soft launch” of my course is this thursday, but that’s not true, and i have the sneaking suspicion that its actual release date will be just before the Summer Solstice. the lessons of this Year 5—adaptability, flexibility, resilience to change—are coming in hot and heavy. i’m trying to hold grace alongside the moments of disappointment and frustration.

as i’m bringing this Saturn Return course into form, my own Saturn Return is approaching, and deep shadows have begun bubbling to the surface to be addressed.

Saturn is asking me to do the work.2

my Saturn is in my 11th House, and i attribute this placement to the lack of belonging that i’ve felt all my life. always something of an outsider, no matter how well i get along with a group of people, i’m haunted by the sense that i don’t fit in. over the last few years, i’ve done a lot of work in this corner of my psyche, recognized the patterns of isolation and self-rejection that kept me within the bounds of predictable, painful safety. i have both more and better3 friendships than i’ve ever had.

tbh, i kinda thought i did the thing…

but last night was the first class in a new online course4 that i’m attending, and it showed me all the ways in which i have not, in fact, done the thing.

my pick-me energy was through the roof. i either felt too paralyzed to say anything in the chat or had to breathe through the immense anxiety that resulted when i did. i second guessed every word i typed. i hyper-fixated on the amount of reactions other messages got compared to mine. i was fearful of taking up too much space with my ideas or excitement, and then wished that i had taken up more.

after class ended, i lay in bed with these feelings, and caught a glimpse of what i feared beneath it all. i saw myself be myself in class, and be met with disdain and disgust. the hosts’ faces curled into sneers, and the chat filled with the messages “GET OUT” and “WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE”. the entire class was halted, waiting for my exit.

how absurd. but a true fear nonetheless.

the energy behind this fear reminded me of a series of dreams that i’d been having within the last month. several dreams with the same person: a mystical creator that i admire (who i have since decided symbolizes a type of person i’d like to be friends with). in all of these dreams this creator approaches me and tells me that they enjoy my work. i am overcome by a sense of unworthiness, imposter syndrome, and find myself unable to hold a conversation with this person because i feel so beneath them. eventually, i somehow lose them in the dream: they either get swept away by a crowd or my own self-loathing turns them against me and they’re no longer interested in anything i have to say.

i was a little stunned to realize how flippantly i’d shrugged these dreams off… they were each so vivid in imagery and emotion. the fact that they featured the same person repeatedly… my subconscious was clearly trying to relay a very specific fear to me (that i’m not smart/good/successful enough for the friendships i’m desiring) and i wanted nothing to do with it.

but now it’s staring me in the face in a new way, and Saturn is all but knocking at my door, demanding that i pay attention and do something about it.

that i take responsibility for how this fear is manifesting in my experience.

my fear feels true: that if i drop my guard and express myself authentically i will be too much for (the kind of people in) this group. i will overstep and be shunned and ridiculed and cast out of this space that i so long to be in. nobody wants all of me, the real me.

but that’s how i felt a couple of years ago, before doing the work that got me the friendships i have now. i didn’t feel safe being myself with those people either, and was positively sure that they wouldn’t accept me as i am.

but they did. they accepted me with warmth and open arms.

and i found new ways of relating. new ways of navigating conflict. even new ways of being, honoring and loving myself.

what new friendships will open to me in this space (and beyond!) if i allow myself to be seen?

i guess only time will tell.

and although my mind is frightened, my heart is ready to be pleasantly surprised.

from earth, with love (and compassion and forgiveness and hope)

xoxo Lizzie

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but as Brynja Magnusson says about my incarnation cross: there is “constant work on surfacing shadows that ask to be addressed” due to the presence of Gate 47. i’m always unpacking something!

i also know that personally, i appreciate seeing the (ofttimes incredibly slow) unfoldment of people’s shadow work and spiritual growth.

with that in mind, enjoy another glimpse into my ongoing journey with personal power, and the sneaky resistances to it! <3

☉5°Pisces | 55.6 | 02-23-25

the last time Mars ended its retrograde, my partner and i had a profound experience—i might go so far as to call it an “awakening” of sorts.

for him, it manifested as the feeling that he had been living inside a virtual reality, and suddenly the mask was taken off. for me, it felt as if i had just found my way out of a dark, dense forrest that i didn’t even know i’d been lost within.

both of our epiphanies came with the sharp clarity of moving from the unreal into the Real, and our entire relationship with Life was changed in a moment.

Mars ends its current retrograde later tonight, and i wonder if another mind-altering experience is waiting for me on the other side. if there is, i suspect that it will be profound, since it feels like my mind has already been reshaped (so slowly that it was almost imperceptible) throughout these past couple of months.

as you know, i like to pull cards from my Yin Mysticism deck at the end of every season to prepare for what’s coming next. based on my last spread, the main theme for my Winter Work was going to be keeping an open mind.

with Pluto heading into my ninth house and this omen presenting itself to me, i was prepared for my beliefs to change drastically.

as i wrote about a couple of letters ago, The Telepathy Tapes really kicked off this process for me. that, combined with reading and following the suggested practices in Psychic Literacy has led me to something that i feel like i’ve been clawing my way to for years: confidence in my own worldview.

there was some ancient fear living inside me that kept me terrified of being seen as crazy. but now, with the turning of the ages, our “mainstream” is dissolving, and our perspectives are splintering into as many unique viewpoints as there are humans to hold them. i can recognize, now more than ever, that my truth is not The Truth, but it is necessary and valid and safe to express.

every single one of us informs the Whole with our perspective. none of us is Right; none of us is superior; but each of us acts as a Witness, contributing to the far-sightedness of the Whole that we can call Truth.

there’s an interesting study that showed, in the case of a problem with a definite answer (like “how many jellybeans are in this jar?”) a group will come closest to the answer when every person provides input and the average of the group’s answers is taken.

we are meant to collaborate and inform each other. we are meant to push and prod each other into new mental horizons. none of us is an island, and our true genius is only revealed in the presence of another’s.

beyond The Telepathy Tapes and Psychic Literacy, i also recently became hip to the CIA analysis of the Gateway Process. that might have been the last thing i needed to see to realize that it is a foolish waste of time and magick to wait around for the government or mainstream or anyone to sanction my beliefs.

the government—the body of people responsible for what is said on the news and what is taught in schools—has known about UFOs and psychics and non-embodied beings and OOB experiences and the power of trance states for decades. despite this knowledge (and significant monetary investments being made in an effort to learn even more) they not only kept it all a secret, but they lied to our faces, got us to mistrust our own lived experiences, and publicly shamed or silenced anyone who tried to share the truth.

there’s an entire dark rabbit hole that one could go down, wondering about the motives behind keeping such a fundamental part of the human experience suppressed, but i’m not interested in conspiracy theories. i don’t think finding a definitive why matters.

what matters to me is taking the blindfold off, letting my mind out of its self-imposed prison, and standing firmly in what i know to be true. even if those beliefs still belong in the “crazy” bin according to whatever’s left of the mainstream.

☉8°Pisces | 37.3 | 02-26-25

the New Moon in Pisces is tomorrow.

in a way, a New Moon—when the last sliver of this ever-changing luminary fades away into total darkness—symbolizes a death. while this collective death is occurring, i am impacted twofold, as Saturn has been straddling my natal Sun. the New Moon itself will take place within one degree of my natal South Node.

it’s time to say goodbye.

i can always tell that i’m in the midst of an ego death because my ego gets very “prickly.” last week, as Saturn began creeping ever closer, i had days filled with irritation and indignation. the smallest things seemed to set me off, sometimes into bouts of unwarranted rage.

that feeling seems so far away now; once i recognized what my short fuse was reflecting, i fell into a state of surrender.1

instead of rage-full, for the last week i’ve been gloomy and withdrawn, allowing my current self to be small and fade away until whatever (whoever?) comes next is ready to take its place. and as i’ve done so, i’ve contemplated what about my current self is ready to be let go.

with the New Moon happening on my South Node, this “current self” must be seen as patterns that have lived within me for quite some time; things that might feel comfortable or familiar but are leading to stagnation.

i’ve contemplated my relationship to my legacy and my public image and my hesitancy to let myself be seen. what in my psyche is keeping me from blossoming in this area of my life?

i found a fear of failure, an internalization of my parents: my mom’s lack of faith in herself and my father’s lack of faith in me.

tied into this fear of failure was a fear of commitment: what if i commit myself fully to my dreams, and they don’t come true? what if i’m wrong, or incapable of achieving what i really want? how embarrassing. how shameful.

what if things take some time to develop (as things usually do) and people see me as a delusional, ignorant child? can i hold up against their scrutiny? am i strong enough not to abandon myself?

finally, am i a bad person for wanting material success? how can i reconcile my desire for service and spiritual growth with abundance?

it’s hard to move forward in manifestation if you can’t commit to what you really want—even harder if you cannot even admit what you really want because of the fears clouding your awareness of it.

all of this (and even more that is difficult to put into words) was acting as an anchor, holding me right in place.

but it’s good to look your demons in the face, because once you see them for the phantoms that they are, you slowly but surely begin to outgrow them.

i may have absorbed2 my parents’ fears and expectations of failure, but i don’t have to hold onto them forever. some mantras that i’ve been keeping in mind lately to shift my energy in a new direction: worth comes from within, & worthiness is a practice.

in order to move forward, i need to have confidence in myself. that can only come from my own heart, my own inner knowing that i am divine and worthy of every desire that reveals itself to me. and i don’t have to remain in a state of utmost confidence every moment of every day—especially while still at the beginning of this journey. worthiness is a practice, and i practice by bringing myself back into remembrance of my worth whenever i notice that i’ve fallen out of it.

i also need to commit fully to wherever i want to go. think about the absurdity of getting into a car, driving around with no destination in mind, and then complaining that you haven’t gotten where you want to go. or imagine having a destination, but being too afraid of the roads that you’ll have to take along the way or what you might find upon arrival that you drive around aimlessly, never really going in the direction that you need to. i’ve gotta get in the “car,” set my GPS, and proceed confidently in the direction of my dreams.3

as for my other fears…

things will definitely take time. that is the universe we live in! holding my vision steadily in my heart is a sacred practice. it is an act of devotion: to my Self, to the Muse, and to the Beauty that i hope to create in the world. if others question the viability of my dream because of the lack of progress that they see, that is none of my business and not my problem. let me be an inspiration to anyone who thinks the impossible can’t be done—if they see me do it, then perhaps they will start to believe in themselves.

and material success is nothing to shy away from. can you pour from an empty cup? can you save someone from drowning if you succumb to the water yourself?

for far too long, those of us who would use an abundance of resources to improve the lives of the people around us have shrunk from such prosperity. we’ve bought into some narrative that to have while others have not is evil—some twisted interpretation of a bodhisattva who thinks they can help those in poverty by keeping themselves impoverished.

how is that helpful???

i say this to myself and to all humans transmuting that false narrative: go get rich.

enrich yourself, enrich your life, cultivate so much goodness that you cannot help but share it with others.

instead of trying to pour from an empty cup, create a world in which your cup runneth over, and anyone who comes into contact with you is watered.

scarcity is a falsehood; lack is manufactured.

this universe and this planet are endowed to meet every need of every being inhabiting it. when we find our way back to this Truth, the whole world benefits.

☉15°Pisces | 63.5 | 03-05-25

this morning has been a strange, and emotionally heavy one.

i woke up around 5:30 from a vivid nightmare-esque dream in which i was pursued by a bear. the dream was laced with fear, although the bear didn’t really show aggression, and she certainly never attacked me or anyone/anything else in the dream.

unable to shake the fright left over from the dream, i wrote it out in my dream journal. the bear never attacked… why was she pursuing me? and why was i so afraid?

Bear Spirit is the guardian of my relationship with the Summer—and so she represents to me my relationship with high Yang energy: the expressive, masculine ability to do.

interestingly, Bear Spirit also represents the 34th Gift of Strength in the Gene Keys animal codex.

and so, translated: my subconscious wants me to know that i am fearful of and running from my own Strength, my Yang ability to create in the world.

on her website, Christie Inge asks the following questions in relation to the energy of the 34th: what are you creating with your life force energy? when you have faith in your vision, what actions do you take? are you willing to surrender to your own magic? are you open to miracles?

the most recent Starborn episode got me excited about conscious reality creation again. in the weeks since recording it, i’ve re-read Seven Steps in Practical Occultism and begun putting its wisdom back into practice (blended with my own, of course).

i started the work on the same day that Mars stationed direct, and at first it was euphoric.

but as time moved on, i was naturally shown all the ways that i hide from the things that i want. i’ve been shown my hesitation, doubt, and resistance. i’ve been shown my fear.

Kali came to me several weeks ago and warned me that there would be Growing Pains where i was headed. she showed up for me in a dream, as well.

in that very simple dream, i got a large thorn stuck in the palm of my right (dominant) hand. when i tried to remove it, the pain was too severe, and so i decided that the thorn would stay put.

Kali said to me: are you really going to forsake your power—permanently limit and make things harder for yourself—to avoid the temporary pain associated with taking your power back?

but growing pains aren’t fun, Kali. just ask the severed heads around your neck!

while floating in the bardo yesterday, i found a Joe Dispenza quote that really resonated with me. to paraphrase:

IF YOU WANT TO EXPERIENCE A DIFFERENT REALITY, YOU HAVE TO BECOME A DIFFERENT PERSON.

you aren’t going to change your reality if you continue being and doing the same things you’ve always been and done.

i suppose all of this is to say that i resign myself to the fate that i know lays ahead of me: the death of who i am, what i’ve been. it’s already taking place.

ever so slowly, I’m slipping away…

can i remember with each breath to let go?

can i remember that the pain is only increased by my resistance to it?

Kali, Bear Spirit, Majesty; Anubis and Arcturus.4 please lend me your grace, guidance, and support.

please hold my hand as i walk willingly into oblivion.

please catch my tears and use them to water my Soul.

i feel this death more strongly than the others. perhaps that is why so many of you are surrounding me now, as i enter the death-tunnel-birth-canal.

i love you. can’t wait to see you (and Me!) on the other side ;)

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

my website

my podcast

my tiktok

Talaria is now completely free, as I have moved my focus to my new publication, The Visionary’s Field Notes.

All payment plans are defunct. All the content is yours as you wish!

UPDATE: 04-05-25

I’ve just added a Founding Member tier to the paid subscriptions.

As a Founding Member ($150/year) you gain access to all paid subscription benefits as well as an in-depth interdisciplinary natal reading!

These readings typically take me about a month to complete, and for this reason I do not offer them with the rest of my services.

To create your natal reading, I will need your date/time/location of birth; I will study your astrology, human design, and gene keys charts as well as your numerology. What you’ll receive is a long and winding recording of me relaying what i see in your Design: the things that stand out to me, interest me, intrigue me. I’ll initiate you into deeper connection with the archetypes whose fingerprints cover your cosmic blueprint.

Cool. That was all. Peace n blessings <3

Lizzie

ORIGINAL POST BELOW:

I’ll make this short and to-the-point.

I’m officially offering paid subscriptions to Talaria! Yay!

The reason I’m doing this is twofold:

First ~

This is not a podcast. I repeat, this is not a podcast!

I created Talaria as a space where I could practice writing. But, since I had been podcasting already and felt more comfortable doing that, I ended up turning this space into a crazy mishmash of mostly audio uploads with some writing sprinkled in here and there—at least, that’s how it feels to me.

Now, some of my friends subscribed to Talaria (whom I love dearly and am extremely grateful for) refer to my Substack as a podcast. It makes me want to pull my teeth out.

All I can say is I’ve learned my lesson! Like I said in my previous post, most of the audios that I uploaded here really belonged on Starborn, and this should have stayed a sacred space for my writing practice.

With the intention of “righting this wrong,” I am putting the vast majority of my audio uploads behind a paywall. Everything except the Vestalia series and audios that I find very important will now be accessible to paying subscribers only! I hope that this puts the focus back on my writing, and makes the audio element of Talaria something that can be enjoyed as an add-on.

Second ~

Some of the shit I have to share is embarrassing. But the embarrassing stuff is the goooood stuff. And I wanna get it out!

If you’re wondering what I mean, think: insightful high thoughts; raw journal entries; unedited notes to self (similar to YEAR ONE. but with better audio lmao).

I don’t have anything along these lines ready to share yet, but when I am ready, I want to know that there’s a space waiting for me. Putting these embarrassing little nuggets of self behind a paywall will make me feel safer in my sharing. I’m already getting excited!

Subscriptions are $5/month OR $50/year.

And to be clear, the current perks of subscribing are as follows:

• Access to my entire library of podcast episodes on Talaria

• A warm fuzzy feeling from supporting this little mystic :)

If you think that by subscribing you’ll be receiving a new paid-subscriber-only piece of content from me every month—stop! That’s not what I said! Scroll back up and reread!!!

The main benefit of being a paid subscriber, at this moment, is the knowledge that you’re financially supporting an artist whose work you enjoy. That’s it.

Alright, I love you—whether you change your subscription or not thank you so much for being here <333

xoxo Lizzie

Subscribe now

Mars has finally stationed direct again! And with the blessing of its forward motion, I am elated to announce several new things that I have to share with the world:

The FEWL Diaries

As those of you subscribed already know, I’ve been dabbling with a new format of writing here on my Substack. I’ve also been going back and forth between whether or not I think this new format is “necessary,” and as we approached the end of Mars’ retrograde, I decided that it was. Here’s why:

I like to write about two things, and in two ways—first, I like to write the way I was taught to in college, in a more “scholarly” tone, about the things that were deemed “unscholarly” by my professors; second, I like to write very lazily and unprofessionally, about my life and my experiences as a human during this transformational time in Earth’s history.

The FEWL Diaries is not me hiding behind a premise; it is a way for me to have fun and express a point of view that I truly do hold but haven’t gotten to express too often. I enjoy getting to take a more zoomed-out perspective, grounding my experiences in the knowledge of the times in which we live, and exploring how my particular design plays out in my life.

Talaria, on the other hand, is where I want to rewrite (lol) my relationship with academia, and bring my love for studying the esoteric sciences into a space where it wasn’t encouraged before. (Some things that I have in my notes app to give you an idea of what will be written here: social agreements and the 19-49, 37-40 channels; the relationship between Projector and Manifestor energy types in Human Design; how the mutation of the Emotional Solar Plexus will affect the aura of Emotional Manifestors; manners, Autism, and Gate 49; what the word “mortified” shows us about the link between death and embarrassment.)

The two pieces that I wrote earlier this year have been moved to the FEWL page, which you’ll find a link to below. Stay subscribed to one or both of them; these are my focuses for this Substack moving forward!

THE FEWL DIARIES PAGE

The Starborn Podcast

This was my first ever podcast, my first real creative endeavor that I shared with the world. It had a 3-season run from early 2021 to mid-2022 before I put it aside to work on other projects (like Talaria!).

At the time, I truly thought that it was dead—no more Starborn. But this winter (and I assume this Mars retrograde) has spun me around and enticed me to bring this project back to life. I realized that Starborn never really died, I just put a lot of the content that probably belonged there on Substack instead. I think that it felt convenient to me to have my writing and podcast all under one umbrella; but after a few years of trying things that way, I’ve realized that those two things are better kept separate. My writing belongs on my Substack, and my podcasting belongs with Starborn.

If you’ve never listened to the Starborn Podcast before, I’m excited for you! It was born from a desire to talk about all of the strange, occult, magickal interests that I had at a time when I was surrounded by “normies” who would have probably considered me crazy were I to confide in them.

There are download dumps; mountains of insights and epiphanies; and full episodes dedicated to exploring concepts like suffering, death, emotional alchemy, and individuation systems like the Gene Keys.

To kick off Season 4, I recorded an episode earlier this month about what I’ve been up to for the past two-and-a-half years. It’s full of Lizzie Lore that you wouldn’t have heard (or read) anywhere else before, and dives deep into my personal relationship with manifestation / reality co-creation. The link below will take you to Spotify, but you can also listen on Apple Podcasts, and I might start posting this newest season to YouTube as well!

LISTEN TO STARBORN

MysticalMassey.com

Finally—and perhaps most excitedly?—I’d like to let you know that I have a fucking website now. YAY!

It’s been in the works for about a year, and I’m so very happy with how it turned out. (Or at least how this first final version of it turned out—always leaving room for growth and change around here!)

This website is an amazing tool that allows me to showcase my creations; express the grand vision that stands behind my work; book clients for personal energy readings and attunements; and do something I’ve dreamed of since I was a child—host my own classes.

The class that I’m going to be offering initially is for people around my age who are approaching their first Saturn Return as the planet moves into Aries. It will be available later this Spring!

Another fun and academically inclined offer described on my website is Alchemy of the Mind, a virtual literature-based salon that I’ll be hosting beginning this Summer. Each of the books that we discuss in the salon will be hand-picked for their ability to show us a new way of being as humans on earth—to open our minds and stretch our belief systems to include more of what we say we so desperately need, but have had trouble imagining and creating for ourselves.

Read about all of these things and more via the link below!

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE

Thank you for reading <3 And thank you, Mars, for providing the time I needed to sloooow down, gain some clarity, and build a solid foundation for all of these creations.

I feel blessed!!!

xoxo Lizzie

i guess i should have assumed that if i gave myself space to write four days a week, it would happen eventually. but i didn’t think it would happen so soon…?

regardless, i’m cookin!

i’m also questioning whether or not i wanna make a whole new section for the FEWL Diaries… is it necessary? do i need the bubble to feel safe writing about myself so often? would i really rather write to extra-dimensional beings and then share it with humans, instead of writing directly to the humans in the first place?

I DON’T KNOW!

and i don’t think that i’ll know until Mars ends its retrograde.1 so until then, we’ll keep posting these with the assumption that they’ll end up under the FEWL umbrella if/when the time to officially launch arrives! enjoy :)

CW:2 references of sexual and physical violence

☉8°Aquarius | 19.2 | 01-28-25

a couple of days before the Aquarius New Moon, some things have come into clarity around my relationship with Bigness, Prosperity, and most of all, Power.3

for as long as i can remember, i’ve wanted to do great things in this world. i’ve wanted to make a difference, to leave an impact, to create something significant; to be big, bold, powerful.

there is nothing wrong with that. but, as i’ve known for some while now, i have a karmic history with the misuse and abuse of power.4 somewhere deep in my subconscious, i know—i can feel—what i’ve done with power before… and i’m afraid to let myself hold it again. frankly, i’m disgusted that i’m even interested in it.

i have to remind myself that i’m drawn to power5 in this lifetime because i have a chance to change the story; drawn to experience abundance and prosperity so that, this time around, i might know the joy of sharing it with others.

having power is not a bad thing; wielding it over others to try and strip them of theirs is.

being prosperous is not a bad thing; hoarding resources and attempting to block people from their own prosperity is.

taking up space is not a bad thing; denying anybody else the ability to be seen or heard is.6

i believe this is a main “reason” my childhood was the way it was: to teach me the consequences of abusing power while i was young, so that i wouldn’t be tempted to go down that path as an adult.

perhaps that too is part of my sacred work this lifetime—to disentangle the raw inclination toward power from the grips of the shameful, fearful Ego. my Design, my Astrology, and my Numerology all reflect my desire for bigness—a desire i’m shocked to find not everyone has—as an integral part of my journey here.7 if i’m going to die fulfilled, i need to let this desire breathe.

i need to trust myself to not get lost in the Ego, and abuse others again. i need to trust that i can use my power in an aligned and enlightened way, without trying to steal from others.

this New Moon (less than 10 degrees away from Pluto; in the house of my Midheaven and my ninth house of firmly held beliefs) is offering me a chance to re-write the stories i’m telling about power and my relationship to it.

in two weeks, the Leo Full Moon (activating the 5th Sacred Seal;8 conjunct my IC) will give me an opportunity to find Forgiveness for the past; to release resentments formed around power during my childhood; and to illuminate a new perception of myself and my role in the world.

as i write this, and allow myself to touch a part of me that has been denied for so long, i am overwhelmed with feelings.

i feel guilt. i feel shame. i feel fear.

i feel like a monster.

i feel greedy. i feel selfish.

i feel trapped within all this.

and i can understand why…

here on earth, we’ve been shown model after model of power that is destructive, parasitic, deceptive, and domineering.

that “power” is false.

the root of the word POWER means TO BE ABLE.

true Power is the ability to act; to set in motion; to make something occur. (in this way, it is fascinatingly similar to the word Energy.)

it is the ability to shape one’s own Reality, not another’s.

and true Power does not corrupt if you are only working with your own.

in 2025—the year of the Line 5, the line of Authority and Power—as we near the Full Moon activation of the 5th Seal, i feel as if i need to make peace with the lifetime(s) in which i abused my power. to find Forgiveness for myself; and send remorse through the veil to those whom i abused.

i’m sensing that the word i really want to use is not remorse, but understanding. i understand the pain and destruction that i caused, and i am sorry. i am sorry for it now that i can see.

i also want to send my understanding back in time, to the moments when i was young in this life and abused what power i could find.9

i’m so sorry for the pain i caused.

i’m sorry that i hurt people, and happily so.

i’m sorry that i lied and cheated and used the perception that some people had of me to gain leverage over others.

i’m sorry that i used my status to intimidate people.

i’m sorry that i abandoned10 my own values to keep a hold on my “power.”

i’m sorry that i used people’s love for me to manipulate them.

i understand now that this was not Power, but Fear—deep Fear, rooted in the belief that i could only be powerful by stealing someone else’s power, before someone tried to steal mine.

i am sorry for the choices i’ve made that have caused such harm.

i do not flinch from the guilt and shame, but embrace them as an echo of actions that no longer align with what i understand about the world, and a reminder of the kind of human i want to be.

in this important year where so many of us are taking our personal power back…

i wonder how many humans are caught in the fear of their own power, due either to their own misuse of it or witnessing the misuse of those around them. i wonder how many others will be reaching into the depths of their psyche to uncover the transgressions they participated in, both in this life and in lifetimes before.

in order for us to heal our relationship with power, to reclaim the self-sovereignty that is our birthright, i do believe that we have to make amends with our own actions. we have to acknowledge what we’ve done and find a way to forgive ourselves. we have to see the harm before we can trust ourselves (and those around us) to hold true Power—or even to discover what true Power really is.

and so i surrender and humble myself before this idea of true, honest Power. i ask it to fill me up from the inside, allowing me in turn to fill up my own life, to take up the space i deserve within my own Creation. conscious of my Ego and aware of the ways that conditioning might try to pull me toward abuse, i allow myself to be big and bold and exuberant. in the coming weeks, i ask for the deeper discovery of my relationship with Power through the eons, that i may walk through this life with open eyes and the wisdom of memory.

☉16°Aquarius | 13.4 | 02-05-25

last night i visited the Akasha in an attempt to unwind the karma that i had wrapped around my relationship with Power. i asked to be shown the full story, to gain an even deeper understanding of my dance with Power through my many incarnations.11 and shown i was:

i first saw the opulence of kingship, felt the weight of Authority as i looked down on those around me. i saw me force myself on a woman in my castle, and got the sense that it was not the first or last time i did such a thing. i saw the sexual abuse that i suffered in this lifetime alongside it. i am both the raper and the raped.

i saw war, war, so much war—are there any of us within humanity who have not been touched by it in one lifetime or another? i saw people dying by the hundreds at my command. i saw myself charging into battle. i felt my body opened by the end of a sword; pain in my stomach, pain in my legs, pain in my neck.

a flash forward in time. a flash back to sexual violence. i saw myself in army uniform raping a subordinate. i liked that he didn’t like it, liked that my will and my station were both stronger than his. i am in charge. i get what i want.

then, i was a soldier again. i felt my body contorted by injury—neck bent, arms mangled, chest collapsed. i lay on the battlefield waiting for Death.

at this point, i realized just how much of human history is marked by our brutality toward each other. it never seems to end… i understood that the horrific slide show i was playing for myself could keep going, perhaps indefinitely, from all the different perspectives of those involved. the abusers and the abused; everyone’s been everyone at some point. it’s no wonder we continue dragging this story out: on some level, we’re all seeking Justice.

i left the visions, and came back into a sense of my body. i felt the tension—the push-pull of Victim-Villain—and realized yet again that there can be no resolution in the world if we do not each of us resolve the battlefield that lives within our very bones. we have to Forgive ourselves for all that we’ve done to ourselves, if we ever want to truly heal.

still in the visionless dark, i felt a fire sweep through my body: the fire of purification. having seen the Truth of it all, i was ready for my karmic entanglements with Power to be burned away.

my contorted body began to right itself: my head found its place back on top of my neck; my arms slowly returned to an unbent position; i could breathe again.

light and spaciousness followed the warmth of the fire, along with a sense of joy and gratitude. i let these feelings fill me up. i sat in their pleasant energy for what felt like ages, until i began to sense my awareness calling itself home, away from the Akasha and back into my body.

this morning i awoke feeling lighter, the effects of my Akashic session seeming to have held.

i had some preconceptions about what coming into balance with Power would feel like and this quiet, serene strength surely wasn’t it. i’m excited to let the effects of this session continue to unfold, excited to see how i respond to the next time i am faced with the opportunity to be Power-full.12

it feels like i’ve uncovered a great secret, a great gift…

we’ll leave it mysteriously there. til next time!

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie

it’s a newsletter within a newsletter—a sneaky little feature on substack that lets me create new things without completely releasing my grasp on old ones. i’m not ready to let Talaria die!! and i feel like i still have some things to say on that wavelength.

but what i want to express has changed, and it’s calling for the creation of a new Vessel that is better equipped to hold its energy.

it’s called the FEWL (from earth, with love) Diaries:

i’m intending it to be a creative outlet for me to play with the role of the galactic field researcher that i love so much—that aquarianly-detached, gemini-motivated1 reporter who’s just tryna spread the news about what they see goin’ on.2 i’m also intending it to be a space where i can recommit myself to the regular practice of writing (and sharing some of that writing).

however, i’m not fewlish enough to officially begin a project during a Mars retrograde. so think of all this as a “soft launch.” a little taste; a preview, if you will.

the text below will be reposted officially as a part of the FEWL Diaries page once Mars’ retrograde has ended. i might even have something new to say by then—who knows?

the best part is that you’re automatically subscribed to this new thread if you subscribe to Talaria; so you can just sit back and enjoy. (if you want to unsubscribe to FEWL, you can do so and stay subscribed to Talaria as well.)

without further ado, welcome to the new leg of my winding adventure!

(( this piece is too long to be contained in an email, so make sure that you go to the web to read it in full! ))

☉26°Capricorn | 61.6 | 01-15-25

the beginning of the year is off to a wonderful start.

i had my wisdom teeth removed after christmas, and got to spend 10 days away from the office. being absorbed almost daily in solely my own energy, coupled with the haze of drugs and pain and the powerful Lunar cycle in Capricorn, has me feeling like a new person—a new version of myself, anyway.

the theme for me this winter is an Open Ajna3: letting my hard-won, calcified and no-longer-helpful opinions soften so that a new Light of Awareness might break through. the Sun’s transit through Gate 61 (and the presence of the Earth and recent Full Moon in Gate 62) has helped crack me open.

there’s a podcast that has shot to #1 on the charts here, called The Telepathy Tapes. in it, a journalist explores the widespread phenomenon of telepathy among non-speaking autistic children—something that has been systematically kept from mainstream knowledge for decades.

after listening to that podcast, i’ve started reading a book called Psychic Literacy and the Coming Psychic Renaissance. this book, like the podcast, reveals decades of psychic research that have been hidden from the public to maintain reliance on the current scientific materialist paradigm.

the rich combination of information presented in the podcast and the book with the potent, eye-opening energies of the 61st and 62nd have left me contemplating my own relationship to psychic-ness.

i remember being about nine years old, teaching myself to enter a trance state before sleep so that i could receive small visions of things that i’d encounter the next day. i remember believing—no, knowing that i could communicate with and receive energy from the crystals which i collected. i remember writing spells and performing rituals with the Moon for no reason other than to play with the magick that i sensed all around me.

and then, gradually, as it was challenged and dissuaded by the people around me, this magickal connection to the world grew thin.

i tried to show friends my book of shadows, and they no longer wanted to be seen hanging out with a “crazy” person; i had to choose my magick or my friends, and i chose the latter. bye-bye spellbook.

next, i was swallowed by the machine of scientific materialism. i fell in love with science when i was thirteen, sitting in my classroom during our astronomy unit and watching this video. in it, astrophysicist Neale DeGrasse Tyson shared what he thought was the most astounding fact about the universe:

“the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core... these stars…when unstable in their later years, they collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. guts made of…all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.

“…so that when i look up at the night sky, and i know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us. when i reflect on that fact, i look up—many people feel small ‘cause they’re small and the universe is big—but i feel big! because my atoms came from those stars.

“there’s a level of connectivity. that’s really what you want in life—you want to feel connected; you want to feel relevant; you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you. that’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.”

looking back, i now understand that his words touched my mystical heart: the deep and irrefutable knowing that we are all One. but at the time, he represented Science to me, and that was the respectable thread i chose to follow.

i spent the next eight years (all of high school and most of college) pursuing the sciences, trying to get my mystical fix from a hyper-rational framework. the people i surrounded myself with didn’t believe in friendships with spirits or fairies, scoffed at healing with crystals and herbs. talking to the Moon or the Sun or the trees or the stars was loony behavior—i tried to remove myself from it.

but old habits die hard; the Truth of ourselves cannot be expunged, and i kept coming back to the mystical.

i moved from astrophysics to biology to neuroscience to psychology, steadily slipping further and further from the hard sciences with all their numbers and facts into softer, more subjective realms.

i sprinkled various philosophy classes into my schedule, studying Hinduism and Buddhism and the philosophy of religion. i started reading spiritual texts and allowing my mind to stretch, to hold both the rational and the magickal side-by-side.

when the time came, i even tried to write my capstone on the healing power of the mind—an idea that was shot down immediately because it “wasn’t science,” even though i’d learned about the placebo effect in every single psychology class that i’d taken, so i knew that we all knew the mind had an impact on the body.4

as fate would have it, after college i became a middle school science teacher, and i was forced once and for all to face my beliefs about Life. the pressure to hide who i had let myself become—a ritual-holding, “inanimate object”-speaking, crystal-wearing, God-loving “nutjob”—was overwhelming. i was supposed to tell these bright young minds that anything unsupported by science simply wasn’t real, and i couldn’t. so i left teaching and the world of science behind.

the next few years were difficult for me. i had spent so much time and energy denying the Truth of myself that it was tricky, shameful, and frightening to find it again. that, coupled with the harsh (and frankly, excessive) rejection of science left me standing on unstable ground. in a way, i was belief-less. but having nothing to turn to for Truth outside my direct, current experience turned out to be exactly what i needed.

i ended up realizing how much of my truth i’d outsourced to both scientists and mystics; only if someone else said that something was real could i believe in it. in reality, our personal lived experience is the greatest source of Truth that we have.

in science, personal experience outside of a highly controlled experimental setting is referred to as “anecdotal evidence,” and is not usually respected as “evidence” at all. instead, the term is used mainly in a derisive fashion, accompanied by a shrug and an eye roll and a disregard for whatever anecdote was just shared.

even today, as i read Psychic Literacy, i can feel my science mind cringing away from the personal stories that the author shares. i hear the voices of the PhD holders that i used to admire: “he could be making this all up, or this could all be due to wild chance—you have no way of knowing, no way of testing, no way of verifying. what good is a story to science?”

i reject that close-minded, fearful belief; but i also reject the idea that i need to adopt anything that anyone says into my perspective. i have my own well of experiences to draw from, and according to my own life, magick is real. even when i struggled against it and made excuses for why certain wondrous, inexplicable things were happening, magick was real, and it was all around me.

in both Psychic Literacy and The Telepathy Tapes, we are challenged to broaden our understanding of the term “psychic.”

until now, this term was widely understood to pertain to the mind. being “psychic” or “telepathic” was seen as a special gift, some higher functioning of a single person’s mind that not everyone had access to.

but the children featured in the Tapes and the author’s plethora of psychic examples show us that psychic-ness is less of an individual ability, and more of a function of our (hereto ignored) interconnectedness—not just to each other as a species but to all of Life.

this new model of psychic-ness explains inter-species telepathy; future-seeing; extra-dimensional communication5; claircognizance6; and the strange experience we’ve all had at least once, where the world seems to be dropping synchronicities at our feet left and right.

as Uranus moves into Gemini this year, i anticipate a great shift in the way that Humanity experiences our innate psychic nature. with heaps of formerly hidden scientific studies around telepathy coming to light, emboldening people to share and believe more deeply in their own psychic experiences, our world is about to change. after all, our beliefs shape our perspective, which builds our Reality: if we don’t believe in something we won’t ever allow ourselves to see it; but if our beliefs change, we are granted access to an entirely new way of being.

i’ve come into the realization lately that we humans who are alive now have chosen to be present for one of the greatest paradigm shifts that Humanity has ever experienced.

i imagine what what it was like to be alive at the dawn of heliocentrism or darwinism. all of a sudden, the earth loses its place in the center of the universe; humans are brought back into the arms of Nature, and the idea of some “higher power” creating us out of thin air is shattered.

one day, hundreds of years from now, we will look back at this time in a very similar way. oh, all of the things that we did not know; and how utterly obvious and taken-for-granted the new truths will be.

i’m excited and so, so ready for this plane to land. not just because of how fucking cool it will be for our entire species to recognize its psychic abilities. not just because of the impacts this paradigm shift will have on technology and science and the overall bank of human knowledge. i am excited for what it will do to our souls.

as i said earlier, “psychic” abilities are really just the natural outcome of our interconnectedness with Life. in the tenth episode of The Telepathy Tapes, the non-speakers share the worldview that they carry because of their direct experience with this interconnectedness. they share messages of love, understanding, compassion, and wholeness. they showcase the mindset and way of being that inherently flows from knowing that you and Life and all its myriad forms are One.

in Psychic Literacy, the author refers to this phenomenon as a “catharsis,” wherein people who experience “mystical ecstasy” or “psychic insight”—somehow or another tapping into this unifying invisible field of consciousness—are profoundly changed, no longer able to keep their perspective trapped within the little Ego that wishes to fight and compete and overpower everything around it.

so yes, i am excited for the deeper changes that this paradigm shift heralds. we cannot help but be evolved by this.

i am ready for our minds to be changed, forever.

from earth, with love

xoxo Lizzie