A bright beacon

on switching stories and magic amulets

Dear Wanderer,

I keep rewriting this.

That’s okay. This Full Moon, which I am calling the Unmasking Moon, I’m learning that you don’t have to live your whole life inside one story. If you don’t like the one you’re in it’s possible to switch to another, just as it’s possible to close the book you’re reading and open a new one.

I’ve just switched stories.

I’m trying to catch those first moments of new, unformed life, trying to see the strange in the familiar and hold it like a trusted secret-keeper. I’m letting the warm, healing waters of a new story soak in; I’m trying to get a Polaroid at the moment of a birth.

I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD. It was a collaborative and easeful process between me and my therapist, whom I trust. I don’t think I could have done it sooner; my symptoms have been long-obscured by other things like trauma, depression and general upheaval. And I’m an expert in subterfuge: good at masking, good at coping, good at hiding my struggles even from myself. But if I am honest I meet all of the criteria for inattentive, and many of the criteria for hyperactive, ADHD, not just the six out of however many that are required for diagnosis.

I have a whole different brain than I thought I did.

Now I’m learning skills that make life feel like sailing down a smoothly-flowing river, instead of fighting against the current and being washed, more often then not, back the way I came. But I also want to pause to honor the newness of the story I am entering, the tenderness and discovery of it.

The landscape of my mind feels like an entirely new place to me. As I dismantle rules and assumptions long held in place that no longer work, I find, alongside the new story, a deeper, older story of a curious, energetic mind that learned to coerce, control and threaten itself into unnatural shapes. But before that—before hours and months and years of school, of being labeled clumsy, lazy, forgetful and disorganized—before that, I knew what I needed. I knew what I liked. I knew who I was.

It’s deep, this story I am leaving behind, of I don’t know what’s wrong with me, everything is just really hard. Of I don’t know why my house is a mess and I can’t keep appointments. I’m sorry, I know I had six hours and I didn’t get it done. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

I do know and I’m not sorry.

I am a full and shining person in a world that devalues nearly every aspect of my identity and being. Therefore I am exactly what this world needs. I am the poison that is also the cure.

And it’s tender to open myself up to what I am truly experiencing all the time, not just in terms of focus and productivity but anything that triggers the anxiety and dread I’m used to shoving aside. It really is that hard to go to the bank, to walk down the street in a rich White neighborhood, to listen to what you’re saying, to accomplish anything without a plan. Is this really who I am?

While new strategies for getting things done fill me with deep satisfaction and joy, there are also moments of surprise and grief and overwhelm as I realize how much I’ve been “managing” myself in order to try to seem different than I am. I realize the bigness and realness of all the feelings and internal cues I’ve been ignoring and realize I don’t understand how my own mind works at all. I’ve only ever seen it through the lens of what I thought it should look like.

So for now, I’m a jellified lump of unformed newness. I want to finally meet myself, so amidst the tools and apps and plans and timers I am also making time to just let myself be, let my mind wander where it will and observe its patterns, the dance it does. I notice my body more too and what it actually wants to do when it’s not rigid with fear of impossible tasks and unstructured time.

And inside, a very young part of me comes home. Feels safe. Feels seen. Feels, finally, understood.

I’ve been writing this letter to you for days, Wanderer. I didn’t know, when I attended Amanda Yates Garcia’s Full Moon Ritual last night that the practice would be centered on dismantling an old story that no longer serves for a new one that is life-giving. I only knew that on the list of things to bring was a piece of jewelry for turning into a magic amulet. I chose a necklace from a now faraway friend who once really saw me, in ways I hadn’t yet seen myself.

During the ritual we excavated our old stories together, discovered who was telling them and who was listening, and where these stories live in our bodies. Then we wrote new ones, moved the stuck energy in our bodies and spoke our new stories into our amulets, which we consecrated with the elements. I hung mine on the pear tree in my yard under the full moon light, and this morning I scrubbed its tarnished surface with lemon and salt to reveal shining silver underneath.

Just as I now have several apps and tools to help me do my life, I have other spells for this work as well, like the simple red beanie I’m knitting. Everything I make becomes a spell by the time I’ve finished it, a physical representation of something I’m working on, consciously or unconsciously. This pattern, by Hilary Grant, is called the Beacon Pom Hat. In its description she writes: “The hat and the pom pom look particulary striking, like a bright beacon, when created in a single colored yarn.”

It’s about making the invisible visible. It’s about embracing the brightness of a new story.

Beacon Pom Hat in progress

In Body Work, memoirist Melissa Febos describes a workshop in which she told her students to write the entire story of their sexual lives in five sentences. Then she had them do it again, the only stipulation being that they don’t reiterate any of the previous version’s sentences. Then she had them do it a third time. A fourth. “We could do this all day,” she told them.

What she meant was, the stories got better. Truer. They pushed past the stories the writers had been telling themselves and into the place of discovery and deeper, more profound truth—the stuff that keeps writers writing and readers reading.

The reason I started writing in the first place.

A story isn’t finished with the first telling. You don’t only get one story. You get many, as many as you want, as many as you need to find the truth that keeps you moving forward, creating and being created by your life. And you get all the tools, spells and support you need for that purpose. So mote it be.

Inattentively yours,

Sasha

As always, Free Palestine!