So, I Died, And Now My Life Is A Question Of Should vs. Must

After nearly 3 years of mostly being MIA, I decided that this is the path in life for me after all. With some key changes.

Hello, new readers. This is awkward.

My subscriber count on Substack is in the 700s range, and as far as I know, many of you have no idea who I am because you came here via recommendations. This is both wonderful for me, because I want and experienced a (re)freshening of my slate, and terrible, because I have to figure out how to give context for my voice and my purpose without oversharing. I have to do this conscious construction of myself, again, after v.1.0 got wiped out by an unexpected existential freight train.

Who Am I, Roughly, Again?

Well, I’m in my early 30s, and I’ve lived so much life it’s honestly a bit of a blur. I’ve never had a full-time job (not for lack of trying), and became an unwilling college dropout, despite two full rides and twice over honors college placements (I accidentally got an associate’s degree in Business Administration and Political Science.) While I’ve put my feet into work ranging from business management to marketing to Squarespace design, my main bread and butter has been writing, and working with my Ancestors as a spirit-led practitioner. I made my way from couch-surfing, extremely traumatized, hyperindependent hustler, to living on my own in my (modest) dream apartment in Chicago, by the grace of love of chosen family, my Ancestors, and a lot — and I do mean a lot — of magic.

As I wandered the winding road of ‘where the hell am I going with this whole spirituality and magic thing?’ — my Ancestors brought me to a place several years ago where they shared that they would like me to receive teaching and lifeway guidance that they were going to formulate *together*. I have 5-7 lines of ancestors, depending on how you count them, because I was adopted both as a baby and again as an adult. I am unique and wonderfully special in that this gives me an incredibly strong + robust foundation to nurture + support others from. By broad strokes, I will accept ‘ancestral sorceress’ or ‘ancestral witch’ as a way to describe my spiritual vocation, but my Ancestors specifically gave me the title/role of kasima, which refers to a water well in Swahili. It signifies that I am connected to a large reserve of ancestral insight and revelations (in Afro-Diasporic, Kongolese spirituality, the ancestors are associated with water) — and as a result, I am a ‘well’ of ancestral memory from which people necessary insight about restoring + cultivating well-being and well-doing in their lives within community.

You can call me Bunny, because you’re not my friend, you don’t know me, and I won’t respond to Alexis unless you’re someone I would welcome in my private sanctuary. I use Bunny professionally as a way to also speak to the fact that I am an ‘us’ (not a we, an us) in my spiritual vocation: you may see me as my singular adult self, but I live as, and represent the interests of, my collective ancestors who walk with me, as well as society. This is not the same as a diagnosis like Dissociative Identity Disorder, I do not ‘switch’ between alters, etc. It’s helpful to think of it this way: Dr. Joe Schmoe expresses certain personality traits and qualities while at work as a physician, and in the part of her life as Joe Schmoe, private citizen, she expresses other parts of her personality. That’s what I’m doing here.

So, What’s This About Dying?

In 2016 or so, I got into a public spat with a colleague I was concerned may have unintentionally plagiarised me, and whom I challenged because I felt like the way they were writing about social justice was setting themselves — and contributing to the rest of us — up to experience a reactionary table tilt. I regret to inform everyone that it looks like my spidey sense was accurate about the cultural provocation. I have no comment on anything else.

It was this experience that, in part, prompted me to decide to do what many, many, many other people said was impossible: to thoroughly prepare — magically and otherwise — for my Saturn Return. I booked a Saturn Returncast from the esteemed and inimitable Theresa Reed, and then set about working with my Ancestors and guiding spirits to lay the ground for this transformational gate point in my life. In hindsight, I’d give myself a 97%.

My Saturn Return began the same day Illinois issued its shelter-in-place order for COVID. I exited the pandemic in residence in a modest but extraordinarily luxurious apartment to me, in my dream neighborhood in Chicago with a gorgeous view of Lake Michigan, in my dream building. I didn’t have health insurance and I was bed bound for 18 hours a day from the stress of self-employment and spending 10 years struggling with knowing how to find or ask for help, knowing with certainty I had never had COVID, deeply at peace, and finding myself preparing to die. Not out of a place of distress, or desire to evacuate the planet — quite the opposite! I was deeply content with my life and with myself for the first time in my 30-some-odd years of being — but just acceptance that my health was worsening, doctors weren’t helping, and I had a vague sense at this point that it was magical in nature, and the support I needed was out of reach. I asked my Ancestors to help me learn how to die well, so I wouldn’t be afraid and cling, and cause myself anymore suffering.

As luck would have it, that’s…not what happened, and the death I experienced wasn’t quite what I was thinking of either, strangely enough. Disaster struck my ceremony, realizing several of my worst fears in a fell swoop both real and sensorial. The cascading impact of sorting out the rubble, healing myself, holding myself + others accountable, and vaporizing my sense of self, was that my definitely-would-have-happened-anyways relationship with my now-husband emerged from the ashes, as our Ancestors mutually intended. I returned from the perfect realization that it was just another Tuesday, to discover that magic was really real, not just ‘real’.

What followed was a surprise relocation to Philadelphia (living on my Chiron line), complete dissolution of my ability to live and function independently, major changes to my understanding of my health, experiences of the magical + occult on an octave that even spooked the hell out of me with my 20-ish years of experience under my belt, and the complete and utter collapse of most of my ‘community’, including several close relationships that caused me an incredible amount of distress. My intuition and magical pilot light got turned off for a bit, so I turned to astrology to help me find my way and recontextualize myself in the world. I’m back in 5-digits worth of debt, but somehow we only managed to accumulate balances in the range of what I earned after taxes and expenses my very last year in ‘serious’ business, even though it’s been almost three years of sabbatical at this point.

Such is the way of a Saturn 8th house transit (in Pisces! lucky me!) paired with transit Chiron *and* Uranus cozying up to my Midheaven.

(Thus the 97%. I forgot the cardinal rule of Mother Time’s purview: always think ahead 🫠)

It would be incredibly difficult, and probably, ultimately, unsafe and unwise, to try to explain many of the things I have experienced to an audience in detail. Despite the insistence of whiteness and late stage capitalism, some things do need to be gate kept — not out of control, or hierarchy, but safety. I am reminded of a story in the Talmud of Rabbi Akiva and three of his students/fellow rabbis finding their way to Pardes (paradise, the garden; this is also an acronym for the primary exegetical approach of most Jewish thinkers when engaging text.) Cutting down saplings is a grave, grave harm.

For the last few months, as Saturn inches closer to her ingress into Aries (Baruch HaShem), Chiron moved off my Midheaven, and the rest of the stars continue their ever-ongoing sojourns, it’s like a fog lifted and the protective cocoon of enchantment has become more clear. Had I not dedicated myself so deeply and sincerely to the call of my personal responsibility — if I had listened to the people who told me what I was doing was an impossible task — I would not have been equipped to be in the relationships that kept me alive while I underwent these profound changes. I would not have survived, especially undergoing this alone while surrounded by a world further driven by and into the madness of kyriarchal capitalism, genocide, and decay.

But this now begs the question: now what?

Making The Impossible Real

I originally thought that I would find myself, eventually, back to work as a spiritualist.

But as I waded into the language of shared beingness — astrology — it became very clear to me that the old way of doing things was a complete non-starter. So to fill my time, I applied for a scholarship to attend the practitioner/facilitator training for Trauma of Money, and then my sister Graeme gifted me ilovecreative’s Squarespace Design course. I ferreted out the useful-to-me bits of Human Design (tl;dr: it’s just like, a data visualization dashboard for astrology and the sync of it with I Ching. The “Kabbalah” stuff is bullshit), and I did more dominatrix trainings, alongside expressive arts coaching facilitation training, too. You know, as one does. I have hypnotically breathed my way through (re)birthing myself, a control freak bridezilla, but make her…an ancestral sorceress witch in the 21st century.

I eventually realized that I’ve spent 20 years — constantly trying and failing miserably at it — to fully sublimate myself into the needs of others, trying to find safety in being needed. That’s a pattern of behavior encouraged of all parts of me as a femme being in a multi-hyphenated, historically marginalized identity. Over responsibility has been as real and painful as overgiving. It feels like a cruel joke to come to the very clear conclusion that what is right and true for me in this moment that is so dire and deeply antithetical to my values politically, is: I’m a full-time working artist who does whatever the fuck I want between pots of tea and sessions of home Pilates. Turns out, my intuition - while keenly aware of all the dangers — says this isn’t a moment for me to fight in or for. As much as I hate it, as much as it conflicts me to say it: I agree.

I don’t know how I’m going to pay these bills, to be frank. Especially because RB left his gig on my intuition, so now we’re living off savings, and the job market is batshit. Thankfully we have two beautifully placed Jupiters - mine in my 2nd House; his in his 10th — so we have extraordinarily good luck for surviving late-stage capitalism and superpower implosion as a unit, and, you know, I’m a seasoned witch. But then again, while it’s true I have no idea what I’m doing, I have also been here once (…mm, thrice) before, feeling like I hit the lowest of the low, shortly before my life began to finally turn a major corner in a major way. So the pattern holds true. I will magic my way out of Hell like the escape artist my Ancestors have taught me to be. My joy and joyful existence is, genuinely, defiant, given how…nearly all of them were and would still face systemic violence.

Substack is where I’ve decided to document this new becoming, much in the way I once documented this process (mixed with way too much personal shit) for Facebook, before it became a cesspit for my mental health and to interact with other people in, of course. My only goal at this juncture is to regularly post with meaningful substance for me, not an algorithm, an audience, or any outside expectations. Just me and only me, because if I think too hard about the rest of you, my ability to access my own inner safety vanishes. It’s a method of mastering and alchemizing the balance of ‘should’ vs. ‘must’, to favour the liberation of self-certainty. (shout out to Elle Luna, whose book I am reading again, for the 3rd or 5th time.)

Thanks for hanging in here if you do stick around for these odd dispatches. Gd knows I’m not, lol.