A wandering essay

When personal life changes collide with wildfires

I was planning to write an essay sharing about a new move I’m making this year: starting graduate school to become a licensed therapist. I wrote many starts to this essay, and each one only lightly touched on what feels like many important strands of meaning. There were already so many braids starting, of personal meaning intertwined with collective meaning, and then the fires in LA hit this week. I already had so many half-formed ideas about social media, about purpose and function, about financial stability, about identity, and emotional labor, and burnout, and then this week happened and certain things became crystal clear.

I think there is important meaning in those previously mentioned things, but many things I was thinking about or writing about have been revealed to be irrelevant. I have no energy for outrage, or grief, or hot takes on the LA fire situation. I don’t want to talk about this in terms of city politics or compare it to Gaza or discuss celebrity loss vs regular people loss. To get it out of the way — as of now, I am fine, my house is fine, my dog is fine, my partner is fine, and we are spending some time out of the city to get fresh air and to lend our home to some friends who lost theirs. There are so many levels and spectrums to the complexities of people’s lives, and while I am of course outraged that it takes catastrophes like Covid or wildfires for us to prioritize working collectively for the sake of the group, because we value the individuals within the collective, not in spite of individual need like some dystopic communist fantasy —I don’t have any room in my mind or my heart to care about discussing this outrage. I only want to act, to take action in service of the needs of the collective, which includes the needs of the individual, because we can choose to have both. There is no split or divide between the two needs. When we just act compassionately to the best of our abilities, there is no need to choose between the two, they can comfortably merge.

I’m learning how to be a therapist because I will learn how to better honor the individual’s needs, in balance with the collective’s needs, without going through the hyper-personalized lens of my own emotional experience, because I have been emotionally exhausted doing this for the past decade. For a while now, I’ve wanted to get away from doing my work in such a heavy way, with such a reliance on emotional labor and emotional investment. I realized that for me, work has not as simple as doing a task and receiving compensation for that task. Instead, all of my work has felt more like a presentation of myself onto the altar of consumerism, a ripping open of the protective layer of my heart and a pleading request for validation. It’s not that I need the validation on a personal level, but working in art and healing, it feels like I can’t make a living without that acceptance or that validation coming along as a prerequisite. Someone has to believe in me and my powers in order for me to make a living. When no one believes in me, I disappear.

It truly used to be different: I just showed up to the internet back in 2013, 2014 and said here I am, I like Betty Boop and Bart Simpson and I draw and I have deep esoteric thoughts, and the internet understood me.

But now I’m at a point where the constant mining of myself for daily tidbits to offer has drained me dry. I have mined my last diamond for the mirror world. I am actually full of diamonds, but I’m reserving these for real life.

The heyday of IG meant that I never had to explain myself, you just understood. When new people asked me what I did, I could just say I’m Small Spells, and they understood. Now, I try to explain what I do to people and it sounds confusing and convoluted and weird. It’s too many things and none of them are that successful on their own. It only makes sense in the conglomerate, but the conglomerate can’t be really seen anymore.

I’m a tarot reader, but I also drew my own deck! I’m an astrologer but I also do tattoos! I’m an illustrator but I mostly draw for my own zines and projects and tattoos. I’m a tattoo artist who mostly writes essays and talks to people in sessions. I’m a hypnotist but I’m also a ceramicist. I make ceramics but I mostly draw. I do this but I also do that. It’s too much. It all used to enhance each other but now it just feels like an avalanche of amateurism. I imagine the simplicity and clarity of saying I’m a therapist, when people ask what I do. All the rest can still be there, under the surface and a pleasant surprise.

Not to get into too much detail, but the day the fires started I was spending time in the ER, with a skin infection. I was also starting my first week of classes, in this big leap of faith in myself that I’m taking. Because of the confluence of these major events, stressful on their own, two things happened; I asked for and received help and support from caregivers, when my usual mode is to try to do everything for myself on my own, and everything in my mind narrowed down to the immediate: the safety of those I love, the health of my body, and the pursuit of my goals to be a functioning, compassionate part of society. Yes I am grateful my house is intact, with everything I love in it, with my life’s work still around to do whatever action it needs to do still. But it became crystal clear that what is most important in my life is my body, my mind and my heart. Everything else is a reflection of those things which reside inside of me and are never lost until I am. My art and my words and my things are important reflections, they are my sources of joy, as everyone’s preferences and pleasures should be for themselves. But it’s the source that really matters, more than the reflections that echo from it. As long as I have my body, mind and heart, I can create new reflections, forever.

This has been really helpful to move through the anger and grief and frustration I’ve been feeling around my work and the context of my work, for years now. I decided to make the switch to a more “legitimate” form of healing than the work I’ve been doing, for many reasons, mostly financial, but also I just felt unmoored. I felt uncared for, uncared about, like my desire to connect was draining straight from my heart and soul into the garbage can. Intellectually knowing that outside forces were manipulating these feelings doesn’t help to not feel the feelings. However, coming to terms that things are changing, without getting caught on how or why they are, has felt good. I’ve pulled away from sharing so much of my more immediate and undeveloped thoughts online, and this is because things have changed, and it’s no longer a beautiful garden of personal connection, it’s no longer safe to be a person there. I’ve been off IG but went back on for info about the fires, and observed over the past few days how the vibe changed from useful in the immediate, to destructive as the algorithm works its evil magic. In the first days, I saw information about evacuations, updates from friends about their safety, and expressions of sadness. And now it’s back to the usual mis and disinformation, outraged hot takes, opposing viewpoints about the validity of people’s losses, creating a sense of confusion instead of care. When our tools start to make us feel bad, we should stop using them.

These things in our lives, the tools we use, the cultural connections, the stories we tell, have usefulness for specific times and places. Our reflections have purposes that change depending on these times and places. When we get stuck in tools that don’t change, or identities that don’t change, or self-images that don’t change, or patterns that don’t change, we lose effectiveness but we also lose the enjoyment that we feel when a tool meets its purpose and braids together to form a solution. That braid, the process of solving problems together with other people, like interconnected strands of of hair, feels good. It hits some deeper linking mechanism inside us that simply feels good. As much as I never want to spend endless time in an ER again, especially as an out-of-control fire swirls around my city, something inside me clicked into place as I watched the process of care unfold, alongside my mental shift into learning new care practices myself. When each step is taken with healing as the goal, even the most minor interaction can be enough, be just what is needed to feel not alone, not uncared for. For so much of my life, my reactive self felt like I had to be a superwoman, to go above and beyond at every moment in order to feel effective, significant, acceptable. The past few years have been retractive, pulling back the layers of over-doing it, layers of perfectionism, layers of trying to sparkle the brightest in order to cover feelings of inadequacy while also skirting around the edges of just facing things head on. And now, coming into a more humble sense of what it takes to be the person I want to be, it seems like it’s in the tiny moments, the steps we take, the small gestures and words we share with others. It is in feeling like you’re enough, and working to help others feel the same.