Welcome to my spiderweb of thoughts

Why am I starting a Substack now? I’m feeling addicted to information in a way that isn’t helpful, and I think writing more consistently, and tbh, about life things that extend beyond horoscopes and astrology, will help move and organize my thoughts in such a way where the distraction desire will lesson (I hope?). I’ve also been working to “live my work” more, which for me looks like honoring my thoughts, my intuitions, my perspective, my words more. My hypnosis work is all about being in love with how the mind works, in order to use its healing powers more easily, and when my mind is filled with a bunch of random, boring, violent or transactional input from “media”, I can’t really access the unique dance of the constant neural linking of my own mind. I want to feel embodied inside a spiderweb of my own making, so that each thread joins to another one in a strong and sensical way, essentially world-building inside my mind, which naturally makes it easier to then world-build through external action.

I’m feeling really trapped in the false spiderweb of the internet, specifically social media, but also my news feed is now just repeating things that appear on social media, so it’s more than just the apps, its all media. Our reality is being fundamentally altered by trends and algorithms and manipulations, and I don’t like it! An antidote I’ve found is retreating into alternate takes on life — I’ve been getting really into modern re-imaginings of medieval and 1600s life, for many reasons. Thinking of “Everyone Knows your Mother is a Witch,” an excellent read. Or “Matrix,” which I haven’t finished but enjoyed the setting of a medieval perspective. 

So, obviously the main interest for me is reading about witches, witch hunts, witch trials, which centered around the 1600s but whose origins began in more medieval times. Using my modern mind to imagine what it was like for fear of women to become a foundational societal structure, and of course comparing it to our current society’s fear of women. And then there are the parallels with our modern late capitalism serfdom situation that many of us find ourselves in. Truly identifying with the absurd survivalist mentality, especially considering that at that time private property was a relatively new concept, so it’s fascinating to imagine how people emotionally responded to the change from freely using shared resources to owning very little, and the sort of reality show competition vibe that created. Accusing your neighbor of being a witch because your cow died makes more sense when you’re in such desperate competition for previously shared resources. 

But I’m realizing what I really like about this modern imagining of an older time, this projection into a past time that might have some parallels to us, is the idea of assembling your idea of reality from such limited stock, mainly your lived experience, and gossip or second-hand information. No third-party shapers of reality with an agenda, in your face every day. So instead of all of us reading the same news, which is served to us in a particular way, or seeing the same memes, or being fed the same fashion, all with the veneer of discovery, because we “found” it on the interest, when really it was shown to us on the internet by certain companies for certain reasons….instead I would be making things up based on what I was seeing or doing in real life. And of course a lot of this knowledge would be wrong, and some of it would be right, but more importantly, it would all feel real and tangible and potent and meaningful. There is an element of nonsense or fun that comes in when life is such an experiment: will drinking this milk kill me? Maybe, maybe not! Did my horse die of natural causes or because my neighbor looked at it sideways? Who knows! There’s no answer so it could be any answer. And today, I feel like there is still no answer, but there is an assumption of an answer — we’re all knocking on Daddy’s door as if he’s home and there’s no one there. And we can’t really find out anything for ourselves on our own, because we’re all working from the same source material, and simultaneously not trusting our own lived experience, and simultaneously also always trying to escape our own minds. And it’s no fun, because in this internet reality, we all see the same things, we say the same things, we start to look the same, and none of it is weird or funky or pleasurable, in a true sense. A dopamine hit is not the same as pleasure. 

Truthfully, I want to be off of Instagram. For real this time, since I’ve had this feeling for a while now: that my life would be so much better in some ways if I didn’t tap into this poison well every day. And I have been looking less, posting less, caring less, in some ways because real life feels almost as full as it did pre-pandemic, and in some ways because IG is pushing us away by showing us all of the garbage we don’t want and none of the gold we actually want. And while I was about to say, and my livelihood depends on it, it’s actually becoming more true that it doesn’t even function well in that way anymore. Which leads me to things like this Substack. My hope is that you’ll subscribe and contribute a little bit to my world-building, and that I’ll be developing something real here, that can turn into a book, or a new offering, or something I haven’t thought of yet.

I love writing. Not all the time, and not about just anything. But I really do live in my head a lot, and love to piece together thoughts and feelings. And through my work, I’ve discovered that most of the time, when I write about what feels super specific to me, in a super specific way, it ends up also being resonant for others. I’ve also been feeling ever-increasingly confident in my reading skills (tarot and intuition), and trusting in my mind to put together words in interesting and enjoyable ways. And letting myself take pleasure in that, with less self-consciousness, because I’m also training myself to re-engage with “weird and different” instead of “trending and viral”. I personally prefer the unusual to the trending, but even I succumb to the intense marketing of social media apps to be palatable and understandable to everyone.

I always marveled at the way my grandmother spoke (speaks, she is still with us, although I have less conversations with her now as she is over 99 years old). I don’t know if this is just an old-fashioned style, but it was like she had a full sentence constructed in her mind before she started talking (she also had that weird New York, old timey, Mid-Atlantic, fake European sounding movie voice, which is adorable in its snootiness). Not that she was thoughtful, but that she was formal and proper in her speech, almost as a courtesy to whoever she was speaking to. Never an ‘um’ or anything like that. It all just seemed to come out as if she was reading lines already written. My speech is usually more rambling with way too many ‘ums,’ ‘likes,’ ‘uhs,’ etc. Like I don’t know what I’m saying until I’ve said it, which I guess can have its charm if you’re a patient type of person. Except when I am talking during tarot readings. During a reading, I can communicate in paragraphs with the thread totally intact the whole time. I want my relationship with words to change a bit, just to mature and grow up, as a courtesy to you all. Part of this is moving my writing here, away from IG with its word limits and its trends, where opening up my heart and mind has become toxic at the worst and feels futile at best. I want my words to be potent, all of them. A witch uses words as spells: desire is powerful, is enacted through language, and shapes reality. I feel this very much when giving readings, as I know my words are landing more heavily than another type of conversation. 

In these Substack posts I am going to try to write with the same long form intention. And from a place of assembling reality through my own observations and conclusions, uninfluenced, as if I didn’t know much except my own thoughts.