It’s called Yearbook of You, and it’s a 52-week self-discovery program built around the 40 numbered cards of tarot’s Minor Arcana. Each week you spend time with one Minor Arcana card, and do a ritual and prompt to connect with your life more deeply. It’s not reading spreads. It’s a structure for paying attention to your own life for a full year, with time to connect with the cards and build something like a personal reference by the end.

It runs anniversary-to-anniversary, meaning your year starts whenever you join. You can pick any annual threshold that’s important to you. I’m starting on my birthday this time, but there’s no need to wait for that if you’re eager to check it out.

Why isn’t this here on Substack?

Yearbook of You needed its own home. It runs on a weekly delivery schedule and functions more like a living program than a publication. This Substack, every thing changes, is where I write as myself and about reflections that connect people with change and transitions. I wanted to keep that separate from a structured, year-long container. So Yearbook of You lives at YearbookofYou.com, and is supported by delivery automation in beehiiv. It means that anyone who joins can experience the program on their own timeline.

How do I access Yearbook of You?

You can read the intro, FAQ, and the first two weeks of the practice completely free. Give your email and you get through week five. If it resonates, full membership is a flat $70 for the full year (not a recurring subscription), including a companion journal and monthly calls with me and others participating in the program.

What I’ll be doing: I’m doing the whole year myself, right alongside anyone who joins, and I’ll be posting about it on Instagram (@changewithaja) as I go. I invite you to follow me there to see how I experience the rituals and reflections week by week, in real time.

If any of this sounds like something exciting, I’d love for you to start.

Check out Yearbook of You

This is a monthly roundup. Thank goodness it’s summer.

Happy July everyone!

This is my birthday month, my favorite of the year. I love a good threshold, and this year is delivering.

For endings: June marked the end of my kid’s school year, and the end of my psychedelics facilitation program!

For beginnings: I’ll share that I’ve been posting less frequently because I’ve been working hard to finish a project that’s been years in the making! I plan to release it on my birthday in mid-July.

I’ve got to turn my attention back to that, but will leave you with a list of ways I’m entertaining myself through the lazy days.

• Rebecca Nagle’s new podcast First America “unveils how the founders’ treatment of Indigenous nations—and their resistance—shaped US democracy.” The series extends the tradition of examining United States history from other perspectives (see also Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project).

• Literally just released – Sex on Murder Island, the sequel to comedian Jo Firestone’s hilarious reality TV satire Murder on Sex Island. Murder on Sex Island was initially released in installments as a podcast with saucy instrumental theme music. Jo is an amazing narrator. Listen to or read both books while at the beach.

• I’m sure you’ve heard how fun Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay is – it’s a rare blend of horror and comedy. Episode 4: Beach Reads is my FAV. Parts of the show were filmed on the little island I used to live on in New England. I’ve also been watching Apple TV’s re-imagination of Cape Fear.

• I just made my first batch of homemade chili crisp because I was tired of giving David Chang and Jing all my money for just a few ounces of condiment. Super easy recipe. I added five spice powder and crispy garlic to this batch.

• I rent a quirky little house in the middle of Seattle that has established herb gardens, apple and plum trees, and a large raspberry patch. It is plum season and we have a BIG crop this year. We’re going to start with large batches of jam, but I’ll let you know what other recipes are good enough to repeat.

Tell me what you’re reading, listening to, eating…

This is the third in a series of interviews with people I know going through transitions.

As an undergrad, I studied abroad in Turks and Caicos. I still get made fun of when I mention this as school. People laugh that I must have just sat on the beach with tropical drinks for credit. This is far from true, but the experience was rare and transformative. One of the biggest gifts from my study aboard experience, besides it being the gateway to my career, has been that it also put me on the path to to meeting this magical human: Cinda Scott.

Cinda is 48 years old, a marine biologist originally from Massachusetts. For a while, she had what a lot of people might consider a dream job. She spent eleven years as the director of a study abroad program in Bocas del Toro, Panama. While there, she introduced US students to rainforest and ocean ecosystems, marine governance, and environmental policy in that region. She recently returned to New England, in her first year home, trying to figure out what comes next.

When I asked her to describe herself, she started with her parents.

“I’m the product of two overachieving people. My dad was a PhD in sociology. My mom had an EdD in higher education administration. Going to college, going to grad school, that was instilled in me from a very young age.” She paused. “And I think [my upbringing also instilled] this whole problem of hyper-overachieving. When you do go through transitions and you’re trying to figure out what the next step is, when everything’s not in a row, it can feel like failure almost. Even though you’ve not failed at anything. It feels like you don’t know where you’re supposed to be because growing up in that environment, everything was planned. It’s like, okay, you’re going to go to college, you’re going to go to grad school, you’re going to achieve, you’re going to do all these things. And then suddenly if you find yourself in a transition, or not enjoying what you’ve done your whole life, you suddenly are like, wait a second, something’s not…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need her to because I was nodding with my whole body. I was raised on the east coast on the same academic treadmill, and have written here about the challenges of learning that a linear path is not the only option.

The transition she’s navigating started with eleven years of giving everything she had.

“I was just burned out. Eleven years of working with students very, very intimately, very closely. It just got to the point where I was exhausted. I was taking care of 36 people every single day, all the time. Constant questions, constant demands. It just got to the point where I had had enough.”

She’s an empath, she said her aunt recognized in her the gift and challenge attuning to and absorbing people’s feelings. “I tend to take on a lot of other people’s emotions, and that’s very draining. I’m very extroverted, but I’m also very introverted. I’m an extroverted introvert. When I need time alone and time out, like I really need it. I was the queen of being at a party and then just disappearing. My friends were like, ‘Did you come home?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I did.’ Because once I’m done, I’m done.”

The director role, essentially mothering college students in many of their first experiences living in another country, left no room to recharge. And the loneliness of the role compounded it. “Because I was the director, I couldn’t confide in anyone about a lot of the things that were happening, other than my other peers who were around the world. And it wasn’t always easy to get a hold of them. So I was beginning to feel just really isolated.”

She was also ready. “I knew I was ready in my heart to leave the island. I was ready to leave, not the relationships that I built or the community that I was involved in, but I was ready for something bigger and different. I had a whole vision board. I had put my whole energy, my whole self into getting myself out.”

What was easy about coming home, she said, was falling back into the rhythm of life in the United States, where access to many basic necessities is standard.

“It was easy to move back a little bit into the comfort space. I could go to a grocery store and not worry about not having things. I didn’t have to lug a five-gallon jug of water into my house to have drinking water. I could turn the tap on.”

Living on a tropical island is not the fantasy people imagine. “I was always dirty. You’re always constantly dirty.” She described tourists arriving in white linen, and the knowing look she’d give them. As soon as it rained, they’d be a sloppy brown mess. “You constantly have mud on the back of your shirt because when you ride your e-bike into town and it just slightly rains, all that gets splashed up on your back. Or you just have a deluge on your way to work and you show up wet.”

The last few years in Panama, she found herself dreaming about comforts that don’t even register for many of us living in temperate climates. “I even wanted to wear certain things. I’d be like, I wonder what it’d be like to wear a nice sweater. And people are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s crazy.’ But when you live in one extreme, you dream about the other.”

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What’s been difficult is the same thing: the sameness.

“I sometimes feel like I’m not really living by just doing the same thing over and over. You get stuck in a routine and suddenly you wonder, what else can I be doing? What else is there for me to do and explore? I get a feeling of boredom with the sameness that I can’t quite describe, but it seems to nag at me.”

She’d been reading an article about car colors the morning we talked — how they’ve narrowed over the years to white, black, gray. The reds and yellows and greens have mostly disappeared. “I pulled into the lot and I looked around and I was like, oh my god. We’re all just creeping towards the sameness. Everything is just routine.” She laughed a little. “They tell you when you have a transition to create a routine. But then when your routine is so routine, you’re like, well, this isn’t helping me.”

Part of what’s made it harder is the cultural return. She grew up in Massachusetts, remembered what it was like to live among people in the Northeast. “I thought, ‘I know these people, it’ll be fine.’ But I haven’t been in the US living here in so long that it has been a very jarring return. People are not as open and welcoming. I’m used to hugging and kissing everybody and even strangers and saying hello in the street.”

She went to a tennis clinic. The man next to her was decked out in Brown University gear, making sure everyone knew where he’d been. “It’s like a cloak of armor. He wanted everybody to know how important he was and where he’d been to school. And of course he’s a good tennis player, but you’re not Federer here. You’re at a clinic with me.” She shook her head. “Not even a hello.”

She contrasted it with Panama without hesitation. “In Panama, no matter what level you are, whether you think you’re super fancy or not, you’re going to say hello, and you might come up afterwards and have a drink with all of us at the bar. That’s the difference. People still communicate with each other there. They still have a sense of community because it’s a collectivist society. Whereas in the US, because we’re so individual, it’s still very hard for us to even imagine embracing someone just out of the blue.”

She’s building her way toward community in Rhode Island. It’s slow. But her core group of friends and family has held her steady through all of it.

There is one more loss woven into this year. Her dog died. He had been her companion for all eleven years in Panama. “When he died, the whole island, I got bombarded with text messages because they all knew him, and they all knew that we were a pair. And so it’s just a beautiful thing that an entire community wrote to me to let me know. I even got a message today from someone and I was just overcome with grief because everybody knew that he was like my kid and I lost him.”

Confiding in people who truly know you, she said, is what gives her steadiness. Even the mundane walks and gym visits. “Getting energy from people who truly know you and care for you is really important.”

I asked what she would say to another woman standing at the beginning of a transition like this one, or to herself before she started.

“I had to tell myself that it was just time for bigger things. I just kept saying: No, it’s time for bigger things. You did an awesome job here. You educated over 250 students. You gave yourself. You gave your all. You left it all on the dance floor. But it’s just time to do bigger things and to see what else you’re capable of, because we’re all capable of so much more.” She paused. “I feel like I kind of need to tell myself that right now.”

She is optimistic she’ll land somewhere great. “But it’s a very slow process.”

What she wrote in her notes: ground yourself in familiar things. Set a routine. Give yourself grace and the space to keep growing.

She is doing that. Even when the parking lot is all white and black and gray. Even when she’s still asking, what next?

That question, she’s learned, is not a problem. It’s the thing that keeps life in you.

Cinda Scott is a marine biologist and environmental educator. She is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

This interview is part of an ongoing series about women navigating significant transitions. If you know someone whose story should be told here, reach out.

I draw one or a few tarot cards to help set intentions for many events. Before my final practicum for my psychedelic facilitation certification, one of the cards I pulled was Temperance.

Temperance is a snore of a card for me. When Temperance shows up in a reading, I have a strong lurch of internal resistance. Ugggghhhh slow down. Restraint. I think of sensible shoes and fiber and pulling yourself back from extremes. In the context of my recent psilocybin experience, the message was about my kids. They’re middle schoolers and my time living with them feels like it’s already dangerously close to ending. I read Temperance as a need to pull back to home, to ensure I make the most of my remaining time with them through their late adolescence. I’ve also been itching to switch up my living situation. I need at least another half bathroom if I’m going to survive the teen years, but can’t move until I know where they’ll go to high school.

I know myself. I get bored and take on too many projects. I jump to move even when I know that waiting a bit longer would make the next step a little more clear (in this case, high school plans). I do NEED Temperance right now to help me slow my roll for the next two years until I can adjust.

(I’m apparently not alone in my complicated feelings about this and other cards — of Tarot Underground recently asked her readers which card they’d banish from the deck forever. If you’re learning tarot, her direct, fun style is worth your time.)

Several of my tarot resources focus on Temperance as something more dynamic and alchemical than my boring associations. Chris-Anne (Light Seer’s Tarot) writes that Temperance “calls you to create your purposeful blend using moderation and patience as ingredients.”

So I’ve been sitting with how to make moderation, patience, and steadiness more dynamic, like a well-balance dish. Ways to make the waiting feel less like purgatory and more like something chosen with joy. Here’s what I came up with:

Max Where You Are

Stop waiting for [X thing] to happen before you let yourself be comfortable. The cocktail glasses you keep passing over until you have the new house and the right hutch to put them in. Your watercolor painting habit you’ll get back to as soon as you get through that big work obligation. The logic goes: I’ll do that / get that once things are more settled. But things are settled enough. You live here now.

Waiting for a perfect situation before you can have any delight is a form of austerity. In this case, rebalance the austerity by making the best possible version of the situation you’re in. Delight is available exactly where you are.

For me this includes doing everything I can to make my current living situation as comfortable and supportive as possible, even with the knowledge that I’m going to leave it soon.

Riff to make fun of restraints

Restraint can make you resourceful and creative, particularly with a little structure.

Three examples that come to mind are:

1. My friend @Melissa travels with one art material and leans into just creating with what she chose to bring. She says the limitation “quiets the part of my brain that wants to get everything perfect, and wakes up the part that just has to work with what’s here.”

Melissa Small

Art Souvenir

I have a practice when I travel: I bring one art material. A tube of blue paint, a black pen, a pencil, or a few colored pencils tucked into a pocket of my travel bag…

Read more

4 months ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · Melissa Small

2. The 100 Day Project (originally of Yale Professor Micheal Beirut) engages people to choose a creative project, do it every single day for 100 days, and document and share the process. What a beautiful way to study how your craft evolves for a quarter of a year.

3. The 75 Hard Style Challenge, where you dress intentionally from your closet for 75 days and don’t buy anything new, is all over social media at the start of the year. I like that this challenge forces you to engage with your own closet.

The challenge isn’t the point — the container is. When you know the parameters, the patience stops feeling like waiting and starts feeling like playing and crafting.

Get a Little Smug About It

Here’s a shadier emotion that doesn’t get enough credit: smugness. We’re told to transcend the petty feelings, but sometimes the petty feelings are exactly what gets us through.

I started drinking 24 ounces of warm lemon water every morning before coffee. I’ve been at it for more than two months. My hydration is immaculate right now and I know it. That little hit of satisfaction? It’s what makes the habit stick.

If smugness (or another controversial one, spite) is what keeps you going, use it.

I’m learning to make peace with Temperance. It’s not a card about stopping and white knuckling. It’s a card about tending. You’re not patiently waiting for your life to start, or staying away from the extremes lest they sweep you away. You’re in the constant process of creating something beautiful with what you have.

How are you using patience and moderation to create something magical in your life?

I’m sharing my final essay from my psychedelics facilitator training, which I’m days from completing! I’ll share one more post with my last applied training experience. After that, I’d love to respond to write some posts to address things you’re curious about in the growing psychedelic field. Vote in the poll below to let me know what you’d like me to cover, or reply in the comments!

I started my final project for my facilitator practice in January, in the middle of winter in Seattle. I was inspired by my training program’s suggestion to research our own ancestry and how our ancestors practiced having a relationship with the land. My family is from the Caribbean and New Orleans, and I assume my roots lead back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade prior to that. I looked to the folklore and spirituality that survived the diaspora. Many African diasporic populations reference Orishas: deity, spirit, or divine forces in the Yoruba religion of West Africa. Right away, I found an Orisha that happens to share my name. The Orisha Aja is the spirit of the forest, its animals, and the secrets of herbal medicine, a divine teacher who takes seekers into the woods to reveal nature’s mysteries and returns them as healers. Isn’t that just the most sparkling treasure for a gal named Aja studying to support seekers with plant medicines to find!? Anyway, I planned to build an altar in my garden, make daily herbal offerings to the Orisha Aja, and sit each day in meditation.

I tried. The altar felt forced, the sitting felt wrong, and the wet cold of a Pacific Northwest January made the whole thing feel off. So I walked instead.

Every day I took myself outside and paid close, deliberate attention to what was growing around me. I live in a forested city. My neighborhood has mature trees, both overgrown lots and stunning Pacific Northwest landscaped gardens, and a creek corridor with a sacred spring the Duwamish People once used for medicinal and cultural activity. I decided that my offering would be my attention. I would show up, look carefully, and let the natural world teach me whatever it wanted to teach me.

The first lesson was that I was wrong about the winter. Some of us carry a conception of winter as a time of year when nothing around us is growing at all. Intellectually, I understood that winter is not death, that what looks like stillness is actually a stage in the cycle of life gathering itself for spring. But when it is really rainy and dark, it is hard to feel like that is true. The walks changed that. They showed me it was happening all the time, that growth was always persisting, that the world was full of motion I had trained myself not to see.

I kept noticing a tree blooming everywhere. Clusters of deep pink and red flowers, waxy and perfect, opening in January when I expected everything to be dormant. My first assumption was climate change. Of course things were blooming early. Of course the seasons were confused. I would go home and look up the species I had seen, bracing myself to learn that warming temperatures had pushed them out of their natural rhythm. Except they weren’t confused. The tree is Camellia japonica, and it is a winter bloomer. It has always bloomed in winter. The confusion was mine!

I had been moving through Seattle winters for years telling myself a story about a dead season. Grey, wet, blah. I had been looking without seeing. The Camellia was never early. I just hadn’t learned what winter actually looked like.

I started paying closer attention. I learned the sequence: camellia in January, crocus pushing through the cold soil in February, the first cherry blossoms in March. The whole winter, I discovered, is a slow and steady procession toward spring. You can track it if you know what to look for.

The first lesson was simple: things are always growing and changing, no matter what stage of the cycle. Even the stages that look like nothing is happening are stages where something is persisting, preparing, and waiting.

This is what I came to understand about my practice: devotion doesn’t always look like stillness. Sometimes it looks like movement. Sometimes it looks like paying enough attention to learn the name of something that has been around you all along.

Around the same time I was walking and watching, I was also noticing something uncomfortable in my training. I kept trying to hold my environmental work and my healing work as two separate things. Twenty years of fisheries management, ocean policy, watching ecosystems navigate collapse and recovery on one side. Psychedelic facilitation, coaching, the interior landscape on the other. I told myself the first career was what I was leaving. The second was where I was going.

The medicine and the study kept disagreeing with me. And the walks started to reconnect those parts of me. Being in nature and connecting the practice of honoring the natural world to psychedelic work brought it all back into the same picture. These were not competing identities. They were different expressions of the same person practicing different forms of attention.

That is not a different skillset from psychedelic facilitation. That is the same skillset. I just hadn’t understood what I had been practicing.

I hadn’t understood it, but perhaps my name had known all along. I discovered the Orisha Aja during my training. I have been a student of forests and oceans my entire professional life. My daily practice became walking in the trees. And my name, it turns out, is one I share with a healer diety who works in exactly that space, at the threshold between the natural world and the interior world.

I also spent this season intentionally building relationships with Black psychedelic practitioners. I traveled to Oakland for a Black psychedelic leadership training. Part of my training encouraged us to look into how our ancestors held reverence for the sacred, the unknown, our connection to the planet. I took that invitation seriously. There are only a few times in my academic and professional life when the entire room of people I was learning or working with looked like me. I spent the time leading up to and after thinking about who I am called to serve and why my particular background matters.

Like it or not, the psychedelic space has an elitism to it. It is not strongly diverse. The voices you hear most, the faces in the rooms, the stories that get told about what psychedelic healing looks like do not reflect the full range of people who could be served by this work. And I know, not as a belief but as a lived understanding, that the comfort and resonance someone can receive from a psychedelic experience is shaped in part by the facilitator. The person holding the space is part of what makes the container safe.

I started reading about psychedelic use for Black communities specifically, about using psychedelics to heal racial trauma. I read several books, but the one that stayed with me most was Black Psychedelic Revolution by Nicolas Powers. Its concluding argument is that the psychedelic movement will truly be revolutionary not when it becomes more accessible as a consumer product, but when people can use psychedelics in community to heal traumas they have experienced not just individually but collectively. That is a different shape of this work. It asks different questions about who facilitates, who is in the room, and what shared experience makes possible.

I started to think about what I uniquely bring to that vision. I am a Black woman. I am a child of Caribbean immigrants. I am an environmental scientist who has spent her career in deep connection with coastal fishing communities. I share the experience of moving through the world in a Black body with other Black people, and that is central to what I can offer as a healer. There is a perfect person to hold space for everyone. Part of my work is becoming the right holder for the people who need what I carry.

My ancestry, my twenty years of watching complex environmental systems, my walking attention to a winter that is actually full, all seemed seemed so disjointed before deeply reflecting on my learning experience. I thought I was building a new practice. What I was actually doing was learning to see what had been flowering all along.

This is the second in a series of interviews with people I know going through transitions.

This one is my mother. I used the same simple set of questions from the last interview, and plan to continue that for all the pieces in this series. I wondered how the questions would function in a situation where I know a lot of the story that shapes the answers. I learned the questions produce insightful answers regardless. The more difficult part was parsing back through our transcript, because we speak to each other as any talkative family members would, in overlapping sentences and shorthand.

My mother’s name is Anelda. She is 63 years old, born in Antigua. Let’s start with some dreamy pics of her from when she was a teen.

My mother has lived in Baltimore for 26 years. When I asked what she considers her calling in life, she said, “I think I’m a connector. It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge that.”

This is a funny answer if you know her. She knows a lot of people. My mother is one of the most disarmingly warm humans you’ll ever meet. My whole life, I’ve watched her walk into a grocery store or any old place for a five minute errand, and walk out with plans to help someone later that week, information about someone’s aunt who recently went into the hospital, a new best friend. She balances her extroversion with alone time and a tight inner circle. “My immediate family is primary. Then I have a few select friends that I am in touch with daily who I consider my core tribe.”

I asked her to describe a transition that has been significant recently.

“My husband passed. I lost my job. The past two years have been stressful trying to sustain myself financially. But by the grace of God, I managed with the help of family and friends.”

Her deceased husband and my stepfather, Roy Crosse, had been making art his entire life. It was literally the only kind of work he ever had. His pieces had been installed in museums in the United States and abroad. But when they moved to Baltimore in the early 2000s, they turned part of their large row home into his studio and workspace. The rest they used as a gallery. Roy displayed his work on the upper floors and used the lower floors to promote other artists. This meant that he spent the last years of his life hosting more exhibitions for other people than he ever did for himself.

After he passed in 2014, my mother was left with a large body of his work and a set of hard facts.

“My husband left a large body of artwork that I was automatically in charge of.” She later lost her job, and considered the possibility of selling their large house in the list of next steps. She realized “I could accomplish two objectives: get my hubby’s artwork out to the world, and use the proceeds to sustain myself and my home. So after living with these items for so long on my own, I had to prepare to let them go.”

I asked what made the transition easier.

The answer started practical. She looked at what she had.

“Technically having no money, the thing that I have is this house and I have the artwork. Those are the two things. And it’s like, okay, why are you holding on to all this stuff, and where are you going to go with it?”

She started reaching out to several museums around Baltimore. Some museums expressed interest that ultimately didn’t result in exhibitions. Other galleries offered contracts that would have meant signing away her rights. She said no. She finally found a good match with Eubie Blake Cultural Center and started on the long process of preparing his work for a show.

That process has taken almost a year, partly because Roy started making art before the internet existed. There is nothing about him online. No digital archive, no website. So Anelda has been working with an archivist who comes over every couple of weeks. They sit on the floor together reading through yellowed articles and old exhibition records. My mom makes beans and rice. They sit there, piecing together a history that was never digitized.

But beyond the logistics, what made the transition easier was something she appreciates about Roy’s work itself. She remarked on the objective beauty of his art, but also something that she noticed about his art in contrast to what she saw in other exhibits. She has spent a lot of time in recent years going to art shows around Baltimore for her own education.

“Art is very personal. But a lot of the exhibitions I’ve gone to, I thought were too personal. Like, things that were so representative of the artist that it was more representative of the artist than say a piece that I would buy to be in my house. I don’t want your face in my living room.”

I laughed, because that is exactly how she talks.

“That’s the one thing that I really, really love about Roy’s work. I could take one of his paintings and put it in somebody’s house and it would fit in. Even without knowing that it was created by him, it fits into your home and it compliments it in some way.”

She has lived inside his art for the length of their relationship. She knows what it does in a room. And she knew that Roy would have wanted her to do this. What she was holding onto, she realized, wasn’t really about love. It was about habit.

“It’s more habit that I’ve gotten so used to the pieces. It’s here. I’m used to it. And embracing change, because like you say, everything changes! And it does. It comes down to, how are you going to embrace that change? Are you going to embrace it with anger, or with feeling sorry for yourself, or finding something, like, some active way to make it relevant to you and possibly to other people?”

I asked what was hardest.

“Just coming to terms with the fact that things have changed. That was hard. It was really hard.”

Not the logistics of organizing for a gallery exhibit. The acceptance.

“This is a new chapter. And coming back to embracing that things are going to be different regardless. Things have changed. So what are you going to do?”

I was there, years ago, helping her sort through things right after Roy passed. She was processing his death and simultaneously realizing she had to deal with an enormous body of work. I don’t think we could have done what she’s doing now back then. It wasn’t time yet.

She told me about a friend whose husband passed around the same time as Roy. Twelve years later, all of his things are still in the house. His closet is untouched. Anelda has offered help, but her friend declined.

“She’s just not ready. And who knows. It’s a different timeline for all of us.”

About five years after Roy’s passing, Anelda started gathering his things into one room. She calls it the Roy room. It’s set up like a small library and archive now.

Before the show, she went through the works she truly loved and moved them upstairs in her house where no one would see them. When the exhibition finally came together and a crew showed up to pack everything, she told me it felt like she was moving. The walls were suddenly empty. She said the same to the gallery director, who told her: “You’re not moving. You’re moving ahead.”

That loosened something. “It made me feel like I’m making space to be able to deal with all the changes that have happened in my life, and I hadn’t before.”

Now, when the gallery calls to say a piece has sold, she knows exactly which one before they finish the description.

“I’ve been so intimate with these pieces over the years. Like, automatically I know which one. There’s thirty pieces in the show. I said yes, it was hanging at such and such a place in my house. I remember where everything was.”

I asked what gave her strength.

“Honestly, really my family and friends. It was just nice to know that they were being supportive and encouraging. So many people asked if there were things they could do to help, but a lot of it I had to do myself, because I literally had to go through things and find what they wanted to know. I had to sit on the floor and go through things, and I just couldn’t ask anybody to, because they didn’t know what I was looking for either.”

But the support mattered. People called. People brought food. People checked in.

“It just really made me cherish the people I chose to associate with and hang around. It is really important to be connected.”

Her aunt once told her: “Whatever you do, Anelda, it’s very important that you have companionship as you get older.” I think my aunt meant a husband. My mom really loves living on her own. She told me this plainly and without apology. But companionship doesn’t have to mean one person or a partner. It means tending to all the relationships you have.

She told me a friend of hers put it more bluntly: you need friends of all ages, because the ones closer to your age are going to die off, and you need the next group ready.

“She broke it down like that. And she’s sort of right. You just need to foster friendship and community. I passionately love being by myself. But though I like being by myself, I like being with other people. The knowing that I get to be by myself later on, that’s what matters. You have to have some sort of balance.”

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I asked what she would say to other women going through something similar.

“I started to look at my fear and perceived loss as an opportunity to be able to move on. I broke it down into tiny bits.”

She told me she had written something down on a piece of paper, and walked away from the video call to grab it. This is another thing of my mom that I now do. All my life, she’s written little, hopeful, inspirational quotes on post-it notes or scraps of paper, or sometimes taken the time to frame them. She puts them around the house in places where people linger. Like near the kitchen sink, where you might meditate on the words a little bit while you’re standing washing dishes. It’s a habit I picked up in the notes app on my phone, in a journal I take with me everywhere I go.

She calls it the Three-Part Change Process.

This one said: “Number one is purpose. Number two is truth. And the third thing is action.”

Purpose is knowing why. “What’s important to you about this? Why do you want to do it?”

Truth is knowing what you have. “My truth is I know what I have. I know what I can do. I know the importance to me. And just live with that.”

Action is doing the thing.

“It sounds so easy. Purpose, truth, action. But it’s not.”

And when the nostalgia hit, when she found herself caught in the grief of a particular piece leaving the house, she would come back to it.

“When I found myself just getting nostalgic about things, that was what I reverted back to. Okay, how is this going to help you in the long run? And that helped me to get through whatever emotion I was feeling about any specific piece.”

When she first said “break it down into little bits,” I thought she was referring to breaking the task of getting the exhibit together into small tasks. It’s interesting that she was actually referring to the mental steps to make the decision to act.

She is in a paring-down phase now. Not just the art. Everything in the house that doesn’t have a clear reason to be there.

I’ve lost elders recently, and have elders in my family who won’t be around much longer. I’ve been through the devotion of sorting through the physical items loved ones leave behind. I have anxiety about what’s coming in the back of my mind, that I’ve only just begun. Objects hold the shape of a life you shared with someone. Letting the objects leave the house is not the same as letting the person go. But it is not nothing, either.

My mother looked at what she had. She told herself the truth about what she needed. And she made a choice to act. I see it as not turning away from my stepfather, but towards supporting herself and sharing his gifts with the world.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’m proud of you.

Anelda Peters is a connector, community builder, and the steward of the estate of artist Roy Crosse. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. An exhibition of Roy Crosse’s art is at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center through June 6, 2026. You can view photos of the opening night for the exhibit here.

This interview is part of an ongoing series about women navigating significant transitions. If you know someone whose story should be told here, reach out.

This is a monthly roundup. This month, it's all about other amazing people.

Happy May!

One of my goals this year was to focus on building community. April surprised me. I was healing from a big surgery, but the month felt overflowing with connection. My existing deep connections showed up in force with flowers and food. I’m healing quickly and don’t have the symptoms that led to the surgery. This meant I had energy and some genuinely life-giving chances to meet new people. This month’s roundup will feature those connections.

I’d love it if you’d share something that brought you new energy over the last month in the comments.

• My dear, talented friend led a box beading workshop at Common Area Maintenance in downtown Seattle. Fine motor skills, creativity, and learning a very fiddly new art form was perfect for meeting new friends. Melissa flitted around the room helping people through tricky transitions, and my heart warmed to watch those people turn and pass the knowledge on to others in the group. What if we did that more in life every day? Just helped out a stranger when we figured out something tricky? Check out her most recent post, on returning to old practices to learn something new.

• I attended one of ’s Shared Dreaming Sanctuaries. Denise Shante created a soft, cozy space for a small group of us to lend our creative fire to each other to imagine new directions for our dream projects. The whole thing was an honor: to witness someone in the vulnerability of sharing an idea they’re still working through, and to fan their passion with new ideas. I left the meetings hopeful – people are still making art and willing to help each other. In her latest post, she recites one of her poems: if I left this world today, I’d be OK.

feeling our futures

if I left this world today, I'd be OK

Y’all didn’t know I also write poetry and used to perform spoken word during college years in Atlanta? In honor of National Poetry Month and being the daughter of a p…

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4 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Denise Shanté Brown

• hosted a potluck bonfire picnic to celebrate Bicycle Day on April 19. Bicycle Day is the anniversary of the world’s first LSD trip in 1943. It was a gorgeous night on the sound in Seattle - groups picnicking around fires all along the beach, and big groups of harbor seals playing in the water to mirror the joy on the shore. While I have a pretty strong psychedelic community across Oregon and Colorado through my facilitator training, I’m still building community in Seattle. This will be a big focus for me for the rest of the year.

• I had a reading with a gifted astrologer, . I’ve studied my own chart and use tools like the CHANI app to understand my placements. However, this is the first time I’ve had someone weave my chart together into a cohesive story. Charlice has a gift with words and keen insight. She gave me new perspective and pride in my rising sign, Virgo. I’ve always struggled to connect with Virgo because the world likes to flatten her into an uptight type-A taskmaster. I also tend to ignore the outer planets. Charlice highlighted that Pluto, planet of transformation (every thing changes!), looms large in my chart. I’ve got a lot more to ponder about what she shared. Her most recent post fits right in here: we all need to throw our wild, gutsy imagination into creating a better world.

  Vision Alchemy

  An Economics of Imagination

  Hi friends. So, first of all, the publication’s name has changed from Decision Alchemy to Vision Alchemy. The new name reflects the direction my interests and business have taken over the past few months. It’s a natural progression. I was able to embrace my vision only after I learned to make decisions that belonged to me. This post tumbled out as I was…

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  4 months ago · 7 likes · Charlice Hurst

• I ended the month with two events at LANGSTON Performing Arts Institute in Seattle. The first was the Black Futures Book Club, this month featuring the graphic novel Abbott. The second was the lively opening night of the Seattle Black Film Festival, where they screened TCB - The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing. The film shares the “life of the Black feminist writer, filmmaker and cultural worker Toni Cade Bambara…reconstructed through her words and stories of colleagues and friends.” If you’re interested in seeing it, there are upcoming screenings throughout the summer.

It is fitting to end a month that felt so much more connected celebrating the life of one of the most gifted organizers. I’ll share two things – an essay by her granddaughter titled “Do you know your neighbor’s name?” and a poem collectively written by a group contemplating Toni’s statement that “Sister is a verb.”

I hope we all do a lot of sistering in May.

This post is about beautiful, transporting fragrances.

I’m a lady who prefers the most narcotic florals. Star jasmine, tuberose, and lilac. The preference feels ancestral, passed from the generations of my family who lived Caribbean or New Orleans. I hope my foremothers were out there flirting on summer nights in the sweet flowery air.

I have a luxurious stable of jasmine and tuberose dominant perfumes. However, there’s not a great lilac perfume. Believe me, I’m still searching. Most add other notes to round out the fragrance, and it simply doesn’t make its presence known like the others. I want the first application to mimic the rush I feel when my nose is buried in a cone of lilac blooms. I want the dry-down to tiptoe up softly to grab me by the nose the way lilac bushes do as I walk around the neighborhood. Because I can’t get the lilac scent I want other than through nature, late spring, lilac season, is one of the most special times of year. I order my daily walks around sniffing bushes. I will trespass to deeply inhale a good one.

I went to a college that was also an arboretum, and blessedly have a lot of natural fragrance, texture, and visual associations with that time of life. The arboretum clustered varieties of single plants in several areas around campus. There was one garden dedicated specifically to lilacs, arranged in a circle. On unseasonably warm spring nights, my friends and I would drink a little too much cheap wine and hang in the lilac circle, romanced from all sides by the heady blooms. The nights were always giddy, late in the semester, summer break approaching, a frazzle of stress releasing in the soft evening air.

Smells take us back to a time, place, and mood so quickly because the part of our brain that senses odors lives right next to the parts of our brain that governs emotion and memory. My late spring walks are a direct portal to a time of joy and relaxation and limited worry. It’s a bonus when I can engage my senses of taste, sight, touch if I can take a glass of wine on a lilac walk on a balmy night. The effect, whether we’re smelling something associated with good or bad memories, is near instantaneous. This means we can strategically, intentionally employ scent to lift our mood.

My invitation:

Make a poetic menu of your favorite fragrances. List the emotions, memories, and senses each scent evokes as a description for that “dish.” Bust out your menu and find ways to recreate the scents the next time you need to be quickly transported to a different emotional state.

Here are a few of mine:

I attended parts of a five-day work meeting from my couch last week, still recovering from surgery. Normally I’m in the room, present, engaged, absorbing everything. This time I was on a screen, slightly removed, wrapped in a blanket, crocheting.

It changed everything about how I engaged in the discussions.

The meeting covered hard things. Draconian cuts to money, staff, and time, and very real frustrations. I’m sure whatever field you work in has inertia, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the federal bureaucratic inertia of fisheries management is way more calcified, viscous, and barnacle-covered than anything you’re working against. I’ve sat in versions of this meeting many times and left feeling heavy, convinced that nothing was ever going to change.

This time I could see the negativity without being absorbed by it. I could hear the exhaustion in the room and feel compassion for it rather than catching it like a cold. And from that distance, I could see something that’s hard to see from inside the weight of it all: there are things that are still possible. Not everything. Maybe not most things. But some things.

I surprised myself with how annoyingly optimistic I was. I kept imagining people rolling their eyes at my Mars in Aries fire. I felt brazen and courageous and ready to roll up the sleeves of my cozy sweater and kick down doors.

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There are circumstances in our lives that are genuinely hard. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise or performing optimism in the face of real pain. But I know we all sometimes completely lose access to possibility. This is especially true when we’re too tired or too close to the situation to see it.

My meeting didn’t change. I’m usually as sad and defeated as everyone else. But I was someplace new. Specifically: I was rested, physically removed from the room, and approaching topics without the accumulated weight of being with everyone in person.

This was a good reminder that we can do this deliberately. We can orient ourselves, in time and space, at a distance where we might be able to see things differently.

Two small invitations for the hardest things you’re facing:

Create some distance. Insert time or physical space between you and the hard thing you’re facing. This doesn’t have to be dramatic. Can you think about this problem from a walk instead of your desk? Can you plan to deal with something challenging on your preferred turf, or from a location or mindset where you feel more grounded? Can you choose a different day, when you’re less depleted? Can you talk about it with someone who isn’t as close to it as you are?

Distance isn’t avoidance. Distance is sometimes the only way to see and address things clearly.

Name one thing that could be possible. Just one thing. Even in circumstances that feel hopeless and claustrophobic, there is usually a door that isn’t fully closed, a new seed that could grow. Your challenge is only to find that one thing and hold it as a reason to keep going.

What’s the hard thing you’re too close to right now? How can you deliberately create distance so that you can see the situation with new hope?

This is a post about recovery.

I’m mending from the biggest surgery I’ve ever had.

I was overjoyed to get the pathology back from my hysterectomy. No cancer, but LITERALLY all of the lady ailments. Fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, big ovarian cysts. I feel so fucking validated, everything that I felt was off was truly off. With validation in hand, I’m excited for the long walk back to health.

I’m observing myself recover, as a reminder for when I care for others and for when I’ll inevitably have to recover in the future. I’m noticing that the boundaries I need to hold for physical healing are clear. Reflecting back on times I’ve had to heal emotionally, I pushed past my boundaries to meet societal expectations. This was especially true for recovery from emotional wounds that society doesn’t clear space to heal from (e.g., rejection, heartbreak that’s not divorce, job loss).

Here’s a tidy healing reminder list that I think applies for physical and emotional convalescence. Take the items that help, and leave what doesn’t fit your situation.

1. Trust yourself to know what you need. As my interviewee Alex, a salmon scientist and death doula, put it, listen to what your body and soul tell you what feels good.

2. Go slow. Don’t be rushed out of any state you’re in. The world will try to keep sirening for you to return or find a solution, but don’t be fooled.

3. Be needy. Get real comfortable asking for help and accepting it. Don’t be a hero about support – take the meds, let someone bring you the soup, the tissues, the candy. Let your community help you get up.

4. But also don’t be afraid to ask everyone to leave you alone. People want to help. AND some of the ugliest parts of healing require solitude. I had some moments of wanting no witness, when I felt like a weird broken thing and wanted no one to look at or think about me. The image that comes to mind is how the vampires in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles would bury themselves in mud or sand to heal from severe injury. And then the feeling would go away and I wanted my community again. Both are fine.

5. Grieve. Your grief and disappointment about what happened will not vanish on its own. Give proper, dedicated time and space to your sadness. Express it with your mind and body, and then compost what you’ve expressed. I don’t want to diminish this item, the grief will take as long as it takes. Just make sure to offer grief your time and energy. I wrote instructions in this post, where I share that I won’t get to work in the Caribbean before I retire from working in fisheries:

6. Celebrate. This one may not come easily or quickly, but there are things to rejoice even when life feels flat, desolate, hopeless, or painful. First, celebration is tied to grief. Consider that you would not be sad but for the love and importance of what you lost. Second, if you can see the light in your situation, then bask in it. Right now, I’m so grateful to know that although I need to take things slow and heal over the next year, I have at least gotten past the rupture. Last, praise yourself for every little progress you make. Did your mobility increase? High five! Less despair compared to yesterday? Gold star! Saw a cool butterfly? Yes, the world still is marvelous!

7. Rest deeply. Let sleep sneak up on you and drag you down. Recline and talk slowly with loved ones. Read and watch things that are easy to ingest. Eat nourishing foods.

8. Orient yourself towards nature. I say “orient” because this is a soft invitation depending on the season and physical ability. On the low end, just be near a window, let yourself gaze outdoors, bring some blooms inside. Welcome in and seek out as much nature as you can.

9. Create something. This is one reminder that there is fertility and growth on the other side of endings and destruction. This time, I crocheted a lot. I’m working on a blanket and an infinity scarf. Doodle. Journal. Sing. Cook.

10. Expect healing to be non-linear. I keep riding high on how fast my body is recovering. But bright pain or deep fatigue arrive to communicate when I’ve gone too far too fast, and I have to rest all over again. The path to any worthwhile destination can zigzag. I’m trying not to let either the ups or downs have too much influence over my view of the process.

I’d love to hear what you’ve noticed about healing. What things are on your list?

This one is about women’s health issues. Stay if that interests you.

I’m having a hysterectomy on April 1. Diagnostic tests indicate I likely have adenomyosis: a condition where endometrial tissue grows into the muscular wall of the uterus, causing an enlarged uterus and heavy, painful periods. My grandmother had a hysterectomy in her mid-40s for the same symptoms. She never shared the word for the diagnosis. I learned mine in February 2026.

I’m still processing how I feel about losing my uterus.

I’m afraid of the surgery. I’ve never had surgery before, never even broken a bone, had both of my children naturally and without medication. I enjoyed overall great health until my late 30s, when all of this started. I recently finished ’s We Were Made for These Times, and her chapter on the Five Remembrances is a good reminder that every thing changes: we are of the nature to have ill health. This is my time for that.

Even though I don’t want more children, I’m sad to lose my ability to carry them. I still have more to unpack here, but some of it is this: my uterus feels like part of my womanhood and feminine power, a point of sisterhood with my mothers, my daughter, and other women. I love to imagine who all the children I could make would be, while holding the possibility I never intended to use.

And I’m angry. For myself, and on behalf of so many women whose bodies have not been studied more. My uterus had been identified as enlarged since September 2025. My symptoms had been accelerating since 2023. So many of us have been suffering immense pain for so long. Women’s reproductive pain is diminished and ignored. Recently, I sat through a week-long professional meeting while bleeding two tablespoons of blood an hour, dressed up and everything. We were sitting on padded cloth hotel chairs. Each time I stood up, I would gush blood and pray I hadn’t bled through onto the chair or down my leg. I glared at all the men in the room. They would honestly ask to be taken to the ER under these conditions.

There’s gratitude and joy too. I am so grateful my uterus gestated two beautiful children. I was blessed with easy conception and pregnancies. I’m grateful for how my uterus contributed to my sexual pleasure, until it stopped helping and made things painful. I’m excited to never have a period or that specific cramping again. I’m ecstatic to live a portion of my life where the only purpose of sex is pleasure and intimacy, with no risk of pregnancy.

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Three lessons I learned through this process:

Excessive menstrual pain and bleeding is not normal. There is pain and blood with menstruation. But because we expect both, it is easy for others to dismiss our experience, and for us to gaslight ourselves about its severity. I gaslit myself for years. I had a copper IUD placed six weeks after my daughter was born. Because heavier periods are a known side effect, I wrote off my increasingly bloody and painful cycles until I sheepishly asked friends whether their experience matched mine. They resoundingly told me to hurry to the gynecologist. The societal normalization of feminine pain is explored well in The Retrievals, especially Season 2. If you suspect something is off, regardless of your age: ask the women in your life, go to Reddit, see a doctor.

Women’s health issues can tie to all kinds of other systemic health issues. Here are just a few of the symptoms women cited related to gynecological issues: Fatigue. Hair loss. Heart palpitations. That weird lightning shot of pain through your butt. Autoimmune conditions.

The U.S. healthcare system is fragmented, focused on symptoms over underlying causes, organized into silos that make a holistic view nearly impossible. Complex, multi-system conditions get missed or patched over for years because of this.

Here’s how this cascaded for me:

I switched to a Mirena IUD (from the copper IUD) to deal with excessive bleeding, even though I had a history of mood instability with hormonal birth control. Predictably, my mood destabilized. The episodic eczema I’ve had throughout my life expanded to new locations and severity across my body, including really painful eyelid eczema. My primary care physician prescribed Lexapro to manage my moods and steroid creams to manage the eczema. I stopped bleeding and itching and was numbed emotionally, but began gaining weight. My A1C rose to pre-diabetic levels. One physician prescribed Metformin. Another prescribed semaglutide. I eventually ditched ALL of the prescriptions because I kept feeling more bloated and crampy and started bleeding through the Mirena IUD. Without intervention, the bleeding came back with a vengeance. I’m close to anemic going into surgery. Oh, and I have to pee constantly and have digestive issues because my enlarged uterus is pressing on my bladder and small intestines. I can now step back and see I was bandaiding and duct-taping around something more significant going on with my body – an enraged, inflamed uterus.

You have to advocate for yourself. I’m lucky I have comprehensive insurance and excellent care in Seattle. I have a responsive gynecology group. Even still, I didn’t learn the name for what I’d been describing for five years until a month ago. I’ve read about women who told their doctors about symptoms for years with no response, and doctors who declined recommending surgery because the woman might still want children someday. Let her decide.

The struggle is even harder for Black and brown women. As a Black woman, I drew on my family’s experience and peer-reviewed research about the disparities we face. Black women are diagnosed with fibroids more frequently than white women, develop them earlier, and have more severe symptoms. Studies indicate Black women are more likely to receive open hysterectomies rather than less invasive laparoscopic procedures, and some research shows Black women receive hysterectomies at rates three times higher than white women. With all of that, even knowing that I am in a more privileged position in terms of insurance and care providers, I’ve still been skeptical of the path I’m choosing. Real questions I had were: was my grandma rushed into a surgery she didn’t need? Am I being rushed into a surgery I don’t need? Can I just hunker down better and try to manage this somehow without a major surgery? Did my race factor into my treatment so far or the recommendation that I get a hysterectomy?

I didn’t resolve all of those questions. Some aren’t even possible to answer. I won’t even officially have a diagnosis for adenomyosis until I receive pathology once my uterus is removed. However, I used my own research, meditation and conversations with my loved ones. I used AI to help formulate questions for my doctor, outline my symptoms over time, and understand the societal and systemic context. I sat with these questions with psychedelic medicines, and gained confidence about my own deep knowledge. I got clear enough with the landscape, exhausted enough with the journey, and physically depleted enough to pick this path forward. Use as many tools as you have available to you to be informed and tenacious on your own behalf.

For anyone walking a similar path:

You are not imagining it. You are not being dramatic. The pain, fatigue, and grief of having to fight for answers is real. Start wherever you are: a conversation with a friend, a clumsy Google search of your symptoms (“is it normal to bleed through a super size tampon each hour?”). The women on r/hysterectomy (and a month ago, once I learned what I likely have, on r/adenomyosis) gave me language and hope. Organize your records, bring your timeline, bring your questions in writing and take up space until you’re heard. If it is within your means, see a holistic specialist who relies on actual tests. Above all, you are the most informed person in the room about your own body.

I’ll check back in on the other side.

Other women’s stories around Substack:

Having a Hysterectomy Changed Everything - on how years of cascading conditions led her to a total hysterectomy, and how it related to other shifts in her life.

Can Green Tea Extract Shrink Fibroids? - explains clinical research on EGCG as a non-surgical fibroid treatment, including trial data, dosing details, and what we still don’t know.

Endometriosis Now Takes 9 Years and 4 Months to Be Diagnosed - March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. highlights the staggering diagnostic delays women face in the UK.

Ain’t No Sunshine When the Uterus Is Gone - I loved reading ’s account, a really different, symptomless lead up to a hysterectomy than mine.

They Told Me to Get a Hysterectomy — Here’s What I Did Instead — on choosing to manage adenomyosis and endometriosis without surgery through diet, movement, nervous system regulation, and assembling her own care team. Her resource list is worth reading even if you are considering surgery.

I’m reading an excellent philosophy book: The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. One of his arguments is that scoring systems don’t just measure our values. Over time, they can replace them. The metric becomes the thing we’re actually chasing, and somewhere along the way we stop noticing that it was never really ours, or even tied to things that are important to us.

The Gradient

C. Thi Nguyen: Values, Legibility, and Gamification

Episode 127…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 8 comments · daniel bashir

I looked at my own life through this lens. What I found ranged from silly to concerning.

A light but (negatively) impactful example, also raised by Tim Clare in the Guardian, is my relationship with Duolingo. I set out to *finally* learn more Spanish. I did great at first, actually understanding bits of conversational Spanish out in the wild. But I started to deprioritize the daily lessons because I was busy. By around 270something days, I maintained my ranking and streak doing chess or math modules well past bedtime. A few times I woke in a panic and grabbed my phone to squeeze in a lesson before losing my streak at midnight. In the end, I quit because I’d been captured by a system and still hadn’t learned Spanish.

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Duolingo is silly. Most of the rest is not. On the heavy and concerning side, I have spent a lot of my life chasing approval in the eyes of others. I grew up on the east coast, where schooling matters too much. I went to elite schools, collected letters behind my name, and climbed, methodically, the ladder in front of me. By almost any external measure, it worked. I am, right now, at the top of my environmentalist metrics game, earlier than I hoped to be. And still, a lot has been way off. I recently accepted a spot as a commissioner on an international treaty. Long ago, it would have been a dream to have that responsibility. Instead, I accepted the role reflexively, without considering the difficulty having the role would add to my job. My first year as a commissioner was emotionally and physically draining. I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting that the challenge has not been worth the honor.

A well-designed scoring system is that it’s convincing. It tells you that you’re winning, offers real rewards. Status, stability, the glow of being seen as an authority not in your own right but because of the societally agreed-upon measures you have at your back. I’m not going to pretend these things didn’t matter to me. But I’m now asking myself: whose game am I actually playing?

I recently interviewed Alexandrea Safiq, a salmon scientist and death doula, for this newsletter. She ended our conversation with a statement I’ve been repeating to people since she said it. A healed place, she said, looks like no longer placing your emotional investment in validation from systems that have consistently shown they were built to invalidate you.

Most of the systems I operate in were not built for me. I kept playing anyway, kept optimizing for metrics I didn’t design, kept measuring myself against standards that were never actually mine. I think about this a lot as I pivot my career towards what matters most to me.

I leave you with a reflection prompt:

Think about a goal you're genuinely working toward. Are your values driving how you pursue it, or have you outsourced that to someone else's system? What would it look like to take one step back toward your own metrics?

This is the first in a series of interviews I plan to do with people I know going through transitions. I kept noticing that people going through the hardest transitions were also becoming the most interesting versions of themselves. Something gets stripped away in seasons of change, and what’s left is something more essential and usually more true. I’m honored to use this space to capture that. I hope never to present tidy, retrospective stories where everything worked out. I want readers to see the actual texture of going through change: what cracks, what holds, what’s surprising.

I met Alex through fisheries, which is truly the most unlikely meeting place for two black women. She is the only Black woman I know working in Pacific Northwest salmon management, which means she’s one of the few Black women I know, period, who does the work I do. I share in this post that I’m likely the first Black woman (and possibly the only black person) appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to serve on a federal fisheries management council. That rarity is something we talk about often. While it is lonely and heavy, it is also really beautiful that I found someone who looks like me in a field that wasn’t built with either of us in mind.

Alex is 33. She is a scientist, a policy mind, a professor, and a practicing Death Doula. She is honest about the complicated business of being all of those things at once. We spoke on a Sunday morning in late winter. I also include some answers that Alex wrote about herself before we spoke.

I always ask the people I talk with to just introduce themselves — not their résumé, but themselves. Who are you, what are you here to do, who matters to you most?

“I’ve always wondered how to introduce myself if I were to write an autobiography, and I still haven’t come up with a satisfying answer. Something along the lines of: I was born on the gale-dawn of Sunday, November 3rd, 1991 — a Balsamic moon — a near poetic slight at the power and glory of sunlight. Perhaps that’s why my middle name is Dagmar. Dag-, a Nordic root meaning ‘day’ (probably informed by the association with the rune Dagaz), and -mar (or maer) meaning ‘maiden’ or ‘mother’. Readers who are inclined toward astrology will know I’m a Scorpio sun, could guess I’m a Libra moon, and if I share the anecdotal information that I was born in Seattle, WA, would suspect I’m a Virgo rising.”

Dagaz — the rune that encompasses the in-between of sunset and daylight — is a recurring touchstone for Alex. She describes it as “that very shamanic, thinning-of-the-veil, ushering-in-light kind of space.” It is, she says, a useful metaphor for where she tends to find herself in any room she walks into.

“In all honesty, my calling in life remains an open question. If I lean into my inclination from childhood, my calling in life would have been to become an Olympic swimmer who would eventually retire to Ireland and pursue a second career as a poet. Unfortunately, an abusive swimming coach and lack of funds to consistently access a pool put an end to this. If I lean into my mother’s inclination about my purpose, I’d say I’m meant to be a great academic. I’d swiftly point to you my lack of publications in Nature or Science as an indicator of how well this thread of fate has unfolded.

Today, I’d say my purpose in life is to hold safe, sacred, and supportive space for all forms of dying — literal and metaphorical. In natural resource management, I witness the falling away of capitalistic and colonial practices, which to me is a kind of death. I simultaneously try to hold the grief of those who, literally and metaphorically, bought into these systems, while also building toward a more sustainable future in which we recognize our interdependence on nature and build managerial structures that honor this relationship. Outside of my nine-to-five, I am a practicing Death Doula. I support people, pets, and their communities of care through the dying process.”

And who is significant in your life?

“My ancestors, especially my grandfather. I could write an entire book on the personal significance of my grandfather, so what I type here won’t do him or our relationship justice. I’ll briefly share that my grandfather held space for me to understand myself, build a system of integrity and internalize it at an early age, and taught me how to fish. I remember thinking to myself when he passed that the entirety of my life will only be a shadow of what it could have been. Perhaps that’s my true purpose in life — to learn how to grieve my grandfather’s passing.”

She lost him at eleven.

You mentioned that you ended up in salmon almost sideways — that it wasn’t the plan. Tell me about that path, and about the transition you’ve been through most recently.

Before we got into the hardest part of it, Alex told me something that I think is important context: she is a woman who has, as she puts it, “conflated her career with her spiritual path.” She describes it not as a mistake, exactly, but as a fact about herself — one with real consequences.

“I believe that we bring our whole selves into any room we occupy. I decided a long time ago that I would mindfully bring my whole spiritual self into my career. It felt like I was called to and made for salmon work, even in ways that weren’t at all obvious and were very indirect.”

The mechanics of what happened are worth understanding. A restrictive legislative budget cycle eliminated her position.

“My recent job change has been one of the most significant transitions thus far in my life. I used to work for a state agency in marine natural resource management, but following a particularly restrictive budgetary legislative cycle, my position with this agency was cut. This was incredibly painful on several fronts. When my position was cut from the budget, I felt the Universe had dealt me a failing grade in my spiritual life.”

What followed was a disorienting in-between: a layoff option that landed her in aquatic invasive species work — a field she’d deliberately moved away from, for reasons that are both intellectual and deeply personal. She was also picked up as an adjunct professor at a moment when she felt entirely unequipped to teach.

I want to ask what was easy, because I think we tend to skip that question and go straight to the hard. Was anything easy?

“Nothing was easy about it. However, the blessing that emerged from it was a community of politically visionary, spiritually insightful, and brilliant women coming together to support me through this transition. I can’t thank them enough for their love, support, and guidance.”

What also happened, in that holding place of invasive species work and its retraumatizing familiarity, was something she hadn’t expected: a corrective experience in the form of a supervisor, whose management style was so fundamentally different from what she’d experienced the year before that it rearranged something in her.

He offered to join her through a particularly painful annual review for the position she lost, and supported her while she cried afterwards. “He was so able to receive that and hold it with compassion and love and validation. He would call me by my title (Dr. Safiq!) and would defer to my expertise on technical matters, which rarely happened in my old job. He collaborated with me to expand my skills. He was a very strategic, supportive mentor and coach.”

That a good supervisor should feel like medicine is its own kind of indictment. But it was medicine nonetheless.

And the hardest part?

This is where Alex’s writing is worth quoting at length.

“The most difficult part of the entire situation was witnessing, in real time, the very harms and traumas inflicted on my ancestors being enacted upon me. Whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously — and in truth, through a combination of all four — the patriarchal, colonial, bigoted, and capitalistic systems that have long sought our erasure at national, local, impersonal, and personal scales were, however briefly, able and permitted to erase me.”

Her grandfather was an Air Force pilot, the most brilliant human being she’d ever known. Like many Black folks from the rural South, he joined the military to get out of a racist and economically defunct region of the country — rural 1950s Mississippi. He was treated horribly in the service. He never told Alex. She only knows from fragments she overheard, and from one of the two times she ever saw him cry.

“One of two times I ever witnessed my grandfather tearing up was when my mother told him she had joined the Army Reserves. My grandfather didn’t want her to experience misogyny and the same racism he experienced while in the armed services. He was a stoic, quietly powerful, and profoundly wise man. His quiet strength carried with it a deep intention — to prevent the transmission of generational trauma.”

She continues: “Through my own lived experience, the wisdom he embodied, and the memory of his steadfastness, you can understand the depth of my grief when I found myself subjected to the very harms he had spent his life trying to shield his lineage from. In that moment, I felt as though I had failed him — that I had somehow betrayed the legacy he worked so hard to build. Why would I willingly serve a government that had sought not only his erasure, but mine as well? That question haunted me throughout the entire transition.”

There’s something else she said in our conversation, quietly, almost as an aside: “I had to acknowledge that I have no idea how to grieve for myself. And here I am taking on the role of a death doula.”

I told her: You’re so young and you have so many years to learn this. That it’s actually a gift that it hit you at a point where you could begin to reckon with it. She laughed and said it felt like being kicked while you’re down — not only apparently unqualified to keep doing salmon work, but now apparently unqualified to do her second career. She tried to spiritually bypass it, she said, by reframing it as shamanic initiation. “And in some ways I feel that. But in another way I’m like: no, Alex, you need to do the actual work.”

That’s the yes-and of it, I told her. It probably is an initiation — and you still have to do the confronting.

What stayed with me is that grief is a lifelong lesson, and society doesn’t give us space for it. There are communities that still make a public and collective show of grief around death, around things that are universally acknowledged as grievable. But grieving an identity, a job, the things that don’t register on the scale of the whole community must stop and bring me snacks, those are harder things to do. And for someone who holds other people’s dying for a living to discover she had no map for her own? That smacks harder.

What gave you strength? What steadied you?

“My community of colleagues, friends, and spiritual mentors.”

She also found it in nature — specifically in a quarry pool near her home in Tenino, where a natural waterfall became something like a weekly appointment. “The catharsis and release of emotional baggage — all the big feelings just naturally moved through my body when I was sitting under there. I realized that no matter how much I tried to intellectualize what I was going through, my body wasn’t processing it. The only way I found, quite by accident, was sitting under this waterfall.” She mentions that trout would flock to her feet when she stood in the shallows. “It felt like they were witnessing what I was going through. Like they were saying: We still love you. We see you.“

She found it in cooking — specifically in reverse-engineering her grandmother’s gumbo from sense memory. “I would put on In the Heat of the Night in the background, lay out these green cafeteria trays from the ‘90s, and just start smelling different spices. ‘Oh yeah, that smells like the one that was in the kitchen when grandma was cooking.’ It was just an intuitive process.” She got it right. She can make the gumbo now.

When she finished describing all of this — the waterfall, the trout at her feet, the spice-smelling, the green trays, the In the Heat of the Night playing in the background — I told her: you said at the beginning of this that you don’t have your own spell for grief curing. But I think you just wrote one. These are all things that sound like you engaged all of your senses and abilities to get yourself through it. You made your own grief recipe.

She sat with that for a moment. “Part of it is just trusting my body with what feels good and trusting that that’s the medicine,” she said.

She found it in Hozier, specifically the album Unreal Unearth. “The bass that comes from his music really gets my body to move through some really hard things I can’t just sit in a room and journal through.”

And she found it on the other side of the transition, in a form she couldn’t have predicted: she is now a lead salmon scientist for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which called her and asked her to come work for them.

“To be solicited by the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission to apply for a lead salmon scientist position was so validating and healing. I was told by my leadership (from the job I left) that I didn’t know how to communicate and work with the Tribes in the salmon context — and that felt totally opposite of everything I’ve tried to do in the salmon world.”

What would you say to another woman standing at the beginning of something this hard? Or to yourself, before it started?

From her writing: “A healed place for me looks like no longer putting all of my emotional investment in validation from systems that have consistently showed me again and again that they’re built to invalidate. Through that, I want to be a person whose presence creates and holds creative space for something more sustainable, affirming, and sacred to be built.”

She ended our conversation with hope: “I see a lot of fertile opportunity,” she said. “Like shimmering shards of something. And I am inspired by that today.”

Alexandrea Safiq is the lead Chinook FRAM modeler for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. She is also an adjunct professor at The Evergreen State College and a practicing Death Doula. She lives in Tenino, Washington.

This interview is part of an ongoing series about people navigating significant transitions. If you know someone whose story should be told here, reach out.

In preparing to sit with a macrodose of psilocybin as part of my practicum for my psychedelics facilitator training, I pulled three tarot cards to help form my intentions for my experience. I got the Ace of Swords; Justice reversed; and the Four of Cups. I formed questions for myself from each card, with help from the words in the Light Seer’s Tarot Deck guidebook.

The Ace of Swords asked: what do I want to see clearly? Justice reversed asked: where have I been too hard on myself, or not hard enough? What would it mean to see myself without distortion? And the Four of Cups, the card of the gift you’ve overlooked, the blessing sitting right in front of you while your eyes are cast downward, asked the question it turned out I most needed: what’s already available that I haven’t let myself receive?

My intention, formed from all three: I am willing to see myself clearly, fairly, and to receive what’s already being offered.

The day before my journey, I had the immense honor of attending to a classmate while they sat with the medicine. When it was my turn, I walked into that same room to be held. I got to witness something I hadn’t expected: more than half my classmates are men, and in that space I watched them caring for each other and for women, genuinely and without agenda. And I noticed how hard I found it to let that in.

I spend a lot of my time angry at men. Not all of my time, not every man, and mostly not without reason. But the anger is there, worn into me by a world that has given me plenty of reasons to carry it. I work in a male-dominated field where I have had to fight, consistently and over decades, to be seen and heard and taken seriously. I am a daughter and friend and mother, and the women in my community have been harmed physically and emotionally by men. I carry armor into rooms where it isn’t needed. I carry it home a lot of the time, and rant at the caring men in my family even while they support me and my kids.

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My armor isn’t irrational. recently wrote about how patriarchy is fundamentally an extractive system, one that converts women’s energy toward the accumulation of power at the top, and that the wariness women carry toward men is a response to real structural conditions, not a personal failure of generosity. She’s right. The conditions that shaped my armor are real. The world that trained me to be watchful is harsh.

’s recent essay on survival and misdiagnosis characterized the extension of this well:

It is a smoke alarm shaped by the house it learned in. In that house, even a faint smell could mean something was about to burn. When the house changes, the alarm does not. It still sounds quickly — not because it is broken, but because once, that quickness mattered.

My alertness around men is that kind of alarm. It was shaped in real conditions and history. Not just my own lived experience, but something passed down through generations of women who learned, with good reason, that care from men came with costs. That lesson lives in my body. It fires in rooms where the conditions still call for it.

I was lucky to get to be in a room where, at least in that moment, the conditions were different.

The men supervising our training and training with me showed up to hold people with deep respect and love. Experiencing that during practicum, in a non-ordinary state, made me reflect that it wasn’t just in that room, but is a condition that is present in my life. Caring men are there for me in ordinary states, too. I’m fortunate that a male partner, co-parent, father, and colleagues all show up with real presence and real holding each day. Still, much of the time, my alarm sounds over a fire that isn’t there.

Justice reversed had asked me to see myself without distortion. Part of that, I realized, is learning to examine the conditions I am actually in, not just the ones that trained me. The survival strategy that keeps me safe does its job faithfully, and I still need it to work because there are still men in the world who will harm me, each other, and other women. At the same time, I also can be mindful to soften to the men who I deeply trust. Just as I was writing this reflection, wrote about looking up from the goal long enough to notice the abundance already surrounding you. She was writing about divine timing and the wisdom that lives in the in-between.

I set my intention to see things clearly, to receive what was already being offered. I wonder what armor you wear that is honed for battles you’re not presently in. I wonder what gifts are sitting right in front of you, waiting to be noticed. I wonder who in your life has been trying to offer you care, while you’ve been braced for a fight.

This is a monthly grab bag post, including books I read in February, Substack articles that made my heart sing, and some foods that are making me happy right now. Happy Women’s History Month!

What’s going on

February was a big month of gatherings in person. I work from home and am technically a single-person company, so a month this dominated by human connection is exhilarating and tiring. Two of the events were psychedelics-related, and were dreamy. You can read my recap of one of the events here, and I’ll share another post soon about the major downloads from the other:

I also finally got the thumbs up to get a hysterectomy. I have almost no grief about this, mostly excitement to be free of the pain I’ve been in for a long time. I’m determined to share my story because it has been a long journey to get this decision. I adore my care providers. They have listened to me and helped me experiment through treatment options. And still, even with a supportive care team, I only found out the name for what they think is wrong with me in my last visit AFTER THREE YEARS. Once I knew the issue, I spent hours on Reddit reading stories from women with identical symptoms. I was certain I wasn’t a victim of our klutzy health system and yet here I am. I’m frustrated because we could have figured this out sooner, and it was possible for me to not feel so alone.

wrote an excellent post on the astrology of February’s solar eclipse in Aquarius. I commented over there about how my stars aligned with my recent diagnosis.

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What I read

• There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone - this is a heartwrenching, exhaustive portrait of five families in Atlanta who struggle to maintain stable housing. The detail about the systemic issues that trap these families is important to refute our society’s tendency to cast homelessness as an individual failure. I recommend the audiobook for this one – it listens like a podcast.

• Shift: Managing Your Emotions–So They Don’t Manage You by Ethan Kross - I loved this book. Kross presents science-backed internal and external strategies for working with emotions. He narrates the audiobook, but I actually purchased the real paper book because there was so much gold. @Carrie Jones writes a bit about the book in this post.

• That’s Not My Name by Megan Lally - This is a continued effort to read with my children. Turns out – like mommy like daughter – she LOVES teen thrillers. Hallelujah!

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones - The Vulture blurb got me: “Jones has written his Interview with the Indigenous Vampire.”

• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writings from Soil to Stars by Erin Sharkey- This is a beautiful essay collection about black experiences in nature. I share more about this in a recent post:

Fish Forward

Blacks in fisheries

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Aja

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Around Substack

• ’s advice for aging. I’ve gotten something different from the list every time I’ve read it. Today it was this item: “you can be a good person, do the right thing and still hurt people.”

• Two great guides on tarot reading, one by on intuitive card reading (hint: the LAST step is to look at the guidebook), and one by about improving tarot readings for yourself.

• ’s post highlighting Black History In the Health Space.

• ’s astrology of the Bad Bunny Halftime Show.

• ’s *sharp* debunking of misconceptions about matriarchy.

Snacks

• Organic India Tulsi Sweet Rose Tea is my JAM right now. The accurate description on the box is “Stress Relieving & Magical.” It is prepping me for the start of Seattle springtime, which is a true riot of flowers.

• I have a crush on Vaughn Vreeland from the NYTimes, so I listened when he suggested Penny’s Chocolate Mousse for Valentine’s day dessert. It is a perfect rich mousse and pretty foolproof. I cheated and used Mitica’s Carmelized Pecans instead of making the hazelnut crunch topping, to save time for romance. They’re not too sweet. I also recommend big flaky sea salt.

Next post: Reflections on my first Psychedelic Facilitator Practicum

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I was lucky to attend ’s first Women in the Wild gathering. April created a cocoon for 10 women to pause for self-exploration. Of course, this kind of reflection is possible alone and without heightened consciousness. However, there is a magic to having these conversations with strangers, with your guard down. I had to retell my own stories without the shorthand of shared experience. As I chose and shared details about my life, new crystals of awareness formed. For most of the night, April asked us to talk in intimate groups of three about fear, faith, and freedom, from our own perspectives and the perspectives of our mothers and grandmothers.

I share these reflections to convey the depth of self-understanding that is possible in an experience like this. Just three short hours shifted my view of my challenges and my lineage.

Fear

I know my mother and grandmother were afraid in some of the ways I am; we share a vigilance for the health and wellbeing of our family. However, I have the privilege to experience an entirely different set of fears because of what they endured. My mother and maternal grandmother immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean to seek better work opportunities and more effectively provide for their families. My maternal grandmother was a nanny in Pennsylvania, often missing time with our family to support theirs. My paternal grandmother was a driven, corporate administrative assistant whose family was from New Orleans, but her primary working years were in Chicago during the Civil Rights movement.

They worked long hours without any promise or possibility of upward mobility, endured racism, sexism, and distance from their homeland and community. Because of their sacrifices, I got to go to elite colleges and achieved the middle-class life they were hoping the next generation would get. I get to live with an entirely different kind of fear—the fear that comes with choice.

Faith

The word faith evoked established religion for my discussion group. My mother and grandmothers followed sects of Christianity—a faith I assume was handed to them in the course of European colonization. Colonial elites in the Caribbean and American South suppressed African religion and often introduced laws prohibiting their practices. Because of how the world has shifted, I am free to choose how I engage with faith. I can openly explore and form my own spirituality, including exploring what faith might have looked like for them in the absence of colonialism. This has taken a lot of forms. I am an environmentalist by profession, and much of this faith lives in my relationship to the natural world. I’ve also recently been learning about how African faiths have persisted in the diaspora.

Freedom

This was the richest topic for me. My definition of freedom includes autonomy, agency, and choice. With those notions in mind, I started the discussion thinking my mother and grandmothers did not have freedom. However, I know that they were focused and filled with purpose in spite of this. They were not plagued with my constant fretting about whether I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, using all of my potential and choice in the right ways. They had work to do and mouths to feed, and didn’t seem as unhappy as I feel in spite of leading a life with less. Their relatively limited choice may have given them space for more joy than I have access to now.

Dr. Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at my alma mater, Swarthmore College, writes in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less:

“Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”

I left with such tenderness and empathy for my ancestors. I have a new sense of gratitude for the luxury, the freedom, to choose what my life and faith look like. I am rich with choice in a way that my mother and grandmothers were not. They worked their asses off so that I could have this much choice. Why should I be afraid to pursue the things that I can when so many women battled so much fear so that I didn’t have to?

This renewed sense of purpose, born from my ancestors’ sacrifices, is not a burden of choice, but a call for courageous action. I can honor their endurance by pursuing my own path, deepening my spirituality in my own way, and transforming the fear that comes with choice into the fierce freedom they worked so hard for me to have. My life, rich with options, can be the legacy of their strength.

Despite a personal commitment to moderate my attention to current events for my own sanity, the world’s impressive chaos since January 1 made it difficult. I’m grateful for my health and safety, but I’m walking around with a simmering anxiety that I know I share with a lot of my community.

If your system is also overloaded, you are not alone. The American Psychiatric Association’s 2025 Healthy Minds poll reports Americans “feeling anxious about personal finances (59%), uncertainty about the next year (53%), and current events (49%).” That is a lot for a nation the government tells us is doing better than ever.

You are likely using all of the tools in your arsenal, your chamomiles and slow deep breaths, to soothe your frazzled system. And that all may not be enough because the load is great right now.

Don’t stop the soothing techniques. Whatever you’re doing is important to nourish your heart. In addition, I want to offer a different framing. It has helped me to stop trying to smudge my anxiety away and to embrace some of it. We evolved emotions for a reason; they are information to help us respond to our world. In Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You, Ethan Kross reminds us that unchecked anxiety is bad, but that anxiety “has a fundamental adaptive function that helps us marshall a helpful response to either approach or avoid the threat that we’re dealing with so that we can handle it.”

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Not all of your anxiety is helpful or even reasonable. But some anxiety is spot on. What happens when you reframe some of it as beneficial? For example, I thank my anxiety for keeping me vigilant for bears in the woods while I’m on a hike, for keeping me alarmed about the slow walk towards authoritarianism, and for reminding me that billionaires are trying to deepen how we collude with capitalism with free fast shipping and high-speed, wide-spread wireless coverage.

I like Kross’ words – approach and avoid. This week, when you’re feeling anxious:

• Slow down and soothe yourself.

• Identify 2-3 concrete things that you’re anxious about.

• Thank your anxiety for identifying those things.

• For items on the list that are within your power to approach or avoid, plan one action that will ease your anxiety. For example, if your health has been nagging you, make an appointment to see (approach!) a doctor. Or if you’ve been dragged into doom scrolling, make a plan to avoid social media and shift towards consciously consuming the news.

• Some of the items on your list may be outside of your power to effectively approach or avoid as an individual. For collective issues like climate change, I remind you of the power of community. You can use your agency to engage in collective response about these issues, which may re-contextualize your individual experience of anxiety. Maya Shankar, author of The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, also suggests zooming out through: 1) studying history as a reminder of the human ability to both endure horror and radically shift society; and 2) experiencing awe through love and nature.

Your anxiety is not a flaw; it is information. This week, stop fighting the feeling. Listen to what it is trying to tell you, then turn your alarm into action. Approach what you can change, avoid what drains you. For the great, shared anxieties of our time, remember the ultimate power of connection and community. Your job is not to be unafraid, but to recognize you’re afraid and move forward anyway.

I’m trying something new with my monthly posts. I want to create more community in my life and on Substack. We also need some levity. This time, I’m sharing all I read in January, including the Substack articles that made my heart sing.

Happy Black History Month!

Around Substack

• This moving piece by about joy amidst oppression.

• This dream tending exercise by .

• This textured sensory journaling exercise shared by of the Hillbilly African Substack.

• This tarot journaling exercise about female strength as we age by of the Moon Shed Tarot Substack.

• A Sinners Resource Reading and Resource List by of the Reviewing the Record Substack, so you can study up before it wins all those Oscars.

And I consumed a stunning 9 (!!!!nine exclamation points!!!!!) books in January.

I’m a big reader but often don’t have time to read as deeply as I’d like. I started January on vacation, so got a really good head start. I feel like I cheated because I listened to a few of them. However, this allowed me to go on long walks, wash the dishes again forever, etc. The books that made the greatest impression show up in recent posts. Please support your local bookstore or library if you choose to read any of them.

• Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self Recovery by bell hooks - I wrote about one bit of this for a recent post, but can’t fully cover what this book meant to me. I imagine bell hooks would be both honored and saddened that her words continue to be so resonant to someone born 30 years after her.

• Killer of the Flower Moon by David Grann - I was reminded to read this after watching One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed One Battle After Another, contributed to the script for the film version of Killers of the Flower Moon. Reading the book let me linger on the bullshit absurdity of the guardianship the U.S. government imposed on the Osage people:

After Osage people were driven from their land into parts of Oklahoma that were poor for farming, a treasure of crude oil was discovered. The Osage people negotiated mineral rights, and some tribal members became among the richest people on earth for a time. But under federal law, many Osages were not free to do as they wished with the wealth. Under a particular system of guardianship imposed by the government, Osage people without some white ancestry were deemed “incompetent” and assigned a non-Native lawyer, businessman, politician or rancher as a kind of financial manager. The guardians were empowered to say yes or no to purchases as small as a tube of toothpaste. It was paternalism at a grotesque level. In the book, Grann refers to a guardian who viewed an Osage adult as “a child six or eight years old, and when he sees a new toy he wants to buy, he buys it.”

• Radical Healership: How to build a values-driven healing practice in a profit-driven world by Laura Mae Northrup - I expect to return to this book a lot as I build my coaching and psychedelic facilitation practice. I love the support Laura provides for building a spiritually-led business in the healing arts, while still valuing yourself and the healing work you provide.

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy - This absolutely gorgeous book made me deeply cry, made me horny, AND touchingly explored the fear of raising strong, aware children on a planet sick from climate change.

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - This has been on my list for a long time. This is a climate change / end-of-world science fiction story narrated by a middle school science teacher. The impending movie raised it in priority. My son is now reading the book, then we’re going to see the movie together!

• Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu - This is a good one to listen to. Elise is a bright and relatable narrator. I went in hoping to understand the Korean beauty products my daughter is increasingly interested in, and left with a greater understanding of the geopolitics that led to Korea’s dominance in culture and cosmetics.

  

• Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change by Olga Khazan - Olga puts effort into improving herself across the big 5 personality traits - openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I recommend reading this rather than listening. I didn’t love Olga’s narration, but did like the research she presented to support her approaches to change herself.

• The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans by Maya Shankar - Maya Shankar wrote this book to synthesize patterns she identified in her own life, research, and podcast A Slight Change of Plans, regarding resilience after life-rocking change. This book just came out, so Maya is appearing for interviews on a lot of podcasts now.

• Black Psychedelic Revolution: From Trauma to Liberation by Dr. Nicholas Powers - I covered my reflections on this book in another post.

Take care of each other until next time. 💞

I love The Wheel of Fortune—I think of it as a challenge to consider who we want to be in the circumstances presented to us. But The Magician resonates more right now because I need to feel agency in this painful moment when xenophobia and murder have become our norm again.

The Magician stands ready to conjure, reminding us that we have the power to transform our circumstances using tools already in hand. Everything we need is already present. We just have to choose what to create with first.

If you’re like me, you forget your power all the time. This post by reminded me to mine my own history to remember my tools, my power, and my agency.

corinna’s Substack

Planting Seeds is all We Can Do

I keep saying. it over and over again, and I know I’m going to say it some more. It’s a Magician Year, we have to do everything differently this time…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · corinna rosella

The last Magician/Wheel of Fortune year was 2017.

Think back to 2017. Think about both the twists of fate that got you to where you are today and the agency you brought to those twists. The skills you already possessed. The magic you made out of what was available to you.

Here’s some of what 2017 held for me:

After Donald Trump's inauguration, a federal hiring freeze blocked the career change I was desperate to make. Stuck, I threw myself into the difficult job I already had and nailed it. When the freeze lifted, I applied for a promotion I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I got it. That twist of fate - not getting what I wanted, then stretching for something bigger - propelled me forward. In the coming years, I hit career milestones a full decade earlier than I expected.

It was also the year I edged closer to my divorce. A really big revelation happened in my marriage. We decided that year to move with our young children from a small town in Massachusetts across country to Seattle, in part for the promotion but also so we could get the mental health support our family needed. While my marriage ultimately ended, it was the start toward a very healthy revised relationship that is truer to both of us.

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Looking back, I can see how much agency I actually had in a year that felt like pure chaos and held an immeasurable amount of heartache.

I didn't have ideal circumstances. I had a hiring freeze, a difficult job, a failing marriage, and young children who needed support. I was grieving deeply for the lost opportunity and my crumbling marriage. But I also used what was already on my table: my professional competence, my clarity about my family's needs, my willingness to make a hard choice to uproot my family serve multiple purposes. I made what I could out of what was presented to me. The Wheel of Fortune was turning, but I was also the Magician. I took things that were available and transformed them into something new.

Some reflection prompts for you:

• What did 2017 hold for you? How did the Wheel of Fortune turn?

• What skills did you develop or lean on? What tools did you already have?

• How were you the Magician? How did you use your skills and tools to make magic from your circumstances?

• What tools do you have right now that make you the Magician in 2026?

The Wheel turns whether we want it to or not. But you’re not just along for the ride. You have tools, and I’m certain you’ve done stunningly impressive things in less than ideal circumstances before. You know how to make magic out of what’s in front of you.

What will you choose to create first?

If you’re not already connected to ways to help and it is within your means, here’s a mutual aid guide for Minneapolis.

Stay Angry

Minneapolis Mutual Aid Guide

By now I’m sure you are aware of the second fatal shooting by ICE in Minneapolis. 37 year old Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse, legally observing and filming agents when he was tackled to the ground, beaten, and shot while face down in the street…

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7 months ago · 166 likes · 10 comments · Alex Cascio

I’m halfway through my training to become a psychedelics facilitator, and having déjà vu. After nearly 20 years as an environmental professional, I recognize this landscape. The workforce doesn’t reflect the people who need the service. Western knowledge gets elevated over Indigenous wisdom. Structural and financial barriers keep care out of reach for the communities that need it most.

my environmental experience

I started at NOAA at the beginning of the Obama administration and left just before Trump’s second term began. I experienced the Biden years as genuinely hopeful. Climate and equity became priorities. We finally acknowledged what we’d been avoiding: the communities most impacted by climate change had the fewest resources to respond.

We started adjusting everything. How we collected data, how we analyzed it, what products we created. We wanted to actually prepare the diverse American public for what was coming. We expanded our capacity to communicate critical warnings by expanding translation, connecting with organizations who were lighthouses in diverse communities, and studied how people actually receive information. What good is the most sophisticated wildfire prediction model if the people you’re trying to warn can’t receive the message?

The federal government put earnest effort into a simple idea: if a public service agency is meant to serve the American public, its workforce must reflect the American public. NOAA tried. But a 2021 report showed what we already knew: white men were “vastly overrepresented,” making up 54% of staff, with white women at 25%.

This was unspoken but not spotlighted until the national push for environmental and racial justice after the murder of George Floyd. Diverse representation in science and technology fields is lacking, in part because young people don’t see themselves represented in those career paths. The years of required training are costly, the professional pipelines are narrow, and education access has historically been lacking for diverse students. There simply weren’t enough Black, brown, Indigenous, or rural candidates with the necessary credentials to meaningfully shift representation. The government filled in the gaps with cultural competency training, which is like putting a band-aid on a cracked foundation.

The challenge extends to what we consider valid knowledge. Western scientific data and analysis are still paramount. Indigenous knowledge, meaning wisdom about the historic magnitude of floods, the damage of storms, the ranges of species, is considered folklore. NOAA was just starting to grapple with how to bring Indigenous and local ecological knowledge into our climate assessment.

You know how this story ends. The administration changed. Equity and environmental justice programming was obliterated. As one of many specific erosions of the federal role in protecting humans from the climate change that we’re causing, the White House directed federal agencies to stop considering the economic damage caused by climate change when writing regulations, except where “plainly required” by law.

The consequence will be predictable: the communities least able to weather climate change impacts will be the most impacted. The communities who need the care most will be least able to access it.

what i’m seeing in psychedelic-assisted care

I became a coach and started studying to be a psychedelics facilitator because I needed a change. My environmental hope tank is running on fumes.

Now, as I wade into the world of psychedelic-assisted care, I see the same patterns.

Laura Mae Northup writes in Radical Healership: How to build a values-driven healing practice in a profit-driven world:

Humanity needs more healers because we need more healing.

We need to heal from personal tragedy, generational trauma, all of the -isms we’ve enshrined in our systems, the unfathomable grief of watching the planet wither before our eyes.

Because we have so much healing to do, we need an ecosystem of care. No single modality is a magic wand. We need it all: individual care, communal spaces, and systems-level change that stops harming people in the first place. Just like in the environmental community, we need diverse care providers. That doesn’t mean every provider must look exactly like every client. It means that across the system, people should be able to find care providers who reflect their communities, histories, and lived realities.

As a Black woman, I’m not saying I only work with Black care providers. What I am saying is this: for certain kinds of healing, there is a particular kind of understanding that comes from shared experience. I’ve experienced racial trauma in professional settings. I’ve tried to share those experiences with people who don’t share my background, only to have my experience diminished or denied. That kind of understanding doesn’t require training manuals or cultural competency workshops. It is embodied.

When diminishment happens in a recovery setting, where you’re surfacing your most tender moments to heal, it’s devastating. At best, it slows healing. At worst, it re-isolates the person and sets them on a trajectory to re-injure more people. That’s why representation isn’t just a gold star on a diversity report. It’s a cornerstone of safety, recovery, resilience, and liberation.

I’m thinking about this hard in the context of psychedelic-assisted care because I’m learning in that space right now. Akua Neizer writes for Chacruna Institute:

In psychedelic work, where people are often in vulnerable states, the practice of cultural humility is not optional, it is foundational.

I look out at my psychedelics classmates and see the same thing I’ve seen my entire academic career. I was one of only three Black people in my environmental graduate program. This isn’t a fluke. You can guess the pattern in my current cohort.

It is expensive to train to be a psychedelic facilitator, or a therapist who offers psychedelic-assisted care. Schools need to make money and can’t prioritize creating a diverse student body. There are not enough therapists overall and certainly not enough therapists of color. Without intentional planning through early investment and sustained support, the workforce will never catch up to the diversity of the public it’s meant to serve.

Access to care is the second, inseparable issue. The training model I’m in prepares practitioners to legally facilitate psychedelics use in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico, sometimes associated with mental health care. It’s rigorous and well-intentioned, but prohibitively expensive. If access is limited by price and training pipelines remain narrow, the resulting workforce will inevitably skew toward people with the resources to pay for care out of pocket.

The communities who need the care most will be least able to access it. Just as the private sector steps in with climate and environmental solutions when the government won’t quickly provide them, psychedelic support will go (or stay) underground.

Finally, knowledge systems in psychedelics need to elevate the Indigenous communities who have been using them for generations. I appreciate ’s reflection on indigenous expertise in this space:

The Indigenous teachers I’ve spent the most time with speak with a clear and humble voice. They speak from a level of relationship with medicines and with the earth that goes far deeper than I could ever hope to understand... If anyone is an ‘authority’ on psychedelics and plant medicines, it is the Indigenous people most deeply connected to them. And yet, I’ve never seen an Indigenous person wield this ‘authority’ in the same way we moderns do: like a sword. Like a microscope. Like a noose.

Depth Medicine

Why I'm Tired of Talking about Psychedelics

Humans have always sought to articulate the ineffable. The haunting animals on the walls of the Lascaux caves silently howl to us from a remote past that only our bones know. Tibetan thangka paintings contain thousands of symbols of enlightenment, and yet still we stumble towards it. Kaleidoscopic mosques depict the fractalized infinity of Allah that no…

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a year ago · 51 likes · 27 comments · Simon Yugler

I’m still a fisheries manager, working to elevate Indigenous and local knowledge perspectives. Both perspectives can coexist and inform us. In my experience, we keep trying to westernize the Indigenous knowledge, which defeats the entire point. Evgenia Fotiou states: “We need to acknowledge how little we know especially when we tread into conceptual territories that native peoples inhabit.” This is equally true about ancestral lands, plant medicines, and fish populations.

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what I hope

This all bubbled up for me while finishing Black Psychedelic Revolution: From Trauma to Liberation by Dr. Nicolas Powers. As he promised, his book reads like a psychedelic journey at some points, weaving fact and speculative fiction, highlighting patterns that sweep across historical eras, phenomenons, and genres. Time expands and contracts. Some chapters are crisp. Other chapters, like the climax of the book, wind like a journey for way longer than you expect, lingering in high relief on certain details and concepts. He concludes:

The Psychedelic Revolution becomes the Psychedelic Renaissance when it serves the multiracial working class.

This is also true for environmentalism. We succeed when our solutions serve those who are least able to fend for themselves.

To get there, we need to hook diverse young people early, and make education affordable so they can enter these fields. We need to respect Indigenous knowledge without demanding it perform for or look like Western science. We need solutions that exist both inside the system (policy change, FDA approvals) and outside the system (community care, underground networks, private sector climate solutions).

The New York Times just reported that the FDA is moving up its review of a psilocybin treatment for severe depression by nine to twelve months. New Jersey also just signed a bill to create a psilocybin therapy pilot program. Medical approval could start to destigmatize psychedelic use. I hope this could expand the view of psychedelics from elite to therapeutic to ceremonial.

There’s the beautiful possibility that these movements support each other by deepening the human connection to the natural world. That the healing we do individually helps us see our place in the larger ecosystem. That protecting the earth and protecting each other are the same work. That’s what I’m holding onto right now.

I invite you to work with these closing reflections, the questions that were in my mind as I wrote this:

• How does your lineage show up in the field you work in?

• Is there a target population you want to reach with your work who is missing at your table?

• Whose knowledge is devalued by the structures you work within?