Before I tell you about the day, I have to tell you about Dani, because she is the other half of the weather I was living in that summer.

Dani is my best friend and I love her, and I have never felt more alone than I do beside her sometimes. She wants us to be a duo. She wants the plan, the evening mapped out, the two of us moving through the world in matching outfits, covered in glitter and drinking tequila shots at the bar. She wants to go out dancing to the clubs and I want to hermit away in my office surrounded by crystals and the sunshine that pours in through my victorian-room windows. Neither of us is wrong….We’re just built different.

So when I felt that familiar tug of obligation, on the day I was going to meet Silas, I brought Dani along.

He, Dani, and I went to the underground tunnels near the art museum. The minute that I saw him I felt an energy that made me smile. He was perched up on one of the large blocks of stone to the right of the art museum steps, waiting for us.

He almost didn’t come, because he had been hit with a wave of depression and anxiety. When he texted me this, I responded that he should practice breathing deeply, and he told me he was going to take a walk. He ended up deciding to come. We had been planning and canceling tentative meetings for months and it was time for us to meet. The world drew us together right in time for the chaos of the full moon.

The first two questions that I asked Silas were if he ever smoked and what his horoscope sign was. We were immediately comfortable. Being in his presence made me almost feel euphoric and high. Within twenty minutes of meeting, he was sharing pieces of himself.

“I lost my body of work, and then I lost my mind, and then I moved to Uganda, and then I lost my mind some more,” he told us.

His openness elated me and I released myself from my social confines, existing erratically and creatively as I do when I see potential for great conversation and understanding. I felt as though I was making Dani uncomfortable with my grand-scheme thoughts. Silas had made a reference to Alan Watts which got me talking excitedly about the universe and my favorite spiritual teachers. It was so rare for me to meet other people who understood spirituality in Philadelphia and I had always felt alone with it.

So I wanted to verbalize how I was feeling because I knew that Silas would understand. So yeah, I was eager and assertive. When we were leaving I was so excited about Silas’ brain and I was in such an inspired mood, and Dani said to me, “You were talking a lot,” which made me feel insecure momentarily. But then Silas texted me “I like your energy” and I knew that he had understood and she hadn’t.

There it was, the whole summer’s energy compressed into a day. One person telling me I was too much, and me defiantly choosing to prioritize creativity and spirit anyway.

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What is new is that I committed to going to Burning Man again. If you told me that would happen two months ago I would have been thoroughly surprised, but it seems I like to keep myself on my toes like that.

H & I were 100% out. We’re getting married this year and it felt like a lot to juggle, even though that is the magical city where we spontaneously got engaged. So I spoke the fated line that cast its spell across space and time, forgetting the power of my words.

“I mean….I'll only go if it falls into my lap.”

Famous last words.

Two days later one of our friends called and offered to bring all our stuff to Burning man so that we could skip the 20+ hour ride into Black Rock City. All we had to do was get our cute little booties on a flight and then ride in on the burner express which skips the regular ticket holder line.

I was back and forth, back and forth. Plagued by my indecisiveness. Every time my action-oriented man asked me what I was thinking and feeling, what I wanted to do, I deflected the question with an, “I don’t know. What about you?”

He told me he’d be happy so long as I was happy.

I told him I wouldn’t know until our camp’s pre-burn party, which was on 8/8.

do you still want to get married on 8/8? he'd ask. Huub and I were originally planning to get legally married on 8/8, but we had also agreed to change our last name before we got married (we’re creating a new lineage) and the name change hadn’t been approved yet.

“i want it to be meaningful. we need to plan something if we’re not getting legally married, but i don’t know if i’ll have time.”

i’m too busy with my clients and my writing, i’d say. he'd propose other dates. 10/10, 11/11. none of them felt quite right. So I just kept floating. Suspended between yes and no. Between certainty and confusion. Between the version of me that likes to plan and the version of me that knew I couldn’t rush this decision.

For weeks this was the conversation.

Then Saturday 8/8 rolled around and I still didn’t know.

That evening all of our Venice friends came over and we hopped on a party bus to a burning man costume warehouse. We wandered through rooms of furs and kimonos and danced and caught up. The air was already shifting, the energy thick and witchy.

Then we headed to a venue in LA called Gin Ling Way to see Carlita perform and the energy was THICKER. Channeling state thick.

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I’ve been changing. I am changed. I have moved inward to the core of myself and now I can’t help but live anything other than that core. The centrifugal force of my being is poetry, imagination, mysticism, sacredness, even in the mundane. This is my core and I know her better than any of my intellectual pursuits. She is full of heart and ecstacy and deep liberation when her fingers do exactly this.

Thing is, dear reader, I’ve finally granted myself permission to put writing and mysticism first. All the way. I’ve surrendered to the forces of my nature. I’ve accepted what I am. There is a wild rebelliousness that comes with this shift.

I am prepared to let go of everything that does not honor that core, even that which I love, and which benefits me.

I watch as my decision-making shifts directions towards all that has changed. I say goodbye to bounty, I say goodbye to external validation, I choose to surrender all of the goodness and magic in my life for this. It takes time for the material to catch up when you shift your identity in such ways. It also takes a relentless meeting of fear against the sharp blade of truth, again and again. (but let me tell you the secret, truth always wins.)

I wish I could tell you that I am fearless, but I am not. I have nightmares that relay my fears to me almost every night. I remember once in college a photographer told me that I was so positive in my waking life to compensate for my deep unconscious restlessness. That struck a chord.

My nightmares used to be much more severe, but they still reveal to me my own unrest.

Just last night I dreamed I was on an endless staircase down to a beach and every few steps we encountered some rocks and other obstacles that seemed to rise out of no where. I was with a man, my man, only it wasn’t my man. It was the erratic viking king walking next to me, and then he became some nerdy tightly-wound stranger that I didn’t recognize, and then the viking king again. Whoever it was, they were not right, yet they flickered in and out like a mirage. And there I was, walking down toward my sanctum, the ocean, the place my soul feels the deepest sense of belonging, hesitating as I took every step, pondering in the back of my mind, how exactly I would abandon my loyal post and escape this situation. Fuck.

I woke up tangled in sheets alone in our bed. The bed I share with the man I am certain about. The man I will one day soon marry. He’s downstairs working since 5am probably. Relief courses through me. Yes. I am certain. He honors my wildness and lets me be totally free. He enables my freedom and takes care of me in every way that a wild writer spirit like my own needs. I locate that feeling and breathe into it. I am certain, but I am scarred by my own past-uncertainty and mistakes. My own mistakes in love haunt me sometimes. I wish I could say that wasn’t true.

What can I say, dear reader? What else do you expect from the child of a custody-battle-divorce? I love my parents, but if you saw how they are still relating to love, you’d understand the miracle of the stability that I’ve created.

What a miracle that someone from my background could find such powerful, transformative, stable, certain love.

And yet, that deep fear of making the wrong decision, of being trapped, it bubbles up within me sometimes like a fever dream. My dreams make me aware of all of the places where I’m still gripping, where I am still afraid.

I am not fearless. No.

But I am relentless in my willingness to meet fear in the arena and charge headfirst with everything that I’ve got. I feel the fear and I do it anyway. I am honest about my fear, and that honesty dissolves it back into pure and utter freedom.

I can claim that boldly.

The old me pulses fear into my psyche at night to make sure that I’m staying safe, even as I move towards the version of life that I want more than anything.

The version of life where I’m almost-high in a state of ecstacy as my words pour out onto the page and empty out my million-miles-per-hour brain. I write imperfectly sometimes, but if you look closely, you’ll find little pieces of yourself within these words.

As always, thanks for reading me.

— B

We take the train to Amsterdam to eat lunch with his friend Nate. He’s waiting for us at a french bistro, legs crossed on the patio, leaning back with the confidence of a Leo, face soaking up the sun, a bottle of white wine waiting chilled in the cooler. Glorious.

Nate is a charmer, and exactly what you’d imagine when I say picture a gay dutch man. Tall and handsome and blonde, with an ease to his movement and a laugh that hypnotizes you to smile. He stands immediately and gives us both a big hug and a kiss. His hug is sincere and thorough. He pulls off his sunglasses even though the sun is cascading down into his face, so that I can see his eyes. So that I can feel him. His eyes are blue. His presence is one that demands to be felt.

He asks about our engagement and I’m shocked.

“You didn’t tell him?!” I ask H.

But I also know H. He is a man of few words. H & Nate have known each other for twenty years and the way that H announced our engagement to him was by sending a 20 minute video of our Burning Man proposal with no context.

“I had to fast forward through to see what was happening,” Nate laughs. “It was just you two at Burning Man fumbling around in the dust and the lights and then suddenly—he’s on one knee.”

I smile and Nate demands the full story.

I sit back and I watch my man tell it in detail for the first time.

He doesn’t skip anything. He loves this man, because he wants him to know.

Nate is the most engaged listener you’ve ever met.

"We all wondered who H was going to end up with," he tells me, ordering a second bottle of white wine and topping my glass up. "He never really brought anyone around."

I don't drink, but the moment calls for celebration. When in Rome. Or Amsterdam, I guess.

“No one was ever worthy.” H says with complete certainty. And my heart melts, because he means it. That’s one thing about H that I can count on. He always means what he says.

Before He Knew

The Last Nate and H had seen each other, I was in Costa Rica about to sit in ceremony with Ayahuasca and I was very much in denial that I very much loved H.

I had no idea. I'd just lived through the craziest year of my life—my house literally burning down in the Palisades fires, a reality-warping breakup—and I was pretty much starting my life over. I was hoping Ayahuasca would give me answers. And even though I knew H and I were good together, I was half-hoping Aya would tell me: "You're not ready. You need a mandatory year of solitude before you can surrender to love again."

But H knew. Once he realized I was it, he decisively chose me day after day while I tried to figure out if I could fully reciprocate. I was writing him poems and sleeping over all the time. But when people asked us I smiled coyly and told them “we’re just friends.” I was fucking scared.

So while I was offline in ceremony trying to figure it out, he was having a late-night conversation with Nate,telling him he was certain I was the one. That he was going to marry me.

And Nate was like, okayyyyy slow down there soldier.

I smile because when H & I were just friends I would always speculate as to why he was always single. He’d been waiting for the right one for years. Who knew it would be me.

“Nate knows, I’ve never spoken like this about anyone.” H tells me with utmost sincerity.

And I know it's the truth. Because if there's one thing I know about my man, it's that he carries the sword of truth like it's an extension of his body. He doesn't speak unless it matters. He doesn't promise unless he’s certain. He doesn't love unless it's absolute.

The part of me that yearns to be loved and chosen wholly, truly, deeply, entirely, smiles within. You did good kiddo, she tells me.

And I’m like, I know.

Thank god I blew up every other relationship I thought could be it, because God, this is it. I had 70 percent, 80 percent, 92 percent, but I always wondered if 110% was out there and damn am I happy I held out because this — this is my husband.

I don’t doubt that.

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Nate and I are going at it and H is sitting back and observing with a smirk on his face as per usual, only injecting when he has something concise and meaningful to say. He’s good at conserving energy like that.

But me and Nate? We are story-tornados.

We talk about my abuela. We talk about dementia. He reaches for my hand across the table, emotion raw in his eyes. His dad too. He died 3 months ago. Long weeks of suffering as the spark of spirit faded.

We both know the excruciating pain of watching someone that you love become a husk of themselves and die slowly, and painfully, and brutally. It's hard to reckon why the hell the universe lets that happen.

We begin talking about afterlife.

I'm three glasses of wine deep—which is rare for me—and I'm not holding back. Neither is he. H sits back, pleased to see us riffing, contributing expansive thoughts here and there to guide us along.

"Do you think dementia is a choice?" I ask Nate.

He stops mid-breath, eyebrows furrowing.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m not certain,” I tell him, even though I feel pretty certain that I know. “But I think it might be. I think when a soul has avoided facing the truth or meeting the lessons it’s here to learn, eventually it can’t take hiding from itself. It begins to leave the body. I think it’s an unconscious choice. At least for my abuela, it was.”

I’m treading carefully now. I don’t want to offend him when his dad died four months ago. But he’s intrigued.

"I never thought about it like that," he says slowly. "I need time to sit with that."

I understand.

We continue rapid firing stories and conversations and eating burrata and drinking wine, and every twenty minutes he reaches his fingers across the table to H & I and does a little wiggle with his finger tips. Magic fingers. Resonance. I get it.

Nate gives me a sincere hug and says, “welcome to the family”

H looks at me with such decisive adoration.

I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And it’s natural. All of this is. We say our goodbyes and H pops into a shop and orders us some food to sober up. I can’t remember the last time I drank, but once in a while, life calls for indulgence. No regrets. We eat gyros and head back on the train and I think to myself, that this is how love and integration with another person and their people is supposed to feel.

Natural.

Right.

Chosen.

Hiiii friends. So I’m in a putting my greatest passion (writing) first era and I’ll be sharing here more frequently for free & paid subscribers. paid subscribers; you’ll be getting at least one of these intimate diary entries every week.

If you love my more personal writing, let me know or share this piece.

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If you want to support me in my endeavor to put art at the forefront, become a paid subscriber and send any prompts or requests my way (i dare you, and i will love it.)

Thanks for reading me and giving me an outlet where I can share my writer’s heart with the world. It’s like the sweetest exhale writing to you.

Xx

Bela

That’s the curse of being energy-sensitive. And guess what? Every creative and spiritual person I’ve ever met is energy sensitive.

That includes you, darling.

How many times have you woken up and swallowed a hundred voices before breakfast? Opinions, aesthetics, silly little videos. Seemingly harmless. But deep down you know as well as I do that it eats at your creativity.

So of course you can’t hear yourself think.

Of course you’re stuck in the loop of bookmarking other people’s ideas instead of making your own.

Of course you’ve gotten so good at documenting your life for everyone else.

It’s just crowded in that beautiful head of yours.

Thing is, creatives need spaciousness. We need to wrestle with boredom until our third eyes flutter open for a moment at a time. We need silence so that we can hear God.

I’m writing this because I need it too. I just got back from three weeks in three countries visiting my family and my fiancé’s, and you can bet that in my free time I was scrolling more than I was creating.

So let me tell you how I kicked the habit.

Journaling is the road home.

Before you roll your eyes and think I've tried that — hear me out. Not all journaling is equal.

I’ve been journaling since I was seven years old and I need you to understand what I mean when I say journaling. I’m not talking about perfect handwriting, or bumper-sticker inspiration. No. journaling isn’t another productivity system or a surface-level self-help hack.

Let me give you the clinical part before I give you the magic.

what actually happens when you write

When you put a feeling into words, your conscious mind does something we can literally measure.

It’s called affect labeling. The moment you name what you’re feeling on the page, the amygdala — your inner smoke alarm — settles down, and the thinking part of your brain comes back online. Naming the thing on paper takes the charge out of it.

That’s the science. But here’s what it feels like:

As your hand keeps moving slowly across the page, the pace lets the deeper stuff slip past your conscious protective mechanisms, and you begin to reveal the deeper aspects of the psyche.Your subconscious stops performing and starts confessing.

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I’ll give you a vulnerable example.

I’m in my Tarot era. I’ve been studying it obsessively in all my free time, because on a scientific level I believe in the morphogenetic field’s ability to deliver the exact guidance we need, and on a spiritual level, I believe our angels and guides are always available for advice.

I pulled the nine of swords first. Of course I did.

The Nine of Swords is the card of being tortured by every terrible unconscious thought you can think of. The suffering it shows is real, but it's entirely internal. Yup. That’s how I was feeling on that late-luteal-overwhelmed-by-work day. Like my contracted mind could only latch onto negatives no matter how much I meditated.

Every good tarot reader knows that every card asks us to take a specific action. This one asks you to reflect:

What specific fear does your mind return to most reliably when you sit down to create?

Damn. Okay universe, call me out.

So I did what it asked. I wrote down every fear, every contraction, every invisible dragon. And once they were on the page, I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I knew what I needed.

Quiet. Space. Room to create.

I took it. And from that action, this article was born.

You can lie to your therapist. I would know, I am one, and my clients are talented.

But you cannot lie to your own handwriting for more than about three pages. The hand is slower than the mask.

And baby, the truth is the only thing that gives you the sweet release you’re actually craving.

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The 3-Step-Process to Return to your Highest Self:

Not all journaling is created equal. But don't worry, I've spent two decades mastering writing prompts and teaching identity work, so here's the exact process to come home to yourself when you're feeling creatively uninspired, or lost in general.

1. Bring awareness to what’s underneath.

You know that famous Carl Jung line? “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Yeah. That one.

We journal to get intimately familiar with our own little underworld. Pro tip: find external inspiration for your prompts. The Tarot. My 7-Day Higher Self Challenge. Whatever it takes to ask yourself the questions that make the unconscious conscious.

2. Reflect and redirect the story you’re telling.

Most of us have no idea what story we’re telling ourselves. It’s usually one you absorbed from someone else, or an old wounded victim story trying to protect you. No shade. None of us are exempt from this.

Catch the limiting story, then ask: if I were the author of my own hero story, what would I choose to believe? How would I move differently, right now?

3. Come back to who you actually are, and act as her.

This is where you return to essence. You take action as your highest self. As the truest version of you.

you are the one telling the story

Memory is fickle, and it’s rarely kind to us with its distortions.

This is the part of the work I love the absolute most. You get to be the author of your own mythology.

So when you journal, understand what you’re actually doing. You’re taking dictation from your unconscious, and then deciding, consciously, which lines make it into the book.

interrupt the spiral

When you vent to someone you love you’re usually looking to be seen. But retelling the story and venting and looping is often exactly the thing keeping you stuck.

The vicious cycle goes: feeling → story you (unconsciously) create→ rumination → intensified feeling.

When you write, it’s just you and you. You become the one receiving your own complaints. And once the charge flows out of you and onto the page, you start drifting toward solutions on your own.

It’s almost like you’re the author writing the story of your life.

And if that were true… wouldn’t you write yourself a hero?

You are not your thoughts. You are the one who chooses which thoughts to act on.

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the magic of writing by hand

I type fast. I think faster. That’s exactly the problem.

Handwriting is slow enough that your body catches up with your mind, and something else finally gets a chance to speak. The pace drops you into a trance-like presence, which is why journaling is my favorite form of meditation, and why I get my clearest downloads when I’m holding a pen instead of my phone.

Thank god for the practices that still let us slow down.

I’ve had entries come through that I don’t fully remember writing. I read them back and think, I did not write that alone. Or I catch the truth just sitting there on the page and go; Damn. I can’t believe I wrote that.

Call it your higher self. Your angels, your guides, the morphogenetic field, the universe conspiring in your favor to help you grow. Whatever superior force you believe in will do.

And look, writing doesn’t have to be your act of creation.

Whatever medium you choose to reflect & express, there’s only one question that matters:.

And then you move. Because a nudge you don’t act on becomes a knock, and a knock you ignore becomes a rude awakening.

Ask me how I know, I dare you.

you don’t need to be ready

You need a blank page and about seven minutes and a playlist without lyrics that gets you in the mood.

Eventually the real words start flowing through your fingertips and onto the page.

Uncover what’s underneath. Reclaim the story. Return to yourself.

You already know yourself better than you think. She’s just been waiting for you to take action on living from a more empowered story.

So if you needed to read this, set aside some solo time to write today.

Put your name at the top of the page like you’re summoning someone.

Because you are. Your higher self.

—B

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P.S., I’m hosting a 7-day higher self challenge to help you stop thinking about how you want to show up, and to practice acting as her. If you’d like to join, click here.

We’ll be putting everything I covered into practice, and so much more.

When I walk away from writing for long enough and then I come back, I feel so much emotion I could cry.

How does that happen? That I walk away from the very thing my soul came here to do?

I’m pretty damn consistent, and I need to be because writing is like my oxygen, but a family trip or a busy season can throw me off kilter.

The good thing is that the dam is open.

There’s no writer’s block keeping my tongue-tied. No. My tongue is sharp like a blade.

I just need to use it more often, and let go of my fear that it will cut.

Of course it will, but that’s not the point.

I refound my voice and I’ll never wonder what I sound like again because I’ll never stop speaking and singing and trying to find the right words to describe this precious human experience.

I’m inspired. One of the woman I admire most is a wild-uncaged-woman-poet named Chelsie Diane, and I adore her because she reflects back the truest part of me that I haven’t fully let run wild.

Chelsie is a wild horse who left captivity and never looked back, while I roam in big wide open pastures, mostly free, but enclosed by a discreet fence. I could probably jump it. But I stay close to home because I’m a show-pony and I’ve got a crowd of speculators counting on me.

Just kidding.

I’m not sure if that metaphor fully fits. Perhaps I’m more like a very long kite than a show pony. I’m flying freely, I’m gone with the wind (almost) but there’s still a tiny string keeping me tethered to earth.

I want to cut it float up into outer space

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My mother’s house is confronting. It’s like a museum of the first 22 years of my life, except for nothing is behind glass and the curator hasn’t swapped out the exhibits in over a decade.

The couch my ex and I bought when we lived in a church sits in the living room like it’s frozen in time, waiting to hold us again.

I don’t have the balls to tell it that it never will.

There's a japanese painting hanging in the bathroom, a parting gift from a foreign exchange student who lived with us once.

It says something about blessing our home with happiness, or at least that’s what my mom told me once.

Since I was twelve, my mother rented rooms to students from all over the world. kuwait, japan, nigeria, italy, france, saudi arabia, the netherlands, croatia. Name a country and someone from it has probably cooked something that smelled like home to them in my kitchen.

I used to get so annoyed by the revolving door of worldly students in my house.

“It’s like living in a subway station.” I told my mom once, “there’s always strangers walking by.”

I always wished I had a normal home life. My whole life was built upon unstable foundations, a revolving door of strangers who came and went all while I dreamed of seeing the world. Moving back and forth from Mexico to Philadelphia every other year. Then my parents divorced and I began backpack life. Riding grimey Philly trolleys across town and living polar opposite lives with my polar opposite parents.

But I guess that throughout all of the unpredictability, the international house stayed a constant. The whole world was being delivered to my living room, one person at a time.

What more could a writer ask for?

I collected more stories in that house than I could fit in my bridge brain. Some of them are sweet, some of them are too heavy on my lungs to say out loud.

My parents divorced, and my dad moved around the corner from Betsy Ross' house, walking distance from independence hall. My mom used to say he was a colonial in a past life.

She would know.

She’s witch.

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No one that loves their life. Nobody walks into their own precious incarnation, takes a paper ticket from the little red dispenser, and sits down under the flourescent lights thinking: Great!! I’ll just be here until the real thing starts.

Except for we all do it.

My ego hates to admit it, but I did exactly that for months.

And I’m somebody who loves her life. I’m a full-blown life addict. No really, ask me about my life, you’ll be shell-shocked by how many stories I’ve collected under my tongue. Heavy on the life experience. Low on the shame. I will die taking every risk that makes my piscean heart leap and beat. I have followed that beating thing in my chest high and low through dry-deserts riddled with mirages and into impulsive decisions and relations and back into paradise where I could kick up my feet and write the kind of poetry that hits you in the jugular when you read it.

But I still fall victim to this kind of to the later-game-waiting-room-thinking.

Just imagine a waiting room again. Maybe your waiting room is the dentist’s lobby. Or maybe yours is the DMV. Terrible lighting. Outdated magazines. Strange smells. Oddball humans. Nothing to do, but literally anywhere better to be….and you’re just sitting there holding that red ticket and waiting while the person you’re itching to become stands on the other side of the glass wondering why the hell you don’t just choose anarchy, take life into your own hands, and go for the thing you want?!

I know. When I put it that way, it sounds f*cking ridiculous to wait for your dreams while your one precious life trickles away.

Months have flown by me like this. Whole months, just gone. I deprioritized everything that makes me feel like myself, the writing, the dancing, the magic, the witchiness, the communing with nature, because I was “too busy.”

Too busy. But never too busy for work or the emails or for the day-to-day responsibilities. Funny how that works.

That’s bullshit and consciously I know it, but the subconscious is sneaky like that.

It wraps around your neck like a boa constrictor until your soul is suffocating and starved for LIFE.

We don’t mean to do things, but we do them anyway.

You do it too. I’d bet my money on it, and I don’t gamble. I’m a pisces with too much dionysus energy, remember?

So yes. You do it too.

Remember?

Do you remember the uncertain times when you were in the midst of a shift, or just plain busy, and you found yourself thinking;

“Ok the real thing starts when I get through this part.”

When the trip is over.

When the holidays are done.

When the break up you’ve been avoiding happens.

When you stop feeling like you’re between versions of yourself and actually arrive at the next one.

When you actually start doing the things you fucking love (like writing, dancing, expressing, practicing magic)

When you lose the weight.

When you leave the job.

When you stop feeling like a rough draft of yourself and finally get to be the published version.

when there's money, clarity, an apartment with good light.

My love….My sweet, sweet, love. Respectfully? Fuck that.

Later is an uninhabitable country where nothing grows and you can’t even get a visa to go there. No plane flies there.

Later doesn’t exist. There’s only right now.

Everyone you’ve ever admired built their life out of a pile of right-nows, most of them inconvenient, and messy, and certainly not photogenic in the early stages.

And I'll tell you what i didn't want to know about my own waiting room, the thing that finally got me to run out of that purgatory waiting room.

Busy, going through it, waiting, they’re all costumes that fear wears. Fear knows that a chapter that “doesn’t count” is a chapter that you can’t fail. Noting you do in that room can be held against you. Nothing in there counts at all, except for the passing of your sweet precious time.

Waiting is just another word for hiding. Waiting is just another way to avoid facing the wobble. But fuck waiting. Fuck later. Later doesn’t exist. There is only right now.

Your hero story is being written right now. This breath. This boring old tuesday, sitting at your desk, finally sitting down in your pajamas with your hair knotted on top of your head to revive the substack you’ve been wanting to go all in on (yes, I’m speaking to myself).

I left the waiting room behind and here’s what I have to say to anyone still in it:

Put the ticket down.

The waiting room isn’t going to get you to the other side that you’re obsessed with fantasizing over.

Growth isn’t waiting for you like you’re waiting for it.

Growth lives in the space between the known and the unknown, not at the destination.

In fact, you only get to the destination if you grow on your way through the in-between.

Your hero story isn’t waiting for you on the other side of the uncertainty. It’s not starting when things settle or you figure yourself out more. It’s being written right. Now. It’s happening right. Now.

So instead of trying to rush through this part, or postponing what this season is asking of you….

Pay attention to what it’s asking.

Let it do what it came to do.

Work with life, not against it.

You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

P.S. HI SUBSTACK FRIENDS! I’m back with a creative fire in my belly and I’m going all in on writing my little heart out to you. I had to take some time away to get really clear on exactly how I wanted to use this space, but I’m back and ready to roll. I’ll be sharing free newsletters, and then lots of juicy personal diary entries for my paid subscribers.

P.S.S.

If you’re ready to go ALL IN on yourself for the rest of 2026, and to truly write yourself the hero story you’ve been waiting for, I designed my new legacy program Divine X Design for you. It took me a year and a half to bring it through to completion because I wanted it to be the best thing I’ve ever created (and it is). For the visionaries, the creatives, the mystics, the heart-led leaders.

We’re already 60% full. The founding cohort specials end in one week.

Learn more here, or shoot me a message to chat!

https://divinexdesign.showit.site/

Love you long time.

-Bela

I know that’s what we’re sold. That fear is the problem. That we need more confidence, more certainty, more readiness, more blah blah blah before we make moves….

We’re told that fear is the enemy and that once we conquer it, everything changes.

And look, I get it. Fear has a strong gravitational pull that affects us all in moments…

But when I look at the women I know, love and work with, (brilliant, capable, badass, self-aware women who have done so much inner work and who are genuinely fearles) I don’t see fear holding them back.

I see waiting.

The Comfort Trap

When you wait in life, it’s because you’re comfortable enough. You’re maybe…70% happy. Happy enough that the friction hasn’t become unbearable yet.

So you wait until the relationship gets bad enough to justify leaving. Until the work feels truly intolerable before considering what else you could be doing. Until the friendship is draining your life force before you set boundaries.

You’re wait until you feel ready (Hint: ready is a myth).

You’re waiting until you get a sign (Hint: you wanting a sign is the sign).

You’re waiting until you magically feel prepared to do the thing you know you need to do.

I get it.

We’re sold the narrative that waiting is responsible. Patient. Even wise.

But what I’ve learned (mostly the hard way, lol) is that when you wait too long to make a change, life eventually makes it for you.

And when that happens, life is not gentle about it.

Burning Down the House

Let me elaborate with a painfully honest story (as we all know I love to do)

A year and a half ago, I was at the tail end of a relationship that looked good on paper. Juicy in many ways. Fun. Electric. Strong polarity. Chemistry. Shared love of nature. But if I’m honest with myself, I was feeling one foot in and one foot out often enough that I should have paid attention.

Especially during my luteal phase, when my body would whisper no. This is not it. But instead of listening to my intuition, I dismissed it as confusion because that was more convenient. I gaslit myself into thinking I was just a “one foot in, one foot out kind of girl.”

So I moved in with him. Even though I was unsure. Even though something in me was saying wait, no, not this.

And you know what? Right away, I just knew it was wrong.

I remember the exact moment. We’d just laid down the last rug, the final furnishing of our home to mark its completion. And as I stood there looking at this perfectly curated home we’d built, complete with a view of the ocean, I felt something sharp and undeniable in my gut.

This isn’t right.

That same morning, right after laying down the rug, I went outside and sat in my car feeling humbled and confessing to someone close to me that I had made the wrong decision.

This man… he wasn’t my person.

While he was great most of the time, his loud ego lashed out every time there was conflict (and he was starting conflict more and more frequently).

And let me be clear, I wasn't scared to leave him. I was excited and I knew it was right. But I feel trapped, like it would be too inconvenient and hard to uproot my life. Like maybe I couldn’t find better. I felt trapped by my own resistance to the identity shift that leaving would require.

(Because that’s what the ego does—it protects us from big changes because it knows what follows is a new identity, and the ego hates what’s unfamiliar.)

So I cried in my car, feeling trapped, and decided: I’ll wait out the lease. One year. That’s manageable. That’s responsible. I’ll just work on myself in the meantime.

When I stepped out of the car I smelled smoke. I looked up at the palatial mountains that overlooked our Palisades hill and our dream home, and saw a thick plume of smoke rising and I felt an incredible sense of calm wash over me.

Our house burned down in the Palisades fire the next day.

Little did I know that day that God was looking out for me. That what was a massive tragedy for most (and for me at the time) would become one of my greatest teachers and blessings.

I had been waiting to let go of a version of my life that I had outgrown but was attached to, and then it was taken out of my hands.

All because I didn’t want to accept that I had already outgrown the life I was clinging to.

Shortly after, I left him.

I decided not to wait any longer because life is too fucking short to wait and see what happens.

The Cost of Waiting

I don’t tell that story for drama. I tell it because I see the same thing happening quietly in so many women’s lives right now.

Not always with literal flames, but with the slow erosion of staying too long.

The exhaustion of carrying a life that no longer fits.

The damn passing of your life—this is your ONE life, and time is the only thing you cannot get more of.

The dissatisfaction that hums underneath everything when you’re not where you’re meant to be because some part of you has already moved on, and the rest of you hasn’t caught up yet.

The dissonance between who you’re becoming and the life you’re still inhabiting.

This is a lesson about choice.

Let me be clear, you can choose to make the big identity shift before life forces you to.

But choosing requires you to be brutally honest about something most of us avoid looking at directly:

Where in your life are you waiting?

Where are you telling yourself not yet—about the relationship that’s already over in your heart, the work that’s been soul-crushing for months, the expression you can feel pressing to come through, the version of yourself you already know is ready?

So I’m asking you this:

What would it feel like to choose instead of wait? What would life look like if you trusted that you don’t need the house to burn in order to rebuild?

What would it feel like to honor the version of yourself that’s already moving on, instead of forcing her to drag the rest of you along?

P.S. Hi Substack, I missed you. Lots more writing coming soon.

-Bela

I’ve been reflecting on the indigenous aspects of my upbringing.

My mother is native to Mexico and raised me with the teachings of our ancestors, (largely Toltec) passed down through word of mouth and handwritten teachings and practices from abuela to abuela. I grew up praying, practicing ritual, meditating, and connecting to the divine in whatever way I could. I didn’t have an oppressive God as so many who inherit religion do. I had freedom to believe. Freedom to create. Freedom to be.

I’m eternally grateful that I was raised with my spiritual eyes open.

That I wasn’t raised praying to a Creator that punishes.

(No. My God would never. My God teaches, it doesn’t punish.)

I had these ancestral principles as guideposts throughout my life, and I come back to them more and more as I get older.

I feel that as a collective, we’re seriously lacking when it comes to initiations, rites of passage, and preparation to face the wild unknown as it presents itself. Most people have had their roots entirely erased, we have no origin story to turn to, to reflect upon, no wisdom to guide us through these deeply uncertain and confusing times. So today I’d like to impart some of my own generational wisdom upon you. I hope that these teachings serve as little reminders, little nudges to remember your essence and your soul, no matter what.

The Three Keys to Mastery

In my lineage it is believed that there are three keys to mastery:

Intuition, Intention, and Imagination.

Intuition because it is your connection to the Divine. It is how you receive synchronicities and sense where life is trying to lead you.

Intention because your intention reflects the purity of your heart. They say that clean intentions is the most important quality of a warrior.

Imagination, because through imagination we create; our personal reality, our manifestations, our dreams, our visions.

These three keys have been my compass. That, and listening to my own heart as a practice to stay connected to my own essence.

The Cognitive Cost of Convenience

The thing about this new age of misinformation that we’re in (with AI and LLMs) is that when we over-rely on them, we end up stifling our own intuitive hits and imaginative downloads by outsourcing them to an algorithm.

A recent MIT study showed that people who used ChatGPT to write essays had significantly lower neural engagement in the frontal regions of the brain (areas associated with critical thinking, memory, and learning).

The researchers from this study even coined a term called “cognitive debt,” explaining how habitual AI reliance fosters a pattern where users experience weakened independent thinking skills.

The participants who relied on AI in this study reportedly struggled to recall what they’d even written because they outsource their thinking & imagination.

The Real Cost

The real cost, when we hand our intuition over to an algorithm that thinks for us, is that we lose our connection to the Divine.

When AI generates your creative vision for you, you lose your imagination, the very tool with which you create your reality.

The crazy thing is that we’re doing it entirely voluntarily, without realizing the cost. We’re trading our ability to think, intuit, and imagine, for convenience.

I often wonder, what m>y ancestors would think. How they would respond to what’s happening in the world

I find myself coming back again and again to indigenous wisdom. To wanting to be closer to our mother planet. To honoring and learning from the greatest technologies of them all; nature & storytelling.

Last month I found myself in Costa Rica, sitting in circle with an Amazonian Tubú indigenous elder. We were doing mambe (a sacred practice of coca leaf and ash) and as I sat there, I couldn't help but notice that the ancestral way of learning, of educating, of initiating, was in large part through storytelling, ceremony, and initiation.

Not through information overload. Through creative, imaginative storytelling.

So let me remind you that story is how we activate intuition.

Story is how imagination lives and breathes.

Stories are how we remember who we are and where we come from.

Your intuition is not something you can outsource.

Your imagination is not something that an algorithm can generate for you.

Your pure-hearted intentions can only come from within you.

These qualities are your birthright. They are essential aspects of who you are.

And in a world of endless mitote, they are how you find your way back home.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Let me know if you’d like me to share more lineage wisdom in a future post.

LOVE YA!

- B

Today is a day like any other day. I begin to stir awake as soon as my love leaves the bedroom at 5ish as he always does. He’s an early riser, and an early thinker, and his desire to positively impact humanity keeps him going. I’m an early riser too, but I’m the slower one in our relationship.

I reach for my phone but do the conscious thing and instead of heading straight into the doom scroll tunnel of social media, I find a loving kindness meditation, put my hands on my heart, and lay there, sending love to myself and everyone in the universe, even my enemies (10/10 shadow work practice).

Then comes bone broth and coffee, mine a little sweet, and finally I arrive here at my desk to write while the sound of Olafur Arnalds fills my office with its dreamy soundscapes.

Yesterday was the first Monday that I’ve missed writing or posting my weekly Substack post because I was too busy and my creative energy was expended on book-writing, so I didn’t have it in me to write something that expressed my soul here.

But I value being a trustworthy person and I take follow through seriously. Every time I follow through on a commitment (like my weekly post) I know I build trust with you (and I value you so much, thanks for being here).

So then I found myself thinking;

Should I do a bi-weekly post instead? Should I stop making so many weekly promises?

Or should I show up messy, every week, just because that is what’s real?

Is it better to be consistent, or to accurately represent yourself, only when you feel able?

Many people would pull out Claude or ChatGBT in this given scenario and have these LLMS write for them, but you already know I refuse to do that. So I didn’t try to force myself to write from a place of having to.

No.

Writing has been the greatest gift I’ve ever received in my entire life — the gift of knowing myself. The gift of self awareness. The gift of articulation. I get to do it.

Ever since that fated day that my dad gave me my first journal when I was 7. It’s been twenty-three years of writing in this way now. Twenty-three years of building worlds with my words. Twenty-three years of practicing messy authentic expression.

I don’t have to write, I get to write.

Writing for me is like oxygen. If I go too long without it, I start to feel like I’m suffocating. This is how I release the pressure valve, stay spiritually connected, and feel immense amounts of clarity and joy.

I refuse to turn it into some spectacle for follows or likes.

No. It’s far too sacred to me.

I don’t want to leash or niche this part of me, but I do want to share it.

I know there’s medicine in it, even when it’s imperfect and unedited.

So then today, I thought, what is the most honest thing I can write about right now? What’s alive, real, and true?

And this is what’s coming through.

No edits.

Just fingertips flowing to the most poetic piano sounds that put my soul at ease.

I’m someone who values authentic expression over performance, so I’d rather just let you in on my messy process instead of trying to force providing value.

That’s what’s real, alive, and true.

I hope this encourages you to create freely, in a way that expresses your soul. Because ultimately, that is how you experience more of the divine in your life — by authentically experiencing and expressing what it means to be uniquely you.

By allowing your heart and your essence to shine through that beautiful vessel called body that you’ve been given.

This is how you come home to yourself.

Xx

Bela

P.S.S if you want to co-create with me, give me a prompt or an idea and I’ll write you something.

We all do it. Rehearse loss in our happiest moments. Imagine the worst case scenarios under the guise of preparation. Preparing for what exactly?

Heartbreak. Rejection. The apocalypse. The day our loved ones die.

We humans have such a resistance to merging with love, when it’s truly what we all desire in our innermost core.

I’m not sure why it’s this way, but it’s undoubtedly innate to the human condition to fear merging with love.

So we prepare for loss by imagining it. In our happiest moments, the highest peaks and ecstasies of love and bliss and joy, we inevitably imagine the come-down. The loss of the very conditions that bring us to such higher states. After all, we live on earth. Whatever goes up must come down at precisely 9.81 meters per second squared.

It’s a strange kind of grief. Aching about something that may or may not happen. Mourning past versions of yourself and timelines that may never play out. Futures that you don’t even want anymore. Reminiscing upon people you once knew, loves you once had, homes that you no longer live in, places that you’ve outgrown, where the ghost of your past selves still roam.

I have grieved the writer I could have been, and the poetry I could have written and the future I could have had if I wasn’t so insistent uprooting my life every time I felt a tug at my intuition. I’ve mourned my childhood innocence and the way I didn’t love myself more when I was younger. I’ve mourned my own maidenhood many times even though I am not yet a mother.

And lately, I've noticed this same anticipatory grief spreading through the collective.

We're all feeling it. The way life is accelerating. AI. Humanoid robots. Global tension. We're grieving a world we haven't even lost yet. Preparing for an apocalypse that may never come.

Grief is a trickster. It does not care much for timing, though it rarely arrives late. It loves showing up early, visiting the mind uninvited. The mind which can be so cruel in its rehearsals when it falls victim to the collective frequency of fear at which so much of humanity vibrates, especially these days.

These days, we can feel things changing. Can’t you?

There has never been a time in history more fertile with potential; for both creation and destruction.

But I’ll tell you what. Fear is not the solution.

Fear is the cousin of grief. It pulls us into its orbit and suddenly our imagination so cruelly pulls us into timelines that were never meant to be ours.

You are not meant to fear the unknown, no matter how much the news media and fear mongering tells you to, I stand firm in that statement.

You are not meant to fear the unknown. You are meant to dance with it.

Surrender to her endless possibilities and do everything you can to move as the most evolved version of you. Pretend you’re an angel in training, sprouting wings from your spine every time that you smile, speak from your heart, or do something kind for a stranger in need when you are in overflow.

You earn your wings by living open-heartedly. By meeting those trickster spirits of grief and fear with love and gratitude.

After all, grief is just another form of love, isn’t it?

Yes.

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The Dragon

So listen here. Let me tell you one of the secrets from my own lineage. The teachings the elders whispered over fires to initiate the young into their power. Your imagination is dragon that you either learn to ride or let obliterate you.

In its cruelest form it burns you; wounds you with vivid mirages of suffering that don’t actually exist yet.

The moment you lose your mother. Break-ups or promises broken or judgements from friends that actually adore you. The apocalypse we’ve been rehearsing. A world consumed by machines.

This is the dragon feral and untamed; your imagination running wild in response to daunting futures you built within your own mind that you were never meant to live.

But when you learn to ride that dragon, you get a new vantage point. You see with a birds-eye view all that is magnificent about your life. All of the endless possibilities that extend beyond the horizon’s reach as you take flight.

And God, is it exhilarating. To ride the dragon that is your imagination. To remember that we all get to build our own personal slice of Utopia here.

It’s important not to underestimate the immense power of this dragon.

The Alchemy

Ultimately, your grief just wants to be held and loved. Gather it in your arms and meet every sharp shade of pain with love until it turns into ribbons of silk. Until your soul remembers that you are eternal.

You are the alchemist. Kindly remember your power to create your reality.

And as this new dawn of time arrives all too quickly —robots, AI, technology evolving at the speed of light— notice your inclination to contract and withdraw. To let fear and grief be the guides.

Choose not to follow them and instead choose to keep your heart open wide, to lead with your own vision for Utopia. Show up as the person who is here to create for good, and not from a place of greed.

In a time when change and uncertainty are and will continue to be rampant, it is my belief that technology will evolve mirror the human condition. So we, as faithful citizens of humankind, must demonstrate the very best of ourselves. Shape this collective dream with your own gifts and your own, beautiful heart.

Hold your frequency high, and let them rise.

And when fear and grief come knocking at your door, get your riding boots.

Take them up high on the back of that beautiful dragon that is your imagination, and give them the perspective, the reminder that you hold the paintbrush to paint the canvas that is this reality.

With every thought, every pulse, every breath.

Point the dragon toward the world you want to create, and ride it like you are the brave protagonist of your own story.

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Storytelling is our most ancient tool for communication. And In a world that’s getting noisier and noisier with absolute AI slop, it’s a skill I not only have to advocate for but also feel like I have to help teach.

I’m very passionate about this subject because last year I almost lost my voice, for a number of reasons.

It was one of those life curriculum things. An initiation that every storyteller and writer probably goes through at some point. And as someone who has been writing my little heart out every single day since I was seven years old, I think it was only fitting for me to go through it.

In this newsletter, I’ll be teaching you one of my favorite practices that helped me to find my voice again as a writer.

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Now, as many of you know, I’m engaged, so I’m officially off the market.

BUT as someone who has always been an avid student of the love-curriculum, a self-proclaimed Carrie Bradshaw of sorts—doing it for the plot and for field research and to heal my own inherited and disastrous wounds in love— I’ve never experienced a dating recession. And I’ve got a bunch of tips and tricks for dating that have helped me to at the very least make connections and collect data when I was bored.

Yes, I said collect data — dating is data collection after all.

And unless you came from a relatively perfect family with a healthy and loving relationship modeled to you by your parents, you likely need to collect data to actually figure out what the hell it is you want as end-game anyway.

As the girl who has done it all (I’m talking dating the perfect partners to full blown narcissists to going on 7 dates in a row with a vegan musician who WOULDN’T KISS ME unless I committed to him LOL) and as a now retiree from the dating scene, I feel it’s my moral duty and obligation to share some of my best tips, tricks, and thoughts with you.

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On Dating Apps

First of all, yeah. Dating apps suck. I would never advise you to use them. Not that there’s any shame in doing so, it’s just not my cup of tea.

I used Tinder briefly when I was nineteen and single for a couple of years, and BOY do I have some funny stories from the two dates that I went on.

(Ask me about this. No really. I’ll tell you the story if you want to know, but probably only if you’re a paid subscriber. Because even for me, there’s limits to how much of my personal history I want to publicly disclose to 12,000 followers. Call me shy or whatever.)

Also, sidenote: ask me about the time I was a personal dating assistant for a CEO on Wall Street. Lol. Suddenly I’m realizing that I’m more qualified to write this article than I thought.

Lets reel it back though. If you ARE going to do dating apps, my tips are simple:

1. Get on a FaceTime and vibe-check your potential dates before wasting your time meeting them in person. Make sure you’re not being catfished and that they’re not exclusively looking for sex.

2. Always have an exit strategy. I would always have a friend just a text away, ready to call me fake-crying with an emergency like “my boyfriend just dumped me” and I’d pull that card after an hour or so, saying “I’m so sorry, but I have to go support her during this very hard time.” Meeting strangers on the internet is weird and it’s nice to set timelimits and take time to integrate. (Also, I was nineteen. Dont’t judge my excuses.)

3. Meet them out and be your own ride. Safety precautions, of course.

My Super Epic Bold Move Strategy:

But for those of you who are like me, and who really just know/knew that you’re not going to meet your person on a dating app, or at a bar or a club, this is my most coveted tip, mkay?

During my single & celibate season in college, I got bored. So I decided I needed to put myself out there again. AND I didn’t like the dating apps or hook up culture, so I was kind of dreading it. I’m (annoyingly) one of those people who needs high intellectual stimulation and connection, but I’m also human and I have a need for affection and touch and the possibility for more.

Not only that, but it seemed that every time I saw someone who might actually be worth considering, it was in the most inconvenient and awkward places. Libraries. Coffee shops. Yoga classes.

And holy shit don’t even get me started on how painfully awkward it would be to make a move and get rejected by a stranger in public or in a dead-quiet library of all places.

But I also hate living with regrets and what-ifs.

SO. I came up with this strategy.

I wrote my name and number on a few pieces of paper and kept them in my phone case for if and when I came across someone who I had an intuitive hunch about.

I’d walk up to said person.

Nonchallantly say “I think you dropped this.” and then, quite valiantly, turn on my heel and all but run out the door as I beelined away. I know. Brave, right?

Thisallowed me to simultaneously be bold and make a move all while avoiding rejection and letting the other person have space to respond without pressure while also coming across as rather confident.

Genius, if you ask me.

Half of the time, I’d get a text. The sentiment was usually “holy shit that was so bold and cool of you and can I take you out on a date.”

Occasionally I’d get a text that was like “that was awesome, but I’m in a relationship.”

and half of the time, I’d never hear from them.

In the end, it was a win-win. There was never anything lost. If anything, at the very least I left a memorable impression and got a fun rush of adrenaline from putting myself out there.

I did once end up on a date with this attractive Michael B. Jordan lookalike guy I saw getting interviewed by a prolific writer in NYC. I brushed past their table, pulled my signature move, and ended up on a date with him two days later only to find out that he had actually just gotten out of jail for false imprisonment. Whoops. Good thing I had my exit strategy planned. Even I have my limits.

But I also mostly went on some pretty amazing dates and met some really cool people that definitely helped me collect my dating-data.

Either way, it felt good to not be passive in finding connection and experiencing love. It was really, really fun. It was my way of taking inspired action to making love happen instead of sitting around, disempowered and desperate and going after low-hanging fruit. No thank you!!

We create our own realities and make life happen instead of letting it happen to us around here.

It’s a much better approach than tolerating a situationship to bandaid loneliness, if you ask me, which sadly seems to be the defining romantic format for this generation.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You actually can just learn how to identify people who are not it.

And people who are unwilling to be vulnerable, feel like they have too many options (and so they don’t choose you) or lack of commitment overall, are certainly not it.

So when those people inevitable don’t show up in the way you need, you can create consequences (lovingly) and move on if it’s not aligning.

I know right? Crazy that we have the free will to believe in our worth.

Of course, there’s so much more advice I have to give you on actually being treated the way you deserve.

I’ve got loooootssss of tips and tricks up my sleeve that helped me believe in my worth and to make my worth and my standards clear. That helped me to not settle for anything less in my adult life.

And while yes, I’ve dated some….confusing and questionable apples, I’ve also dated spectacular apples.

And I can honestly say that all of the apples I gave the time of day to treated me well and did their best to meet my needs and desires. Because I wouldn’t accept anything less.

In Defense of Love

Anyway, I know that Vogue is out here publishing articles about how having a boyfriend is embarrassing now. Single is the new cool, and you know what? I’m not denying that. I love that women are having their thriving, single, happy, era without being called spinster-cat-ladies. Hell yeah. I’m all about it.

But being single doesn’t mean that you can’t also explore and have fun.

This newsletter is actually just my way of saying, girl, enjoy that single era and go collect data and have fun with other people when you want to! Dating while single can be FUN and COOL.

But you know what’s not cool?

Walling yourself off from love and connection when you want it.

Pretending you’re too cool to care.

Not taking risks and going after what you want boldly.

So. I’m claiming it. Finding love is cool.

I love love. I love being in love.

I love my fiance. I’m excited to model a representation of love that makes me fucking excited and giddy every day. That makes the idea of marriage actually feel more appealing and romantic than anything else out there.

Hold the standard, and call people forward.

I promise, there are people out there who won’t disappoint.

Questions, comments, requests, and thoughts welcome.

OK LOVE YOU, BYE!

-Bela

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Hi lovers! Per your request, I put my entire Saturn Return story into one substack for you to read-in full. Enjoy!

It was May 24th. I remember the date because how could I forget? It was the day my Saturn return paused – for those of you who aren’t familiar with astrology, it’s the planet of Karma’s reckoning, known for the way it shakes you out of your old life and aligns you with your path. It was like the cosmos had loosened their grip on my throat. An intermission, so to speak.

I was on my way to an overnight party in Topanga, riding shotgun in my best guy friend Huub’s car. The invitation read something like “wear your finest clothes” which translates to: this is going to be a lavish and luxurious night.

It had been one of the hardest periods of my life. To name a few things; my house burned down in January, weeks after moving in with my whirlwind rebound relationship (that should have only ever been a rebound). And I’d already moved 5 times in six months.

And then, cheers. Champagne flutes clinking over the most decadent charcuterie spread you’ve ever seen, while pretty little bags with capsules within are passed around.

“It’s a heart-opener. They call it the truth serum.” someone says.

And while I don’t frequently say yes to medicine, I say, fuck it. I know these people well. They’re intentional and high vibe, and I trust myself in and out of medicine space in safe environments.

I had been gracefully navigating the chaos for months. Showing up. Holding it together. Doing the inner work. Facing my broken heart.

I wanted, for a change, to not be braced for impact. I wanted to dance and to play.

So I swallowed it down. On the rare occasions that I partake substances, I go into medicine space. And for the first time in months, I felt my body fully relax. Like enough light had been restored inside me that I could safely unwind.

The main event space was absurd. Hollywood’s finest tarot reader was tucked into a corner. There was a grazing table that could feed a village in Versailles. A life-sized taxidermied giraffe head was mounted above the fireplace– real, I was told.

Avant-garde, and uber wealthy.

At one point I found myself sitting next to a friend named Miles. He was drawing an ocean in blue marker on a napkin. Slow methodical waves, moving with the precision that only a true artist could capture. I watched him sketch the horizon line, mesmerized by his intensity.

Out of nowhere, he asked, “How did you go from such a nice guy like Nic to someone like Sam?”

It startled me. Everyone knew my most recent ex, but I had never spoken about Nic to this circle of people. That heartbreak of my one great love was sealed away behind my ribs, gnawing at me with regret and confusion if I paid it too much attention.

“How do you know about Nic?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Podcast. Years ago. You talked about him like he was the love of your life. You had a crazy love story, didn’t you?”

And just like that, I felt the truth serum settle in.

I told him everything.

I couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. The messy demise of us. My throat burned with tears, but I couldn’t stop. I just blurted it out with tears in my throat, while he channeled my emotion into the waves of the ocean he was drawing

“Would you ever go back?”

The question sliced clean through me.

The tears didn’t fall — they pressed, heavy, behind my eyes.

Yes.

If he could show up differently. If he could just change a few things…

Yes.

Because how could I ever experience anything more beautiful than what we had?

Suddenly I remembered the date.

May 24th.

How could I forget?

It would have been our six year anniversary.

I excused myself, from Miles, mildly embarrassed at how much I had shared, and went to find Huub.

If I’m being honest, I’d felt drawn to Huub all evening. Not in a romantic way. Just a quiet pull.

He was my best friend. The safest man in my life. The one who, when everything with Sam imploded, pressed a set of keys into my hand and told me I could use his guest room whenever I needed.

I found him and leaned my head against his shoulder. He adjusted, instinctively, placing his arm behind my back so that I fit there better.

And then the truth serum started talking.

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I needed to tell someone the whole story. The messy truth was begging to be spoken.

The thing about Nic is he’s my twin flame.

I know how that sounds. I know it’s a phrase that’s been dragged through Instagram and stripped of meaning.

We were born on each other’s parents’ birthdays. We’re both half-Mexican. We even look alike– enough that strangers have wondered if we’re related.

I had never loved like that.

I had never experienced the level of magic that Nic and I had.

I don’t think many people do.

The weekend we fell in love, we were at a festival called Elements— my first festival ever. We’d eaten too many mushrooms and were sitting cross-legged in our messy tent when he slipped into a full blown ego death.

He could barely remember his own name. At one point, trying to pull a shirt over his head, he looked at me and asked, genuinely,

“Who am I?”

I told him to lie down.

He closed his eyes and I prayed over him. And in that altered space, he saw his entire life with me. Every child. Every loss. Every version of us.

And I stayed with him while the version of himself he had been dissolved.

When he came to, he wasn’t the same.

He went from being the highly desired, rebellious, leather-jacketed boy who couldn’t admit he loved me to whispering,

‘You’re the last woman I’ll ever love.’

Naturally, I didn’t trust it.

So I asked the universe to speak to me in my native tongue — magic.

The next night, it did.

We were dancing at the edge of the crowd when it happened. Bodies pressed together, dancing freely, the kind of festival chaos where you cease to think.

All of our friends were there. The air felt charged. But then again, it always does when you’re young and in love and high on something.

Suddenly, he grabbed my hand forcefully. Urgently.

He pulled me through the crowd, weaving us between strangers until we were in the center. He stopped, spun me toward him, and said almost conspiratorially,

“Watch this.”

He tapped his temples with two fingers with this crazy look in his eyes.

And the very second he did — I kid you not — lightning RIPPED across the sky.

Not a flicker.

No.

The whole sky lit up white and hot, splitting the darkness open.

Really imagine that for a second.

Have you ever seen someone summon lightning on command?

Because it’s pretty fucking crazy.

“How did you know?” I gasped.

But the shocked, almost fearful look on his face told me he didn’t.

He had no idea what he’d done.

And that’s when I knew. It was the pulse of divinity that I’ve always felt beneath the surface of things that had led him to conjure lightning. It was the Divine’s way of proving to me that everything I’d suspected about magic & the spirit realm was real.

So I looked at him defiantly, like I really understood the universe now, and said,

“There’s no such thing as a random universe, Nic.”

Above us, the moon was split perfectly in half — light and dark, symmetrical. It was the same phase that had hung in the sky the night his father was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

A psychic had one told him that his father would communicate through lightning. Since he never did, Nic was convinced that we lived in a random universe, and that if there was a God, it had forgotten about him.

I always fervently fought him on that.

I knew that life wasn’t random or accidental. I had been raised too close to the spirit world for that. My Mexican lineage raised me with my spiritual eyes open. So while Nic saw synchronicity as coincidence, I knew that it was the Divine’s way of communicating.

And in that altered, fevered clarity, watching the sky split open with light, I knew— with bone-deep certainty— that his father had sent that bolt.

That the veil had thinned.

That he and I….we were made for one another.

That’s how our story began.

With a love so consuming it it brushed me up against God in an undeniable way.

It lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart. I just couldn’t fight the gnawing sensation that life was leading me somewhere else, and I ripped us both apart.

And now, I found it impossible to believe that love of that magnitude would ever be possible again.

As Nic would say; lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

When I finished —when it had all spilled out of me— Huub didn’t dismiss my story.

He just held my gaze and said, quietly,

“You really do have a cosmic presence guiding your life.”

Then, after a pause:

“I understand how it could feel like you’re disrespecting God, leaving a relationship like that.”

And I cried, because who really ever understood that except for Nic, who had lived it with me?

That was our story — the one that lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart.

This isn’t that love story. But that’s where it started: with lightning, revelation, and a love so consuming it cracked me open to God.

Anyway.

That was then.

This is now.

But that’s the backstory that led me to believe that love of that magnitude would never be possible again.

Eventually, we made our way back to the cabin with our other gay friend Ben.

They had somehow messed up the booking for our rooms, and so I invited both Huub and Ben to sleep in my cabin.

Ben and I lay down first, limbs tangled in that platonic, post-party softness. Huub changed in the bathroom and then came back, sliding into the bed between us.

At some point, Ben drifted off.

Huub’s body was warm against mine.

And there it was.

Not fireworks.

Not lightning.

Nothing like that at all.

. Just a small, almost inconvenient curiosity rising through me.

Is there something there?

No.

It was the heart-opener.

We were just friends.

I stuffed the thought down, down, down.

But the question had already been asked.

That night opened up a new avenue of intimacy between us. We remained friends, but we would cuddle frequently, like that was a normal thing to do. It was all fine and dandy for a few weeks, until one day, while we were cuddling, our hips began swirling against each other’s, his breath on my neck, sexual tension steaming hot. Within minutes we pulled away from each other’s arching bodies, and moved to opposite ends of his couch to stop ourselves from making an irreversible decision. We were best friends. So what was that? He suggested we take some breathing room and I excused myself to go home.

He was radio silent after that, so a couple of days later I texted him, playfully, to address the tension.

“ok sooooo. Do we debrief, take a week to cool off and then reintegrate in like a week, or just never talk about it and carry on like monks? I’m open either way.”

To which he responded:

“Lol. Wanna come over later for dinner and platonic cuddles and debrief?”

I smirked, feeling a tickle of excitement in my chest. What a funny and precarious situation. I walked myself over to his house and we talked through it, agreeing that whatever happened between us, the most important thing was to preserve our friendship first no matter what.

And yet, I couldn’t stop my curiosity from taking over my mind, so I suggested we kiss to find out if we even had chemistry, and let me tell you! It was the most mediocre kiss you could imagine. It was barely a kiss. Two seconds in he pulled away after hardly parting his lips, and said:

“I think we should stop there and integrate.” to which I giggled and excused myself to go home. Such a strange man, I thought, such an overthinker, so closed off. We were SO extraordinarily different in matters of love.

The next day, I woke up to a long text from him. He’d hardly slept three hours because he was spiraling and ruminating, and he’d spent an hour crafting a message in which he told me, gently but directly, that “he knew in his heart that I wasn’t his life partner”—and if our little “experiment” meant more to me than it did to him, he couldn’t do it and we should “go back to how things were before” to preserve our friendship. I literally laughed out loud when I got that text. Hilarious. How could he know so definitively that I wasn’t his life partner?! It was such a pre-emptive statement.

The certainty of his text perplexed me. But, whatever, I thought. My person wouldn’t doubt that I was right for him, and he clearly wasn’t my person. I smiled, rolled my eyes, and thought, he had no idea what love was or what I could become to him. But it was perfect. If he had said anything else, I probably would’ve run.

“Great,” I told him. “I’m emotionally unavailable anyway. I can’t promise I’ll never feel something, but right now? Nope. Not going to happen.”

So we started this messy, half-disconnected adventure, hookups threaded through long, cerebral coffees, getting kissy in the back alley by my shabby garage apartment, pretending friendship could hold all that heat.

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Picking up where we left off last week; we’re at Burning Man and I just had my first ego death and realized I was in love with my best friend.

I think that’s all the context you need for now…

My ego let go and it became the best burn ever.

We played with our friends & wandered through dunes of light and art. We laughed until our ribs hurt and danced until we were caked in a layer of dust.

For the first time all year, I wasn’t bracing. I was present, soft, and ALIVE.

My channel had blown wide open.

I’ve always carried the mediumship gift—my abuela passed it down to me, a gift from a line of women who could hear between worlds. I’d spoken with the dead before, received flashes, whispers, dreams that turned out true.

But for years, the chaos of life had quieted it. Until now.

After the ego death, everything came back online. The veil lifted. My body, my heart, my mind—they were all antennas again.

Everything felt clear.

Two days later, Huub and I rode out to the Temple to honor my abuela. We didn’t say much on the way, but we both knew what had to be done. I honored her with a ritual and left some belongings behind to aid her in her transition to the spirit world.

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(pictured above: the 2025 temple)

Afterward, Huub and I slipped away into the dust to see the art and take photos.

We were deeply in love. It was settling. I was surrendered. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be. For once, I could see exactly what was in front of me.

That night was going to be the pinnacle of the whole that is burning man – the night the man burns.

There’s a lot of darkness on man-burn night – I think about it like heaven and hell converging at once on earth, so you have to be very careful with the energy you expose yourself to.

The energy was so overwhelming for me the year before - all of the art cars gather around the man in a giant circular formation and each car plays its own music, leading to a giant warped arena of sound, where the man stands at the center, waiting to be incinerated. I got so overwhelmed the prior year that I made Sam take me far out of the crowd to one of the art pieces so that I could pray for humanity while we sat and watched the whole thing unfold from far away.

But this year was different. I was with Huub, and I felt safe.

We couldn’t find our friends so eventually we stopped searching.

The air vibrated around us, thick with heat and magic.

The moon hung in half again—just as it had the night Nic and I fell in love.

But for the first time in years, my heart wasn’t somewhere else. I wasn’t caught up in what ifs anymore. I was here, with Huub, in my favorite place on earth.

And the realization kept rising in waves:

For the first time in my life I didn’t feel heartbroken.

As he pedaled, tears started falling from my eyes again.

Years of grief leaving my body all at once.

I was in love—deeply, wildly, quietly in love with my best friend. I didn’t think I’d truly deserve such a love again.

Somehow it had found me, and healed me, and left me awestruck again, and the immensity of this realization was hitting me again and again.

He didn’t interrupt. Didn’t fix. Didn’t analyze. He just stayed steady, like he always did.

We got off our bike to take a break from cycling aimlessly around the man and stood in a dark, empty patch of desert, waiting for the man to burn.

“If you asked me I’d say yes.”I said to him, seemingly out of nowhere.

But in the deepest recesses of my being, I knew that I had never been two feet in like I was with him.

He turned his head all too calmly and asked “Should I propose?”

His blue eyes glistened in the firelight.

“What?” I say flustered, & then, “well that’s your decision.”

“But I don’t have a ring….” he says, mostly to himself.

& then, “Oh wait. I actually do have a ring.”

“What?!” I’m not following.

“What better moment?” he asked.

“Well.. that’s your decision.” I said with a hint of sass, clearly flustered as I shook my head in disbelief.

But when I checked in with my body, it was a full-body fuck yes.

“Oh no, but I don’t have a ring….“ and then interrupting himself “Oh wait. I actually have a ring in my backpack.”

“What?!” I said again, laughing, half in disbelief, not quite wrapping my head around what he was saying. He had a ring??

He has a ring? What does he mean he has a ring?!

He smirks.

“Yeah…right before we left camp, this shell ring fell out of my backpack. A ring I’ve had for four years. I never use the front pocket—it must have been there since last year.”

“Are you serious?”

He nods.

I check in with my body then, and stunningly enough it is a full-body fuck yes.

So I propped my phone against the bike frame to film the special moment, still in disbelief.

He gets down on one knee in the dust, says my full name and then asks the question.

“Will you marry me?”

Time stands still.

Yes. A million times yes.

He slides the shell ring that he *happened* to have on him that night onto my finger.

And I start laughing uncontrollably. “Huub, I was your girlfriend yesterday. For only ONE day.”

He shrugs.

“Pretty on brand for us to do things backwards, no?”

Then we’re kissing & laughing and he’s lifting me off of the ground, holding me through an endless stream of tears and laughter and knowing that we are meant to be together. Suddenly fireworks erupt through the sky.

We turn—and in perfect timing, the Man goes up in flames.

Orange and gold fire tear through the night as the pinnacle moment of burning man takes place, and I stand there sobbing, unable to look away, because the divine timing is impeccable.

Everything I’d ever carried—every heartbreak, every wound, every version of myself that had loved and lost—it burned away right then.

When my house burned down, I had told myself I wouldn’t feel at home again until I was back here. I had pictured this exact moment as some kind of completion ritual.

I just hadn’t known how complete it would feel.

So I cried deep, gut-level tears as Huub held me. But this time. Not from loss, from arrival. Happy go lucky tears. I made it, and magic is real, tears.

Tears that purify the soul.

The next morning, we danced and kissed as the desert turned gold.

We magically stumbled upon our friends and told them we were engaged. One by one, their faces shifted from confusion to shock to laughter to hugs to tears. No one was surprised for long. Most of them just shook their heads and said some version of, “Finally.” or “I knew it.”

And that was the strangest part.

To the outside world, it looked sudden. Wild. Illogical.

But to the people who had watched us orbit each other for months, it felt inevitable.

Later, I saw the weight of it finally reach Huub. He had been steady for me all week — holding, grounding, witnessing. Now it was his turn.

He started to cry. I wrapped my arms around him and felt him shake.

“An old woman came up to me at the Temple,” he said, voice breaking. “She put this stone in my hand and then walked away.”

He opened his palm. CELEBRATE, the stone read.

“She knew…” he whispered.

And I just nodded, knowing what he meant. My abuela had died the morning I left for the desert. My abuela, from whom I had inherited my patterns in love, and my deep connection to spirituality and lineage.

And somehow, standing there in the dust and ash, I knew she had her hand involved in liberating me, liberating us, from the wounds in love.

I cupped his face and shook my head, looking at him all bright-eyed and full of hope.

My human.

The next night, the Temple burned.

Thousands gathered in silence as smoke twisted into the sky.

Names, photographs, prayers, grief — all of it rising and dissolving into darkness.

And just like that, the burn was over.

We struck camp down to dust and drove back toward the default world, engaged after two days of officially being boyfriend and girlfriend.

On paper? Ridiculous, considering my track record and the year I had.

It’s laughable. Hilarious. And I’m right there with you shaking my head at the unpredictable way in which my life unfolds. But also? This is how my life has always worked. Not slow. Not cautious. Divinely timed detonations and cosmic catalysts.

7.5 months of being engaged now. 6 months of living together.

Life has only gotten sweeter.

We spend sundays getting empanadas and coffee at Paisita, his always black, decisive, consistent. Mine distilled with milk, soft, sweet, gentle, like I’ve been feeling.

Then we go home and lay on the couch, and I read him Clarice Lispector and Nabokov, and he tells me he’s more in love with me after I close each book because he too shares that deep appreciation for intellect and expression.

Weekdays, we build and create and then in the moments when we cross paths in the kitchen we shower each other in love and laugh and laugh and laugh and dance and play and makeout and smile like idiots.

That’s the best part. The silliness. The laughter we share.

Mostly laughing at ourselves, like best friends do.

Our silly little jokes.

Me, constantly commenting on his European mannerisms and noises (they’re very entertaining to this Mexican-American girl), him, sarcastically disgusted by my American flavor-maxing tendencies and my love of pineapple pizza (which he thinks is a culinary crime to Italian cuisine).

Both of us, sitting on the couch and randomly competing to see who can do the best villain laugh.

Both of us, dancing in the kitchen and singing the words to our favorite songs.

And somehow, after everything… Love feels easy again.

And it turns out that lightning can strike twice in the same place.

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If you weren’t already a believer in synchronicity, perhaps you will be by the end of my Saturn Return story.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading parts 1-3 before you tune into this part.

Parts 4 & 5 are where it gets really juicy. The kind of stories that make you know, in the deepest recesses of your bones, that there is no such thing as a random universe.

In this week’s story reveal we’re diving into the story of my first ego death, and the revelations that followed.

Next week, we’ll get to the evening of my proposal.

Picking up where we left off last week…

Aaaand we were off.

To the desert.

To the playa.

To Black Rock City — the place that only exists for one week each year, rising like a mirage from nothing but dust and imagination.

We arrived early to help build camp, and only then did Miles casually mention that we would be first on playa — meaning we were the ones who would be flagging the empty grid from which our camp, Elementum, would rise from the ground up.

Build was brutal. The kind of labor that grinds your bones and tests your spirit.

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I’ve never had one stable home in my entire life. Not as a child. Not as an adult. I’ve never lived in one place longer than a year.

Home, for me, has always been a dream I keep chasing but never seem to reach.

Anyway, those were the echoes — the subtle detonations reverberating through the landmine of my subconscious whenever Huub showed me too much love.

Because how could he ever understand the complexity of my wreckage?

So I just kept telling him he couldn’t expect anything from me, setting boundaries I wasn’t even sure I wanted to keep.

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A few days later we went to our camp’s pre-Burn party at Elementum, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen with him.

Huub, ever intuitive, could feel my hesitation. He moved around me with this quiet attunement, adjusting his presence to the temperature of my nervous system and my testy nature.

“Do we act like we’re together? Or do we just act like friends?” he asked, trying to respect my wants & needs.

The question alone sent me spiraling.

This was our community. The same tight-knit Venice circle that had watched my life implode in real time — the breakup, the fire, the very public chaos. And now, almost four months after leaving my ex, only weeks after he’d gone to jail, I was… what? Suddenly entangled with my best friend?

I didn’t know. But I did know this: I wasn’t going to risk being seen in something I wasn’t sure of.

I had already lost credibility in my own eyes that year. I was tired of being the girl whose life was always a spectacle, and I was SO done being the storyline people talked about. I wanted to be in control.

“People hook up and date, you know that, right?” Huub said with a playful smile.

Then, softer, steadier, “I’m here to honor you though. Take your time.”

For the first half of the night, I kept my distance—hovering in the safe zone of friendship – socializing and floating from conversation to conversation, pretending like I wasn’t keenly aware of where he was at all times.

As skeptical as I was, my radiance and inner light was coming back because I was finally free of the chaos that I’d once been entangled within. So I danced and flitted around like the little fairy that I am.

Then, Dersu, our community DJ, did something completely absurd.

He played Let Me Love You by Mario.

Let me remind you: that song came out in 2004. It is not, under any logical circumstances, a track that gets dropped at a Burning Man-adjacent house party in 2025. It was comically and cosmically specific.

Because let me remind you, that Huub and I had connected over that song. Also, Mario & I go way back on Instagram, so the synchronicity of it all really felt like a cosmis chuckle.

My body reacted excitedly before my mind could process.

I ran straight to Huub, who was lounging on a couch, and shouted excitedly over the music, “Wanna dance?”

He hesitated for a split second, so I shrugged and said, “Well I’m going to go dance.” and walked toward the dance floor.

Seconds later he was beside me.

We sang every word, half laughing at the sheer randomness of it, and then he pointed at me during the chorus— unironically serenading me in a room full of people we knew.

“You should let me love you…”

It was so on the nose it was almost embarrassing. But in the moment, I didn’t care one bit. Music does that to me. It reminds me that I am free.

And then it hit me all at once—the microdose of mushrooms from earlier, the song from my teenage heartbreak years, the shared playlist, the way the exact track had played, the fact that we were in public, and the absurd synchronicity of it all.

Synchronicities like that, I’ve learned, are little winks from God.

And this one was loud.

My body started overheating and my ego snapped back online just as quickly.

Everyone could see us.

I needed air.

He didn’t ask questions. He just stood, took my hand lightly, and guided me outside, away from the noise, to a quiet corner couch tucked along the edge of the space.

He sat first and pulled me back into him, my back against his chest, his legs and arms bracketing my body like parentheses.

“That was… funny,” I said, still catching my breath, still pretending it had been casual.

“That was more than just funny,” he replied.

“I’m not ready to talk about it,” I blurted, fast, defensive, words coming quick before I could soften them, like I could sense there was a door there that I wasn’t yet ready to open.

He laughed — not dismissively, but with this deep, amused warmth, like my reflex to shut things down was something he already understood about me.

My heart was beating so fast that we could both feel it.

“Breathe,” he said softly.

Then he exaggerated a slow inhale, pressing it against my spine until my body followed his rhythm.

I stayed there in his arms for a long time, feeling, thinking, trying to make sense of the synchronicity. My mind wouldn’t stop.

I know all too well that synchronicity is the language of the Divine.

Eventually, it became too much, and I slipped away to find my friends.

The rest of the party felt like a medicine journey. Everything was heightened—the music, the air, my thoughts, the emotional undercurrent moving through my body.

But at the end of the night, when Huub and I left together for his place, something had softened within me.

The next morning, I woke slowly to find his ocean-blue eyes already on me, quietly assessing, as if he’d been awake for a while.

We were in that strange, tender pocket of time before the day fully begins– when the mind hasn’t yet reassembled its defenses, when the body is honest in ways the ego later edits.

I was processing out loud, as usual. He was listening, as usual.

“Last night… that synchronicity,” I murmured, still connecting threads. “Let me love you was the first song I put on the playlist.”

He smiled slightly.

“I was listening to that playlist,” he said, calm, almost matter-of-fact. “On my couch. Meditating.”

He paused.

“That’s when I got overwhelmed by my feelings for you.”

Another slow sigh, like he wasn’t sure if he should continue.

“That’s when I realized I’d fallen in love with you.”

He said it so casually, as if it weren’t the kind of sentence that rearranges an entire relationship.

Then he grinned. “But no pressure.”

“Huub…” I said, already contracting, “you can’t expect anything from me. I’ve been through too much. I’m… too broken right now. I need time. I like you, but I can’t promise you anything. You need to be patient.”

I went on saying this sort of thing, spilling out all the ways I was trying to protect him from me.

“I know, I know,” he said, brushing it off with that easy smile, like my emotional responses were all too predictable to him, “Let’s go get breakfast.”

No argument. No persuasion. No attempt to pin me down emotionally.

So we did. We hopped on his e-bike and rode through the soft Venice morning. The air still carrying that strange afterglow from the night before.

The waiter sat us at a small table on the terrace, and as I settled into my chair, the music overhead shifted.

All I Need by Maribou State.

I froze.

“Huub,” I said, my voice catching, “listen.”

He froze mid-scan of the menu, eyes going wide, tattooed fingers rising to cover his mouth in disbelief.

”all I need is your love.” the lyrics hummed over the cafe speakers.

He looked at me with this piercing, all knowing look of certainty.

“This,” he said in disbelief, “is the song I was listening to when I realized I loved you. ”

I buried my face in my hands too, both of us shrinking under the cosmic joke of it all.

“It’s too much,” I said. “This is the only other song you ever commented on from our playlist.”

We giggled at the cosmic coincidence of it all, staring down at the table.

I wanted to believe in magic, but coincidence was safer these days.

So I changed the subject.

The next few weeks blurred into a quiet rhythm.

We saw each other often; coffee runs, late-night talks, dinners and dancing in his kitchen, and lots of laughter. And though at this point I was sleeping at his house more nights than not, I was still convinced that at the core, we were just friends.

A few weeks went by, and then right before I left for Burning Man, Nic and I reconnected. We exchanged a few emails, then met on the beach for the first time in a year. Seeing him felt like coming up for air after holding my breath underwater for far too long.

We caught up without grief, without projection—just two people who’d once built a world together, now sitting in the wreckage with tenderness and no attachment to rebuilding.

He told me that I seemed more myself than ever “albeit traumatized,” he teased gently. And he was right. I was afraid of love in a way I had never been before.

My usually wide-open heart was locked in a tower, drawbridge raised, gates closed.

We both acknowledged that what we had was rare, and that we might never experience a bond like that again. But it no longer ached. It simply existed, like a thread woven into the fabric of my life.

Before we parted, we accepted what had always been true: we loved each other deeply, but it didn’t seem like we were meant to build a life together. Not in that way. Not in this lifetime’s trajectory.

I told him that I was done trying to force my will upon destiny, and instead, I wanted to listen to what life wanted for me.

And for the first time in a long time, I meant it. I was more surrendered than I’d ever been.

I told Huub about my meeting with Nic. I even told him that Nic would always be my twin flame, and that my person would have to understand that.

It’s like having another half of your soul out there somewhere. Like a family member. It’s a part of who I am.

As always, Huub received it with quiet grace. No jealousy. No pressure. Just presence.

A few days later, he sent me a letter.

In it, he admitted he could feel himself beginning to close off — wondering if I would ever see what he saw between us.

After weeks of spending nearly every day together, I was still in denial, and he was starting to lose hope.

He ended the letter by wondering, poetically, whether the dream of our love would burn down with the man at Burning Man… or rise like a phoenix from the ashes into something real.

I didn’t know the answer. But I remained honest every step of the way.

Going into Burning Man, my heart felt bruised, confused, and exhausted.

Part of me didn’t even want to go. But after the fire, after the chaos of the year, I had said something without thinking:

“I don’t think I’ll feel at home again until I’m back at Burning Man. But I’m only going to go if a ticket and a ride fall into my lap.”

And life, as it often does with me, took that statement seriously.

One by one, the impossible logistics solved themselves. A ticket appeared. A ride appeared. A place to stay appeared.

So I stopped resisting and accepted what felt undeniable: I was meant to go.

After weeks of preparation and packing, I hopped into my Subaru and drove down to my friends Miles and McKinsey’s house. Together, we packed everything we’d been obsessively organizing for months into the trailer, and at sunrise, we hit the road for Reno.

Before pulling out of the driveway, Miles led a little prayer — for my abuela who had been slowly dying for fifteen days. My native Mexican abuela, from whom I learned every bit of my connection to spirit. My abuela, from whom I inherited the painful pattern of love not lasting.

The night before we left, I had told Miles & Mckinsey my only wish: that my abuela would pass before I reached the playa (Burning Man), so that I knew she was at peace before I unplugged from society.

We bowed our heads and said a prayer for a gentle passing.

An hour later, my mother called me.

My abuela had passed — at the exact time we said the prayer.

After fifteen days of slow suffering, she was finally free.

Another little wink.

The drive was long, uneventful, almost purgatorial — ten hours of desert highway and processed snacks and gas station pickles and the faint hum of grief weaving through laughter. We arrived in Reno, stocked up on supplies, slept five short hours at our camp lead’s house, and then — we were off.

To the desert.

To the playa.

To Black Rock City — the place that only exists for one week each year, rising like a mirage from nothing but dust and imagination.

To be continued next week, this is where things start to get crazy. Next week’s newsletter will be paywalled as there are once again, many personal details.

If you missed last week’s newsletter, the context definitely makes this part of the story juicier. You can subscribe and enjoy and get all caught up.

Next part drops in 1 week!

Let me know in the comments if you’re enjoying the story thus far, and thank you for reading.

P.S. magic is real.

P.S. I’m so honored by how many of you are becoming paid subscribers. At my core, I’ve always been a writer & storyteller first and foremost. Those of you who invest in my art are motivating me to share more. Please let me know if there’s any topics you want me to cover.

I have *lots* more buck-wild stories to share with you. But, in general, writing for an invested audience is the greatest gift ever. Thank you. I love you. More please.

Let me know what you’d like more of, if you feel called.

Let’s exchange love notes.

Xx,

— Bela

Huub and I had just started this messy, half-disconnected adventure, hookups threaded through long, cerebral coffees, getting kissy in the back alley by my shabby garage apartment, pretending friendship could hold all that heat.

(This story is about to get much wilder, like, one of the wildest stories you’ve ever heard) but for the sake of protecting those involved, I’m going to paywall this next part of the story.

Read more

It was May 24th. I remember the date because how could I forget? It was the day my Saturn return paused – for those of you who aren’t familiar with astrology, it’s the planet of Karma’s reckoning, known for the way it shakes you out of your old life and aligns you with your path. It was like the cosmos had loosened their grip on my throat. An intermission, so to speak.

I was on my way to an overnight party in Topanga, riding shotgun in my best guy friend Huub’s car. The invitation read something like “wear your finest clothes” which translates to: this is going to be a lavish and luxurious night.

It had been one of the hardest periods of my life. To name a few things; my house burned down in January, weeks after moving in with my whirlwind rebound relationship (that should have only ever been a rebound). And I’d already moved 5 times in six months.

And then, cheers. Champagne flutes clinking over the most decadent charcuterie spread you’ve ever seen, while pretty little bags with capsules within are passed around.

“It’s a heart-opener. They call it the truth serum.” someone says.

And while I don’t frequently say yes to medicine, I say, fuck it. I know these people well. They’re intentional and high vibe, and I trust myself in and out of medicine space in safe environments.

I had been gracefully navigating the chaos for months. Showing up. Holding it together. Doing the inner work. Facing my broken heart.

I wanted, for a change, to not be braced for impact. I wanted to dance and to play.

So I swallowed it down. On the rare occasions that I partake substances, I go into medicine space. And for the first time in months, I felt my body fully relax. Like enough light had been restored inside me that I could safely unwind.

The main event space was absurd. Hollywood’s finest tarot reader was tucked into a corner. There was a grazing table that could feed a village in Versailles. A life-sized taxidermied giraffe head was mounted above the fireplace– real, I was told.

Avant-garde, and uber wealthy.

At one point I found myself sitting next to a friend named Miles. He was drawing an ocean in blue marker on a napkin. Slow methodical waves, moving with the precision that only a true artist could capture. I watched him sketch the horizon line, mesmerized by his intensity.

Out of nowhere, he asked, “How did you go from such a nice guy like Nic to someone like Sam?”

It startled me. Everyone knew my most recent ex, but I had never spoken about Nic to this circle of people. That heartbreak of my one great love was sealed away behind my ribs, gnawing at me with regret and confusion if I paid it too much attention.

“How do you know about Nic?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Podcast. Years ago. You talked about him like he was the love of your life. You had a crazy love story, didn’t you?”

And just like that, I felt the truth serum settle in.

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I told him everything.

I couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. The messy demise of us. My throat burned with tears, but I couldn’t stop. I just blurted it out with tears in my throat, while he channeled my emotion into the waves of the ocean he was drawing

“Would you ever go back?”

The question sliced clean through me.

The tears didn’t fall — they pressed, heavy, behind my eyes.

Yes.

If he could show up differently. If he could just change a few things…

Yes.

Because how could I ever experience anything more beautiful than what we had?

Suddenly I remembered the date.

May 24th.

How could I forget?

It would have been our six year anniversary.

I excused myself, from Miles, mildly embarrassed at how much I had shared, and went to find Huub.

If I’m being honest, I’d felt drawn to Huub all evening. Not in a romantic way. Just a quiet pull.

He was my best friend. The safest man in my life. The one who, when everything with Sam imploded, pressed a set of keys into my hand and told me I could use his guest room whenever I needed.

I found him and leaned my head against his shoulder. He adjusted, instinctively, placing his arm behind my back so that I fit there better.

And then the truth serum started talking.

I needed to tell someone the whole story. The messy truth was begging to be spoken.

The thing about Nic is he’s my twin flame.

I know how that sounds. I know it’s a phrase that’s been dragged through Instagram and stripped of meaning.

We were born on each other’s parents’ birthdays. We’re both half-Mexican. We even look alike– enough that strangers have wondered if we’re related.

I had never loved like that.

I had never experienced the level of magic that Nic and I had.

I don’t think many people do.

The weekend we fell in love, we were at a festival called Elements— my first festival ever. We’d eaten too many mushrooms and were sitting cross-legged in our messy tent when he slipped into a full blown ego death.

He could barely remember his own name. At one point, trying to pull a shirt over his head, he looked at me and asked, genuinely,

“Who am I?”

I told him to lie down.

He closed his eyes and I prayed over him. And in that altered space, he saw his entire life with me. Every child. Every loss. Every version of us.

And I stayed with him while the version of himself he had been dissolved.

When he came to, he wasn’t the same.

He went from being the highly desired, rebellious, leather-jacketed boy who couldn’t admit he loved me to whispering,

‘You’re the last woman I’ll ever love.’

Naturally, I didn’t trust it.

So I asked the universe to speak to me in my native tongue — magic.

The next night, it did.

We were dancing at the edge of the crowd when it happened. Bodies pressed together, dancing freely, the kind of festival chaos where you cease to think.

All of our friends were there. The air felt charged. But then again, it always does when you’re young and in love and high on something.

Suddenly, he grabbed my hand forcefully. Urgently.

He pulled me through the crowd, weaving us between strangers until we were in the center. He stopped, spun me toward him, and said almost conspiratorially,

“Watch this.”

He tapped his temples with two fingers with this crazy look in his eyes.

And the very second he did — I kid you not — lightning RIPPED across the sky.

Not a flicker.

No.

The whole sky lit up white and hot, splitting the darkness open.

Really imagine that for a second.

Have you ever seen someone summon lightning on command?

Because it’s pretty fucking crazy.

“How did you know?” I gasped.

But the shocked, almost fearful look on his face told me he didn’t.

He had no idea what he’d done.

And that’s when I knew. It was the pulse of divinity that I’ve always felt beneath the surface of things that had led him to conjure lightning. It was the Divine’s way of proving to me that everything I’d suspected about magic & the spirit realm was real.

So I looked at him defiantly, like I really understood the universe now, and said,

“There’s no such thing as a random universe, Nic.”

Above us, the moon was split perfectly in half — light and dark, symmetrical. It was the same phase that had hung in the sky the night his father was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

A psychic had one told him that his father would communicate through lightning. Since he never did, Nic was convinced that we lived in a random universe, and that if there was a God, it had forgotten about him.

I always fervently fought him on that.

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I knew that life wasn’t random or accidental. I had been raised too close to the spirit world for that. My Mexican lineage raised me with my spiritual eyes open. So while Nic saw synchronicity as coincidence, I knew that it was the Divine’s way of communicating.

And in that altered, fevered clarity, watching the sky split open with light, I knew— with bone-deep certainty— that his father had sent that bolt.

That the veil had thinned.

That he and I….we were made for one another.

That’s how our story began.

With a love so consuming it it brushed me up against God in an undeniable way.

It lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart. I just couldn’t fight the gnawing sensation that life was leading me somewhere else, and I ripped us both apart.

And now, I found it impossible to believe that love of that magnitude would ever be possible again.

As Nic would say; lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

When I finished —when it had all spilled out of me— Huub didn’t dismiss my story.

He just held my gaze and said, quietly,

“You really do have a cosmic presence guiding your life.”

Then, after a pause:

“I understand how it could feel like you’re disrespecting God, leaving a relationship like that.”

And I cried, because who really ever understood that except for Nic, who had lived it with me?

That was our story — the one that lasted five years and one day before I broke his heart.

This isn’t that love story. But that’s where it started: with lightning, revelation, and a love so consuming it cracked me open to God.

Anyway.

That was then.

This is now.

But that’s the backstory that led me to believe that love of that magnitude would never be possible again.

Eventually, we made our way back to the cabin with our other gay friend Ben.

They had somehow messed up the booking for our rooms, and so I invited both Huub and Ben to sleep in my cabin.

Ben and I lay down first, limbs tangled in that platonic, post-party softness. Huub changed in the bathroom and then came back, sliding into the bed between us.

At some point, Ben drifted off.

Huub’s body was warm against mine.

And there it was.

Not fireworks.

Not lightning.

Nothing like that at all.

. Just a small, almost inconvenient curiosity rising through me.

Is there something there?

No.

It was the heart-opener.

We were just friends.

I stuffed the thought down, down, down.

But the question had already been asked.

That night opened up a new avenue of intimacy between us. We remained friends, but we would cuddle frequently, like that was a normal thing to do. It was all fine and dandy for a few weeks, until one day, while we were cuddling, our hips began swirling against each other’s, his breath on my neck, sexual tension steaming hot. Within minutes we pulled away from each other’s arching bodies, and moved to opposite ends of his couch to stop ourselves from making an irreversible decision. We were best friends. So what was that? He suggested we take some breathing room and I excused myself to go home.

He was radio silent after that, so a couple of days later I texted him, playfully, to address the tension.

“ok sooooo. Do we debrief, take a week to cool off and then reintegrate in like a week, or just never talk about it and carry on like monks? I’m open either way.”

To which he responded:
“Lol. Wanna come over later for dinner and platonic cuddles and debrief?”
I smirked, feeling a tickle of excitement in my chest. What a funny and precarious situation. I walked myself over to his house and we talked through it, agreeing that whatever happened between us, the most important thing was to preserve our friendship first no matter what.

And yet, I couldn’t stop my curiosity from taking over my mind, so I suggested we kiss to find out if we even had chemistry, and let me tell you! It was the most mediocre kiss you could imagine. It was barely a kiss. Two seconds in he pulled away after hardly parting his lips, and said:

“I think we should stop there and integrate.” to which I giggled and excused myself to go home. Such a strange man, I thought, such an overthinker, so closed off. We were SO extraordinarily different in matters of love.

The next day, I woke up to a long text from him. He’d hardly slept three hours because he was spiraling and ruminating, and he’d spent an hour crafting a message in which he told me, gently but directly, that “he knew in his heart that I wasn’t his life partner”—and if our little “experiment” meant more to me than it did to him, he couldn’t do it and we should “go back to how things were before” to preserve our friendship. I literally laughed out loud when I got that text. Hilarious. How could he know so definitively that I wasn’t his life partner?! It was such a pre-emptive statement.

The certainty of his text perplexed me. But, whatever, I thought. My person wouldn’t doubt that I was right for him, and he clearly wasn’t my person. I smiled, rolled my eyes, and thought, he had no idea what love was or what I could become to him. But it was perfect. If he had said anything else, I probably would’ve run.

“Great,” I told him. “I’m emotionally unavailable anyway. I can’t promise I’ll never feel something, but right now? Nope. Not going to happen.”

So we started this messy, half-disconnected adventure, hookups threaded through long, cerebral coffees, getting kissy in the back alley by my shabby garage apartment, pretending friendship could hold all that heat.

Part two of this story drops next Monday, same time.

I will likely be paywalling parts of the story because there are personal details involved. If you enjoyed my writing, my paid subscriber fee is 8$ a month.

Writing is my whole world. Thank you for reading <3

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