C.S. Lewis once said he didn’t know a writer closer to the spirit of Christ Himself than George MacDonald. MacDonald (1824–1905), a Scottish writer, husband, and father to eleven children, was well-studied in theology, philosophy, classical languages, literature, and poetry. He produced the works that “baptized Lewis’s imagination,” and inspired Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland).

MacDonald’s Lilith, a romance feels very much like a “grown-up” Wonderland, an almost psychedelic, inter-dimensional experience from the the point of view of Mr. Vane, a lone bookworm.

Despite being written by a man and from the perspective of a male protagonist, I’ve found the most beautiful and honest depictions of children and motherhood in this novel. Not just the beauty, but the darkness of femininity and motherhood that spans its opposite pole. I’ve never seen a clearer, more wonderfully painted picture of that which we run to and run from, as women, in the profoundly meaningful, yet entirely encompassing and dizzying work of motherhood. And beyond all of it, at its core, the true weight and importance of our vocation—something all too easy to forget when you’re close to it.

If you have the interest and capacity to read this novel, I would highly recommend doing that before further engaging with this piece. Reading it, without any prior knowledge, is quite a special experience. Alas, with that final “spoiler” warning, the novel is jam-packed with so much more than I can say here and is still very much worth the read, even with prior knowledge. I know I will be returning to it again and again.

As our protagonist, Mr. Vane, ventures through a wood in this other dimension, he comes upon many trees. He finds a small tree, bearing the tiniest and sweetest of apples. As he takes it, heaps of little children come out of the woods claiming him a “good giant” and lavish him with affection. One offers him a large, dull looking apple, which he rejects, and they rejoice further.

These dull, larger apples belonged to the “bad giants,” otherwise known in the forest as “the stupid Bags.” They are described as large, crude, and blind to the existence of the Little Ones, with little distinction between the male and female giants.

These Little Ones, otherwise known in the forest as “the little Lovers” are a group of children that live in the forest, all on their own, with the larger ones taking care of the smaller ones, and the eldest, Lona, acting as a mother to them all.

Mr. Vane inquires to their origins and number, but to no avail. Lona says babies will appear in the forest at random and they gladly welcome them in. As far as the Little Ones are concerned, they have always been and always will be.

Mr. Vane worries for the fate of the Little Ones. He despairs over how to help them, despite knowing so little about them.

The young mother figure, Lona, would see to it that her “children” never grow. They are far too precious, and the only others that she witnesses who are larger than them— the bad giants— don’t have the sort of fate one would desire for creatures so small and lovely.

Mr. Vane discovers another small, but important fact while living amidst the Little Ones—that they lack the most basic and elemental ingredient to growth: water itself. One day when he cries, the Little Ones are stricken by the tears that pour from his eyes. He realizes then that there are no bodies of water around the children. They sustain themselves entirely on the sweet fruits from the trees around them.

When Mr. Vane eventually departs from the Little Ones to seek further help, he runs into a woman known as the “Lady of Sorrow.” From her he learns about the origins and fate of the Little Ones.

She tells him how an evil princess came into this dimension and sucked up all the water. She reigns over a city known as Bulika, where she forbids her citizens from having children, but brought them great wealth and prosperity.

The evil princess of Bulika fears that children will be the end of her reign. Not only did she remove all the water, the very necessity to life, but also prevents her own citizens from reproducing any further—taking away those babies she does find in her city.

By no coincidence have little babies been appearing in the forest to the Little Ones—all who have previously come from the forest themselves. The frightened mothers of Bulika have been bringing their children there to save them from the evil princess. This evil princess that we will soon come to know as Lilith, is she who despises Life.

In order for the Little Ones to grow they need to be hard pressed, as the Lady of Sorrow says. And that they do, as later when Mr. Vane returns he finds they have been preparing to infiltrate Bulika as an army to find their mothers.

When they enter Bulika, some recognize and are recognized by their mothers, but they find them to be cowardly, realizing they’re no more than just bad giants. Lona remarks, “Let us leave the horrible place, there are no mothers here! This people is not worth delivering!”

Eventually they reach the palace of the princess of Bulika, where it is revealed that Lilith’s daughter is none other than Lona, the eldest and original child of the forest. Lona reaches out tenderly towards her mother, Lilith, the evil princess of Bulika, and is struck down, dead.

They bring the captured Lilith to the Lady of Sorrow, who confronts her with everything she has made herself into. Lilith refuses to yield, until she can’t hold the refusal any longer, and finally weeps. She asks to be released into death, but there’s one condition: she must open her clenched hand. She cannot do it, no matter how hard she tries. So they cut it from her, and only then is she allowed her sleep. Then her clenched fist is buried in the ground, and water can finally flow through the lands once again.

The Little Ones… The little Lovers. Their name itself reveals their nature. They simply love. They give it freely, without calculation or reserve. They shower affection and delight on everyone around them, content to live entirely in the present moment—until they discover that somewhere beyond the forest, they have mothers. Then they leave without hesitation simply because love compels them to go.

Motherhood... it’s this underlying fabric of existence that is easy to miss but when it’s gone, its absence unmistakable. The responsibilities of adulthood have a way of dulling our senses, gradually and then all at once. We become like the bad giants, so consumed with the weight of our own concerns that we no longer lower our eyes to notice the Little Ones. We reach for the large fruit high in the trees, forgetting that the sweetest fruit grows low to the ground.

Children have a way of restoring our vision. They call us back to wonder, to dependence, to the present moment. They remind us of Christ’s words that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. We mothers bring life into the world, yet somehow our children become one of God’s sweetest means of breathing new life into us. A life that can only be received with our sacrifice, with our surrender. Only when Lilith’s hand is finally released and buried can the water flow again.

We mothers are not the source of life. We are its stewards. Our children do not belong to us any more than we belong to ourselves. They belong to God, and for a little while we are entrusted with the holy work of loving them, nurturing them, and, in time, releasing them too.

MacDonald leaves us with one final paradox:

Perhaps that is the deepest mystery of both motherhood and faith. The more tightly we cling to ourselves, the less alive we become. But when we receive life as a gift, pour ourselves out in love, and entrust ourselves to the One from whom all life flows, we discover that nothing essential has been lost. Instead, we have finally begun to live.

Leave a comment

Share

There’s a certain point in the universe where you can travel at light speed and still see nothing, no light, for 752,536,988 years.

It takes a level of courage to enter the vastness and uncertainty of space.

NASA’s recent Artemis II mission traveled further away from Earth than any previous space mission.

Astronaut Commander Reid Wiseman trained for well over twenty-seven years of his career as a naval aviator and astronaut, with a background in systems engineering.

He studies the technicality of things, the physical reality and limitations as an engineer and spacecraft pilot. Yet, despite a deep knowledge of the physics of space and travels through it, he was not prepared for the deep spiritual experience he had actually being up in space.

Wiseman spoke recently at a NASA press conference:

“I’m not really a religious person, but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything, so I just asked for the Navy chaplain to come visit us for a minute. When that man walked in — I’d never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears. It’s very hard to fully grasp what we just went through. The sun eclipsed behind the moon. I turned to Victor and I said I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now, because it was otherworldly and it was amazing.”

Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, said: “I felt that I was literally standing on a plateau somewhere out there in space... But now what I was seeing and even more important what I was feeling at that moment in time, science and technology had no answers for. Literally no answers.”

Wonder begins where certainty ends.

If you can let go of the need to know, to be certain, to control for a moment, and allow the possibility of chaos and the anxiety that comes with it, you can find something beautiful, a peace beyond anything you could try to manufacture on your own.

The astronauts that went on the Artemis II mission did not know for certain if they would make it back to Earth. As they descended, their spaceship turned into a massive fireball, and there was a non-zero chance that the heat shield NASA built would fall apart. They risked their lives for the sake of discovery, not just for themselves, but for all of mankind.

We all have a deep fear of uncertainty. It’s almost as if on some level we have a visceral understanding that we are just tiny beings living on this planet rotating in space around the sun in this vast universe that is constantly expanding— its fate still one of the great mysteries of science.

The Victorian poet Arnold, expressed this despair in his poem “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The Egg Nebula, pictured above, is named as such because it is a rapidly dying Sun-like star that has shed its outer layers, and a bright, hot core (or "yolk") now illuminates the milky "egg white" shells of gas and dust surrounding the center. It is a small preview of what could happen to our Sun in five billion years.

In the same breath of terror and ending there exists seeds of beautiful new beginnings.

We descend from the matter of dead stars. When a huge cloud of gas and dust in space gets pulled together by gravity and squeezes tighter, the center gets incredibly hot and starts glowing. This is the beginning of a star.

The remaining gas spreads in a flat spinning disk around the star. Inside this disk, tiny bits of dust bump together and stick. Over time this dust becomes rocks which become bigger chunks, which eventually turn into the seed for a planet. Gravity pulls these together until they become full planets.

When a star runs out of fuel, it dies. This scattered material forms other stars, other planets like Earth, and all the life that forms on it, like you and I.

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on our Earthly beaches, yet He still numbers the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30).

Earth is like this little garden of eden in the vast expanse of the universe. There are estimated to be hundreds of billions to trillions of galaxies in the observable universe. The total number of planets in the universe could be 10²² to 10²⁴ or more (that’s billions of trillions).

All the things that had to be just right for Earth to host us, life.

Our planet has the right distance from the Sun for liquid water to make it habitable, a protective magnetic field and atmosphere to make a stable climate and prevent radiation sterilization, and Jupiter acting as a “shield” against many impacts. It has just the right mix of elements from previous stars’ explosions.

Belief in God is the anchoring system in this vast chaotic experience, this universe. God is like the gravity that keeps our feet solid on the ground beneath us, instead of spinning out into the dark expanse of great “nothingness.” Nothingness as we perceive it, of course. Space contains trillions of multitudes we couldn’t begin to understand. Or as astronaut Reid Wiseman put it, we perhaps weren’t meant to or capable of understanding.

No matter what pain we’re holding, no matter our potentially crushing, seemingly endlessly limiting circumstances, there is a greater universe out there. And we… we are a part of it.

All that God asks of us is to love. To open our hearts to the love He has for us. To surrender disbelief. To open our selves to the vastness of God’s plan and God’s love for us.

One thing most of us cannot deny is the power of love. Love is something we all crave deeply.

As Arnold declares, “Ah love let us be true!” We all crave this sense of a deep, everlasting love. We want it to be true, to be real, not just a dream.

To have the thing we want so badly, we must cultivate a space in our own heart and soul to receive it. The only effective way I’ve found in my life to do that is to tap into the infinite power of God’s love for me.

For the intellectuals that find such vastness “impossible” or “improbable,” God made the universe to show us through our telescopes and science and space missions how far infinity can go.

God made a world where one could enter a state of wonder traveling hundreds thousands of miles beyond our planet into the galaxy, or through simply sitting outside in a garden and watching a tiny butterfly.

One of the great mysteries of the universe is that it is ever-expanding. Meaning there is more, always more. More mystery. More love. More capacity for God.

God reveals Himself in strange and beautiful ways. In 2015 the Hubble telescope observed the enchanting spiral galaxy NGC 3972, who lies about about 65 million light-years away from Earth, meaning that the light that we see now left it 65 million years ago, just when the dinosaurs became extinct.

This galaxy was first initially discovered by astronomer William Herschel in the late 1700s, before galaxies were even understood. He was surveying the night sky using a large homemade reflecting telescope (enormous and extremely powerful for his time). He spotted a dim smudge of light that didn’t look like a star. He recorded its position and describe it as a “nebula” or “nebular object.”

Even though there exists large, vast periods of darkness, we can find a galaxy (even before we even know it), who’s beams of light traveled millions and millions of years just to show us His great expanse. There is always eventually light in the darkness. We just need to use what we have to find it.

Yet, you have only begun to feed into that monster inside your soul desperately trying to silence you and paralyze you. That part of your mind that observes your actions and makes judgments watches you not doing anything anymore. Now, not only are you a fool, but a useless one. I’d much rather be a fool trying than a fool not. Because taking action gives us more information. Real information from the outside world that can be used to improve and change things for real. And it shows that part of our mind that makes conclusions about our selves that we will continue trying, continue moving. Instead of allowing the voices of doubt and negativity to influence our actions, we flip the script. We take action to show ourselves who we are— a spirit that won’t give up.

Eric Dane who recently passed 10 months after sharing his ALS diagnosis, shared a video of his final words to his daughters. In it he said:

It is heartbreaking to watch. A man who earned his living though his great passion for acting, speaking, charming on the screen, now defenseless to this disease that is literally paralyzing him. He has no choice, no option to change his mindset or his perspective to get his muscles to move the way he wants. Unfortunately, his time to do more on this earth came to an end. But, as great performers and artists do, he left with a bang— a gift to us all.

My motor neurons still do what I tell them to do. I still have time on this earth, life in my bones, breath in my body. By the grace of God, I don’t have a disease to fight. The only thing I have to fight right now is fear. My only (self-inflicted) form of paralysis.

Of course, I have two little ones, a home to manage, and a husband who is building a business while working a full time job to support our family. So free time to write has not been easy to come by these days.

I found myself in a rather grouchy place, to put it politely. I was on around the clock, handling seemingly endless demands from my children, from keeping the home by myself, all while not being able to come up for air, to make the work I wanted to make.

It felt like my love meter was off. I wasn’t receiving the love I wanted, but I also felt I wasn’t giving the kind of love I wanted to either. And understandably so, I was in a difficult situation. I was drained, I didn’t have a lot to give. I had to inject life back into myself if I wanted to be more loving to my kids and husband.

Writing has always been a well of vitality for me. If I wanted to tap back into that life source, I had to give. And I had to give without constraints, without the voices in my head telling me I had to write about certain serious topics that were only edited through a number of times, like all the “professional” writers do.

Yet, here I am, writing about cliched topics of fear and love, something I’ve probably written about in ten different ways already on my publication here. So you know my superego had a few issues with this essay topic. But nonetheless, I push through and I’m writing this because our bravery, our sense of duty and love truly must renewed every single day. Especially when you’re in a position like me, a mom who gets out of practice once in a while. Something I’ve accepted graciously (at times) since I am devoted to the responsibility of being a mother to my children and all the sacrifices that come with it.

As I practice being more loving as a mom and a wife, I attempt to carry over this practice into my craft too. Giving what I have, when I can, without judgment. I can’t tell you the level of frustration that I feel deep in my soul on day 6 of “solo” parenting while my husband is working late again and one of them is throwing a tantrum and the other is being so patient, and I have literally nothing to give either of them. It’s the same way I feel when I have a notes app full of essay topics, book ideas, show ideas in my phone that I don’t have the time or energy to work on.

What I realized in those moments when my little one is sick and screaming, and I realized I’ve only been giving my older one commands all day, is that regardless of my perceived failings, I’ve been there. That’s it. I just showed up. I think my consistency does more for my children than I even realize.

And so with my writing, I must show up more, in the small ways I can, even if that means another essay about…. showing up. Or even just a little Substack note or tweet.

This year I am committed to less self-analysis, less notions of self-improvement, and more love, unrestrained (yet discerning) giving.

One of the practical applications of this has been starting my new podcast. Despite an intense aversion to hearing my own voice, and the silly insecurities I have about how I look, video format is actually the most convenient and simple way to share myself online, and also connect with other women and share different kinds of stories.

All of my passions must be given the proper integrity of having a container— a feasible commitment and deadline to achieve them. I decided to film seven podcast interviews as a “season” and then pick something else I can work on (and focus properly on) in my sparse time for another season.

I look forward to sharing these interviews with you all. They will come slowly but surely, I promise. I hope them to be a display of putting all the things I say here into practice, if anything.

Time can feel so constrained as a mom, but nothing is more constraining than excess self-editing. The truth is our time is limited no matter what, and we must use the time we have to give what we have. To hell with the superego (back to where it came). The results may not be ideal, but with consistency we might actually be able to get close to that level that we want to reach. But if we stay stuck in self-judgment and let our insecurity dictate what we can and cannot do, we will lose spirit, our vitality, our sense of life, and eventually have nothing to give anybody at all. An outcome worse than embarrassment, akin to death.

Share

Leave a comment

My story is just one of many. In my time here on Substack I’ve come across many other women who are on the same journey as me, many of us merging onto the same path, while also being so vastly different.

I want to hear your story of becoming. Of unraveling. The good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.

This is the Things My Mother Never Told Me Podcast. A space for creative, intelligent, inspirational women to come together without judgment, without performance, to simply share the things we had to learn the hard way. For our future daughters. For each other.

I’ve been sharing intimate details of my internal and external life with you, and I would love to get to know you as well. Who better to join in this new (scary, if I’m being honest) venture of being seen on a deeper level than my dear readers who have been seeing me in written form for years now?

This is a casual, low pressure conversation, that can be as deep or as surface level as you are comfortable with. The purpose is to simply be in communion with other women who are dedicated to this journey of growth as a woman, unveiling all the unwritten, deep responsibilities and power that come with it, with openness, honesty, a sense of humor and groundedness.

If you are interested and/or know other women who would be interested in these sorts of conversations, feel free to reply directly to this through email, direct message me on Substack, or comment below, and we can correspond a meeting time on Zoom. If you are more comfortable with just audio, I’m perfectly okay with that. These conversations will be recorded, but are not guaranteed to be posted.

I look forward to meeting you and sharing some of these conversations with you in the future. Thank you for being a witness along this journey.

Kyra ✨

Leave a comment

Share

Suddenly, an ominous figure, glowing in a shadowy, green light, appears to her and warns her that the well is poisoned.

The man runs up and looks inside the well. He doesn’t notice the figure, as it quickly dissipates to the side.

Was she hallucinating? She was so dehydrated. Was the figure even there to begin with?

The man turns around and sees everyone else running. There doesn’t appear to be enough water in the well for everyone. He begins desperately pulling up the water.

Frazzled and confused, she makes a weak gesture towards him, “I.. I don’t know if we should drink it.”

He replies, “Why not? We’ll share it and we won’t tell the others.”

“No.. no, I.. I think it might be… poisoned.” She replies.

“What? How could it be poisoned? Have you lost your mind?” He gives her a bewildered stare as he ferociously pulls on the ropes.

“I… I don’t know.”

“What, are you paranoid? Water is water. Look at it.” He pulls up the bucket and shows her the water inside. “Does it look or smell poisoned to you? We’re about to die anyway. Here, quick have your fill before everyone comes and runs the whole well dry.” He gestures to her.

She stares at the water. She began to think that maybe she was losing her mind. They hadn’t had water for days, and now finally out of the blue, there is a well, like a precious gift from God himself.

She looks at him, in hesitation. He drinks lavishly, spilling water all around.

Surely if it was poisoned it would look it. She was so thirsty. Her lips were cracked and bleeding. Her tongue was like sandpaper in her mouth. Her heart was beating quickly. Perhaps just one taste… Maybe if it was poisoned, maybe just one sip wouldn’t be enough to harm her.

She saw the villagers, mere yards away. She looked at the man. He held the bucket to her. She grabbed it, and with the wide mouth of the bucket, and the sweet fresh burst of water that poured from it, she didn’t take just one sip. She gulped and gulped and gulped. Just as she lowered the bucket from her lips, water dripping on her chin, down her neck, her body finally feeling nourished after a long bout of dehydration and illness, she saw the man, lying dead on the ground.

She looks down at the water, it turns green before her eyes. She looks up and sees the figure again. She instantly seizes with fright and pleads with the figure, “Please! please spare me! I.. I was so thirsty. The water… It wasn’t green before.”

The figure replies, “Maybe if you would have heeded my warning, if you would have put your thirst to the side for a moment, your eyes would not have deceived you so.”

She looks over at the villagers as they reach her. Except, they continue running, right past her. As if they were never running towards her at all.

Beyond the well is a luscious, glimmering lake. They begin taking off their clothes. They dive in. They drink. They are bewildered with enjoyment.

She tries to get up to join them, but her body is weak, she can’t move her legs. She begs the figure, “Please, is there anything I can do? I don’t want to die. please.”

The figure dissipates into the dry wind.

As she looks over with longing at the lake, the glimmering sparkle of the water becomes blinding, a large bright light appears. She feels herself lifted up, along with the man. They are set down in the lake as the light recedes to a small dancing glimmer on the water. She feels her strength returning. She reaches for the man and pulls him deeper into the water, and he is revived.

The earliest known cave drawing comes from Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating back 45,000 years ago. Using iron oxide, or rust, some ancient ancestor of ours sketched a pig onto a limestone cave wall, utilizing the natural curves of the stone to mimic the belly of a pig.

We don’t know why that cave ancestor drew that particular pig. Perhaps it was a prayer for abundance. Maybe it was loneliness, madness, or simple observation. All we know is what that image says to us across 45,000 years: “I am here. This is what’s important to me.”

From the very beginning of our species, we have had a need to express ourselves in a way for others to see. It begins with an urgent need like calling for mom’s attention or signaling danger, and slowly turns into religious rituals, then Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, then Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead.”

Every stage of human development carries a new demand for articulation.

The Desperation to Speak

I remember when my firstborn said her first word. After nine months of letting her boss me around with her cries, one day I set her down, contented in her play gym, and told her I would pick her up in five minutes after I folded the laundry. She began to grunt. I gave her a smile, and continued with my folding. She started making “mmm” sounds. She was pushing so hard. Then all of a sudden… “mmmmooommm….. mom.”

It was by sheer force of need that I watched my crying, screaming, grunting little creature baby turn into an articulating little human.

As she entered toddlerhood, she faced a new expression that desperately needed to come out. Her emotional landscape evolved from simply needing mom nearby to more complex things like frustration with her sister, or requesting help with her adventures. It’s part of what makes the “terrible twos”— that in-between phase where little ones are rapidly developing complex social and emotional bandwidth, but with limited language to express it.

My now four-year-old has worked her language use all the way up to manipulation (albeit only effective on her little sister), jokes (adding “poop” in front of any word), and asking me questions like, “what does God look like?”

I think about where I am developmentally, at thirty, where I have this intense need to understand myself and the world around me, and so my language becomes more and more broad in order to be more and more specific with my articulation and understanding.

We articulate because we desperately have something to say.

The Attention Economy versus Living Truth

We live in an attention economy, and in a culture this fast-paced and pleasure-oriented, attention is easy to capture and even easier to confuse with meaning. Posting can be done quickly, rewarded immediately, and repeated endlessly. Desire is activated, validation is delivered, and very little is asked of us in return.

Not all attention is equal. Some forms nourish us, while others merely stimulate and disappear. When expression is shaped primarily by what will be noticed rather than by what is true or life-giving, it begins to lose its depth. What could have been an offering becomes a transaction.

We become tempted to curate versions of ourselves that appear polished, certain, impressive, while our real lives remain largely unexamined. We mistake articulation for embodiment, posting for presence, visibility for virtue.

But expression is not neutral. What we share shapes us. It trains us in what we believe is valuable, what we believe is worthy of being seen. Over time, it either integrates us or fragments us, depending on whether our words are rooted in something we have actually lived.

There is a mass of the younger generation who want a large social media following, to make money online, to post just for the sake of it. But as many have said: you must live before you write. We can’t merely post for the sake of it. We post, we articulate, we communicate because, like my frustrated nine-month-old, we desperately have something to say.

The question is not whether we should speak, share, or be seen. The question is whether our expression is an extension of our integrity or merely a response to the hunger for attention.

The Terror of Demons

Joseph, Mary’s husband in the Bible, is known as the Terror of Demons. God entrusted the most fragile moment of salvation to this man—tasked with protecting Mary, raising Jesus, and providing the earthly fatherhood through which Christ entered daily life.

In the entire Bible, Joseph never speaks a single word. Every time he hears God in a dream, Scripture says he “rose and did as the angel commanded him.” He lived in total alignment with God’s will.

This is the terror of demons: silence, wholeness, and integrity. Demons love endless noise, fragmentation, and distraction. That’s how you keep people out of alignment with God.

Many people in this distracted, noise-filled culture strive to fill it with more of the same. They dedicate their one life on Earth to garnering worldly desires, while forgetting how powerful our words are—how they can bring life or death. We must take utter and complete responsibility for what we post. It’s what we are bringing into the world.

I’ve come to realize the subtle differences between thirst trapping and sharing divine feminine beauty, between venting negative energy and sharing an emotionally charged experience to make others feel less alone, between rage baiting and sharing a genuinely controversial opinion in the midst of conformist thinking, between sharing a final decisive Truth and sharing a personal guiding truth that has changed your own life, between telling other people what they should do versus what worked for you, between shaming down versus inspiring upward.

Joseph’s life reminds us of the importance of silence, reflection, and stepping back before we engage with the world. Do we just want momentary gratification or do we want to make something that feeds life into people, that is timeless?

What Makes Work Last

Think of those ancient cave drawings that have lasted tens of thousands of years. The cave artists used iron oxide, or rust, from the earth, usually mined from surface deposits, riverbeds, or clay-rich soils, then crushed into powder. The rich red coloration came through natural oxidation, a chemical process that can take millions of years of weathering. Iron oxide is stable and long-lasting, unlike organic pigments. When applied to porous limestone like that found inside dark caves, the pigment seeps into microscopic cracks, becoming embedded in the rock. The dark caves also meant the art was less susceptible to weathering.

This is a metaphor for what makes long-lasting work.

The very materials they used were natural, found already occurring in nature. The base of our very best work won’t be found outside of us or artificially manufactured, but from the very materials that made us, our own lives and the resources we find when we tap into that.

Not only was this material naturally occurring, but it only got its rich red color through years and years of oxidation. When I was going through my hardest moments, I could have never imagined it would serve any good anywhere, but each of these processes became the rich material with which I’m able to form my best work. The years of strengthening within me, the years of reflection, of marinating on my life’s journey and narrative.

Where you put that material also matters. The porous limestone rock is like the platform you choose and with whom you share. Are they porous and receptive? I’m grateful to have a space here on Substack where I’ve found like-minded and intentional folks willing to read my writing and receive my message.

And lastly, these works were formed in the dark caves. Sometimes we have to go away for awhile to make our work. Retreat into ourselves. Contrary to the messaging of social media that says you need to be constantly sharing to be relevant, this shows how the best work we can do will be in the dark.

Posting as Declaration

The art of knowing when not to speak is just as important as the art of knowing when to speak up. When to make a declaration.

We got our independence as a country not just through shedding blood, but by declaring. We must fight for what we believe, tear down maladaptive structures, but we must also create, or declare what we value. In doing this we build up the the person we want to be, just how the Founding Fathers built up the country they wanted to live in with the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 to unite the country in the midst of chaos and bloodshed after the start of the war with England. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others sought to explain to Britain and the world why the colonies were rebelling, gave moral justification for the war as a defense of universal rights, and gained recognition from foreign nations:

This is the art of articulation. They wrote the Declaration seven years before the end of the war, they didn’t wait until it was finished. They gave the country unified truth to stand on, to fight for. The Declaration proved the power of words as action. Declaring principles and grievances publicly changed the world. If a written declaration could justify a revolution, a written constitution could sustain a nation.

Written in 1787, the Constitution of the United States still remains as the basis of our country today.

Words can be released much more freely these days. Technology, speed and distance easily separates us from the things we say, but at a certain time in history your word was all you had. It meant something to sign your name to a declaration. It meant laying down your life for something you believe in.

When you remember how this country came to be, what we paid for these freedoms, it feels kind of silly to stress about posting a little idea to social media.

Let’s remove the anxiety, the overstimulation, the egotistical obsessing, and bring back the meaningful weight of posting.

We fought for this freedom of expression over hundreds of thousands of years. We went from grunting to writing on cave walls to developing the printing press to developing the internet. With this freedom and blessed ease, comes a culture where people have their eyes glued to screens with an abundance of thoughtless content, allowing posting to be turned into a performance (since no one is paying attention to real life or what you actually do anymore) rather than a sacred responsibility. Rather than a noble opportunity to declare a new world, a new vision, an opportunity to unite people, to connect with people in a meaningful way.

Don’t let yourself fall into that spiral. Decide and declare what is important to you. Posting something “basic” or silly is forgivable. Contorting yourself to fit into a maladaptive culture might not be. It could squash the entirety of who you could be if you tapped into the image of God, the creator. We were created in His image after all. In our expression, in our creations, we not only make the thing, but we also create our selves.

Let what calls out to the deepest part of you shine. Show everyone what is beautiful to you. Make imperfect, upwardly aiming things.

Every stage of human development carries a new demand for articulation. From the infant’s first word to the artist’s first mark, from silence to speech, we are always deciding what deserves to be made visible. With each act of expression, we are not only shaping the world—we are shaping ourselves.

Posting, at its best, is not performance. It is declaration. A declaration of values. Of meaning. Of what we are willing to stand behind. The words that endure are not rushed. They are lived into. They come from time, reflection, and the quiet work done in the dark.

We live in an age where expression is easier than ever, and responsibility for it easier than ever to forget. But history reminds us that words can build nations, justify revolutions, and bind people together across time. They can also degrade, fragment, and hollow us out.

So decide what is worth declaring. Speak from what you have actually lived. Let your words carry the weight of your integrity. Sometimes, when you speak into the darkness, something answers. And that unexpected voice that calls back can change you in ways silence alone never could.

Leave a comment

So, instead of deeming her “bratty” or “spoiled,” I picked her up and carried her up the stairs happily, knowing I was contributing to her little inner world of feeling heard, seen, and cherished.

Giving affirmation, building up this inner world that, one day when she’s older and on her own in a cruel world that will try to force other contorted stories on to her, she’ll be able to access. She’ll be able to stand in her needs and desires. Feel them justified. Express them. Demand them even.

She won’t be incapable. She already insists on doing most of her daily care tasks like dressing on her own. She won’t be needy. She’ll find herself in relationships where her needs can actually be met, instead of silently suffering.

This is how we end the generational cycle of women contributing to their own oppression.

Girls are born with such a strong ferocity and connection to their own desires. I’ve seen it firsthand.

The training to be less than and smaller starts with other women.

I don’t have to train her to be small if I can be strong enough to handle her ferocity. And if I can trust in the goodness of the best men among us, the benevolent masculine that strives to serve and build alongside other strong women.

There are moments to discipline and challenge our children, and there are moments to look towards something greater— to building the inner scaffolding of our children’s spirits and hearts that will carry them forth in the harshness and demanding cruelty of the adult world.

This was published Nov. 21th on X. In the Margins is a mini-series of posts from my Twitter/ X account, where I attempted to share small fragments of ideas and slices of life that unintentionally became short essays. Perhaps a refreshing break from my aggressively long Substack essays? I hope you enjoy.

The story is as follows:

Kate states in her video that she’s not a fan of “gotcha” stories, rather she calls this an “exemplum” story— a tale meant to teach about the pitfalls of lack of faith and inability to surrender to life. We can all just as easily relate to the richer sister as we can to the poorer.

When I became unexpectedly pregnant at 26, I found myself in a internal battle between both sisters— the voice of faith and the voice of perfection.

My entire pregnancy felt as though there was a dark cloud over it. I felt guilty for putting a sudden stress and strain on my boyfriend, instead of resting in the fact that I had a man so willing to immediately sacrifice and provide. I could feel the disappointment from my mother— someone who did not have an overwhelmingly positive experience as a wife and mother, who was perhaps hoping that her daughter could achieve a different life of financial and career independence in medicine.

Deep down, I felt this culmination of my boyfriend and I’s five year relationship into this beautiful miracle of a new life to be a true blessing. But, the prerequisite to all of the virtues is courage. And I unfortunately lacked the courage to live out my faith and my joy in full force. Instead of pushing through the negativity, the lack of belief from others, I allowed it consume me. I didn’t let myself feel joy or excitement throughout my pregnancy. I let the darker voice prevail— the thoughts that I had preemptively failed my child by not being responsible, by not taking the precautions to wait until a “better” time so that I could provide my child with “more.”

I let these thoughts minimize my experience up until the moment I was in labor even. As I was surrounded by nurses, my baby’s heart rate going down, everyone telling me to keep pushing, the doctor running to get a vacuum suction to pull the baby out before her heart dropped rate for too long— there I was, laying helpless. My little one came out screaming, searching for a source of milk. The thoughts came to me: “Why did I do this?” “Who was I to think I could have a baby?” I couldn’t even figure out how to breastfeed her in her most vulnerable moment, freshly arriving to the world in a most chaotic manner.

As I was watching it all unfold, detached, from afar, I saw the situation and was devastated. This was not how I pictured the first moment of having my baby— a moment I dreamed about my whole life. Why wasn’t I crying tears of joy like my husband? Why didn’t I feel instantly bonded to my baby? Was I doomed to be an emotionally detached mother in the same vein as my own and perhaps the lineage before her?

In the rational part of my brain that was processing it all, I caught myself in this spiral and I thought, perhaps connecting can be mechanic. If I just go through all the motions of nurturing my baby, feeding her, changing her, the connection will come. And I will do it all, no matter how I feel, and then maybe the feelings will come, even if it takes years, I’ll do it.

Not hours later, when my husband was asleep on the couch after holding her and tending to her in my stupor, did my daughter wake up crying. I grabbed her, not wanting to wake him, and held her close to my chest. She instantly stopped crying, and lay her head against her breast and went peacefully back to sleep. I realized in that moment— I was her mother, and she was mine. She knows me, from inside my womb, as the sound of my heartbeat comforted her. I watched her sweet little face, I studied all her features, and I fell in love. This new, beautiful, precious life that came forth through all the strife and struggle and disbelief that abounded. This, is the beautiful, powerful force of life.

I didn’t realize the extent of the seriousness of my delivery in the moment, but had the doctor not acted quickly, my daughter could have lost oxygenation for minutes longer and could have been brain dead or fully, completely gone. How would I have felt then? God spared me that lesson, as I believe God truly is merciful. Instead, He gave me the miracle of life in the midst of chaos and taught me how to find joy despite imperfect circumstances. He taught me how faith is necessary to pull ourselves up and be a beacon for the ones relying on us.

Raising my babies has not been easy, but God has provided for my daughters every step of the way. Everyday, I am awoken by two incredibly vivacious, life-filled, strong-willed little girls, who constantly show me the magical force of life. My daughters are certainly not the type to wait for the perfect moment. They insert their presence as they please, and always make an impactful entrance, much like how they each came into the world.

The years since my births have been fraught with fighting that same battle again and again. Fighting for my peace, my joy, and maintaining my sense of faith. Kate’s beautifully telling of this story served as a poignant reminder to me of that fateful time in my life when I became a mother for the first time. That small, glowing sense inside of me of the imminent blessing and beauty to come, and the way I allowed external voices to squash my fight, deem it foolish, and be a less than faithful receiver of bountiful blessings. Those voices of “not good enough,” of perfection, are destroyers of life.

When we are open to Life, whether it’s in the form of a baby, a calling to create something new, start a business or a new relationship, we fulfill our faithfulness as servants to God, carriers of life through us. When we question it, we stop its flow. But when we take that first step, with love, in faithfulness, we welcome God’s great many mercies and graces.

As I begin to take my other calling in life, my writing, more seriously, I realize how much faith is needed here as well. I’ve long battled the voices that my words are not important, that nobody cares. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve questioned the worth of leaving my daughters with someone else to go write something silly that nobody else will even read or care about. But, if I silence those voices long enough, if I really tap into myself, in the greater force beyond me, and I listen… I hear the calling. I receive ideas constantly, in a never-ending stream. It is God calling me to write, to share the ideas that flow through me.

Just as I am challenged in my motherhood journey to be faithful to the cause of raising my daughters joyfully, I am also challenged to the cause of writing joyfully without doubt, and sharing my ideas openly— beyond writing even. Putting myself out there in more ways, whether with podcasts or videos. Although it feels intimidating and at times, even impossible, as I deal with the same many doubts I’m sure we all share when it comes to recording yourself, hating your voice or the way you look, I remember this story. Where God puts a desire, a vision, an idea, He will create a way.

Faith is like taking the first step on an invisible staircase that is only revealed to you as you walk each step. Faith is what pulls us beyond our perceptions, our beliefs of what seems possible or real, beyond our small ego, into surrender. In this surrender we find a world where life blossoms in the darkest of corners, in the strangest of places, because that is the power of belief, surrender, and faith.

I like to believe that the richer sister eventually had another baby, and learned from her lack of faith. And maybe even learned to be more giving to those she deems as lacking. Judgment is a state of withholding. What will we discover that life is waiting to give us when release judgment and surrender to faith?

This is the tension that Nietzsche talks about. The tension of vitality. I used to see this as curse. But this sort of haunting— one passion interrupting another and vice versa indefinitely— is the sort some could only dream of.

It’s what brings out any ounce of goodness a person has.

Or maybe I’m just manic, I don’t know. I say to myself as long as they eventually come out one day, I’m not. My daughters are turning out wonderfully. And that’s my main focus for right now, so all is well (I remind myself).

This was published Oct. 20th on X. In the Margins is a mini-series of posts from my Twitter/ X account, where I attempted to share small fragments of ideas and slices of life that unintentionally became short essays. Perhaps a refreshing break from my aggressively long Substack essays? I hope you enjoy.

The Temple of Knowledge

Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, Alexandria, the second-largest city in the Roman Empire was a city designed to be a beacon of human achievement. It had Greek temples, Egyptian cults, Jewish synagogues, and, eventually, Christian churches all within the same city limits.

Under the Ptolemaic dynasty, Alexandria became the intellectual capital of the world. The Great Library’s ambition was quite lofty: to gather every written work in existence. Any ship that docked in Alexandria’s ports were searched for manuscripts. Scrolls were seized, copied, and stored. Its shelves spanned subjects like Homeric poetry, Babylonian astronomy, Buddhist sutras, Hebrew scriptures, Greek philosophy, and Egyptian medicine. It may have housed 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls at its height.

It was not merely a library as we know the term today. It was humanity’s first recorded attempt to gather all of the knowledge known to man in one place. It was like a temple to human curiosity. This is where Hypatia taught as a public intellectual, and eventually was dragged through these same streets and brutally murdered.

Alexandria is the closest the ancient civilizations have ever gotten to what we have today with the internet— everything you can possibly want to know in one place, with social media as our public square.

Neoplatonism: Knowledge as a Path to the Divine

Hypatia was the head of the Neoplatonist school, the beating heart of the intellectual life in Alexandria, succeeding her father. It was one of the last major centers of classical Greco-Roman philosophy. Students came from across the empire (Christian and non-Christian) to study under her. She focused on ethics, astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics, central subjects of the Neoplatonic curriculum. She was seen as a philosophical and spiritual authority, and a close advisor to the city’s governor, Orestes.

Neoplatonism is a philosophical tradition based on Plato, a Greek philosopher (c. 427–347 BCE), but expanded during the Roman Empire by thinkers like Plotinus (204–270 CE) and Iamblichus (c. 245–325 CE). It was not a religion in the institutional sense, as it had no priesthood, temples, or formal rituals. It functioned more like a spiritual path or worldview—a philosophical theology that included metaphysics, ethics, and a vision of the divine.

For the Neoplatonists, everything from the stars overhead to the tides to the spark of thought in a human mind was pointing back to a single, perfect source they called “The One.” To study geometry, music, or philosophy was to trace those echoes back toward their origin.

The One was what they described as an ultimate, perfect, ineffable source of all existence. From the One emanated the Divine Mind (Nous), then the World Soul, and finally the material world. Neoplatonists didn’t promote worship of a unique set of gods. Traditional Greek gods were not seen as myths, but as manifestations or aspects of higher divine principles, as spiritual emanations, real symbols of cosmic principles. Apollo, Athena, and Zeus were not to be seen as literal Gods, but rather expressions of divine intelligences within the cosmic order— personifications of order, wisdom, love, and justice.

The Neoplatonist aim was union with the divine through contemplation, philosophy, and purification of the soul. The idea was that purity of soul enables clearer perception of truth and higher realities. There were spiritual exercises, or rituals known as theurgy (from Greek theourgia, “divine work”) that were meant to cleanse the soul of lower passions and prepare it for union with the divine. They felt pure reason alone wasn’t enough to reach the divine. Ritual action was needed to align the soul with the higher realms.

In many ways, Neoplatonists were like the original Substackers (or Tweeters, or Redditors). Their way of life and thinking mirrors today’s internet intellectual subcultures. You can see it in the naturalistic, ‘crunchy’ mothers who pool their knowledge of best health practices online, or in the Twitter circles endlessly debating ultimate Truths. The heart of the Neoplatonist way, gathering to wrestle with ideas, share wisdom, and seek what lies beyond, still pulses through our culture thousands of years later.

Religion as a Means for Order in the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the largest and most diverse civilization the world had ever seen, stitched together from dozens of conquered peoples, languages, and traditions. The Romans adopted and adapted Greek gods, giving them Latin names and tying them to Roman values. Emperors encouraged fusion between local and Roman gods to promote unity across the empire.

The scale was unprecedented and, therefore, precarious. It was a vast experiment in building an empire that constantly risked splintering apart. In such a fragile state, shared rituals and the appearance of divine favor were the glue that held the empire together.

In the Roman Empire, religion meant maintaining the pax deorum—“the peace of the gods.” People believed proper rituals kept the gods happy and the empire safe. Religion was deeply tied to state authority. Emperors were often deified after death. The imperial cult required people to sacrifice to the emperor’s genius as a sign of loyalty. Public rituals and festivals reinforced Roman values and unity.

Religion was not about personal belief in the modern sense, but rather public order, tradition, and civic duty. Instead of a purely tribal or feudal belonging, Rome introduced the idea that being part of a vast state could grant you a kind of legal identity and protection (citizenship, roads, law courts, taxation systems). The individual’s beliefs were not as important as preserving the massive civilization that gave individuals an unprecedented degree of order, protection, and identity, and on a scale humanity had never seen before.

The Rise of Christianity

Christianity began with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the Roman province of Judea. After Jesus’s death, Christianity spread rapidly and crossed class and ethnic boundaries, including slaves, women, and the poor.

The Romans didn’t care if you had extra gods, but refusing all others was a problem. Since Roman religion was closely tied to loyalty to the state, Christians were persecuted for refusing to worship Roman gods or the emperor. Christians refused to offer sacrifices to the emperor or Roman gods, which was seen as unpatriotic and dangerous. This refusal was interpreted not just as religious dissent, but as political rebellion. As it grew, emperors began to fear it as a rival source of authority. It threatened the traditional social order and religious pluralism of Rome.

Eventually Christianity had become too widespread to suppress. In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity through the Edict of Milan. After his death, it was claimed he had a vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, of a Christian symbol (the Chi-Rho ☧, the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek) and heard the words: “In this sign, conquer.” He ordered his soldiers to paint the symbol on their shields and won the battle decisively. Afterward, he interpreted the victory as a sign of the Christian God’s favor, prompting him to support the faith.

Whether Emperor Constantine’s Edict was inspired by spiritual revelation or not, it certainly had a political advantage. Christians made up a large, organized, and growing group across the empire, including soldiers, administrators, and common people. By legalizing Christianity, he gained their loyalty and used the Church as a stabilizing force.

The Edict of Milan not only legalized Christianity, but granted religious freedom for all faiths. Constantine believed that religious harmony could bring political peace.

The Murder of Hypatia

In the wake of Constantine’s public embrace of Christianity, arose Theodosius I, his eventual successor, and a devout Christian who saw Christianity not just as a religion but as the glue for imperial unity. He made Christianity the official state religion in 380 CE. As classical institutions declined, the Church offered stability and leadership. The Church had a tight structure with bishops, councils, and texts, which gave it staying power.

Early Christians who once argued for religious tolerance, now saw paganism as demonic and morally corrupt. The bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, pushed emperors to eliminate pagan practices as a threat to souls and society. A series of laws starting in the 390s banned sacrifices, temple funding, and public pagan festivals. Jewish communities faced increasing persecution and were eventually expelled from Alexandria under Cyril.

Christian mobs (sometimes led by groups like the Parabalani— a brotherhood of Christian men serving under Cyril, originally meant to care for the sick and needy, but eventually turning into an unofficial militia group) destroyed temples and attacked philosophers like Hypatia with impunity.

Even though Neoplatonism wasn’t a “religion” by Roman legal standards, it was still closely associated with pagan culture, in philosophical opposition to Christian theology, and tied to the last defenders of traditional Greco-Roman religion. Early Christians saw it as spiritually dangerous, and ultimately heretical, especially when Neoplatonists like Hypatia held social and political influence.

By 415 CE, Alexandria was fraught with internal tension. The city’s governor, Orestes, who represented imperial authority, had a mistrustful relationship with Cyril, the city’s powerful Christian bishop. The two clashed over control of the city, from jurisdiction over the Jewish population to how far Christian authority should extend into civic affairs.

Hypatia, as a respected philosopher and friend of Orestes, became a scapegoat for his policies. Cyril’s hardline supporters saw her as a symbol of the old pagan order and a perceived obstacle to reconciliation between the governor and the bishop. Rumors spread that she was using sorcery to keep Orestes from mending ties with Cyril.

One day in March 415 CE, as Hypatia traveled home, she was seized by a mob of Christian zealots (many witnesses claiming they were members of the Parabalani, Cyril’s unofficial militia), dragged to a church, brutally murdered, and her body burned. The killing was a politically charged assassination in a city where philosophy, religion, and power had collided into this ultimate violent act.

The Intersection of Faith and Reason

When I first learned about Hypatia, it seemed to confirm my suspicion that faith and reason were destined to clash. Yet, the story doesn’t end in destruction. History beyond Hypatia reveals a longer thread in the story of the battle between faith and reason.

Christianity didn’t entirely kill philosophy. In fact, it actually absorbed and transformed it. Augustine, one of the most influential Church Fathers, was deeply shaped by Neoplatonism before his conversion.

In Plotinus’s (early Neoplatonist) Enneads, he states, “The soul must turn inward and upward to find union with the divine One, transcending material reality.”

In Augustine’s Confessions, a similar parallel: “I entered into my inward self under Your guidance… I saw the Light that never changes above my mind… It was not this common light, nor was it of the same kind as this light of all flesh… He who knows the truth knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity.”

Here Augustine mirrors Plotinus’s language of turning inward to ascend beyond material things to God, but he insists this Light is the God of Scripture, not the impersonal “One.” His ideas were echoes of Plotinus reframed in Christian terms. Augustine borrowed Plotinus’s conceptual tools—soul’s ascent, evil as privation, order of being, illumination—but reshaped them around Christian doctrines of creation, sin, grace, and the personal God.

Even well-known intellectuals who committed their life’s work to matters of the mind, like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor, turned to theology later in life after a mystical religious experience. When he died, he left an unfinished work, Pensées (“Thoughts”) meant to be a defense of Christianity. In it he writes:

This principle is exactly what animates Pascal’s concept of the “Wager.” Pascal knows he can’t give you a mathematical proof of God’s existence (and he thinks that’s by design). Instead, he aims at the will— your power to choose, commit, and orient your life.

The Wager is as follows:

1. If God exists and you believe → infinite gain (eternal life).

2. If God exists and you don’t believe → infinite loss.

3. If God doesn’t exist and you believe → small cost (perhaps some pleasures or illusions).

4. If God doesn’t exist and you don’t believe → small gain.

Therefore, Pascal posits the rational choice is to believe.

Maybe this is how God reveals himself, especially for those us with overactive minds and a wild tapestry of logic and rationale to find our way through. Our minds can take us far, but belief has to take us the rest of the way.

English theologian, John Henry Newman (1801-1890), wrote about how belief isn’t just a matter of cold proofs, but of what he called the “illative sense”— the way the whole person (intellect, conscience, imagination, heart) converges toward truth. He said:

Newman often stressed God’s indirect revelation, that He leaves “traces” rather than overwhelming evidence. He states:

Pascal believed faith must involve a voluntary turning of the heart toward God. If God forced Himself upon us with undeniable evidence, it would produce obedience, but not love.

Faith is a freedom that we must choose with our own free will, which means by nature that it also can be freely denied. This is why Pascal and Newman insist that God reveals Himself in a way that invites rather than coerces. God hides to preserve human freedom. God reveals enough to guide the humble seeker. There is just enough light for those who want to see, and just enough obscurity for those who resist.

Dogma as a Band-Aid for Chaos

In the period of time where I was denying God, in the midst of massive intellectual exploration, there was a lot of darkness and chaos in my life. Yet, now I think about how so much beauty came from that time. I read authors like Nietzsche, who I would have never read if I had stayed the same Christian I was when I was a little girl. It felt as though God was preparing me in that time to be a stronger woman of faith, a better communicator, and also simultaneously showing me the beauty and the fruit of the knowledge here on earth, just waiting for me the whole time to reach out my hand to Him to make that knowledge come to full fruition in wisdom through love and faith.

We must not forget the infamous agnostic Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim:

In the midst of chaos is usually where magic is born. The dogmatists, like the Christians under Cyril’s rule that mudered Hypatia, lose this element when they get too orderly to the point of destruction. When one becomes a legalist, it kills any possibility for magic, for beauty, for the unknown to reveal itself.

I can’t help but see similarities between the fall of the Library of Alexandria and the fall of The Tower of Babel— a biblical story from the Old Testament where humanity comes together to construct a tower to the heavens. The Neoplatonists saw their collection and study of knowledge much like building a tower to heaven— a way to get closer to God.

In the bible, God intervenes directly in the building of the tower by confusing languages so people could no longer cooperate. The project collapses, and humanity scatters. So is this to say that intellectual exploration is truly a sin against God?

The Old Testament God often places limits on human knowing, not necessarily out of cruelty, but because knowledge divorced from wisdom can destroy. In Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a curse in itself, but a power humanity wasn’t ready to wield. In Babel, the scattering was a mercy as much as a judgment.

The dogmatic Christians, are perhaps those with less agency, who choose not to trust themselves and ultimately God Himself, His mercy, and the way He reveals Himself and chooses to spread the good word in and through us. They rely on dogma instead, and in that kill everything good about the faith. They choose understanding and control, in the words that make up the books that make up the laws, over faith. Dogma not only crushes those who are the victims of it, like Hypatia, but it ends up crushing the very ones grasping onto the heaviness of these physical words. It crushes their ability to believe, to love. They end up claiming themselves as a god— the worst sin of all.

It goes to show the danger and tragedy in a group of humans who perceive themselves to be higher and mightier than the rest, and how that can turn incredibly sour when we are unable to see our humanity. To think we must snuff out the bright flame of another in order to verify our own beliefs— those are not beliefs, those are a shield over a dark, hollow, evil, lost soul. There are good ideas and bad ideas out there. Even the most evil can latch onto a good idea, a good cause, and use it as a shield for wrongdoing when there is a large enough mob of blindly following individuals to hid behind and to excuse it. Belief is meant to be questioned, tested, to be fought for, not against. Let us continue to fight the good fight in ourselves, in our hearts and minds and spirits, so that we may bring peace on earth and show love and compassion to all the lives we touch.

Belief & Love in the Face of Evil

In his Pensées, Pascal warned us not to confuse knowledge about God with relationship with God. If belief were just a math problem, then love, freedom, and surrender wouldn’t matter. But because it’s subtle, the decisive thing becomes the orientation of the heart.

Belief in God and religion were ultimately a means of order in ancient Rome. In a precarious, large, newly ordered civilization like that of Rome, it is plain to see why they would latch onto religion in such a manner. God certainly does have the power of order, not just for a society or a large group of people, but also in our hearts and minds.

In Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC, he writes a partially fictionalized account of scientists and mathematicians during the early 20th century, including theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who went on to kill his mentally challenged son and himself, after making many contributes to quantum mechanics. Here, his colleague narrates his descent:

Intellectual exploration often lives on the edge of insanity. Our connection to God is our way back when we get lost too far in the dark.

The other element of my return to God, was being pushed to the edge. In my case, it was not intellectual exploration that pushed me to insanity (although it had done that at many points earlier) but the crucible that is being a mother, and my deep dedication to trying to do the best job possible. It was the love for my daughters that pushed me beyond all of my rational hesitations, into the depths of belief. I knew I could not go on in the chaos of raising two little toddlers in the challenging circumstances I was presented without grasping onto something beyond me.

I needed to place my belief in something greater, wiser, and more loving in order to be more loving to my daughters, and in order to move at all. Belief is a necessary jumping off point for anything. I have to believe in the importance of my writing and my ideas in order to be able to physically put them down at all. I have to believe in the sanctity and importance of my task as a mother to wake up everyday and do a bunch of thankless tasks.

So does intellectual exploration bring us closer to or further from God?

It depends on the heart behind it. If the search is rooted in pride, it can become an idol. If it’s rooted in love, it becomes a prayer.

Some have a predilection for a sharp, overactive mind, just like some people are natural athletes or performers. We need to use our brains. God gave us these gifts to be utilized and used through Him and for Him, for the greater good. In all of my trying to understand the world and myself better, it was always in service of a higher aim to be more compassionate, and move more effectively through the world.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Matthew McConaughey’s Poems & Prayers:

If you’d like to make a one time donation to support my writing, you can do so here:

Buy Me a Coffee

Thank you for reading,

Kyra ✨

My husband and I met on tinder when we were 21. We had an unplanned pregnancy 5 years later. And another one a year after that. On paper, it’s a bit of a disaster. We both had our fair share of “red flags.”

There’s no such thing as a situation or person you jump into and it’s all roses.

Certainly it’s true that you need to have magic & butterflies with the person you spend your life with, but often when two imperfect people come together (especially when there’s trauma/ maladaptive patterns/ no positive role models) there will be friction, chaos, and difficulty.

My husband and I have shown each other our triggers, our scars, but also our hidden beauty too. It gets messy sometimes (probably was bordering on “unhealthy” at points) but we continue to choose to keep growing & learning together.

Just as I mentioned in my last post about the vow of motherhood to witness the full spectrum of humanity in your child and your child in you, this applies just as much to marriage.

I see the fights and chaos in our marriage as what Jung referred to as “circumambulation.” Sometimes seemingly going in circles, but smaller and smaller circles each time until you find that closer understanding, learning more and extending more love and patience each time (the true purpose of the covenant of marriage).

We’ve each learned so much more about love & life through our relationship and all the pain & beauty that comes with it than if we would have just stayed alone until we reached a certain pinnacle.

We’ve witnessed each other’s evolution throughout the years and built a beautiful family together.

I’m able to be a better mother to my children because I’ve seen their father (literally the other half of their genes, the source of the other half of their shadow) through his hardest times and loved him through it and vice versa.

So, in my personal opinion and experience, marriage was quite difficult at times. But it was always worth it. Always a challenge to increase patience, faith, and love. And my husband has met me and matched me at every one of those points.

For every difficulty, there has been an even greater love, passion, and enjoyment too ☯️

This was published Sept. 20th on X. In the Margins is a mini-series of posts from my Twitter/ X account, where I attempted to share small fragments of ideas and slices of life that unintentionally became short essays. Perhaps a refreshing break from my aggressively long Substack essays? I hope you enjoy.

You will meet times when that vow is tested. But you’ll remember. The promise you made to that sweet little baby you helped to bring earthside. The soul who must also witness your full spectrum of humanity. Except they didn’t choose it. And they have no internal scaffolding or protection, except… for you.

It’s been a hard week. I’ve been tested. But I remembered that vow. I will continue to strive to bring beauty and love and enlightenment into my children’s lives. To continue to protect and enrich them.

I will surrender. I will remember they have much to teach me and I have much to learn. I will give myself grace. And I will continuously expand that grace to my children.

I will not raise children hardened, with diminished spirits. It takes so much heart & effort to preserve the spirit of a child while also preparing them for the world. It’s the craziest balancing game for a parent. It takes so much more than we realize.

So this week, I kept the goals small, present-focused. We walked. We talked about what we saw in the clouds. We baked. And in those small moments, the intensity of the task lost its looming effect over me. I realized this is how it’s done. One small moment after another.

I still carried my 90th percentile mama bear anxiety with me as we went into the outside world, and the girls still whined and fought and cried (aren’t we all guilty of doing that despite whatever good things are laid at our feet?)

But as this week ended, I can rest, knowing I gave it my all. I did my best. My daughter grabs my arm and says, “mommy I wuv you” and we go back and forth, “no… I wuv you” until we burst into giggles. This is the life.

This was published Sept. 19th on X. In the Margins is a mini-series of posts from my Twitter/ X account, where I attempted to share small fragments of ideas and slices of life that unintentionally became short essays. Perhaps a refreshing break from my aggressively long Substack essays? I hope you enjoy.

You know that feeling when you forget to reply to a friend’s message, and then a bunch of time goes by and then you start to feel weird about replying at all? Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t know. All I know is that this is the longest I’ve gone without posting since I’ve started my Substack. I strived to post once a month, and during hard times, every other month (which already felt sparse), but now it’s been nearly three months, and the anxiety has building for me each day I think about how I still haven't posted.

It has not been for lack of trying. My process was becoming relatively simple and consistent— on the occasional non-chaotic weekend, my husband would take the girls for the day, and I just wouldn’t leave the office until I had an essay written. I would attempt to convey in the most readable manner I could muster whatever external conflict and internal musings I was dealing with for the past month. Once this became relatively consistent, I began to think if I should try to make a better effort at making my posts more organized and readable. What percentage of this was a genuine, yet misguided upward striving aim to be a better writer, and what percentage was my insidious inner critic and self-doubt, I couldn’t tell you. But unfortunately that second guessing snowballed into a larger pause than I intended.

It was also summertime, which I thought would give me more time to write since my husband, a teacher, was off work, so I diligently set away to work on a post about the infamous murder of the philosopher Hypatia by Christians during ancient Roman times, and the relationship between intellect and faith. This piece took much more time in general as it required a lot more external research than my typical post, where I simply pull from my own life experiences. I also questioned whether it was “on brand” at all for my substack. I probably should still post it, because I did pour a lot into that piece for so long, but eventually I realized my strength lies in the emotional (which inevitably also means sometimes chaotic) nature of my writing.

Right in the middle of working on that post, life began to hit hard. My daughters hit a fast and furious growth spurt (emphasis on the furious…). Whatever level of fear I had for bringing a second baby home to my 16 month toddler, was more rightly apt for the experience of having TWO toddlers. It’s complete insanity. And just like with every growth spurt with kids, it requires you to completely shift the way you were doing things— right in the middle of my trying to shift the way I was doing my writing. And, also, right in the middle of a massive personal shift, which inevitably affected my marriage. I’ve never been more convinced of astrology than when I read about the Saturn Return, essentially a massive period of reckoning and personal shifts that happen in your life around ages 27-30 (I turned 30 this past February).

As more time passed through this chaos, I felt the distance of the last time I posted on Substack. It burned in my brain. Yet, for the life of me, I could not find my footing. I eventually gave up and got back on Twitter. I figured if I can’t write essays, then at least I’ll share my ideas in little bits and pieces. I instead found myself essentially writing mini essays on there, which I think I will publish in an upcoming series here as well (so you’ll get a sense of what I was up to during these past few months).

It wasn’t until I got sick recently, and was literally unable to do anything, that I realized what a true blessing it is to be able to do anything. I have a terrible habit of not giving myself credit for the things I do. The second I’m successfully pulling anything off, I began to think about how I could do it better. As I mentioned earlier, I recently went down an astrology rabbit hole, and when I had my full birth chart read, it was mentioned how my strengths lie in my emotional intelligence and my ability to communicate and connect with others— the very thing I was already doing here.

I don’t need to show you how smart or articulate I am. That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to write to women, to moms, to human beings. God knows, as a human being (especially moms), we can certainly get stuck in ruts sometimes. And just like the old cliche goes, it’s not the smartest or fastest or most talented that reaches the finish line, but the one who simply keeps on going.

I can get caught up in the esoteric, in the intellectual worlds, that I forget as a human being, I am subject to the simplest of cliche life lessons as anyone else. I can trip up, I can make stupid mistakes, but I can keep on going. My being here, and writing this to you is me showing my humanity, giving you whatever permission you may need to forgive yourself for your slip ups, and to encourage you to keep on keeping on in whatever endeavor you may have convinced yourself is not important or you don’t need, but that you know deep down inside is essential for your vitality. Our vitality— that thing we must feed to not become the living dead. When we feed into our vitality, we feed into everything else in our life, and that our life touches.

I have many more things to say about vitality (future essay for sure), and faith (my current reckoning), and codependency in relationships (a huge reoccurring theme of my Saturn Return), but for now I will jump back into the cold waters of sharing my writing with this simple message. I thank you all for staying along on this journey with me. There’s a big number next to where it says subscribers, and I’m astonished that that many people are willing to receive my words directly emailed to them. I don’t know how many of those are bots or people who actually care. But alas, I will keep on writing as if you do, or else what’s the point? I know I care enough to share my words with you, and I thank you for receiving them.

I welcome any feedback (in the comments or replying back directly to the email) on any topics that I mentioned that you’re most interested in right now, or any other topics that I didn’t mention that you would like to hear about.

In the meantime, I wish you the best. And I hope to find you in your inbox soon.

Kyra ✨

Imagine being a mother in the earliest days of human existence. You don’t know if the rains will come, if the river will flood, or if the sun will rise angry and blistering. Your child has a fever, and there is no name for it. No medicine, no doctor—only prayers whispered into the wind and herbs crushed by trembling hands. You hope the men return with meat, but there’s no certainty. A rustle in the tall grass could mean a boar… or a predator. You birth your children alone, sometimes in blood-soaked silence, hoping the spirits are kind. The world is not something you shape; it is something that happens to you.

In a time before science or sanitation or any predictable rhythm, it was natural, even necessary, to believe in gods. To see the divine in the rain, the moon, the soil. To offer up your fear and powerlessness to something greater, because your mind had no other choice.

But now that nearly everything can be measured, explained, or controlled (at least on the surface) what happens to that sense of surrender? Of awe? Of mystery? What becomes of us, of our conception of the world and of God?

Mothers Akin to God

Becoming a mother is perhaps the closest we can get to the divine act of creation: nurturing a new life from its first flutter in the womb, to shaping your little one’s life in the outside world.

Do you remember feeling like your mother was a god as a child? It felt like she could do everything and solve anything. Ancient cultures revered many different forms of mother goddesses, even Western Catholicism reveres Mother Mary as the highest saint and sacred portal through which Jesus came to be.

In our modern era with infinite controllable variables, mothers are no longer revered as a portal for life; no longer merely responsible for giving life and the survival of their young children, but more so responsible for the thriving of their children. This adds layers of complexities and challenges to the task of motherhood now.

It’s no longer: are you able to feed your kids? Now it’s: what kind of foods are you feeding your kids? Vegan, only locally grown produce? Or liver, bone broth, and homemade mineral electrolyte water? Don’t even start about vaccines. What about the toys they’re playing with? Surely only responsibly sourced wood toys? And absolutely no screens. Make sure you have a perfectly curated home environment where you control every aspect of every thing your child is interacting with, but also let them run around wild in nature and become properly socialized with other “regular” children.

Mothers of today are measured by insane, often contradictory standards, which makes us somehow feel less revered and goddess-like than ever, and simultaneously like we are the end-all, be-all for our children.

What We Live and Die For

In my essay, “The Unique Challenge of Becoming a Mother for Intellectual Women,” I explored the challenges we face as modern women when we attempt to manage every variable of our children’s lives with our strongly-driven analytical impulses. It’s clear that when we refuse to surrender to a higher power, we will suffer for it.

It wasn’t that I was making myself god, or even my intellect. The real struggle was that I made my children god. My intelligence became the tool I used to serve them, not Him.

The truth of the matter is that we only saw our mothers as gods when we were little because the sheer force of will they had within them as mothers to serve us as their children. We couldn’t understand the depth and force of that motivation as a young, self-focused child.

Carl Jung touched upon this dynamic in his concept of the “child archetype.” He said how the child can be godlike—the most vulnerable and simultaneously the most powerful. Think of the revered religious baby Jesus image.

The vulnerability of the child is what drives us as mothers to push ourselves to do the impossible. The endless love we have for our children and the weight of the responsibility to care for them and carry them through this unforgiving world is what pushes us past exhaustion, past reason, past what we thought we could give.

Those of us who lead with intellect can plainly see how unforgiving the world can be. As mothers, we can’t stand the possibility of our children getting hurt, so we try to do whatever we can to avoid that possibility. In that striving, we deem ourselves the main and final authority over our children’s lives.

I can tell you where that road leads—and it’s not a perfectly controlled and curated world. It’s the opposite. It leaves you feeling so completely out of control, drowning in anxiety, intrusive thoughts, depression, and bone-deep fatigue. When we raise ourselves to the power of a god, we discover how utterly unfit we are for the task.

When the Hierarchy is Improperly Ordered, Chaos Reigns

I was not chasing God or His will, surrendering to the greater power and wisdom in things. I was trying to engineer a utopia for my children, placing them in the number one spot that was meant for God. I ended up hurting myself and failing to serve my children well.

It’s not fair to place that sort of weight on a child. A child is meant to feel secure in their early years. They want to know us mothers are running the show, that we have the reigns.

As I detail in many of my other essays, like “Releasing Mom Guilt & Cultivating Patience,” I struggled in my early years placing my girls feelings—and my own anxious feelings, disguised as control— in the driver’s seat. Children’s feelings are surely meant to be heard and comforted, but they’re far too fickle and ill-informed to be the deciding factor in anything. As for my feelings, they were rooted in the endless fears of terrible things that could possibly happen to my daughters with any decision I make. How can I lead my children when I’m unable to make firm decisions in anything?

This anxious, fearful way of living—assuming we can predict every outcome, and control every variable—runs us into the ground. I was constantly fatigued, and unable to perform at my best. I depended on substances for any ounce of relaxation, to feel like things were okay for just a moment.

I’ve noticed a similar pattern with myself and other strongly intellectually-identified, agnostic or atheistic individuals. When we grasp so tightly to the known and understood, the urge to surrender to something primal shows up in our shadow with a vengeance. I’ve seen this in a young man, who was extremely focused only on intellectual matters, the known and the real, then suddenly found himself in a deeply enmeshed, co-dependent relationship with a woman he fell for so completely that he imploded the whole thing (similar to a situation young Nietzsche found himself in). Another woman, an extremely high achiever, who had gone to law school and was a CEO of multiple businesses, had a long battle with drug and alcohol addiction at the peak of her worldly success.

These might seem paradoxical, but what’s really happening is their subconscious begging to be deeply immersed in something primal so badly that it drags them into hell to do it. Instead of actively choosing something good and intentional to channel our primal urge to surrender to— like, perhaps a child-like faith in God, this tradition that supersedes all others— we intellectuals deem it as “beneath” us.

Kierkegaard & Either/ Or Choices

Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard has a collection of works in which he reflects on the matter of “deciding,” in particular the big decision of choosing to believe in God. Kierkegaard believed that faith in God is not the result of logical reasoning, but a personal, passionate choice made in the face of uncertainty. He argued that life presents us with an “either/or”—a decision between living aesthetically (for pleasure and avoidance of responsibility) or ethically (through commitment and meaning). Belief in God represents the highest form of ethical and spiritual commitment. Because God cannot be proved objectively, faith requires a “leap”—a decision to trust in the absurd and embrace the paradox.

This leap is deeply subjective; what matters is not abstract doctrine but your individual relationship to the divine. Kierkegaard emphasized that truth is subjectivity: it’s not what you know, but how deeply you live it.

Belief in God is not a matter of objective proof, but of existential commitment. The decision to believe is the most personal, inward, and radical act a person can make.

Turning Away From God

I once had a child-like faith, or quite literally the faith of an actual child. I was raised in a “Christian” home for all intents and purposes. We went to church occasionally, but there was no substantial discussion of faith in my home, and my parents weren’t always the best role models of faith and Christianity. I often find in the older generations, those who were steeped in religion for so long, see God as more of a superstition than an active choice to be lived out, as Kierkegaard described.

Still, I carried on in my personal belief and relationship with God. As a lonely and sensitive child, this carried me through many hard times. I truly found it to be a source of love and strength in my life, yet it only existed as I remained alone in my room. I had nobody to commune with, and most of my interactions with the church or people of the church were largely negative and shame-inducing. We’ve all met our fair share of individuals who use God’s name to justify their own ends, and represent the faith quite poorly.

Then there was my highly curious nature. As I got older, a voice consistently arose when I would try to pray: What if you’re just talking to yourself? What if God is just this fanciful imaginary friend you’ve created for yourself? How pathetic would that be?

It was this seed of doubt paired with Eve-like curiosities about what else the world had to offer that led me right off the ledge.

Jordan Peterson has poignantly observed that pain is the only thing we can be sure of being real. When someone pinches you, you feel it, there’s no doubt. When we feel happy, it feels transient, on unstable ground, maybe a little delirious even. The thing about pain and suffering is that in it, we each feel uniquely special and justified in our own version of it. If it’s certainty you want, then it’s pain you will have.

The realest, most common human problem is the omnipresent pull downwards, towards darkness and sadness, depression and anxiety. What if instead of focusing on that all-encompassing human problem and falling deeper, we look up? What would we find if we fixed our eyes upward? How high would our ceiling of possibility be?

The Upward Limit Problem

Psychologist Gay Hendricks introduces the “Upper Limit Problem” in his book, The Big Leap. It’s the idea that we all have an internal “success thermostat,” a subconscious limit on how much happiness, love, or success we believe we’re allowed to experience. When we go beyond that limit, we often self-sabotage through worry, conflict, or procrastination to bring ourselves back down to what's familiar.

As humans, we can never reach something if we don’t first imagine it to be possible. Why set your foot upon a path that would lead nowhere? I remember distinctly one day in college while I was still in a toxic relationship, seeing this couple who seemed so madly in love in such a pure and sweet way, it made me imagine for once the possibly of a future with a man who unconditionally loves and supports me. If it weren’t for that belief, I could have never gotten into the relationship I have with my husband now. I wouldn't have been able to even identify him as a loving man or accept his love to begin with.

I would rather allow myself to have large and lofty visions for life and be wrong than to stay small and certain. I’ll take my belief, my lightness, my peace, my expansion, and the doubters can have their certainty and the misery that comes along with it.

There were many moments throughout my non-believing years when I actually missed believing in God. I knew the emotional and psychological benefits it could offer, especially as a new mother when I was struggling and alone.

As a parent, you see so clearly what happens to the kids who don’t get unconditional love and support from their parents. When you choose to believe in God, you gain instant access to that sort of relationship: unconditional love, strength, and support from a higher being who holds you to a higher standard that you couldn’t imagine for yourself, while holding your weakness and pain with love, tenderness, and omnipotent understanding.

Yet, I was convinced Christianity was where intellect went to die and I wasn’t willing to put that on the cross just yet.

The Return

It wasn’t until I found myself at a crossroads in parenting, where more information only seemed to make things worse, rather than help. I was having intrusive thoughts of terrible things happening to my daughters. I couldn’t accept this idea of giving my daughters over to the world, surrendering them to God, and all the potential good that came with that. On top of everything, I was still struggling to maintain my sobriety. Even in my conscious, will-driven striving, I still struggled to achieve things that I knew would make me a better mother.

I read an article on Substack about man who had to return to God in order to deal with the depths of sexual sin he found himself in (which unfortunately I cannot find for the life of me; if you know it, please link it in the comments). He said the only way to deal with his struggles were to go to mass everyday, and to take communion with God— to take the bread, the body of God, into his own body and see himself as one with God.

This really moved me. Here was someone so steeped in a lifestyle of sin who, despite all the shame and despair, still went before God. The depth of his humility stirred me and showed me that this kind of deeply grounded striving can come only from pursuing God.

I could max out everyday trying to make a perfect life for my daughters, but if I chose instead to humble myself and pursue God first, I would find an unlimited well of strength, peace, and love to bring to my daughters and all other aspects of my life. I could tell myself everyday that I didn't want to keep smoking and drinking, but the only way I knew I would really follow through on that promise is if I made that promise before God—making the “either/or” commitment to the higher power I actively choose to believe and surrender to, and His power and authority over my life.

The Daily Bread

There is something extremely powerful about returning to God every day for my daily bread so that I can be a better mom, a better person, and have a lived faith— the ultimate relationship with the One who is greater than all. Without this, my other relationships become mere worship at altars of false gods.

We mothers know distinctly the feelings of despair that come with motherhood, especially when you don’t have your own mother to rely on. No matter what you do or don’t have, you must perform 24/7, 365 days a year, with no breaks or special exceptions. You know the weight of your responsibility, and it feels like you’re not allowed any mistakes.

While exploring Christian ideas as I carefully considered entering that portal of faith, I listened to Elizabeth Elliot speak about bringing an offering to God every day. She emphasized the importance of having an offering daily, but that you can bring Him whatever you have— even if that means just bringing your pain, suffering, and doubt before Him.

The seed of doubt produces no fruit; it only spreads misery. The seed of faith produces abundance. If you can allow yourself to raise your ceiling of what is possible, and what can be done in surrendering to God.

Every morning, I wake up and choose again. Not because doubt has disappeared, not because I've solved the mystery of existence. But because I've learned that the choice itself is the point. The leap is what forms our commitment, the foundation of our relationship to the divine.

I hope my daughters now see me—not the anxious, out-of-control mother I once was, but a woman learning to hold her plans lightly and her children fiercely, knowing both ultimately belong to God.

The ancient mother I described at the beginning—the one who whispered prayers into the wind and crushed herbs with trembling hands—she understood something we've forgotten in our modern arrogance. She knew that the very act of surrender, of placing our deepest fears and greatest loves into hands larger than our own, is what truly takes the greatest strength.

And perhaps that's what I've been running from all along—not the absence of God, but the presence of my own humanity. The terrifying, beautiful truth that I am not the author of my story, merely a character learning to trust the One who is.

The loop of rationality that once held me captive hasn't disappeared. It still whispers its demands for certainty, for control, for proof. But now I know its voice for what it is—not wisdom, but fear dressed up in intellectual clothing. And I choose, each day, to step outside that loop and into the mystery.

This is my offering: not answers, but questions lived out loud. Not certainty, but faith worked out in trembling. Not perfection, but the courage to keep showing up, to keep believing, to keep surrendering the false gods I'm so tempted to create and worship instead of the true God who creates and sustains all things.

The seeds of doubt still exist. But I'm planting seeds of faith instead, trusting that what grows from them will be more beautiful than anything I could engineer on my own.

Evidence of Grace

When I choose to submit to the ever-expansive wonder and awe of God, I start to really pay attention to way God reveals himself and works through my life. I think about how the very state of my life is evidence of Him.

In the period I was denying God—when I was confused, alone and lost as a young woman trying to figure out my place in the world, chasing shadows instead of the light that casts them—I still somehow ended up in the perfect spot. With a husband I love, two amazing daughters, and a medium to practice and share my craft. God knew the desires of my heart. These blessings seemingly dropped into my lap in a frenzy, disturbing my otherwise “well-thought out” plans.

In a way, God was with me the whole time I was distant from Him. In no other state of mind than the madness I was in would I read the tomes of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Jung. These are the works that form the foundation of my writing and thinking today— the very writing that God is using for His ultimate good.

God doesn’t want us to cast away our minds. He just doesn’t want us to get lost in them and forget who the true master is. To leave room for the unknown, for wonder and awe.

As mothers, we are constantly the ones in charge, the ones maintaining composure, offering endless love, compassion, and care to our children. No human being can be expected to maintain that pace for as long as our children need it from us. That’s why I took the leap of belief, to allow God into my life—to tap into the endless well in order to increase my capacity to finally become the mother I strive to be.

I’m just a writer in the square, offering words instead of songs. Placing my hat here, if you feel so moved to support my writing financially. Either way, thank you for reading.

Buy me a coffee

Hiding. It’s what we do everyday. We avoid eye contact with that acquaintance at the store. We choose food delivery left at the door, instead of receiving it like we did back when all we had were doorbells and cash. We post carefully curated pieces of ourselves online—just enough to be seen, but never fully known.

On their own, these choices seem harmless. I’ve done them all, and more. But what happens when each of these small acts compound, instance after instance, day after day? What are we left with when we have avoided giving ourselves to the world, over and over again?

The answer is not simply nothing. It’s beyond nothing. It’s isolation, which becomes depression. It’s thoughts ricocheting around a single brain, colliding into anxiety. It’s the slow spiral of disappearing into ourselves, in a modern culture that makes it possible to do with seamless consistency and ease.

The Ways We Hide

When I think about hiding, I picture a little girl hiding behind her mother’s skirt. Scared of the unknown, so she clings to something familiar, something “safe.” It’s not inherently wrong. Seeking refuge when we feel threatened is natural. But the repeated pattern of hiding behind mommy’s skirt every time can turn you codependent, render you incapable of leaving your mother’s house, and any chance of living a normal, well-adjusted adulthood.

And of course, there are endless things to hide behind besides mommy or daddy. There’s other mommies and daddies (relationships, codependency). There’s drugs (always a fun one). There’s work and busyness (because who doesn’t want to feel productive and important?). There’s intellectualization— just try to understand everything and contain it all in your head, instead of actually having any lived experiences (Meghan captures this perfectly in her post: Does Laplace's Demon Understand Love?). None of these things are inherently bad on their own, but when we use them as hiding places, they turn sour.

Motherhood can be an easy place to hide. It’s the old joke: kids are the perfect excuse to get out of anything. And it’s not just a joke—they really do stop you from doing a lot. So it feels justified. Those who’ve spent time around small children know how impossible it is to finish a coherent thought, much less a conversation.

Kids don’t just disrupt your social life. They disrupt your capacity to dream, to reflect, to figure out what you even want—let alone work toward it. Raising children is consuming and sacred and full of love, and so it can easily become everything. Mom mode is full throttle, and so it becomes challenging to step out of it.

The truth is, our children grow up. And if we stay stuck in caregiving mode, if we receive all our worth from it, if we let our children hide behind our skirts forever, we don’t just lose ourselves. We turn into the devouring mother—the one who lives through her child, and in doing so, never lets them live freely at all. We become dependent on their dependence. We lock both of us into codependency that can outlive us.

How Modernity Has Made Hiding Easier Than Ever

Our modern society has become the extension of the over-bearing, devouring mother archetype. The message is simple and constant: everything is dangerous—just stay inside. Stay home. Buy this. Click that. You’ll be safe. You’ll be okay.

But unlike the devouring mother who feeds on ego gratification from her enmeshed child, the cultural machine runs on something else: attention and money. Every anxiety-inducing headline, every piece of clickbait, every doom-scroll video is designed to keep you glued. And it works—because we’re biologically wired to attend to threats.

Millennials in particular were raised in this perfect storm. We had anxious, overbearing mothers telling us the world was a dangerous place. And inside our homes, we had access to an unprecedented world of entertainment—TV, gaming consoles, and eventually, the internet. Entire universes contained in glowing rectangles we could carry into our rooms. The result? A generation of inside kids—raised on safety, dopamine, and disconnection.

Then came social media. Yet another reason to stay home, because now, you didn’t even have to leave the house to “see” people. It quickly became a hiding place—not just for the lurkers who never post, but for those who post constantly. Some hide behind a carefully curated persona; others hide behind outrage and mob dynamics, tearing people down for likes and power.

Of course, none of this is new. Social games, public performance, and manipulation have always been part of human interaction. Social media didn’t originate them. It just magnified them. And like most tools, it depends on how we use it.

It can be a hiding place. But it can also be a sharing place. A place where people come to be seen and to see others. A place of performance or a place of presence. It depends on who we choose to be.

Why We Hide

In the modern world, threats don’t just show up as immediate physical danger—like a snake in the grass—but more often as threats to the ego, to our sense of self and sanity. As technology advanced, so did our ability to approach life with more control. Now, we can decide who comes into our space. It’s considered polite to text or call before showing up to someone’s house, whereas not long ago, there weren’t even phones or doorbells, much less separate homes to shield us from others.

As the world became more “civilized,” so did we. The left-brain mode of thinking became more dominant, as we categorized and invented and controlled. Now, all of sudden, we find ourselves deep in our logic-brain as a society, and somehow nothing makes sense anymore. The old ways of being—of living in messy community, of navigating the unpredictable “other”—feel unappealing, even dangerous. We are bombarded with terrifying headlines in tandem with perfectly curated lives. No wonder we’ve lost our sense of what is actually urgent and what is actually beautiful. So we hide. In fear. In perfectionism. We stop showing up—or we show up filtered.

Even if we put aside the tiny, marginal chance that someone will violently or at best psychologically destroy you for showing up fully, socializing can still be scary. Scary because it’s intimate. In this modern age, we’ve had little opportunity to practice intimacy to the extent it was forced upon the past generations for ages before us.

In face to face interaction, there is no hiding. No special Instagram filter that makes your cheekbones pop. Just you, in all your glory and tragedy. That might be why voices are so intimate, it’s something that is the essence of you that you can’t change or modify in any convincing way. I’m fair-skinned, so the second I’m hot or embarrassed, my whole face turns bright pink. In person, I can’t hide how I feel even if I wanted to. My own body betrays me.

That’s what makes showing up so hard. You risk being fully seen, showing all your cards. Before I had kids, writing felt like this impossible task. I was afraid of putting myself out there and being judged, looking stupid. Now, after two unplanned pregnancies—being metaphorically pushed into the pool—I realize what real stakes feels like, and the potential pain of looking dumb doesn’t feel as serious anymore.

I remember what that fear felt like. It’s the same trap so many young people fall into: staying in love with potential instead of embracing the imperfect, often disappointing reality of doing the thing. In our minds, we can conceive of boundless, beautiful things, but at the end of the day, potential is merely an infinite nothingness.

Writing down an idea in my mind that feels epic, that’s changed my life and how I see things, having to manipulate this limited form of language to capture the effect and spirit of what lives in my mind? It’s painful. It’s painful because you’re having to kill every other version that could have existed. To create is to kill possibility. The Latin root of the word decide is decidere: “to cut off.” You don’t just create something—you sacrifice everything it might have been. Creating, bringing something from potential to life means making hard decision after hard decision, over and over again.

There’s this moment in Succession where Kendall, desperate for his father’s approval, asks him, after years of hoop-jumping, if he was ever really considered to take over his father’s multi-billion dollar media empire. His response, “You’re not a killer,” was not only brutally honest, but particularly cutting for Kendall, as he had been tortured by guilt over a car crash in which a man died. He was afraid he was literally a killer. But in the metaphorical sense, he wasn’t.

Without shadow integration— without accepting the part of us that can hurt and be hurt— we’re incapable of truly showing up. Of fully immersing ourselves in the real world, flawed self among other flawed selves.

What if revealing yourself to the real world means being cut open—only to discover that the version of you in your ego-mind isn’t true? That’s not the end. That’s the beginning. That’s when you can finally become something real—someone rooted in reality instead of fantasy. Because if we keep hiding, if we keep choosing the safety of fantasy over the feedback of reality, we don’t just stay stuck—we slowly erode. And that cost adds up.

The Hidden Costs of Hiding

You pay the price of who you could be when you remain who you are. When you remain in hiding from this scary, uncertain world—clinging to someone or something that feels safe and known— you’ll never get to see who you could become.

Take the overgrown daughter still living in her mother’s house. As long as she stays, she has to continue performing the role of a girl, even when she is not, in order to continue making her mother feel needed. The moment she shows she is a woman, her mother will have to undeniably see that there is no need for her mothering anymore. Without her mother’s protective barrier, she will have to face something terrifying: consequences. She now becomes responsible for her actions. She can no longer blame her mom when things don’t go her way. She has to step out of the roles of the small, comprehensible game and into the larger, unknown reality.

That’s the price of hiding. The longer you stay protected, the longer you stay unfinished.

In stories, characters are revealed through the actions they take. No one wants to read a story where the protagonist isn’t actually doing anything, doesn’t faces challenging circumstances, and avoids makes decisions. Character is forged only through interacting with life. Action, challenge, and hard decisions are the raw material of every story we love— because they’re the raw materials of life, of becoming.

Sometimes I think about all the essays I never wrote before I had kids. The things I could’ve said when I had more time, more space. But I didn’t know how. I was scared. God forbid I actually put my ideas to the test and grow from it.

All is not lost. I’m not dead yet. I have responsibilities I didn’t have before, and major time and energy constraints, but at least now I have my agency. My mind is my own. I’m not shackled to the imagined judgment of the Other anymore. As long as we’re breathing, we have hope to move forward, no matter the circumstance. There is always a new challenge to face, another chance to act boldly and prove to ourselves that we’re alive.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung pointed out the risk of hiding on our psyche:

“If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse!… One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposite and conflicting tendencies… People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don’t accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them.”

Recently, I found myself spiraling into bouts of anxiety—wondering if I was a good mother, if I could ever become one. I was stuck in my hiding at home: scrolling, comparing, watching other moms live while I sat paralyzed by self-doubt, isolated and lost.

This was perhaps not coincidentally around the time I noticed my older daughter was ready for more. More experiences in the outside world. More connection. More life. She was reaching a new a level in her development, and I realized: this was my chance to act.

Showing up Scared

It wasn’t a matter of asking whether I was good a mom or trying to quantify all the ways I could be. The real task was to release the question altogether. To stop spiraling. To stop thinking about myself. My anxiety and shame weren’t helping my kids. They were stealing my presence— draining the energy and capacity I could be giving to them.

So I started doing what I could to get out of my head and into the real world. I reached out to other moms. I created opportunities for my girls to socialize. I forced myself to connect, to plan, to step into the awkwardness of being a homeschooling mom in a town where I don’t know anyone.

No more living in our cozy little bubble of just the three of us. We had to invite new people into our orbit. And with that came a spiral of intrusive thoughts, ranging from neurotic momma bear (What if they’re pedophiles?!) to judgmental and self-protective (What if they’re dumb and annoying?) to semi-autistic panic (Wait, how do I talk to adults again?). Yeah, my mind is a lovely place to be. No wonder I wasn’t surviving in there. More proof I needed to get out of it.

The reason I finally started writing after all those years— the fire in me that burned through years of self-protection— was the hope that something I’ve learned could help someone else. Someone like the version of me who used to hide. It began, truly, with love. With a desire and willingness to connect and be connected to other people.

It's the same reason I'm putting myself out there for my daughter. Because I love her and I want her to have the experiences she needs to grow up well— and that includes watching me live.

Writing is still hard. Trying to shape the ineffable thing in my mind into something readable for strangers online? Still feels like labor. Over and over again. But maybe that’s exactly the point. Labor produces. It’s painful—but it gives life.

I understand how some mothers consider it impossible to take on any more demanding and difficult tasks. The magnitude of our role and our responsibilities can be overwhelming. But what if taking on more of these life tasks didn’t detract from motherhood, but feed into it? The fears and anxieties that come with motherhood can make it so tempting to stay small. But what if we can’t afford to stay small anymore? What if our children become the inspiration to put ourselves out there and rise to life, instead of the excuse?

Made in Connection

No one holds a special memory of that one time they were scrolling on their phone in bed. What we remember—what matters— are the moments we shared with others. The screen isn’t real. The spiral in your head isn’t real. They’re shadows on the wall. The mind is only as powerful as what it does—as what it brings out into the world.

Whether you believe in intelligent design or evolution, one thing is clear: we weren’t made to be brains in a box. We have eyes to see and be seen with. Ears to hear and be heard with. A body to move, hold, be moved by and be held with. We were made to be with other people. We were made by people being with other people.

Even our identities are formed through relating: the places we were born, the culture of the people who raised us, the roles we have like mother, sister, wife, and the work we do with and for others like teaching, writing, building. We would not be able to function without this identity, these anchors. They give shape to our experience of reality. Without them, we lose orientation. We lose ourselves.

Without these limits we would go crazy. Imagine existing only in a sensory deprivation tank with just your mind for eternity. Without other people we can literally lose our minds— which is the proof that our relationship to others and the world is more primary than simply the mind alone.

Life is not about you— it’s about others. So we must show up with and for others.

The only real, truly known form of love is love that is given. Most people spend their whole lies waiting to receive love first, and then they die having given nothing, never having had a taste of love at all.

Consider this piece me metaphorically pulling you onto the dance floor. The music will stop someday. Clinging to comfort will only make things more uncomfortable for us in the end.

One day we will lose all opportunity to feel anything at all. What if we never allowed ourselves to feel joy or fulfillment at all because of our fear of discomfort? What if we keep choosing the numbness of spiraling over the sting of being seen? It’s already uncomfortable in the neurosis anyway. If you're going to suffer anyway, let it be for something real.

If you want a real taste of life—if you want to feel vital—you must put yourself out there. Allow yourself to shape and be shaped. Be something. Do anything but continue to exist in your head. Because one day, when it all ends, everything that remains in your head will die with you. I don’t know about you, but I want to die knowing I gave everything I had in me, left it all out on the field.

What we have to give is more important than our ego, our discomfort, our feelings. All it takes is one small uncomfortable step at a time. And then maybe soon, it will start to feel more natural to be out in the open, and eventually you’ll have built a life to be proud of— a life that you won’t need to hide from anymore.

What is Lost and What is Gained

My recent sobriety has afforded me so many wonderful gifts— more patience with my daughters in the challenging moments and a newfound ability to relish in the simple beautiful moments. Yeah drugs are cool, but have you ever been barefoot on the grass just before sunset, surrounded by bubbles that glimmer and reflect the sun’s golden light, with your two gleefully free little offspring shrieking in joy as they run around trying to pop every last bubble? Talk about distorted time perception and euphoria— no mind altering substances required.

Taking back my brain chemistry has been immensely rewarding, although it can’t be forgotten that in attempting to fully possess yourself, the spectrum of possession spans the good, the bad, and the ugly. I had heard about withdrawal symptoms, and although I wasn’t using cannabis all the time, I was using it over the span of many years, which I was harshly reminded of when I began to experience fatigue, insomnia, and vivid dreams after a couple weeks of sobriety. Before I became the better mom I am now, I felt like a worse one. I knew it had to end at some point though, so I buckled down and let go of extra responsibilities like writing in order to put whatever energy I had into what was most important— my family.

Once I was over the hump, and I felt like I had the energy and wherewithal to start writing again, nothing came… One of my fears from ending my cannabis use made concrete— that I would never be able to be creative again. Without this drug flooding my mind with dopamine, releasing me of all my underlying anxiety, how will I ever be able to be present to the expanses of my mind and allow myself to see my ideas as beautiful and important?

At a certain point, I so desperately wanted to write again, I even debated smoking again, but I ultimately decided against it. I realized I would give up my writing and my creativity for the woman, mother, and wife I am now. My husband, the adult who spends the most time with me and has seen me unfold over nearly ten years, has even said he’s watched me become a better person over these last couple months. And to me, that’s priceless.

When You Lose the Magic

In Kiki’s Delivery’s Service, after living on her own and running a delivery service using her flying abilities, a young witch named Kiki suddenly loses her powers to fly and understand her black cat, Jiji. It’s not because of some external curse, but after a series of setbacks—including a botched delivery, an illness, feeling alienated from her peers, and growing distance from her cat Jiji—she becomes emotionally and psychologically blocked, and her powers fade as a result, leaving her with no other option than to pause and reflect.

In his interview with Chris Williamson, Naval Ravikant talked about what he believes true life fulfillment entails and how to achieve it, mainly anchored in this idea of learning how to deal with our animal brain. He mentioned this idea that we all have these background scripts running in our mind, and how much that takes away from what we’re trying to do in the present moment.

I saw one of my biggest personal life-sucking scripts reflected back to me in Heather Havrilesky’s recent Ask Polly piece. Someone wrote in asking about why they always dread following through on plans previously made in the moment. Seemingly a simple question about a localized issue, Havrilesky unearthed the source of this individual’s anxiety to commit to anything as a fundamental, underlying deep-seated shame:

“When you’re anxious, you want peace. You want your mind to be dead. You want total control over the future. You overvalue your thoughts about events before they happen and undervalue your feelings about events after they happen. In other words, you undervalue yourself. You cast blame every day. … So even though it may be that you find plans and scheduling and being busy oppressive, the heart of the matter is that you find EVERYTHING oppressive, because you’re oppressed by the steady notion that you’re DOING EVERYTHING WRONG, ALL THE TIME. So instead of MORE WRONG CHOICES, you want LESS. You want peace and rest from the shame you feel over all of your bad choices every day, big and small. But even when you get peace and rest? You don’t feel better. You feel worse.”

Getting high was the only way I knew how to escape this constant underlying shame that was pulsing through me, without me even knowing. And without that shame I was liberated to actually create— to access my own magic.

By the Jungian nature of things, the way I unconsciously attempted to bypass this very real emotion I was feeling by pressing the big red dopamine button, it ended up accumulating in the shadows. This is manifested in the very biology of how drug use affects the brain. When you use cannabis it floods the brain’s endocannabinoid system, which is what makes you feel good in the short term. When you repeatedly activate cannabinoid receptors with external methods, the brain reduces its own natural production to maintain homeostasis or balance—creating this negative feedback loop, lowering natural cannabinoid production over time, resulting in higher stress and anxiety levels in the long term.

By attempting to bypass this unknown phantom of shame within me, I unintentionally accumulated more anxiety. Cannabis was never the true source of my creativity, but rather it was the thing that gave me a small taste of what it was like to live without that dark phantom— only, if I continued to rely on it to access that place, I would be inevitably destroyed.

Returning to the Source

In the end, Kiki gets her magic back when she sees her friend, Tombo, in danger. The urgency of seeing her friend, who she cares deeply for, about to fall from a blimp, snaps her out of her paralysis, and she regains her flying ability just in time to save him. Her magic returns not because she willed it to return, but because she reconnected with her sense of purpose and courage.

I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember. I wrote a book in kindergarten that my dad found and showed my teacher, and they had me read it to the class. Even at that age, despite whatever levels of admiration and pride I must have felt, I remember feeling a little bit like a fraud because the book was heavily based on Beverly Cleary’s Henry and the Paper Route. Which, looking back is actually pretty impressive because it’s a chapter book for 4th graders and I was five years old, and it is said that the new creator learns through mimicking. But that’s always been my MO, I suppose, reading and admiring things beyond my reach, and attempting to be as good as they are.

It takes a certain level of bravery to strive for goodness despite knowing how flawed you are. All those years after my initial piece of work in kindergarten, my husband managed to push through the many layers of shame I had within me that was holding me back from writing and encouraged me to start sharing my thoughts on Twitter. This idea of starting small pleased my anxiety because it gave less chance for error. Through Twitter, I found Substack, and subsequently left Twitter, a place rife for quick rage-baity “hot takes,” for this other place that seemed more my style with longer, deeper reflection pieces, and a slower pace.

I figured after a year of tediously writing posts on here, and accumulating maybe fourteen subscribers if I was lucky, I would get over it and then quit. Yet somehow, through it all, 600 of you have found me and found my writing interesting enough to have my words directly delivered to you. Thank you for that, it really is so encouraging to my writing, and I truly appreciate you spending your precious time and mind space on reading my writing. Now, I’m in this. I’m on here and I’m sharing some pretty personal and deep revelations about my life. Yet, Substack is not always what it seems. I’ve found many parallels between this site and Twitter that sometimes makes me question if I should continue writing on here.

Miyazaki’s Beautiful Yet Cursed Dreams

Substack is still social media, at the end of the day. It’s a place where the masses gather to share ideas and/or garner attention. Even though those on here are willing to read a lot more text than most people, and may be deeper thinkers on some levels, they are still susceptible to playing the status games that intrude any social environment. In the way one might get status on Instagram for how “aesthetic” or beautiful their life looks, writers here on Substack get status for how smart they appear, or even how contrarian and cool they are, or how lofty and idealistic their values are.

None of these things are inherently wrong, and I’m not immune to this either, but if sharing your ideas is done in a surface-level, insecure, click-baity way to pull in audiences, it can contribute the greater sense of shame people feel on a whole. People have hearts and souls, and need to be inspired to great things, not torn down or made less than. As a writer, and as a reader particularly, I know I only resonate with things I recognize as real and raw and vulnerable and hopeful and delightful all in the same breath.

Much like what Miyazaki does in his films, with the range of emotions he captures, the deep struggles, the small grievances, the stillness and wonder and beauty— it’s why his films have captivated so many for so long. I recently watched a documentary focused on his creative process called The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. He said something in it that really resonated with me:

Miyazki explored these themes deeper in his film The Wind Rises, a fictionalized biography of Jirō Horikoshi, the real-life designer of the Mitsubishi A5M and A6M Zero, used by Japan during World War II. The film explores Jirō's childhood dream of building beautiful airplanes and how that dream is slowly co-opted by the machinery of war.

Do I really want my writing to be this thing that is part of our current cultural trends like these controversial, salacious commentaries I see a lot of writers on here do? I think about the young five-year-old me that wrote that picture book. I remember simply loving that story of Henry and his newspaper route for whatever reason (Beverly Cleary had a special knack for touching on the “small,” poignant emotions that little kids feel), and I think I just wanted to recreate that feeling for other people of feeling seen. I wanted to be the one who wrote something like that.

As I began to unwind all these complex scripts deep within me that were holding me back, and connect back to the source of everything, the love which propels me forward, I slowly became more of the self-possessed woman I always wanted to be. I feel the bounds of my being expanding as I claw and fight for every ounce of freedom I feel to begin to dream again.

There’s another moment in the film where Miyazaki’s assistant ask him about that final scene when Kiki gets her magic back. The exchange is as follows:

Assistant: “Say, why couldn’t Jiji speak at the end?”

Miyazaki: “Sometimes we become speechless. When they’re together at the end, there’s nothing to say.”

Assistant: “He didn’t say anything.”

Miyazki: “But he came, right? … What could he possibly say?”

Assistant: “Well, maybe that her magic is…”

Miyazaki: “That her magic is back? Her magic deepened, you see. … When you gain, you also lose.”

Motherhood’s Constant Reminder to Surrender

Maybe it’s not always about having the right words to say. Sometimes it’s about simply living, experiencing, and then allowing the words to find you.

I’ve come to find that most of writing is just thinking, being, letting the subconscious do it’s thing, and not necessarily just sitting down and writing.

In the midst of Kiki’s struggle to find her magic again, she confides in her painter friend, Ursula. She helps Kiki to understand that the loss of her magic is part of a natural cycle. These moments are not failures—they’re part of growth. Magic comes back when you stop trying to control it and start living with intention and heart again. Ursula compares it to her own experience with painting—sometimes the inspiration just disappears, and you have to wait, reflect, and keep living until it returns.

So many of my days as a mom are filled with seemingly mundane tasks, doing the same thing over and over. In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Miyazaki talked about his daily routines, things like making coffee, taking out the trash. He talks about these things like they are a precious part of his creative process. He said the routine is his life foundation from which he can “read the world.” This repetitive kind of living allows the subconscious mind to brew a bit. Yes, sometimes as a mom you’re just so physically and emotionally exhausted, it feels like you can’t even think a thought, but even those experiences go into your subconscious and inform your thinking later.

I used to resent the fact that my daughters required such a long process to be put down for naps and bedtime— holding them and rocking them back and forth in the dark for thirty minutes, and even up to an hour at the worst of times. The frustrating aspect was that this moment was right on the precipice of my precious alone time, where I could finally write or clean or whatever I desperately needed to do when I wasn’t dealing with two very awake, rambunctious toddlers.

Eventually, I learned to surrender to it, which allowed me to recognize the ephemeral preciousness of the moment. What a sweet privilege that my daughters get to nod off into the unconscious dream world on top of their loving mother who holds them close, while they feel the rise and fall of her chest, and the soft hum of her voice. That’s me— I’m doing that for them. What’s more important than this? When I allowed the moment to be, I realized that I actually get my best ideas in that rocking chair, holding my babies, with the rhythmic, repetitive rocking, with no screens or any external pulls or demands, in the one peaceful moment of the day, doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. The kind of reflections I wouldn’t get sitting in my office staring at my computer, willing myself to write something.

In a lot of ways, writing and creating is an ideal calling for mothers, if you can be patient. Motherhood itself, as my greatest calling, being a witness to the human lives I’ve co-created and helped to grow is my greatest inspiration and impetus to write at all. In those simple, slow day-to-day moments as a mom are when my subconscious can marinate and allow inspiration to strike. The key is to give yourself, your ideas, and your inspiration the integrity to write them down. Capture them immediately and always. My finished, polished pieces are simply an amalgamation of whatever has been on my heart and mind for the previous few weeks, plus random interesting things I’ve consumed or experienced. I never know for sure which ones will make it into the final post, but I have to be able to excavate through all those ideas, find the ones that fit, that make sense together, that get across the greater idea I’m searching for and desiring to communicate.

Keeping the Faith

Miyazki has immense reverence for the creative process, never hurrying it along, and always allowing time for creative digestion. He said:

His films take anywhere from five to seven years to complete. Production begins over a year before his storyboards— which he meticulously hand draws frame by frame— are finished. He allows time for his story to breathe and to be changed. He doesn’t even begin with a script. It all starts with the drawing, the images, the Vision.

The other day, the song J. Cole sampled in “She Knows,” the Cults’ song “Bad Things” came up on my shuffle, and I thought, “Oh, it’s that song J. Cole sampled!” I went to go listen to “She Knows” and all of sudden the song sounded disjointed and weird.

When you have a vision for something, you begin to create from scratch, looking at the blank page, with this slowly fading bright light of the vision in your head and your heart. Sometimes it can feel weird or wrong putting it all together in one form, because you’re literally doing it piece by piece. It’s the difference between approaching your work with the left brain—breaking things down, analyzing, making distinctions—and the right brain, which sees from afar, intuitively grasping the whole. It’s essential to remember the gestalt principle here: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not 1 + 1 = 2 (logic, left-brained math), but rather 1 + 1 (one concept tied into another) = infinity.

As creatives, we have to tap into that right-brain space. We have to step back—like Miyazaki does with his drawings—and trust the muse to lead. Equally as important as stepping back is returning again. This hinges upon the greatest challenge of all— having faith in your vision, even when it’s not fully revealed. As the Bible says, faith is shown through works. The only way to exhibit true faith in your vision is to continually show up, no matter how you feel, no matter how hard it may be with your life circumstances. We honor our selves by honoring our vision.

Being a creative while also being a mother, can feel like a beautiful yet cursed dream. So can being a creative while sober, or in this cultural climate, or whatever dream it is you have inside a life that feels too heavy, too full, or too limited to hold it. But that’s the thing about creativity — it is the essence of life — bringing forth something from nothing (something us mothers are intimately familiar with.) The thing about life is that it’s a force. It always finds a way, even in less than optimal circumstances. We just have to let it. We have to see the beauty in our vision, maintain the faith to carry it through, and push through the times that feel cursed. Nobody ever said birthing was easy. As the creative, the vessel, we allow ourselves to be torn open to make space for something deep within us to emerge. Something with the power to touch others, to show them that they are not alone— the ultimate act of love.

My list of fears was quite long, as I think is the case for many young moms in this current world we live in, where information is abundant, all-encompassing even. Back in the day, babies and children died quite more frequently than we are used to today, and very often to unknown causes. Now, we have so much control, that the control itself can becoming overwhelming. We struggle with the power akin to gods. Naturally, of course, as mere humans, perhaps we were never meant to have the power and information at our fingertips like we do today.

That phrase— “Self Possession”— has become a guide to me since that moment of realization. How can I accomplish anything in this life? How can I strive to become the woman I want to be if I am not in control of the wheel?

As my mind oriented to that salient term of possession, my life began to change unexpectedly, and surprisingly without much of that thing which many “self-development” folks like to call “will-power.”

The first area that I noticed a change in, and perhaps the most important, was how I related to my kids. The boundary between “me” and “them” was more defined. I stopped being so quick to take responsibility for their feelings. I was able to actually keep my home in decent order, as I didn’t let the whines from my little one stop me from loading the dishwasher. Although seemingly a small step, as Jordan Peterson would say, the first step to getting your life in order is getting your room in order.

The reality is though, even when you have a control on boundaries and responsibility, dealing with two strong-willed, fiery little toddlers can still wear on you.

It was Christmas Eve, and we were hosting both of our families for the first time at our home. It was a lovely scene, everyone together, and my daughters enjoying all the attention from their grandparents. There was convivial spirit, and naturally with my husband’s family that means drinking. I was going shot for shot with my 20-something sister in law (bonding), but I forgot my position and how infrequently I actually drank, so of course I got way too drunk. It was by all conscious means unintentional, but I certainly would have never allowed the possibility of getting that drunk if my daughters were not being so lovingly attended to and taken care of by their grandmas. Subconsciously, perhaps, it was my chance to let loose. But like all things done subconsciously, of course, went a bit too far.

So there I was, on Christmas Day, what I called my daughters’ first “sentient” Christmas (they actually know what was going on at some level and excited, and me excited to begin new fun traditions) terribly hungover and unable to actually carry out said traditions. Of course, all said and done, my daughters didn’t actually care about things that only existed in my mind, and throughly enjoyed their Christmas regardless. But I was so massively disappointed in myself. And there was that word— “self possession”— haunting me in my mind.

I never had a sip of alcohol before my 21st birthday. And I never thought I would would get high either until I fell into a group of well-meaning potheads in college (they are always just so generous with their weed). I was socially awkward, and especially in a setting like university where you are a small fish in a big pond, it was extremely intimidating meeting new people and making friends. And of course there’s the element of the forbidden fruit.

Alcohol allowed me to relax and loosen up, so that I can participate in social settings. But cannabis did something different for me, something much more enticing to me. It didn't just relax me, but succeeded in turning off the most awful part of experiencing myself— my judgmental, scrutinizing superego. When I was high, all my ideas could flow, and I was allowed to just experience them and see the beauty in them, instead of instantly killing them with finding every possible error.

When I became a mom, you bet that overactive superego had a field day. I never thought I would continue to use cannabis when I became a mom, but it became more “necessary” for me than ever. It would serve as the momentary relief for me after a long, hard week of dealing with a baby and a toddler, and simultaneously scrutinizing myself every second.

Nothing is ever free of course and as I tried to bypass the anxiety and the stress, it would remain boiling up in the shadows of my mind, not just psychically speaking, but on a fundamental chemical level. Chronic cannabis use floods the brain with THC, overstimulating CB1 receptors and causing the brain to adapt by reducing their sensitivity (down-regulation). This leads to less natural dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (dulling pleasure), lower GABA in the amygdala (reducing calm), and higher cortisol levels (increasing stress), making the brain more anxious without cannabis.

That important “first” Christmas Day for my daughters, I felt on a very visceral level the after-effects of attempting to bypass some necessary human experience with alcohol or cannabis. It affected how I showed up for my daughters. It set me back in my ultimate pursuit for self-possession. I was certainly not possessing myself when I was getting high or drunk, and not even in just those moments, but the moments long after.

So that day, I decided to set out on what my friend, Matt aptly calls an “experiment” in sobriety. You technically can’t just decide to be sober. It doesn’t really work that way. You have to set yourself up for success, as you’re attempting to break a habit that holds a massive weight in your psyche and brain chemistry. When you view it as an experiment, you expect from the start that there will be trial and error, and so that leaves little room for shame— that terrible emotion that has no place in an individual who is trying to better themselves.

Sobriety is not simply refraining from drugs, but it is a state of mind. It triggered in a me the overarching sense of curating much more intentionally what I am putting in my body, my mind, my space. Not just from the outside, but also from within.

After the reflection which resulted in my realization that the greatest benefit I get from cannabis is relieving myself from my harsh superego, I knew I had to integrate that knowledge into my daily life. I had to begin to honor myself more— every thought, every idea, every desire. Honoring one’s self might even be the highest form of self-possession.

I recently watched the Italian show My Brilliant Friend, which, along with my love for Italian culture, inspired me to start learning Italian. I’ve always wanted to learn another language, but there was always that part of me that thought, “Who are you to learn another language? You will sound like a fool.” But decidedly, I was not listening to that voice and so I followed that whim. I downloaded the Duolingo app, which gamifies learning a language, and has cutesy emoji people elements to it. Turns out, my daughter loves doing that app with me. When I pull out my phone she asks for “the owl game.” She has an affinity for words like her mom, and so now it’s become this little thing we do together sometimes. Ora, io parlo italiano bene (Now, I speak Italian well). Okay not actually well, but I don’t know how to say “kind of” yet.

When I decided to pursue my little sobriety experiment, I knew I would need something to replace it, or occupy my mind in other ways. Ever since we got our hands on a free keyboard, I’ve been wanting to brush up on my piano again and start really playing for fun. (I played shortly in elementary school, but then had an awful teacher who killed the spirit of it for me.) I saw how I could buy time to build skills while being with my kids since my daughter really enjoyed the Duolingo app, so I got the Simply Piano app, and have been learning piano again. It’s not quite as easy as sitting down with Duolingo, as I’m having to learn notes while my daughters bang on either sides of the keyboard, but they really do love having music be apart of our lives. The other day I caught my daughter singing “Happy Birthday” while banging on the keys of her play piano.

Last, but not least, a desire that has been on my heart for as long as I can remember, long before I started even blogging, was to write stories. I remember when I wrote a picture book one time in kindergarten and my dad showed it to my teacher and she had me read it in front of the class, I felt so proud. That was about as far as my parents encouraged my writing though, aside from buying me whatever books I wanted. As I grew up, I developed this sense of shame for speaking or writing or sharing what was going on in my head, and so I pushed that desire way down.

About a year ago, my husband encouraged me to make a Twitter/ X account to share my ideas. I very reluctantly did it, but along the way I actually made a few friends, was introduced to some amazing ideas and writers, and most importantly of all, found Substack through Made in Cosmos’ beautiful writing that inspired me to begin writing long form on here.

Despite the good people that are on the platform, and the intentional curating of my timeline on X, I still found myself being affected by the constant barrage of information. In my newfound attempt to honor all the desires within me, I decided to delete X in order to focus more on long form writing. When someone reads our writing, we are inviting them into our world. I want my writing to beautiful and my world to be beautiful. So that means taking in only the highest quality of writing and media. And that usually means applying more effort.

One of the main problems with using social media is that the information your mind is attending to has already been pre-packaged and digested through someone else. We can quite easily lose the motivation to apply effort and intention to find interest in our own lives and other longer pieces of work that exist in the world, when we get the dopamine hit so easily from receiving mild interest through scrolling.

The brilliant, but sorely pessimistic Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote:

The biggest thing my experiment in sobriety has taught me is how to sit in those moments of pain and boredom— possess them, as a natural part of living, as a part of my self.

In the 3rd and 4th centuries, a group of early Christian monks known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers retreated into the Egyptian wilderness to live lives of solitude, prayer, and contemplation. They believed that by stepping away from society’s noise and distractions, they could better hear the voice of God and confront their inner struggles. They valued silence not just as an absence of noise, but as a spiritual discipline. In silence, they believed, the soul could find clarity, confront its own weaknesses, and open itself to divine wisdom.

They didn’t escape struggles with sin and temptation, though. In fact, many of them believed that the desert amplified these inner battles. Without the distractions of daily life, they faced their thoughts, weaknesses, and spiritual vulnerabilities head-on.

In his work Praktikos, Evagrius gives a vivid portrayal of one of the most common temptations the monks faced— spiritual boredom termed as, “acedia” (from the Greek akēdía, meaning lack of care). It brought restlessness, apathy, and the temptation to abandon their practices:

“The demon of acedia—also called the ‘noonday demon’—is the most oppressive of all the demons. He attacks the monk at about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First, he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he forces the monk to look constantly toward the window, to jump out of the cell, to look carefully at the sun to see how far it stands from the ninth hour, to look now this way and now that, to sigh over the fact that no one is coming to see him. Furthermore, he instills in him a dislike for the place and for his state of life itself... Finally, he leads him to the thought that there is no longer any purpose in remaining.”

When many of us face this battle, we tend to pull out our phones and begin scrolling. Similar to the times where, when I faced pain with dealing with my anxiety and struggles with motherhood, I went to substances to momentarily release me from it.

In Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes the “Seeking System” as a fundamental emotional system in the brain that drives organisms to explore, investigate, and interact with their environment. This system is linked to feelings of anticipation and excitement, motivating both animals and humans to pursue resources, solve problems, and engage in goal-directed behaviors. It's often associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine, which fuels curiosity and the desire to learn.

This idea of “seeking” is fundamental to our natures, and while it may responsible for human civilization, art, and society as we know it, it can also bring us to ruin if it we don’t hone it carefully, like utilizing seeking mindlessly when we face boredom.

Evagrius believed that acedia often struck when someone was either facing monotony (as the desert life was simple and repetitive), struggling with commitment (acedia tempted monks to abandon their spiritual path, suggesting that anything else would be better than staying the course), or avoiding inner work (acedia was often a defense mechanism against confronting uncomfortable truths about oneself).

Carl Jung once wrote:

Evagrius said the first step to combat acedia was to resist the urge to leave, or perseverance. A common saying of the Desert Fathers was: “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Those silent, still, empty moments that we face in life (if we allow ourselves to) can be rife with discomfort and temptation, or can be the perfect breeding grounds for reflection and growth.

I once feared that I wouldn’t be able to write or that my writing wouldn’t be as good if I couldn’t get high to relax my mind and get ideas. But it turns out, just showing up consistently in those still moments where I’m not feeling particularly inclined or impassioned to write, I actually write even more, and it’s still just as good, if not better, because it’s more deeply developed and reflected upon.

The filmmaker David Lynch spoke extensively about this idea of stillness, his passion for meditation, and how mental wellbeing is actually great for creativity in this interview with GQ, where he disavows the notion of the tortured artist type, who believes his suffering is necessary for his art, and who may be worried getting his life together will make him lose his edge:

“But you'll get more of an edge. There's unbounded energy there within us. That’s a lot of energy! You still can get righteous anger. And be for or against something very powerfully. And you can still get sad. But you can't...it won't last, you know, it just goes away. You can still get depressed for a while but it doesn't last. It just comes and it goes. You don't get numb to things—you just feel everything.”

He goes on to say:

Lynch believes at his core in this idea that goodness is what makes more goodness, as he elaborates here in the origin of his creativity:

“Stories have been told throughout time, and stories will be told throughout time. And we're all different on the surface, so I'm going to fall in love with certain things. And I always say for cinema I fall in love…one, because of the idea itself, and two, because of the way I think cinema could say that idea. And when those two things are green lights, I go. Stories are not just happy from beginning to end. People would fall asleep! It might be great for a sleep aid, but they would not go to see the movie. Stories have conflicts, contrast, highs and lows. But it's the ideas you fall in love with that drive the boat. Love drives the boat! So I get these ideas I love, and I want to realize them in one medium or another. And that's what makes me happy. And I figure if I translate them in a way that works for me, maybe they'll work for others. You can't guarantee that. But that's what you think. So consequently those films I've made have been made. And, you know, some people like them and some people don't. But I like them. And I loved making them.”

Love. The beginning of everything. So while there is undoubtedly always going to pain and suffering and boredom and the avoidance of pain and boredom in life, we can learn to transcend those things— feel them, honor them, and move past them, without staying stuck in the cycle of avoiding them and having them strike vengeance on us anyways. The ultimate form of self-possession: honoring your self, all its complexities and pain and inclinations, until you create a life that you truly love.

The Left Brain Dominated Intellectual

As is well documented here on my Substack, the early days of motherhood have been challenging for me. It hasn’t quite been the easy, breezy, “natural” experience other women claim to have had. Although much of my struggle can be attributed to circumstance, it wasn’t until I listened to Dr. Allan Schore, a psychologist specializing in attachment theory, on the Huberman Lab podcast that it hit me— a lot of my struggle has to do with the fundamental way I approach motherhood, and life in general.

Schore explained how attachment between the mother and baby is formed in the first three years of life. In his research, they found that before the age of three, babies are primarily using their right brain— the side of the brain responsible for feeling and intuition. In those first three years, the mother (or primary caregiver) and the baby engage in a right brain to right brain communication, in which the healthy attachment of the baby is developed upon an in-tune synchronization and response from the mother.

The primary role of the mother in those first three years is to co-regulate with her baby, to feel with and intuit her baby’s needs and emotions.

Now, imagine, an intellectual women, who primarily uses the left side of her brain, which is responsible for logic and language, who makes sense of things through theories, through articulation. This sort of woman who over-emphasizes the left brain, while ignoring or repressing her intuition (the right side that is required for mother and baby bonding) was described in Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey.

The Intellectual & Control Seeking Woman

Murdock details the journey of a woman she describes as the “father’s daughter.” As a young girl, she may have had a depressed, repressed, or oppressed mother and so resisted an identification with the feminine, and instead identified with the father, the virile, ambition and intellect focused masculine. The masculine-identified intellectual woman has a fundamental rejection of “right brain” associated things, such as feeling and intuition, due to their negative association with the feminine and weakness.

For me, in early motherhood, this manifested in over-researching everything about pregnancy, birth, developmental milestones, etc. Then, when things didn’t go according to my research, I didn’t know what to do, and that “not knowing” made me feel massively uncomfortable, and because the unknown, the unarticulated was foreign territory for me— it felt wrong. To be made to feel wrong as a mother may be one of the worst feelings, because you care so much about this little creature you just made and brought into the world, you want to be able to do everything for them, and for me that meant knowing everything (I delve more into this journey in my blog post on Being vs Doing).

Alas, motherhood was not like the world I was used to, school, university, and work— where there was a right answer, and I always made sure to know it and beyond.

In Lane Scott’s Substack post about creating and maintaining traditions in motherhood, she mentioned how many of the associations that our children make with holiday traditions are centered around “creature comforts,” like feasting. This triggered in me a sense of how carnal motherhood really is. Literally growing your baby in your body, feeding your baby from your breasts, getting your circadian rhythms interrupted regularly. In the early years, your baby doesn’t necessarily require your mind as much as they do your body.

An overly-intellectual person can sometimes forget they even have a body. To them, everything exists in the head, and everything is malleable through thought and theorizing. They have such a strong grip on the reality they attempt to hold and manipulate, that when something from beyond happens, like motherhood, it can be hard to learn to surrender to it.

In My Brilliant Friend, Lila, a highly intelligent and agentic woman finally becomes pregnant after many failed attempts, and has a brutal delivery. The doctor later recalls the labor to her friend as, “a fight against nature, a battle between mother and child.” Lila is used to having such a grasp on reality to the extent that she is able to influence situations and people to get what she wants and needs out of them. In pregnancy and child birth, something beyond you is using and moving through your body in an entirely uncontrollable and unpredictable manner.

The Angst of the “Masculine” Striving Mother

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, also a highly accomplished intellectual like her husband, struggles with the transition into motherhood. They are isolated at Los Alamos while Oppenheimer is doing his own work in pushing the boundaries of intellect, while Kitty is at home with their baby. In one poignant scene, Oppenheimer comes home after another long day at work to the baby crying while Kitty is sitting in the kitchen with her drink. He asks if she is going to go to him, and she replies, “I’ve been going to him all fucking day.” She develops a drinking problem and eventually they have to give their baby over the to care of close friends for a while for her to get a grip.

Drinking and drug problems were quite common in housewives around the early to mid-20th century. It was still a time where women were expected to bear the entire burden of child rearing (without much choice of their own), and amid the rise of suburban living (and subsequent loss of familial and group associations), they faced isolation. For an intellectual women like Kitty, with all the horsepower in her head, the mundanity of the day-to-day chores of a housewife can be mind-numbing, and enough to drive a woman crazy when she has nothing else to aspire to or focus on.

One of the most unexpected emotions I’ve experienced in motherhood is Angst. At levels like never before, too. It’s an emotion most associated with adolescence, during which a child is becoming an adult and goes through intense physical, emotional, and cognitive changes. Things are happening to them that they cannot quite understand. That’s how motherhood can feel to a woman who is used to it being the other way around.

There is, in fact, an equivalent term for mothers I recently learned about: matrescence. The term was coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transformation a woman undergoes when becoming a mother, similar to adolescence in its profound identity shifts and physical and hormonal changes. This transition might be the hardest on women who have the strongest sense of self, the strongest superego.

We Cannot Survive on Intellect Alone

Jordan Peterson often warns about “Luciferian Intellect,” or the idea that intelligence as a single and highest pursuit leads to sin and ruin. In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the first ring of hell, or Limbo, is reserved for great thinkers, philosophers, poets, and individuals who lived righteous lives but were not baptized or lived before the advent of Christianity. The punishment in Limbo is the absence of God's light and eternal separation from His divine presence. This is often described as a sorrowful existence rather than active torment. It is portrayed as a serene yet somber place. It lacks the violent and grotesque torments of the deeper circles of Hell but carries a pervasive sense of unfulfilled longing. In Canto IV of Inferno, Dante writes:

The egoic, intellectual mind infinitely craves understanding. When it comes up against something new, something indefinable, it is at risk of collapsing if not open to the possibility of something greater than itself.

In the story of the Tower of Babel from the Bible, where humanity, speaking a single language, united to build a tower reaching the heavens and were condemned by God, seeing their pride and ambition, to be scattered across the earth, halting construction and creating different cultures with different languages. The story critiques human pride and the desire to challenge divine authority. The tower symbolizes human overreach and the consequences of collective arrogance. The story underscores humanity's dependence on God and warns against attempts to attain godlike power or immortality.

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes,

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

In Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC, he writes a partially fictionalized account of the lives and struggles of scientists and mathematicians during the early 20th century, focusing on the moral and existential dilemmas they faced while developing technologies like the atomic bomb and early computing. Labatut delves into physicist Paul Ehrenfest’s enigmatic personality, his almost machine-like intellect, and his struggles to reconcile human emotions with the abstract, often cold logic of his scientific pursuits. Here, Ehrenfest’s colleague narrates his descent:

Ehrenfest would go on to kill his mentally challenged son and then himself in an extremely “rational” and well thought out manner (killing his son as to not leave a burden for his wife and other children). This part being very real and not fiction.

The Feminine Feeling

Emma Jung further elaborates on the connection between intellectual grasping in the masculine and the opposite feminine manifestation in her essay “Anima and Animus:”

This is the very right brain use that Schore described in his research as necessary for the healthy attachment and development of babies. The right brain connection is not only natural for women, but necessary for our purposes of reproduction and child rearing. It involves an opening to possibility, to the unconscious. This aspect, although unspoken, is still a fundamental part of life as it is, and to deny it would be to miss the mark and live in a different kind of delusion.

Lila, the character from My Brilliant Friend, who is highly intelligent, yet removed from academia, gave her thoughts on Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, much to the confusion of her highly educated, “intellectual” friends:

She points to this idea of the over-intellectualization of life, which can snuff out the very flame of life. When you have nothing to sense with, nothing to perceive and reason with, your eyes and ears can’t deceive you. You get to feel the undefined, unspoken parts of life, and simply be one with the river that is life, instead of a separate force attempting to capture it (a strange irony in that it can’t be fully understood unless actually lived out and felt).

Integration of the Opposites in Motherhood

Jordan Peterson spoke about the seduction of intellectual superiority and how to manage it:

“Intelligence is a tool, not a virtue. Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re wise. Wisdom comes from the integration of many modes of being, not the domination of one.”

Becoming a mother has added another entirely new mode of being for me. It has forced me to connect more deeply to my feminine side. I was suffering for trying to carry out a fundamentally feminine role in a masculine, intellect based manner.

At the end of the day what do my kids really need? Certainly not me pontificating about all the ways to be a 2% better mother if it drives me to misery seeing all the ways I’m inadequate. Sometimes I just need to turn my brain off and do the dishes. It’s so easy to get caught up in my mind and thinking about motherhood in all the ways you see me think as I write in this blog, that I forget to just pick up some dirty laundry, sit down and play with my kids and that’s it. Sometimes it’s just not that deep.

Having my daughters enriches my writing— it forces me to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground in the “mundane” tasks of motherhood. It keeps my brainiac self in the moment, in life itself, instead of getting swept up in whatever may come into my head at any moment. Only the best thoughts and ideas will survive because I have too many competing thoughts in my head, being in charge of my kids and the household and all the constant demands that come with that.

I can’t write as frequently as I want to, and that’s okay. The trade off is well worth it. I am intentionally sacrificing something I love, that is important to me, in order to be a mother to my girls. It deepens the meaning of being a mother. I’m not just doing this because I got knocked up and it’s some chill, easy gig to stay at home. There’s lots of women writing about femininity, but nobody can be a mother to my girls except for me. They are mine and I am theirs. This is the most important task, always and forever. That is the deep love of a mother, the sacrifice that motherhood requires.

No sacrifice comes without its fair burden of suffering. After not having time or energy to write a blog post for the past few months, I felt myself going crazy, starting to see my family as a burden and resenting my responsibility. It was a dark time, but I knew what I needed to do to get out of it. As all my ideas built up in me and started to rot, so I too began to rot. I had to get the words out.

For whatever reason, whatever potential “dysfunction” or not, an intellectual woman is an intellectual woman. She can do herself well by integrating the necessary feeling and intuition of her oft neglected feminine side, but she will always have the need to use her mind to the greatest possible extent.

That’s the beauty of the integration of the opposites. There is a time and place for using my mind in mothering, when my girls are older, they will have the privilege of having a mom they can actually talk to— not just some entirely right brained woman only capable of providing nurturing through meals. Likewise, using my emotion and intuition in my intellectual pursuits only enriches my writing and my ideas.

At the end of the day, it’s about being like water — moving through each one when you can, when the time calls for it.

Having a child opens up your heart in the biggest way possible, leaving you feeling vulnerable, raw, and exposed. You can only do so much for your child, but ultimately you know they are susceptible to this messy, dark world and you cannot control every outcome of their life. When our children get hurt, it hurts us more than if it had happened to us. The connection is so deep. This very child came to be inside of your womb. You feel an innate responsibility for their well-being. So, when a mother cannot accept the fate of putting her entire life into a child, only to have to release them into the world, they grasp for control, and in turn, destroy the child by their own hand.

This does not happen consciously, of course. But it all stems from the inability to accept that your child is not your own. Every ounce of desire or pain they experience is not solely your responsibility. They are their own individual, and we exist as mothers to nourish, guide, and love on them, with all the pain and suffering that it entails to love something that will inevitably leave you. When we cannot cope with this pain, it can come up in strange ways. One of those ways, I believe, is mom guilt. Certainly there are some healthy forms of guilt which are meant to guide you to listen to your inner voice that believes there might be a better way to do something for your child, but then there are toxic forms of guilt. This toxic guilt that I speak of consumed my first two years of being a mother.

It’s impossible to see it when you’re consumed. So how did I find my way? Something in me knew I was off track. I knew I could be doing better. I was continually being triggered by my kids — which logically I knew was ridiculous because they certainly have nothing against me. I couldn’t stand it when my kids cried. I would immediately become flustered and try everything to get them to stop. I was forgetting one of the most important responsibilities of a parent — to maintain your center at all times and to not be swayed by your child’s every whim and emotion. Someone needs to be in control. As a parent, you are the captain of the ship. You must lead the way through the choppy water and heavy storms, or else the boat risks capsizing.

The inkling of this realization began one day when my mom was at my house. I hadn’t done my usual psychological bolstering to prepare myself for her constant barrage of unsolicited comments, and furthermore, my daughters were having a particularly hard time that day with teething and growing pains. In the midst of playing outside, my daughter started to become increasingly frustrated and upset and began a full blown tantrum.

I was managing it the best I could, allowing her to feel her feelings, trying to talk to her about it, and also thinking about what I could do in that moment, if anything, to help. My mom, meanwhile, clearly could not handle that my daughter was upset, she kept saying “don’t cry” and “why are you crying?” She anxiously ran around trying to give her different toys and things to distract her. I went inside to grab my daughter a snack and my mom followed me in, and asked me why I wasn’t doing anything. It hit me in that moment where the root of my anxiety came from during all those moments my daughters were upset.

I was raised to believe we aren’t allowed to be upset because it makes my mom upset. My mother not being able to handle her own emotions during my difficult moments in childhood flipped the script from a parent comforting and supporting a child in a vulnerable moment, to a child suppressing their feelings to support a parent. I certainly did not want to do that to my daughters. I had to be able to control myself and maintain my center while my daughters had their natural struggles with growing up and dealing with difficult feelings.

Another thing I realized that day is how much my mom blamed me for every little thing that happened with my daughters, and how I internalized that voice. The main source of my frustration when my daughters became upset was how it made me feel — like I was failing them or doing something wrong. Your child crying or being upset is not a direct indicator of your performance as a parent. This is something that mothers who cannot accept their children as separate beings, susceptible to all the difficulties of the world have a hard time understanding. And as long as we hold that guilt as parents, we cannot have patience with our children.

That night, when I was putting my teething baby to sleep and she was crying more than usual, I grappled with keeping my emotions in check. I thought about how I had taken care of all her needs that day, and that she was probably just in pain and tired. I thought about a comment a mom made in a forum once when someone was asking about how to deal with sensitive frequent criers. She said she holds her baby close and imagines absorbing all their pain. What a beautiful concept. It had been the complete opposite of what I was doing in all my stress and striving to end the pain. I was attempting to deflect it. Just absorb it.

So I held her close as she screamed, and stopping trying to end the pain and just let it be. I thought about how she had only arrived in this world a mere 17 months ago. About how new and strange this teething pain must be for her, after spending many months in the womb, cozy and close to her mom, that direct connection to my heart and breath and the umbilical cord that provides for every need before she could even desire it.

Just as I was able to lift myself out of my consistent simmer of mom guilt, I finally was able to see the reality. To truly begin to feel with her. The true meaning of empathy. My job was to just be there with her. And when I was in my head, worried about all the things that I could potentially mess up because I cared about doing a good job, I wasn’t really doing a good job. Groundbreaking for me, because that was kind of my main strategy for the first two years of being a mother.

I recently watched an interview with the daughter of FLDS cult leader Warren Jeffs, who took multiple wives (even girls as young as twelve), and encouraged other men to do the same. One of the more disturbing things she said was how the children would be taken from their mothers, and not even know who their mother was. Furthermore, they were not allowed to cry ever. Who knew it was some kind of elite privilege for my daughters to be able to cry as loud as they want? And furthermore to know they are crying out to their mother, who is next to them and who can hear their cries.

These truths were not so apparent to me from the start. I had no feminine wisdom to guide me along my journey. I grew up in a society where masculine traits were encouraged, like being goal and material oriented, pursing a career, and putting relationships and other feminine based ideals on the back-burner. I had a hard time grappling with what exactly my role was as a mother. Unlike in the masculine world where goals and success are defined and seen in the external, the feminine task comes from within, as I talked about in my last post about being versus doing.

As long as a mother feels guilt and lack, she won’t be able to serve her true purpose. A mother is made complete for her child by the mere fact that she belongs to her child. A good mother honors this undeserved fact by stepping into that power to serve her children. She doesn’t let anything get in her way, herself included. We serve our children from the inside out. A powerful mother takes responsibility for her role, for her internal landscape that affects and guides her children. She does not take on responsibility for anything more or less than what is hers to take on. If she oversteps her responsibilities, she risks raises incompetent children who are not resilient enough to take on the world.

As mothers, we have the ultimate privilege of watching and shaping humans from birth into adulthood. We are their first map of the world, of relationships, of acceptable behaviors and beliefs. We must take on that responsibility with the full power that we have within us, or we risk falling short. When we get stuck in guilt, it weighs us down, and it takes away our ability to be present and patient with our kids. That ability is where our power lies as mothers. To give our children our presence is to give them love — that love which will allow them to blossom into the highest version of who they are meant to be.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you’re not enough as a mom. Particularly in this age of social media, where unlike before any other time, we can see how other types of moms are parenting their kids — or at least how they portray that they’re parenting their kids. You really can never know for sure what goes on in those homes, which makes comparison futile.

Despite knowing this, I continue to consume other mom content because I know there’s more wisdom and knowledge out there that can potentially fill my blind spots. But perhaps that’s where my problem lies — thinking that the answer to mothering my kids is outside of me, and even further, thinking that I am the source of the problems in my home.

We’ve all had rough patches in motherhood where your kids are extra fussy, and your husband is stressed out. I fall into this thinking where if only I did what [fill in mom influencer here] did, then maybe my kids wouldn’t be crying so much. As a mom and a wife, it hurts you so much to see the ones you love in pain because you feel every bit. So you want to solve all their problems. But is that really what is best for them or for you?

Stepping Out of Bounds

In one of her recent podcast interviews, Kelly Brogan (holistic psychiatrist and author of The Reclaimed Woman) mentioned how when a woman tries to solve her man’s problems, she is stepping into her masculine energy — which Kelly then jokes is why, as a psychiatrist, someone who loves to solve other people’s problems, she’s been divorced twice. I realized that’s what I had been trying to do with my husband. Not only was it not working, but it was actually counter-productive.

I was resisting my husband feeling his pain by trying to solve it and move past it, instead of being the space to let him feel it (God knows men allow themselves so little of that already). Trying to solve his problems meant carrying the weight that was only meant for him. I was overestimating my part in the situation by trying do more, instead of just be there for him. Be a witness. So I tried that, and the next day, instead of feeling weighed down by his stress, I consciously decided to let it go and leave it in yesterday’s conversation. One of my favorite hobbies is baking so I baked some cinnamon rolls and made a nice brunch. When my husband came down, he told me that that was all he needed from me to feel better. My ego was convinced me that I needed to take on his problems to feel like I was doing something, when simply existing and doing my own thing was enough for my husband.

This same idea applies to my children. Maria Montessori wrote extensively about how most of children’s development happens spontaneously through their own discovery (albeit in a proper environment). She details in The Discovery of the Child how when once a child masters the skill of forming words with movable letters, they can then naturally begin to read. Much of what I was concerned about doing for my kids was more of a task for them. My kids are madly curious, and they can easily get frustrated when they don’t figure something out on the first try. That in itself does not qualify me as a bad mother, but perhaps is more of a sign that I have given them an environment to be curious in, which is the greatest gift.

Furthermore, my husband made the point to me that the fact that my girls can so easily cry and be upset in my presence means that I am doing a good job because they are comfortable enough to feel their whole range of feelings around me. When he said that, it got to me because I did grow up in a home where I felt like I had to repress my feelings because nobody would listen or care. Perhaps, that is part of why I get so stressed when they become upset, because I had a pattern of taking responsibility for other people’s feelings.

The Feminine Wisdom

With all that being said, at the end of the day, when things get hard and my kids or my husband are feeling all the feelings, it does not mean I have failed them. Nothing else is to be done. My only task at that point is to be. Allow them to feel. Be the comfort to them, and be the example of emotional control upon which they can draw. That means I have to sit with the hard feelings myself. It is perhaps one of the hardest tasks of a mother — to watch her children in pain and not only not do anything about it but know that she must not.

Mother Mary, the OG mother, represents the ultimate example of this. She had to watch her son be physically tortured and murdered in front of her. All the while, he is telling her he is doing it in service of God, and nothing can or should be done to stop it.

Simone Rizkallah (writer at the Cultural Gypsy) wrote about how Mary is the ultimate example of the feminine genius:

“It is always the temptation of the Christian to become self-absorbed, to focus on one’s weakness, to become angry at one’s limitations, and therefore behave negatively or reactively. Especially in times of crisis it is very easy to fall into obsessions with external solutions or placing one’s hope or certainty into politics or ideology….

…At the end of the day, when all our ideologies and formulations fail, we are reminded that the other demands to be engaged on an emotional and spiritual plane.

And this is precisely the place where women are experts.

Women ground us and keep us in the right state of mind because they remind us of God when we have forgotten him in one another.”

I had certainly fallen into the temptation of focusing on myself, my weaknesses, and all the possible external solutions of the world when my family was struggling, when all that was needed was my own unique feminine genius. Something that is already within me. This is nature’s wisdom. When I try to step out of my plane and attempt to take on someone else’s emotions or responsibilities, I am defying nature’s wisdom.

In the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, the principle of wu wei, or doing less is discussed as the primary way to achieve:

Equating Actions with Worth

Parkinson’s law, the idea that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, applies to how we mother our children. If we think our days need to be consumed with doing every little thing for our children, then they will, and we will endlessly find more and more tasks to do.

I became acutely aware of this the other day when my mom was at my house. She is such a huge help to me and my kids, but I know to expect a certain level of baseline anxiety when she’s there. I realized why the other day, when, instead of becoming consumed in it, I just sat back and watched her. This woman does not spare a second to think. She is constantly running around, busying herself with cleaning, feeding the kids, going to the store, or giving the kids toys. She can’t just sit down with her grandkids and play with them. It made me sad for her because she feels that she alone is not enough and that her worth is found only through her actions.

I realized I had fallen into that same trap. It’s quite easy to fall into as a mom. You love your kids so much, and you want to do everything for them, buy everything for them, but you physically cannot. It is a losing battle. You will spend your energy and money in poor ways, attempting a fool’s errand like that one.

I recently listened to a Lila Rose interview with homeschool mom Sarah Mackenzie, who has three successful, grown adult children that she homeschooled from preschool. She talked about how she constantly felt anxiety and guilt because there was no hard road map and clear signs of whether or not you’re doing a good job as a homeschool parent. When her three kids were at a grade school level, she had three babies under three, meaning very little book work got done for a few years. She interviewed her older daughter years later, who said that was her favorite year of homeschooling because she learned so much about real life. Sarah said it’s so easy for homeschool moms to worry if they’re doing enough, but that she believes God will make it enough.

Nature’s wisdom is above our own. We can never have a bird’s eye view while our feet are planted firmly on the ground. Being a good mom is not following some prescriptive formula but more just being for your kids. That is in itself enough. It will be made enough because the love and effort we put into them plants seeds in our children that we can’t always see right away, but are being nurtured each day.

Lessons in Lightness

I recently went back to visit the apartment we raised our first baby from six months of age to a year. It was the kind of place where when I would take my daughter outside on the balcony, we would be met with the strong stench of cigarette smoke, the sounds of police sirens, and the sight of homeless men and stray dogs on the street below. I was raised in a middle-class suburb, so the experience was entirely new for me; on top of being a new mom, having to move suddenly to a new city for my husband’s job was jarring.

I remember being riddled with anxiety that I wasn’t taking my baby out enough. One time, I decided to be adventurous and walk around the apartment complex, despite the fact that nobody else ever walked around outside (should have told me something), and I came across a coked-out homeless woman. Eventually, I found a decent park that was a twenty minute drive away, but I would only venture there the times I had the emotional energy to deal with a six-month-old baby who did not like cars and screamed her face off the whole way there and back.

Now, we are blessed to live in a single-family home with a big backyard in a suburb with plenty of beautiful parks. Yet, I find myself still feeling that constant background hum of anxiety. “The park is down the street from me, how could I be so lazy as not to have taken them today?” and more nonsense like that. Going back to our old apartment and seeing the contrast and all the things I had to deal with gave me so much compassion for the young mom I was back then and all I had to struggle with just to take my baby out. To think I was not doing enough was absurd. I was probably taking my daughter out as much as was reasonably safe for us then. To inundate myself with anxiety and regret was only poisoning my family. The idea behind taking your child out is essentially for them to enjoy life. By allowing my anxiety and fear to take hold, it was making enjoyment impossible.

As mothers, our number one priority is to protect our children, and we must honor that. But another important responsibility we are tasked with is to show our children the full extent of life and, most importantly, the beauty of life. This is the lesson that will carry with them into their adulthood, when they are far away from us, when they are in pain or alone.

When I think about those times I was in that apartment with my daughter, just me and her, while my husband was at work five days a week, I think about how exhausted I felt from all the expectations and anxiety I placed on myself. If I could go back, I would tell that young mom that everything will be okay. I would take away all of her self-defeating thoughts so that she could just be in the present moment, enjoy that time with her daughter, and allow herself to just be. I would echo the sentiment that Aldous Huxley shared in his novel Island:

Back in college, a foster parent spoke to my psychology class and said that the point of the foster care system is to find care temporarily for kids and that the ultimate goal is to always get the kids back with their parents. I remember being shocked by that. Why would you put the kids back with a parent who put them in danger? Why would the kid even want to go back? Now that I’m a parent, I see how my kids look towards me, the unconditional love they have for me and that they constantly seek from me. That love doesn’t have to be earned, just honored.

The Sacred Ritual of Play

I honor my children when I allow myself to engage with them in the present moment. When I allow myself to tap into play more. Play brings out the fullness of life. Some might say holiness is found in sacrifice, but there is another side to the coin: a special kind of holiness is found in enjoyment. Participation in the sanctity of life. Being fully in the present moment means allowing yourself to feel pain to the fullest extent and not trying to numb it or ignore it. Only then can you release it. Only then can you open yourself to enjoyment. You find yourself on a hamster wheel in purgatory when you try to avoid the pain and when you try to earn the enjoyment. In life, we will continually find ourselves in absurdities. I’ve felt pain I never thought I deserved and love I never thought I deserved, and I have let it all change me for the better. We find our power as mothers from within. When we tap into that, we can truly be a force for good in our children’s lives. Though it might feel precarious, allow yourself to feel like enough in your life and see what kind of magic you can find.