I was 19 when I got roofied at a job interview. And then some.

It wasn’t the modern kind of rape, where a girl decides after voluntarily participating in a sexual act that maybe she shouldn’t have. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been drunk, hadn’t felt pressured, didn’t need the money…or whatever else fits into the modern Me-too lexicon. I may have just lost half my readers (leaving exactly two subscribers remaining), but fuck it. I said what I said. And I meant it.

It happened because a valet at a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale offered to set up a meeting with the owner for the cage dancer job. He said I was a shoo-in for the position, and since I was a top-tier dancer and exceedingly sexy, I believed him. He brought me a drink while I waited for the interview to begin. I barely remember what came next, in the bathroom, the parking lot, or between the flashes of his fat sweaty face looming over me in the passenger seat of my car.

What I do remember: tight red Edwin jeans that wouldn’t budge (this was before stretch denim), which probably bought me enough time to save me from the line of pigs waiting for their turn that never came. One of the few perks of being redheaded is that it takes ten times the amount of medication to affect us, so that one roofie wore off way quicker than expected. By the time another valet in uniform ran toward my car, I was already stumbling around outside the car trying to pull those jeans back on. The moment he saw me standing and conscious, he about-faced and ran his sorry ass back to the club. Those jeans and that genetic quirk really worked in my favor.

What also stuck with me? The phone call from the state’s attorney (actually, the secretary) to let me know they dropped the case. Essentially it came down to my credibility, and since I wasn’t a virgin, had weed in my system, and wore red to an interview, it was tenuous at best.

Apparently, these factors are easily translated to consent. Good to know, right? Next time you wanna get passed around unconscious and gang raped, simply bust out your best red pants, smoke a doob and head out for the evening! I stuffed that story in a very full file labeled “Very Fucked Up But Could’ve Been Way Worse,” and didn’t think about it much for thirty years.

Another thing that stuck with me was gratitude. I was grateful to be unconscious for most of it.

At least I didn’t have to be present, watching, horrified. At least I didn’t have to feel any of it. At least I wasn’t awake, aware, trapped in my own body while it happened. It was like a good root canal. You wake up and it’s done. Thanks to the prosecution or lack thereof, I was able to take the few flashes of memory and shove them deep down where shame can live indefinitely without being so much as acknowledged.

I always felt that being unconscious was a kind of mercy. That it would have been worse if I’d been fully there. To a point, I stand by that assessment.

And then recently—while I’m writing a memoir, which means I’m excavating every story I’ve ever buried—CNN did a report on something called The Rape Academy, and I learned about “sleep porn.”

That’s when I realized: being unconscious isn’t just about logistics or even mercy. It’s a whole-ass kink unto itself.

THE EYE CHECK

Turns out there’s an entire subculture, comprised of thousands of men all over the developed (mostly white) world who organize, attend schools (yes, schools), and share tips with each other on how to drug their wives and girlfriends unconscious so that they, and others can have sex with them while they’re out cold.

Let that sink in for a second. Schools. Curriculum. Tips, tricks and hacks. Best practices!

A heinous detail that sticks with me is something called the “Eye Check.” You pull back the woman’s eyelids to make sure she’s really unconscious. To confirm she has no idea what’s happening to her. They photograph, record and promote the eye check as part of the package. Prime spank material for the modern necrophiliac. And that’s what gets them off. Not the sex itself. The absence of consciousness. A body with nobody home.

After reading the full investigation file (linked in comment), something shifted that I wasn’t able to see back when I was 19 and told myself I was lucky to have been unconscious.

I wasn’t just lucky. I wasn’t even just raped. I was removed from the entire equation. Being kicked out of the experience wasn’t a side effect or a means of accomplishing the act. Rather, it was the entire point. They literally didn’t want me there. My consciousness, my ability to say no, to witness, to remember, to be present in my own body while it was happening, that was the ick as much as it was the threat.

So he took it away. And I spent thirty years being grateful for it, and equally ashamed to even think about it, no less bring it up.

THE PATTERN

The Gisèle Pelicot case confirmed what we are finally starting to see. Her husband drugged her for years and invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious, for a fee. He filmed it. Organized it. Made a business out of it. Lots of Eye Checks were sold as upgrades. Way to value-add, my dude.

Somehow, when I ask people what they thought of the CNN report, the articles about the Rape Academy investigations, or even the story about Gisèle Pelicot, they have no idea what I’m referring to. I’ll bet you didn’t either before reading this. People have heard dozens of stories from friends and family about women getting roofied (or the like), and lately it’s happening with increased frequency, but nobody knows how far-reaching this phenomenon really is.

What makes my skin crawl, even now, is that it’s already being pushed to the back of the pile. Pelicot was a once-in-a-generation reckoning: a woman who waived her own anonymity so the world would have to look. And within a season the coverage thinned, the think-pieces dried up, and the news cycle moved on to whatever was louder and easier to watch. The Rape Academy investigation surfaced, made a few people gasp, and then promptly sank into obscurity. A subculture of men selling courses on how to drug their partners unconscious should have been a five-alarm fire. Instead it got a short news-cycle and a shrug. Everyone’s a fuckin Coach these days. Shrug.

There’s something about the consciousness kink that requires it to stay below public consciousness. The same erasure the men perform on individual women, our culture performs on the story itself. Look away. Don’t witness. Don’t remember. Let it slip under…and away. And for fuck’s sake don’t be weird enough to talk about it. It gives “Victim Consciousness” a whole new meaning.

It all tracks with what’s being revealed lately. I’m not just thinking about what some valet did to me in a parking lot anymore. I’m thinking about the pattern. It’s not just that men are, generally speaking, less interested in sex for the sake of connection. It’s not just that they’re less interested in the energetic or spiritual aspects of intimacy than the physical. It’s that some men, lots of them, actively seek disconnection. They fetishize the absence. Unconscious, involuntary and unaware is the whole point. I wonder if they left money on the table by not offering copies of videotaped conversations wherein the victims were called crazy when they woke up bruised and disoriented. That gaslighting smells like big money to me.

This kink isn’t an aberration at the far edge of how women are treated. It’s simply the most honest version of it. It just says out loud what a thousand quieter arrangements only imply—that a woman is easier, safer, better, when she isn’t fully there. When she isn’t witnessing. When she’s been talked, drugged, or simply worn down into not being present.

THE REAL THREAT

For thirty years, I told myself that being unconscious during that rape was better than being awake for it. But every time I called it mercy, and every time I kept it to myself, I was kind of agreeing with them.

I’m done agreeing, I take the gratitude back, and I’m posting this article despite feeling intensely embarrassed by the whole situation. The word was never mercy. The word was erasure—mine, performed on me because my presence was the buzzkill.

The Greeks gave us Cassandra, cursed not simply with prophecy but with the burden of unwanted consciousness. She could see what was coming long before everyone else, but her greater punishment wasn’t the vision. It was that seeing it made her socially intolerable. Nobody wants to be around the woman who insists on naming what everyone else prefers to deny. The truth isn’t contagious, but awareness is.

That’s the feeling I’ve been trying to name while deciding whether to post this. Not shame over what happened, as much as fear of becoming associated with what I’m asking you to witness. Consciousness itself is socially contaminating. I don’t particularly love the idea of being stained with disgust by association. I’m really not trying to be the Rape chick, the Trauma lady or that writer that won’t shut-up about disturbing shit.

Gisele Pelicot said she waived anonymity because the “shame had to change sides.” She refused to extend the courtesy of silence and risked becoming socially radioactive in the process. So out of respect for her and for myself, and as cringe and gross as this article feels to write and probably to read, I’ll post it anyway. I’ll be present. I’ll remember. I’ll witness it, name it, write it down where it can’t be pushed to the back of the pile. I’ll risk contamination and refuse to look away from the thing that we try to make ourselves forget.

Stay conscious,

— Zanna

I was lying on my infrared mat on the bathroom floor (again/still), when I saw her name for the third time this week. I realized I’d been seeing it all year and couldn’t continue to ignore it.

Bathtub running, palo santo still hanging in the air, my altar candles doing their thing, and I was scrolling. This is what I do when I’m avoiding the thing I’m supposed to be doing, which lately is writing a memoir, and which requires that I dredge up every story I’ve ever drowned on purpose.

Speaking of drowning on purpose, there she is again. Sedna, the principal character in the Inuit myth that’s showing up all over the cosmic landscape.

Maybe it meant there was something for me to examine. Maybe the algorithm clocked that I’d paused on her once, and decided to keep serving her up like a waiter who won’t stop refilling your water with ice when you want it room temp.

Either way, three times in a week, in every other post or video, and then glowing up at me from the bathroom floor, where I spent the majority of my time since we moved into this so-called luxury apartment, Sedna showed up.

I did not grow up here, and most days it’s so gorgeous outside that I still don’t quite believe I actually live here. As luxurious as it may be, this place has been quite the excruciating crucible for my spiritual evolution.

That being the case, I figured I should probably find out more about her story.

WHO TF IS SEDNA

In astrology, the planets (and asteroids, and sometimes just points in space) correlate to the myths and archetypes from various cultures throughout history. Every cosmic placement is named for a god or mythological figure, and it carries that figure’s story.

Venus is love.

Mars is war.

Saturn is the strict father that forces you to grow up.

Astrology is just mythology mapped onto the sky.

And myth, as Jung understood, is a language for the parts of us too big or too buried to say plainly. These archetypes, as he called them, are human patterns so old that we recognize them before we understand them. You don’t learn something new from a myth. You recognize something you already knew about yourself, but didn’t know you knew. I like to think of each of these figures as an energetic flavor, if you will.

The general consensus is that mythological figures are symbolic forces within each of us, and human growth follows recurring mythic patterns. We’ll deep dive into this later, because it’s really fucking cool.

Sedna’s not one of the regular planets. She’s a tiny frozen body way out past Neptune, so far out that one of her years equals over eleven thousand of ours. She’s so far out, in fact, that it took us until 2003 to even discover her. She is, by a wide margin, the most distant named thing we orbit alongside, and she spends most of her protracted life in the cold and dark, where nobody’s looking.

I’m just going to tell you the rest plainly, because if I dress it up in more astrology-speak I’ll lose half of you and bore the rest.

Right now, this year, Sedna moved permanently, after a couple of years of dipping a toe in and then backing out, into Gemini. Gemini is the sign that rules the mind, the voice, and the very act of expression. She’ll be there until 2066. I’ll be dead. Most of us will. So she just walked through a door and made herself at home in a place she won’t be leaving during our lifetimes.

And she did not arrive alone. She pulled up and parked right up against Uranus, the planet astrologers link to the sudden and disruptive. These are the things that completely blow up your life, and for good reason. Usually, it’s so you’ll stop rearranging furniture in a house you were supposed to move out of.

The two of them haven’t been this close since 1931. They’re locked together right now, in the sign of the voice, while I sit here trying to find mine on the bathroom floor. The translation, in my case anyway, is that the frozen thing way out in the dark that nobody was looking at is surfacing, and it’s surfacing in the part of the sky that’s about finally saying the damn thing.

To be clear, I don’t believe that a rock the size of Ohio could reach across the solar system and change my life. Astrology isn’t causative, it’s synchronistic. That’s exactly what Sedna was for me. She didn’t explain my life, but she sure as shit reflected it back to me, with a story so on-point that it gave me all the words for what I’d been living. It was an undeniable synchronicity, like a giant mirror showing up the moment I was finally ready to look at myself.

THE MYTH

Here’s her story. Sit with it the way I had to.

Sedna was a young Inuit woman who refused a great many suitors. Her father sold her to a mysterious stranger, trading his only daughter for something useful like food or supplies. The details change depending on who’s telling it, but the story is always the same: Her value to him was whatever he could get in trade.

The stranger turns out to be a bird-man in disguise, because of course he does.

When her father finds out she’s miserable and starving, he takes to the water in his kayak to get her back.

On the way home, the bird-man’s people come for revenge, the sea turns violent, and the father gets scared they’ll capsize.

In his terror he throws her overboard to save himself.

She doesn’t accept it, grabs the edge of the kayak and holds on for dear life.

He takes out his knife and cuts off her fingers to release her from the boat.

She clings to the side with what’s left of her hands.

He cuts off her hands.

She finally sinks, handless and betrayed, to the bottom of the sea and her cold, tragic death.

The first time I read that I had to put the phone down and just breathe while staring at the ceiling for a while. I know that fucking boat. In some ways, I’d been clinging to the side of it my whole life.

The thing that hit me wasn’t the betrayal. It wasn’t even the violence. It was the GRIP.

Every version of this story turns on the same image: a woman hanging onto something that can no longer carry her. Something that cast her out. The father, the husband, the storm, the sea, they all matter to the story. But the moment I haven’t stopped thinking about was her clinging to the side of that kayak long after the life she clung to was already gone. She hung on long after there was anything but pain for her in that boat.

For the past three years or so, it took me getting dismembered piece by piece before I was finally forced to let go too. Emotionally, physically, fucking existentially, I lost my old identity. I tried to earn my way back into the lives of certain people whose lives I honestly wanted nothing to do with. I feverishly bailed water out of a boat filled with people who were planning to jump anyway.

I know now that you can’t perform your way back (or your way in, for that matter) to someone’s presence, especially when they’re not present for themselves. But I didn’t know that then, so I kept doing it anyway. I guess I hoped that if I were useful enough, good enough, helpful enough, I wouldn’t get thrown overboard. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. They say the lowest level of consciousness is when you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s where I was, until the long dark night of the soul that spanned the last few years. The thing about that particular relational strategy (unconscious as it may be), is that it almost never works.

It’s not that other people are wrong for their valuations. Even Sedna’s father wasn’t a monster, not exactly. He was a man so frightened of going under that he threw his daughter to the water and called it survival. To a far less dramatic degree, I have loved that man and been valued accordingly. And if I’m honest, I’ve been that person too.

I’ve spent my whole life organizing myself around that fear of being tossed overboard if I didn’t bring enough to the proverbial table. It meant figuring out whose comfort gets to come first and finding, over and over again, that it sure as hell wasn’t mine.

THE CUTS

After my Dad died, I kept waiting for that singular moment to come. The clean break. The last good cry. The before-and-after. What finally dawned on me is that none of these losses were actually separate. My father’s death, the rearrangement of my long-term relationship, resigning myself to the reality of aging, and the collapse of my identity as the most useful woman in the room, all came off like fingers being cut from the grip of the boat.

They all look different on paper, but they felt identical in my body. Every one of them was asking for the same thing: release your grip. But release doesn’t work like that, not all at once. Grief isn’t a door you walk through. It’s a long hallway, and you let go of things in stages without ever actually deciding to.

This is how I eventually let go of the old way of being married, my old friendships, and the energy, strength and blissful ignorance of youth. Those seasons all ended. They no longer worked the way they once did, yet I clung to their familiar corpses out of fear of the unknown next phase.

With my father and husband no longer in my daily experience, I was slowly forced to let go of the security that comes from simply knowing there’s a masculine figure somewhere in the background of your life. The one who ostensibly cares and wants the best for you. The one who’ll beat someone’s ass if they deserve it.

Except here’s the thing I had to actually look at: that protection was mostly a story I told myself. The masculine figure in the background was a comfort precisely because I never tested it. The times I actually needed protecting, nobody came. And when I needed it most, the figure in the background was usually the one I needed protecting from. The security wasn’t real. It was just familiar, which I kept mistaking for the same thing.

You don’t release that kind of protection so much as discover, some unremarkable morning months later, that your grip on it has loosened and you never felt it happen. And that the thing you were gripping was never holding you anyway.

That’s how I noticed I’d stopped holding my breath. It wasn’t a moment as much as a realization that I had exhaled. A body that had been braced since before memory, standing down while I wasn’t looking.

And underneath the grief was something else. Not anger. Sedna’s father and her husband betrayed her with their hands. They sold her, cut her loose, and they meant it. That’s not my story and I won’t pretend it is. Mine is quieter.

I could still feel the love in what had ended. It just wasn’t the kind or the way I needed to feel it.

Maybe because they didn’t have that particular kind of love to give, the kind you can only give once you’ve found it in yourself. Or for whatever reason. The reason doesn’t really matter. The point is you simply cannot earn what another person doesn’t possess.

During this transition my marriage came apart and got put back together in a shape that has no name. We don’t live the way married people are expected to live. When it first started rearranging, it ripped my heart clean out of my chest. I thought I was losing the one boat I could rely on. I hung on for dear life, terrified and heartbroken.

And now? We love each other and the new shape of our lives together in a way we never expected we could. Tellingly, I will not be explaining the architecture of it to anyone. I’m finished explaining because:

1. it works, and things that work don’t owe you a diagram; and

2. explanation is just another form of earning.

Fuck being understood. It’s just as overrated as marriage.

So here I am. Father, gone from this dimension yet somehow feeling closer than ever. Relationship, severed and regrown into something completely different and honestly, so much better. The youth I’d been wearing like a coat I refused to admit didn’t fit anymore — that came off too, and I don’t mind the weather one bit.

First the fingers. Then the hand. Everything I’d been gripping, cut loose one after the other. Not gently, and certainly not because I was ready. Because it was time.

THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Sedna’s myth doesn’t end with the drowning. The part that gets me is what happened next.

Sedna’s severed fingers don’t disappear into the cold. They become the seals, the whales. And every living thing in the sea. The parts of her that got cut off while she clung to a life that was already over, turned into an entirely new living world.

And she doesn’t drown. She sinks all the way to the bottom and then becomes the Goddess of the entire ocean. The one who decides what swims and what starves, who the hunters worship and give thanks to. The daughter who got traded and thrown overboard transforms into a completely different life form. A limitless, majestic creature ruling over all of the sea.

She didn’t become that because she let go with grace and gratitude or intention and prayer. I want to be clear on that because a lot of women would love to sell you Sedna on a tote bag.

She got her fingers hacked off by her own father and went down screaming into the dark abyss, against her will, unready, and with nobody watching or giving a rat’s ass if they did. And the transformation happened down there, in the cold, alone.

It happened after the earning was finally, brutally over. Because there was no one left to perform for.

I’m not at the bottom yet. I want to be honest about that, because I’m not going to skip to the part where I’m sovereign and serene. I’m still in the dark water, but I’m seeing a fish or two swim by lately.

Some days I still catch myself in the old habits: selling myself out just to be liked, useful, or good, and all so I’ll be worth keeping around. Usually in something that no longer works, by people who aren’t meant for me, and who couldn’t keep themselves if their lives depended on it. Or worse, I still get triggered by what feels like rejection because I disappointed somebody and they didn’t like that.

A lifetime of that shit doesn’t evaporate because a planet changed signs and I had a good cry in the tub. But I notice it now, and that makes all the difference.

Maybe that’s why this myth found me now. Not because I’m losing something else (please God, no more). Because I’m finally seeing how much better life is when we stop holding on to what’s already gone.

Giving up control and what is known in favor of surrender is scary, but it sure beats the horror of staying in that reflexive, exhausting effort that it takes to grip things that have already completed. It’s hard to say goodbye to the familiar dynamics that once worked so well, and even harder to release the identities that carried me exactly where they were meant to, and then quietly reached their destination.

There are stories we unconsciously continue to tell ourselves, like bouquets we continue to water long after the flowers go dry. The tragedy isn’t in what we lose, just like the myth was never about the fingers and hands. The myth was about the grip.

And maybe the thing waiting for us at the bottom isn’t death or punishment.

Maybe it’s a life we couldn’t reach with our hands full.

— Zanna

I should tell you upfront. I am not writing this from a position of detachment.

I am writing this as a woman who has, with remarkable consistency, centered men at the absolute core of her life since approximately birth. Raised by a single mom as an only child, meant the rotating cast of men she dated were the weather system of my childhood. I learned to read them fast, accommodate them faster, and disappear when necessary. Disappearing was almost always necessary. I absorbed the lesson early that men are the organizing principle of life. Everything else arranges itself around them.

One could say that I took the lesson and ran with it. I have never, and I mean this literally and not for effect, gone a single week of my adult life without being in a long-term relationship. Not one. I moved from one to the next with the efficiency of someone who finds open water terrifying. I’ve been married more than once, and never been single. My romantic history is not a timeline so much as a continuous river with different names on the shore.

Along the way I’ve worked as a dancer (that’s South-Floridian for stripper), dominatrix, and trial attorney— careers where reading and responding to men’s desires was the actual job. Where my value was measured by how well I could anticipate what they wanted before they asked for it, or ideally before they even knew what it was. I got very good at it. It nearly killed me. But that’s for another post.

When I say I understand the pull, the gravitational, structural, deeply conditioned pull toward organizing your life around male attention, approval, and presence, I am not theorizing. I’m describing my autobiography.

And then came this particular moment.

THE CURRENT MOMENT

We are living in a world where men own private islands. And governments. And humans. And baby farms.

And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Jeffrey Epstein operated a human trafficking network for decades with the full knowledge and participation of powerful men across multiple power structures—finance, politics, academia, entertainment. Women and children were treated as commodities. Photographed. Catalogued. Traded. Eaten?

And that’s just the one we know about, and only because he got caught. Again.

Gisèle Pelicot’s husband drugged her unconscious for nearly a decade and invited dozens of men—neighbors, colleagues, ordinary guys—to rape her while he filmed it. Fifty-one men participated, that we know of. They organized on forums. They traded tips on which drugs work best. Most of them had families. Jobs. Wives. Kids. They walked around as regular stand-up guys. Family men.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re structural features.

Abortion bans are forcing women to carry their rapists’ children. Child marriage is still legal in most of the US. States are criminalizing miscarriage. Trafficking networks operate in plain sight—women and children being farmed and sold while everyone argues about politics, pronouns and bathroom signs.

In this particular moment, rape and abuse are treated as background noise. Expected. Inevitable. Just how things are. Layer on top of that the wars spreading, markets collapsing, and the threat of World War III as an actual conversation people are having.

And in the middle of all this clarity about the madness that’s actually happening in the world, we’re also supposed to… date?

Like, get on the apps and meet strangers for drinks. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Be open. Don’t be jaded. Don’t let past experiences make you bitter. Men can sense when you’re guarded.

The cognitive dissonance is fucking staggering.

You’re supposed to maintain plausible deniability about the scope of male violence while also protecting yourself from it. You’re supposed to see the pattern without naming the pattern. Be cautious but not paranoid. Discerning but not man-hating.

And if you can’t pull off that tightrope walk? If you’re too careful, you’re damaged. If you’re not careful enough, well, what did you expect?

It’s enraging. And the rage is justified.

There’s a specific energy that shows up when you really see the scope of it. When you let yourself feel the full weight of how disposable female life has been treated across history and how little has actually changed. When it triggers a myriad of memories you’ve tried shove down, laugh off and make the best of, it can make you feel rather unhinged.

In Hindu tradition, that flavor of feminine energy has a name: Kali. The dark goddess. Creatrix and destroyer.

She’s depicted standing in cremation grounds with a garland of skulls around her neck, tongue out, wild-eyed, dancing on the chest of Shiva, the archetypal masculine. She holds a severed head in one hand and a sword in the other. She’s covered in blood. She’s terrifying.

And she’s sacred.

Kali represents the force that says: if this structure fails to respect life, while requiring my silence and compliance to stand, I’ll burn it right down to the bones. Let it fall. And then dance on the ruins.

She’s not angry for anger’s sake. She’s purifying. She destroys what needs to die so something new can be born. She’s the necessary violence that precedes transformation. And creation.

Kali energy is real. And a lot of us are feeling it right now. The pendulum is swinging back toward the feminine after decades of being told to be nice about our own degradation. With the litany of horrors being exposed on a daily basis, we are waking up. Naming what’s happening. Refusing to pretend. Decentering the male hierarchical structure as the energy we orbit around, is part of that correction.

The part that trips me up? It’s that rage, justified as it is, is not the same thing as decentering.

It’s a challenge because I also have a son. A husband I love. A father who just died. Men woven into the fabric of my actual life who are decent and real and complicated in the ways all humans are complicated. And man-hating energy simply doesn’t work in my life.

I find myself unwilling—genuinely, not performatively—to let justified anger at systems become contempt for every individual inside of them. Because contempt is still a form of centering. I’ve spent enough of my life organized around men, even when that organization looked like opposition.

Especially then.

There’s a way to hold structural reality without detonating your actual life, or becoming one of those man-hating, sad, annoying chicks that don’t get invited to girls’ night anymore because they take everything way too seriously except what matters.

On girl’s night, we just wanna have fun. And not get roofied.

THE MISREAD

There’s a predictable mistake that people make when women start talking about decentering men. They assume it means revulsion, revenge, and fury. As if the only way to stop orbiting something is to light it on fire.

The drama is aesthetically satisfying. It also completely misses the point.

Decentering isn’t a declaration of war. It’s a change of address.

The algorithm has flooded me with angry, well-spoken women since I made the mistake of looking at the Epstein files. I can’t help but think, if your “decentering” looks like seething and men are still the main character in the story you tell about yourself (they’re wearing a villain hat now), then congratulations. You haven’t decentered anyone. You redecorated the obsession. New story, same central character. Very on-brand for our generation.

bell hooks astutely wrote that feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression—not men.” Her wisdom remains true. The systems are the problem. Men are human beings shaped by those systems, which also harm them.

This is not naivete'. It’s precision.

Because rhetoric that sounds like men are trash, all of them, categorically, is still a form of organization around men. When you hate, you are still orienting your nervous system toward the object. You wake up thinking about them. They are still the stage you’re performing on, but now the audience is your IG or group chat.

Kali’s brand of rage isn’t personal. It’s purifying. She destroys what needs to die so something else can be born. But if you’re still obsessing, still performing your anger for an audience, still needing them to witness your transformation—you’re not embodying Kali. You’re still seeking male attention. Or female attention about men. It’s the same shit with different aesthetics.

The solution, for me at least, is not to cultivate rage as identity. It’s to stop providing the priority, attention and emotional labor that drained me and created resentment in the first place.

THE ACTUAL WORK IS STRUCTURAL, NOT EMOTIONAL

Simone de Beauvoir identified the core issue in 1949: women get positioned as the Other. Humanity is male. Woman is the satellite. Not a center. A complement.

This isn’t about individual men’s intentions. It’s architectural. The structure routes women’s attention, labor, and sense of self toward men as a default. We didn’t choose it. We inherited it.

Decentering is the project of re-routing. Becoming the organizing principle of your own life instead of a supporting character in someone else’s. This is just structural work, not moral warfare. My son would say, “it’s not that deep.” But actually it is. Like so many other things I’m seeing lately, it’s about going uncomfortably, deeply inward, not focusing on what’s wrong with everything else.

Here’s the actual model I came up with—three layers of boundary architecture. Because “just be unbothered” is not a strategy, and unstructured rage just burns you out. Ask me how I know.

LAYER ONE: MATERIAL BOUNDARIES (MONEY TALKS)

The first layer is material. I hate that this is true, but it is. You can’t decenter men if you’re economically dependent on them. Full stop.

I don’t mean you have to be wealthy. I mean you have to be able to leave. To say no. To enforce boundaries without worrying about losing your job, housing, health insurance, or the ability to feed your kids.

Economic dependence isn’t a moral failing. It’s a structural trap. And it’s deliberately maintained because women who can’t leave are easier to control or ignore.

When I worked at the gentleman’s club, I had a clarity most women don’t get. The exchange was explicit: my time and attention for money. Transactional. Bounded. Everyone knew exactly what was being exchanged and what wasn’t. I loved the honesty and simplicity of that.

When I left that world for “normal” or “professional” relationships, things got a bit murky. The expectations were implicit. The true nature of the exchange was hidden or denied. And somehow, I ended up giving more emotionally, domestically, and physically while receiving less than I did as a “sex worker.” Sounds weird to call it that, but I feel like that same label could easily apply across normal male/female relations if we’re willing to see things for what they really are. It’s all sex work.

In any case, it’s also hilarious in a dark kind of way. The “respectable” relationship is in many ways, the shittier deal. Capitalism is more honest than romance. Let that sink in.

The first step in decentering is building the capacity to leave. Even if you never use it. Especially if you never use it.

Your own bank account. Your own income. Your own credit. Your own exit plan. Not because you’re planning to leave, per se. Rather, to establish that staying is a choice, not a necessity.

Without this layer, everything else is performance. You can journal about sovereignty all you want. If a man represents your only way to survival basics, he absolutely holds the center of your life.

LAYER TWO: RELATIONAL BOUNDARIES (ACCESS IS EARNED)

The second layer is relational.

Men are not entitled to access just because they exist.

This sounds obvious until you notice how much access in they form of “customer service” energy you provide to men. Mostly men who haven’t earned it.

Texting back immediately. Managing feelings. Softening needs. Being easy on the eyes. Explaining yourself repeatedly. Tolerating disrespect because you don’t want to be difficult. Giving the benefit of the doubt seventeen times in a row.

And that’s just romantic partners.

Emotional labor extends to every man you encounter. The coworker whose ego you manage so meetings run smoothly. The stranger on the street whose attention you deflect with a smile instead of telling him to fuck off because you’ve learned that’s safer. The guy at the coffee shop whose small talk you entertain because saying “I’m busy” feels rude. The male friend who vents to you for an hour but somehow never has time or interest when you’re having a bad day.

You smooth, accommodate and perform pleasantness without even realizing it. You make yourself smaller so they can feel bigger. You laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. You pretend not to notice when they talk over you. You downplay your expertise so it doesn’t threaten. You absorb their anxiety so they don’t have to regulate it themselves.

We do this so automatically that we may not even notice we’re doing it. It’s just the water we are all swimming in.

In the BDSM world, access is a privilege with clear criteria. You don’t get time, attention, emotional labor, or body just because you want it. You earn access by demonstrating respect, clear communication, and the capacity to follow the rules.

Obey. Pay Tribute. If you can’t do that? You don’t get in. Simple.

In this highly transparent dynamic, access is earned. Everywhere else, it’s assumed…if you’re a man. The irony is, I’ve had better boundaries with men who paid me than with men I engage with for free. Decentering means reversing that. Access to my time, attention and energy is a privilege for everyone. Not just the ones paying by the hour.

An interesting pattern emerges from the reversal. When a man responds badly to boundaries: gets defensive, guilt-trips, withdraws affection, or calls you harsh or difficult, he just told you everything you need to know about himself and about how it will likely be if he’s allowed in your world.

In truth, it means that man is disqualified. The word “qualify” will bother people. It implies criteria. But men apply criteria to hiring, alliances, and competitive hierarchies without anyone calling them cold. Women applying standards to intimacy, dating or even basic access, is treated as a personality defect.

In reality, it’s just coherence.

LAYER THREE: INTERNAL BOUNDARIES

The third layer is internal. This whole “inner work” thing is becoming a theme.

But even with economic independence and clear relational boundaries, I still catch myself.

I might wonder what he’s thinking, or adjust what I say or do based on how I think he’ll respond. I could interpret his mood as data about my worth or perform a version of myself I think he’ll like better. It’s all the same thing: prioritizing his comfort over my truth.

This is the deepest layer of centering. It’s about where your attention lives.

And my attention has been trained by culture, family, and every movie or TV show I’ve ever watched, to focus on men. To read, respond to, and organize myself around their presence or absence. I’ve been doing this since before I could talk. It’s automatic. Like breathing.

And I hesitate to bring this up, but we all know that one woman. Maybe you are that woman. The one who disappears into her curret relationship like it’s a black hole. Her friendships go into a holding pattern—a type of waiting room where everyone sits patiently (or not) until the relationship ends, or she surfaces for air. Or she needs something from a person that actually cares about her as a person.

When she’s in a relationship with a man, she stops showing up. Stops returning texts. Has to check everything against his schedule, his preference, his life. In a way, she becomes part of him, much like an appendage or accessory. Her entire identity becomes “we” instead of “I.” This is the woman that receives three calls from him during a coffee date about absolutely nothing. And when the relationship pauses or ends, she must try and rebuild everything she let atrophy while she was centering him.

Decentering at this level means noticing the dynamics and redirecting. When I catch myself wondering what he’s thinking, I redirect to what I’m thinking. Adjusting my words to manage his reaction? I redirect to what is actually true. The bottom line is, if I’m making his comfort more important than my boundaries, I redirect to what I actually need.

Am I good at this yet? Absolutely not. I still revert to centering men every time I’m scared or uncertain. Which is often. And sometimes, it’s for no reason at all except that it’s just the way things have always been. Turns out, decades of conditioning don’t evaporate because you read the right Substack. Change and growth take time.

What I’m starting to notice is that men who can handle me as a full subject, not a satellite, are better partners across all areas of life. More reliable, fair, and usually more interesting. And they’re infinitely more capable of actual intimacy.

The ones who can’t handle it leave my life. And honestly? They were never really in it with me anyway.

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THE OPERATING STANCE (BETWEEN NAIVETE AND MISANDRY)

I’m trying to build an operating stance that’s neither “trust men to lead” nor “men are disgusting,” although the latter is becoming harder to resist as a million planets pile up in Aries, sign of the Warrior…and the leader of the free world wakes up on Easter morning and tweets “Open the Fuckin strait or you’ll all be living in Hell. JUST WATCH!”

Riiiiiiiight.

So, not “all men are dangerous” (they’re not).

Not “not all men” (irrelevant when you can’t tell which is which until after they’ve done something retarded).

Something more like: evaluate case-by-case, trust patterns over promises, center my own agency over their comfort, and make them earn access through consistent behavior over time.

That, my friends, is not man-hating. That’s discernment in a world where the stakes are high, the odds are stacked against women, and the institutional protections are minimal at best.

Sadly, most men won’t even pass that filter. Not because they’re bad, but because they’ve been trained to expect things to continue as they always have been, and feel entitled to be the main character in any given social structure.

Even men center other men. There’s a significant body of psychological work showing that men organize their entire lives around approval from their fathers, by either proving the critical father wrong or making the supportive father proud. Watch how a man dismisses the exact same advice from his girlfriend or wife that he immediately implements after hearing it from another man. The information didn’t change. The gender of the messenger did.

And it goes much deeper than strategic authority. Men buy luxury watches to signal status to other men even more than to women. They choose partners, at least partly, to signal status to other men. Women are told they dress for each other, but that’s mostly projection. Women dress for the male gaze. Men, meanwhile, are literally structuring their entire lives around impressing other men. The car, the house, the wife, the watch; it’s all performance for a male audience.

So it’s not just women that operate this way. The whole system runs on male-as-default.

I’m burning that shit down. I’m done.

Not with men. With organizing my life around their presence.

Big difference.

The result of this architecture, structural, relational, and internal, is not isolation.

Love remains available. In fact it becomes cleaner. A partner enters a life that already has gravity. He is not asked to supply identity, security, or narrative purpose. He is assessed for alignment with an existing structure. He is a participant, not the premise.

And if he can’t handle that, or if standards feel like an attack on his manhood and wholeness reads as coldness, he’s out. That’s not misandry, it’s architecture.

I don’t have it all figured out. I still catch myself wondering what some guy I met twice is thinking about me, or performing pleasantness for some random dude at the coffee shop. I can backslide into customer service mode with alarming speed.

Some days I want to light the whole thing up like Kali in the cremation grounds. Other times, I’m right back to being my mother’s daughter, reading the weather, accommodating to suit the man at the center of the current equation.

But here’s what’s different: I notice it now. It’s not always, and not perfectly, but much more often, I redirect.

So how do we operate in a world where the Diddy tapes exist and everyone’s terrified to see what’s on them? Where people traffic children like disposable products and then walk free as if they just got a parking ticket? Where human life doesn’t seem to matter anymore?

Not by pretending it’s not happening, or trusting everyone, or letting rage at systems that protect monsters turn into contempt that burns you out.

We can take notice, and build our own system of material, relational, and internal redirects. One boundary at a time.

Organize around your own sovereignty, safety, and truth. And let everyone else adjust accordingly.

— Zanna

I’ve been wearing a key around my neck since we moved out of the snake year, when I finally took off the snake charm I wore throughout most of 2025. Enough already with the shedding! Today the chain broke and it fell into my hand. Clean break, right before I stepped into the sauna.

Maybe it means something. Maybe it was just a cheap charm doing what cheap charms do? Either way, it got me thinking about what keys actually represent. And what it means when they show up.

KEYS ACROSS TRADITIONS

Keys appear in the hands of gatekeepers across every major spiritual tradition.

Saint Peter holds the keys to heaven in Christian iconography. Two keys—one gold, one silver. One for binding, one for loosing. The power to grant or deny entry to the kingdom. I always thought of the kingdom as a metaphor to the heart space. The most sacred of places.

Hekate, Greek goddess of crossroads and rites of passage, carries keys to the underworld. She governs thresholds—the places between. Dawn and dusk. Life and death. The moment of crossing from one state to another.

Janus, the Roman god with two faces, holds the keys to all doors and gates. One face looks forward, one backward. He sees both what was and what will be. His keys grant entry to the transition between them.

The Hierophant in tarot (Major Arcana card Five, The Spiritual Teacher), holds crossed keys. One is silver (the unconscious), and one is gold (the conscious). These are the keys to hidden knowledge. They grant access to the mysteries that cannot be unlocked by force, only by initiation.

The pattern across traditions: keys represent authority over transitions. Not just physical doors. States of being. Levels of knowledge. Access to what was previously inaccessible.

THRESHOLDS AND LIMINAL SPACE

A threshold isn’t just a doorway. It’s a liminal space. The sacred in-between.

The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It’s the space where you’re no longer in the old room but not yet in the new one. No longer who you were, not yet who you’re becoming.

Liminal space is often uncomfortable. Disorienting. You don’t belong anywhere because you’re between belonging places.

Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep identified three stages of transition:

1. Separation - leaving the old state

2. Liminality - the in-between, where transformation happens

3. Reincorporation - entering the new state

Keys show up in the liminal phase. When you’re standing at the threshold, deciding whether to cross. When you’re being asked to release what doesn’t fit through the door.

And here’s the thing about thresholds: they’re one-way passages. You can’t cross back. You can’t take everything with you. Something has to be left behind for the crossing to happen.

ECLIPSE AS THRESHOLD

We just came through a **Virgo lunar eclipse on March 3rd**. The final eclipse on the Virgo-Pisces axis after 18 months. The eclipse corridor closes completely tomorrow on March 17th with the new moon in Pisces (new moons are always beginnings).

In this very magical moment at the anaretic (final) degrees of the last sign of the zodiacal wheel, we are called to the final release before we cross into the new. It’s time now to release and burn all the karma we’ve shaken loose in this past cycle.

And then comes the rebirth of Spring through fire of Aries season. An entirely new cycle begins as the light overtakes the dark once again at the Equinox on Thursday. Insane clarity as Mercury goes direct in Pisces as well, conjunct the North Node of Destiny. This my friends, is a soul level karmic course correction.

Eclipses are threshold moments. Gateways to destiny. Accelerated transitions where the universe opens a door and says: That’s done. Go this way now. If you have the key, that is. Translation in my case: If you finally have the balls to step into the unknown.

Thresholds require release. You can’t cross into Pisces energy while clutching Virgo patterns. The door won’t let you through.

If you’ve been feeling like you’re standing in a doorway lately…uncomfortable, disoriented, not quite anywhere, that’s liminality. You’re in the crossing. I heard someone say it’s like leaving your seat before finding a new one.

And keys tend to show up right before or during these moments. As symbols. As synchronicities, and also as reminders that you have the authority to choose the crossing.

LOCKS, DOORS, AND KEYS AS SYSTEM

Keys don’t work alone. They’re part of a bigger system.

The lock is the mechanism of discernment. It filters. It says: not everyone passes. Only those holding the right key.

The door is the barrier between states. Inside/outside. Before/after. Known/unknown. Sacred/mundane (or even profane).

The key is permission. The tool that opens what’s closed. Or closes what’s open.

In alchemy, the key represents solve et coagula—dissolve and coagulate. The process of breaking down the old form so the new form can emerge. The key unlocks the transformation from lead into gold.

In countless mystical wisdom traditions, keys unlock the three realms: heaven, earth, and underworld. Past, present, future. Conscious, unconscious, superconscious. The key is the tool that moves between levels of reality.

But here’s what matters: the key doesn’t work if you’re at the wrong damn door.

You can have the key and not cross the threshold because you’re going in the wrong direction. Or it’s the wrong timing. And by wrong, I mean not aligned with the true path your soul chose before you even got here. Or you’re not ready to release what the crossing requires. Keys grant access, but access without readiness is just standing in front of a locked door gripping the right key, paralyzed by fear.

WHEN KEYS SHOW UP

Keys appear as synchronicity when threshold energy is present. Sometimes they’re literal keys, and you’ll find them in parking lots, trails, and all the random places. Sometimes they’re symbolic, and you’ll start to see key imagery everywhere, have conversations about locks and doors, or dream about lost keys or even keys that don’t fit.

When keys show up repeatedly, they’re usually marking a threshold question:

What am I ready to access that’s been closed?

Sometimes the door is unlocked now. You just have to turn the key.

What do I need to close that I’ve left open?

Sometimes you’ve been too accessible. The key reminds you: you can lock the door.

What threshold am I standing at?

Sometimes you’re in liminal space. Between states. The key marks the crossing point.

The key I was wearing appeared around the beginning of eclipse season when the year of the Fire Horse began. And it broke as it came to a close, suggesting the karmic work might finally be complete. For now. Because it never really is.

Maybe a new threshold is opening. Or it’s just a cheap-ass charm breaking and I’m reading patterns into randomness. But that is a pattern in and of itself, isn’t it?

Either way, I’m being reminded that I am standing squarely in the in-between right now.

THE AUTHORITY TO OPEN

Here’s what I may have been meant to see. I hold the keys to my own thresholds. I decide what the crossing requires, what the boundaries are and whether they’ve been honored. What gets left behind. What comes through.

And when someone outside me wants access but doesn’t have the key—when they can’t meet what the threshold requires—the door stays closed. vEnergy is currency and access to mine is a privilege. The key to earning it is consistency, effort, and respect.

The key breaking today might mean the boundary is internal now. Or it might mean I’ll forget again next week and need a different reminder.

Either way, the key fell off, and something has shifted. Instead of immediately trying to fix it, I just let it be broken. Maybe that’s threshold work too. Letting things come to completion without forcing them to stay. Especially when they’re broken.

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If you’ve been seeing keys lately—literal or symbolic—pay attention. You’re probably standing at a threshold. In liminal space. Between states. The key is asking: are you ready to cross?

And more importantly: are you willing to leave behind what doesn’t fit through this door?

— Zanna

March 2, 2026

Astrologers have been losing their collective shit for the past six months.

First it was the Wood Snake year ending and Fire Horse year beginning—liberation! initiation! freedom! Then Saturn conjunct Neptune at 0° Aries—once in a lifetime threshold! major shifts! Then the nodes preparing to shift from Pisces-Virgo to Aquarius-Leo—collective evolution! new era!

And every time, the message was the same: Things are about to change. It’s going to get easier. We’re finally moving through this.

Then March 3rd rolls around with World War III preceding a full moon lunar eclipse in Virgo and it feels like: Right. More chaos first.

Because of course there is.

If you’ve been feeling like your entire life is unraveling while simultaneously trying to come together, welcome to eclipse season. To make it spicier, it’s taking place on one nodal axis that’s ending while another one’s beginning. It’s a hybrid shitstorm. It’s the final eclipse on the Virgo-Pisces axis. The last one in an 18-month cycle that’s been systematically dismantling everything you thought you had to do and be.

And if you’ve been white-knuckling your way through it, trying to control the process, trying to perfect your way out of the chaos, that’s the whole problem.

But at the same time, that’s the pattern. Death, rebirth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth… on and on forever.

Astrologers are hyping the rebirth part. But you can’t skip the death part. That’s not how it works.

WHAT TF ARE NODES?

The lunar nodes aren’t planets. They’re points where the moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic—the path the sun appears to take around Earth. In astrology, they represent an axis. A polarity. A tension between two ways of being. They get loud during eclipse season.

The South Node is your karma. Your past. The gifts you brought into this life AND the burdens you’ve been carrying. The patterns you’re so good at you could do them in your sleep. The comfort zone that’s actually a trap.

The North Node is your dharma. Your destiny. Your fated path forward. The thing you’re supposed to be moving toward even though it feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar and you have no idea how to do it.

The nodes move backward through the zodiac, spending about 18 months in each sign pair. And wherever they land, that’s where the evolutionary pressure is. As always, the current positioning applies to the collective consciousness and in our individual lives.

For the past 18 months, the South Node has been in Virgo and the North Node has been in Pisces. This means: everything Virgo represents has been up for release. And everything Pisces represents has been calling you forward.

Whether you wanted it or not.

SOUTH NODE IN VIRGO: WHAT WE’RE RELEASING

Virgo energy is: perfectionism, control, analysis, productivity, usefulness, fixing, improving, proving your worth through competence.

It’s the part of you that says: if I just work harder, plan better, optimize more, I can control the outcome. If I just do everything perfectly, I’ll be happy/loved/respected/safe/(or… insert desired outcome here).

It all sounds reasonable until you realize you’ve been doing this your entire life and you’re still not there. Or maybe you thought you were, but your nervous system, unconscious mind, inner child, higher self, or some other such part, thinks otherwise. Yay. More shadow work! But I digress.

South Node in Virgo means: we’ve been living there. Collectively. Personally. For lifetimes, maybe. Definitely for the past 18 months.

And the universe has been systematically breaking that strategy like a piñata at a latino kid’s birthday party.

Here’s what South Node in Virgo may look like when it’s trying to release:

You work harder but nothing improves. You plan meticulously and everything falls apart anyway. You try to fix the problem and the problem multiplies like an acne flare after you tried to squeeze. You attempt to control the situation and it spirals further out of control.

Every coping mechanism you’ve relied on, be it productivity, perfectionism, analysis, or usefulness, stops working. Or maybe it still works but at the expense of your health, self respect, or both.

And you’re left standing there asking “Wait, what? I’m doing everything right. This used to work perfectly. Why is nothing working anymore?”

Because with a Virgo South Node eclipse, we’re (ideally) stepping out of what has always worked, what’s oriented to being perfect, and what comes naturally. In this period, we’re aligning with taking the leap and into the uncomfortable unknown. That’s the whole point. Ain’t growth grand?

For me, this has looked like trying to plan, control and achieve my way out of everything.

Every single Virgo strategy I’ve ever used—and I’ve used all of them as a Virgo rising, so I’m very qualified in this department—has failed spectacularly over the past year and a half. I had no choice but to surrender to the very terrifying idea of surrender.

With this axis activating the South Node in Virgo, we are upgrading our operating systems, both collectively and as individuals. We’re running on new software now and this time, Pisces the Mystic wrote the manual.

NORTH NODE IN PISCES: WHERE WE’RE GOING

Pisces energy is: surrender, trust, intuition, spiritual knowing, dissolving boundaries, faith, going with the flow, letting go of control.

It’s the opposite of everything Virgo taught us to value. To me it feels like jumping off a cliff, blindfolded.

Virgo says: work harder, fix it, control it, perfect it, prove your worth.

Pisces says: let go, trust, surrender, stop trying to force it, you don’t have to earn your existence.

If you’re anything like me—surviving on control and competence your whole life—Pisces feels like death. I think I actually have “stay in control” as my high school yearbook quote. Embarrassingly telling.

This shift feels terminal because it kind of is. It’s a form of ego death. The death of the self that believes it has to manage everything, be useful, organized, and look as close to perfect as humanly possible in order to be safe.

Here’s what North Node in Pisces is asking for:

Stop trying to figure it out. Trust what you feel instead of what you think.

Stop forcing the outcome. Let things unfold.

Stop proving your worth through productivity. You’re valuable because you exist, not because you’re useful.

Stop fixing, managing, and attuning to everything. Surrender to the damn process.

For me, every cell in my body is screaming: ABSOLUTELY NOT! That sounds like a recipe for becoming toothless, homeless and possibly insane.

What I’m slowly, painfully learning is that the old way isn’t working anymore anyway. It’s not going to suddenly start working if I just try harder or plan better or optimize more efficiently. I can’t keep trying to do more of what isn’t working.

The only way out is through. Through mystical, boundless and beautiful Pisces. Trust. Surrender. Faith. Finally letting go.

Which I hate. But also, every time I actually do it, like actually let go instead of pretending to let go while secretly still trying to control everything, things do seem to get better.

So. There’s that.

THE MARCH 3 ECLIPSE: THE FINAL RELEASE (BRACE YO SELF)

Eclipses are karmic course correction portals. Accelerated timelines. Moments when the universe reaches in and yanks out whatever you’ve been refusing to release.

They’re not gentle. They’re surgical. And they don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re ready.

A full moon lunar eclipse specifically is about release, culmination, endings. Something reaching fullness and being let go. Oftentimes, against your will.

This lunar eclipse on March 3rd is the final eclipse on this axis before the nodes shift into Aquarius-Leo later this year. That makes this the last chance to release Virgo patterns willingly before they get ripped out of your hands like a toy from a toddler who wasn’t sharing.

Whatever you’ve been clinging to—the need to be perfect, the need to control, the belief that you have to earn your existence through utility, the idea that if you just work hard enough you’ll finally be safe—this eclipse is the last time you’ll be asked to put that shit down once and for all and step away from the vehicle.

Not because anything you’ve done was wrong or bad, but because you’re done with that way of being now. The cycle is complete. The karma is cleared. And also because we’re shifting into Aquarius-Leo energy which is a whole different game to learn from.

And don’t worry. If you don’t release it willingly, the eclipse will release it for you.

I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve had three major structures dissolve in the past 18 months—relationship, career, identity. I didn’t choose any of them. The South Node chose for me. Very rudely, I might add.

When I said “I’m not ready,” the Universe replied “I literally don’t care, here we go.”

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN REAL LIFE

Practically, here’s what releasing South Node in Virgo and moving toward North Node in Pisces has meant for me:

Releasing:

- The belief that if I plan perfectly, nothing bad will happen (it will happen anyway)

- The need to be productive every single day to prove I’m not lazy (I’m not lazy. Fine maybe I am but that’s not why)

- The compulsion to fix everyone’s problems including my own (some things don’t need fixing, they need space. People are not projects)

- The idea that I have to have everything figured out before I move (I will never have it figured out. Time to move on anyway)

- The insistence of hoarding boxes and bins of shit from the past 30 years in storage because I might need it one day (and getting a notice of ‘move your shit or we’ll move it for you’ from my landlord yesterday)

Moving toward:

- Trusting my body’s signals over my mind’s analysis (my body knows things my mind can’t logic its way into)

- Letting things unfold instead of forcing outcomes (this is excruciating but it does work better)

- Resting without guilt (rest is not earned, it’s required)

- Not knowing and being okay with not knowing (this might be the hardest one)

Am I good at this yet? Absolutely not. Do I still revert to Virgo mode and try to control everything when I’m scared? Every single time.

But I’m learning. Slowly. Painfully. With a lot of backsliding.

And this last eclipse is already feeling like a final exam I didn’t study for. Actually an exam for a class I audited.

Although this eclipse is the final release on the Virgo-Pisces axis, the pattern doesn’t end. Because it never ends.

The nodes shift into Aquarius-Leo later this year. We’re already starting to feel that hybrid energy, which is why everything feels extra chaotic right now. We’re ending one cycle while beginning another. It’s a cosmic clusterfuck.

Death, rebirth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth. Forever.

You can resist it. White-knuckle through it. Or you can work with it. Let go when it’s time to let go. Trust the dissolution. Surrender to the process and trust that what is unfolding is what is meant to.

On March 3rd, the eclipse is going to test how much you mean it.

I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of trying to control things that are clearly not controllable. I’m tired of pretending I have it figured out when I very obviously do not.

I’m ready to let go.

Even though I have no idea what comes next. Even though I’m scared. AF.

Maybe especially because I have no idea what comes next. That’s the whole point.

The astrologers were right about one thing: things are changing. We are moving through this.

But first, we have to let go of what we’ve been holding onto.

And that part? That’s happening on March 3rd and playing out for a week or two afterwards during the shadow period, whether we’re ready or not.

See you in the fire of Aries season!

— Zanna

My father died last year, during what numerologists call a universal 9 year. I know it sounds like something you’d overhear at a farmers market from someone wearing tie-dye balloon pants and selling homemade kombucha, but stay with me here.

Numerology assigns meaning to numbers 1 through 9 and maps them onto time. It maps them onto everything but this is about timing. There are two tracks: universal years (what year it is for everyone) and personal years (calculated from your birthdate, running on your own cycle). A universal 9 year means the collective is in completion mode. A personal 9 year means you specifically are.

I was in both.

Universal year 9. Personal year 9. Double endings. I didn’t know that when my Dad passed, or when my relationship imploded, or when the work I’d spent years building dissolved, or when I woke up one morning and realized the person I’d been pretending to be had finally, mercifully, stopped participating.

I just thought God hated me.

Then someone mentioned the 9 year thing and I looked it up, mostly to feel something other than vertigo, and realized: Oh. Maybe this isn’t a random catastrophe. This is a timer going off, as scheduled.

Everything I was experiencing—the grief, the endings, the versions of myself fading away—wasn’t personal failure. It was structure. Architecture. The pattern doing what patterns do.

And that realization changed everything.

REALITY HAS RHYTHM AND WE’VE ALL FORGOTTEN HOW TO READ IT

Reality isn’t random. It’s organized. Maddeningly, persistently organized.

There isn’t just one universal cycle governing everything—that would be too clean. There are dozens of overlapping patterns, each using different numbers, each operating at different scales, all layered on top of each other like transparent maps.

The Tarot has 22 Major Arcana that maps the arc of human life, or of the alchemical process if that’s your thing. The fact that it describes both and could be viewed from either framework is kind of the point. The zodiac runs through 12 signs and houses. Numerology uses 9 for collective and personal cycles. Some Indigenous calendars tracked 13 moons. The I Ching works with 64 hexagrams. Kabbalah maps 10 sephirot on the Tree of Life.

And then there are the cycles of actual physical movement. The Earth doesn’t just spin—it wobbles. The axis shifts over roughly 26,000 years, moving backward through the zodiac signs in what’s called the precession of the equinoxes. We’re currently transitioning from the Age of Pisces (which lasted about 2,000 years) into the Age of Aquarius. It’s not just a song from Hair. It’s astronomy. The Earth physically moving through space in a pattern that takes millennia to complete. And you guessed it…we just ended one and started another.

Take it inward now. Your breath cycles every few seconds. Your circadian rhythm every 24 hours. The moon every 28 days. A menstrual cycle, the context for human life, mirrors the lunar cycle. Same four seasons every year. Saturn returns every 29. Generations roughly every 80. Civilizations rise and fall over centuries. And all the while, the Earth wobbles through the zodiac over the course of 26,000 years.

Different systems, different numbers, same underlying truth: reality is cyclical, not linear.

And we’ve been taught to ignore that.

THE MASCULINE LIE (AND LINE) OF PROGRESS

Western culture—particularly since the Enlightenment, industrialization, capitalism—runs on a very specific story: progress. Growth. Forward momentum. Up and to the right. More is better. Linearity as the ultimate virtue.

This is a masculine structure. Not masculine as in “men,” but masculine as in the energetic principle: hierarchical, goal-oriented, competitive, expansion-focused, control-driven. The logic of empires, corporations, quarterly earnings reports.

It’s the logic that says: growth should be constant, energy should be endless, rest is laziness, contraction is failure, cyclicality is weakness.

It’s also completely counter to how nature actually works.

Nature is cyclical. Feminine. (Again, not “female”—feminine as energetic principle: receptive, regenerative, seasonal, rhythmic, death-and-rebirth oriented.) Trees expand and contract. The moon waxes and wanes. Tides come in and go out. Animals hibernate. Plants go dormant. Everything in nature moves through phases.

Except humans, apparently. We’re supposed to be productive year-round, maintain peak energy indefinitely, grow without rest, expand without contraction, progress without cycles.

Which is insane. And also why everyone’s burnt out. Men and women alike.

The cultural obsession with linear progress isn’t just ineffective—it’s a cosmological misunderstanding. We’ve built an entire economic and social system on the premise that reality works one way (straight lines, endless growth) when it actually works another way (cycles, rhythms, seasons).

And we’re breaking ourselves trying to function inside that lie.

THE RETURN TO CYCLICAL THINKING IS PART OF THE PATTERN

The fact that people are suddenly interested in astrology, moon phases, communal living, divine feminine energies, seasonal alignment—that’s not random either.

That’s the pendulum swinging back.

For the past few hundred years, we’ve been deep in the masculine phase: domination, extraction, linearity, control. The logic of empire. And it’s not sustainable. It never is. Everything that expands eventually contracts. That’s natural law.

So we’re entering the contraction. The correction. The return to cyclical awareness as part of the cycle. This return itself follows the pattern. And that’s so meta.

Masculine and feminine energies cycle too. Not over years—over centuries, millennia. Matriarchal societies gave way to patriarchal ones. Goddess worship was replaced by monotheistic male deities. Lunar calendars were replaced by solar ones. Cyclical time became linear time.

And now it’s shifting again.

The return to astrology isn’t just Gen Z being quirky. It’s a collective remembering that time is cyclical, that we’re governed by planetary movements, that we’re not separate from nature even if we do inhabit cities and live and die by our iPhones.

The current interest in the divine feminine, mens and womens’ circles (feminine shapes groups in circle, masculine in hierarchy), in rest as resistance, in cyclical living—these are not just trends. It’s the pattern correcting. We went too far into the masculine, and the feminine is re-emerging.

Which, if you’re paying attention to the cycles, is exactly what should be happening. Not because one is better or right, but because it’s time.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEAN INTO THE PATTERN

Once you recognize that reality follows rhythms, you don’t get blindsided by things that are predictable. You may feel sadness or grief when things end or fail, but somehow it’s less painful when you know it’s all part of the grand plan.

That relationship that cycles between intense closeness and needing space? Maybe it’s not dysfunction or drama. Intimacy expands and contracts just like breath. If you try to hold it at constant peak intensity, someone suffocates. I find this breathing pattern reflected in just about everything.

Your creative work stalling after three months of manic productivity? Maybe not a useless block, but Fallow time instead. Your brain might be composting soil for seeds to be planted later, as part of the underground phase where nothing visible happens but the actual integration is occurring, so you don’t just keep producing the same recycled shit ad infinitum.

My energy often crashes completely even though I’m “doing everything right.” Seeing symptoms as temporary, and part of a natural waxing and waning has changed my state of being from reactive and spiraling to flowing with what is. Easier said than done, but easier done than the alternative. Learning that my nervous system is rhythmic instead of mechanical has been a game changer in my long and winding health “journey.” More on that later.

Even political movements hit maximum momentum and then splinter. This is simply the arc. Collective energy peaks, then wanes. It either integrates and evolves or collapses and something new grows in the rubble. I could go into the Hegelian dialectic but it’s a bit early for German idealist philosophy. We’ve only just met.

When you start noticing this it’s easier to stop taking things personally, or alternatively you realize they’re happening for you personally; either way you can see things in accordance with the phase you’re in. This is deeply comforting and clarifying when you’re the one in the phase.

THE POWER IS KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE

Knowing cycles exist doesn’t just help you predict what’s coming—though that’s useful. If something’s peaking, the turn is near. If contraction is starting, expansion eventually follows. But the real power is knowing where you are in the cycle right now so you can work with the energy of the cycle instead of against it.

If you’re in contraction—grief, loss, things falling apart, structures dissolving—you don’t try to force expansion. You don’t start three new projects to prove everything’s fine. You integrate. You process. You sit in the ash and let nature do its work.

If you recognize a relationship or institution is in decline, you don’t force loyalty as it sinks. You acknowledge what season it’s in and respond accordingly, and with confidence. This knowledge is the antidote to fear.

If you’re at peak energy, you use it. You don’t hoard it out of fear it won’t return. It will. That’s how cycles work. This is the antidote to scarcity.

At the end of the day, working with cycles gives you leverage. Fighting them is how you end up exhausted, resentful, and convinced you’re uniquely terrible at being human when actually you’re just expecting to have spring energy in the middle of an internal January.

YOU’RE NOT SEPARATE FROM THE PATTERN, YOU ARE THE PATTERN

Your body is doing what the moon does. Your energy cycles mirror the seasons. Your relationships move like breath. Your grief follows the same structure as civilizations rising and falling. You’re not a separate thing experiencing a chaotic universe, you’re part of the same lawful system as everything else.

The Hermetic philosophers referred to this pattern “as above, so below”—the principle of correspondence. What happens at one level reflects what happens at all the other levels.

Taoism mapped it as yin and yang. Expansion, contraction, repeat, at every scale from breath to cosmos.

Hindu cosmology said it plainly: the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm.

Indigenous traditions across continents recognized humans as part of nature’s cycles, even if we did invent agriculture and the internet.

Modern science continues to accidentally confirm repeating cycles and patterns in the natural world. Fibonacci sequences show up in nautilus shells, sunflower spirals, galaxies, even bone structure. Fractals repeat at every magnification. Atoms look like solar systems and those look like the cosmic web. Your neural network has the same structure as mycelial networks underground. Same patterns. Different scales.

Is it me, or is that REALLY FUCKIN COOL?

WHAT TO DO WITH IT

The skill isn’t memorizing all the cycles. It’s learning to read pattern itself, in real time.

Once you can do that, you can walk into any system and orient yourself.

Where am I in thIS cycle? Beginning? Peak? Contraction? Integration?

What phase is this relationship in? This job? This creative project? This institution? This culture?

Am I trying to force the wrong energy at the wrong time? Should I launch, chill, or keep digging? This recognition gives new meaning to phrases like “Timing is everything,” or “Time heals all wounds.”

This knowing leads me to ask myself if I’m resisting a necessary phase because I don’t like how it feels, or worse…how it looks. Contraction and decline get a bad rap but they’re usually where the learning happens.

The cycles don’t tell you what to do. But they tell you where you are. And once you know where you are, the right move becomes obvious.

You stop flailing when you start reading.

THIS IS WHY WE READ THE FIELD

Reality isn’t chaos. It’s structured. Lawful. It’s annoyingly consistent once you learn the structures.

The same patterns show up in breath, moon phases, planetary movement, numerology, astrology, tarot, economic cycles, generational shifts, the lifespan of empires, your menstrual cycle (if applicable), your creative output, your relationships, grief, and power dynamics.

Some of the languages are mystical—symbols, synchronicities, dreams, or even the ways reality communicates through metaphor.

Some are tactical—leverage, manipulation, how power actually moves, and what people do versus what they say.

Both follow laws like a type of grammar. Both can be read.

That’s what I’m noticing and sharing here. Not political statements, self-help or a better morning routine.

Once you start to see the patterns, you can read anything. Your own cycles. Other people’s patterns. Collective shifts. Systems you’ve never encountered before.

You can stop being surprised by predictable things or pathologizing natural phases. You stop thinking you’re uniquely bad at being human when you’re just a cyclical being in a culture that insists linearity is King.

This post is the foundation. The pattern underneath all the other patterns. Everything I write here ties back to this in one way or another.

Welcome to Read the Field.

— Zanna

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