I have Mars in Scorpio, and the older I get, the more I understand it as one of the engines underneath who I am.

Mars describes how we move. How we pursue. How we fight. How we protect ourselves. Mine sits at 15° Scorpio in my 7th house, and I think that explains a lot about the way I have moved through relationships, conflict, power, loyalty, betrayal, and the wild emotional terrain that exists between people.

My anger is rarely simple. It has a deep root system. It remembers and watches quietly until it understands exactly what happened, why it happened, and what it means. I am not usually interested in fighting just to fight. I want the truth underneath the fight. I want to know what created it, what fed it, what everyone involved is refusing to say out loud.

Scorpio Mars gives me endurance that can look almost unreasonable from the outside. Once I decide something matters, I can stay with it long after other people would have walked away. I do not scare easily when things become messy, taboo, uncomfortable, emotionally complicated, or intense. Sometimes I actually become clearer there.

It also means I do not do much halfway. I love deeply, protect fiercely and will investigate until the floorboards come up. If something feels wrong, I have a hard time accepting the surface explanation simply because it would be easier. My instinct is to keep digging until I find the mechanism underneath it.

Where did this come from? Who benefits? Who got hurt? What happened before the part everyone is talking about? What are we pretending we do not know?

That instinct can be one of my greatest strengths, and one of the places I have had to learn the most about myself. Because Scorpio Mars can hold on. To anger and hurt. To people and their never ending mysteries. Especially battles that stopped deserving my energy three chapters ago.

Lest we forget about my Mars in the 7th house, which means so much of this energy gets activated through other people. Relationships have rarely been background scenery in my life. They have been furnaces. Mirrors. Doorways. Occasionally trapdoors.👀

Other people have taught me enormous amounts about power, loyalty, manipulation, devotion, boundaries, control, and the difference between loving someone and surrendering yourself to them. I can meet a person and suddenly find myself examining an entire psychological ecosystem I did not know existed before they arrived.

And because Mars rules my Aries rising, this placement is not tucked away in some forgotten corner of my chart. It is driving the car.

There is something deeply Scorpio about the way I have had to become myself through destruction and reconstruction. I rarely seem to learn through neat little revelations. Life has preferred to drag me into the underworld, hand me a flashlight with questionable batteries, and tell me to figure it out.

So I do. And maybe that is why the image I keep coming back to is spelunking.

I think of myself as a lone caver moving through the emotional trenches of people, relationships, culture, politics, and society itself. I lower myself into places that have been abandoned because they are too dark, too complicated, too uncomfortable, or too painful to keep looking at.

I want to know what is down there.

I follow one emotional thread backward through a person, a family, a relationship, a belief system, a political moment, sometimes an entire culture, until I find the root buried underneath everything else.

Scorpio gets reduced so often to secrecy, sex, jealousy, revenge, darkness. All the spooky little keywords astrology has collected around it. But I think Scorpio’s deeper obsession is with what survives underground.

What has been buried.

What has been hidden.

What keeps growing underneath the surface long after everyone has agreed to stop talking about it.

My Mars wants to crawl down there and see it for itself.

Maybe that is why I am drawn toward subjects other people call too much. Death. Power. Politics. Trauma. Spirituality. Betrayal. Human behavior. The strange places where love and control touch each other. The systems underneath the systems. The emotional motives hiding underneath supposedly rational decisions.

Give me a locked door and my first instinct is usually, well, now I need to know why it is locked… (I would put money that Penny from Inspector Gadget was a Scorpio Mars.)

But there is danger in being good at going underground.

You can forget that surviving the cave does not mean you are supposed to live there.

I can keep digging because I am convinced there must be one more chamber. One more explanation. One more truth buried behind the truth I already found. I can hold onto anger because I have not finished studying it. I can keep trying to understand someone who has already shown me everything I actually needed to know.

That is where the lesson has become less about how deeply I can go and more about knowing when to call it.

Sometimes I go down into something difficult and come back with astrology. Sometimes politics. Sometimes a story. Sometimes a sentence that makes another person stop and say, holy shit, that is exactly what I have been feeling.

And I love that about myself.

I love that I can go into difficult places and come back carrying something with the roots still attached. But I am learning that I do not always have to. Sometimes there is no artifact to recover. No final answer waiting in the deepest chamber. No revelation worth another mile underground. Sometimes the thing I am supposed to bring back is me.

Just me…alive. Whole enough and climbing toward daylight with empty dirty hands.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Emotional Spelunker

Welcome to the Astro-Crypt.

This is a collection of short, fictional, politically charged dark stories written to make you think, squirm, laugh at the wrong moment, and maybe look at the known world sideways for the rest of the day. These stories tear through pop culture, politics, ego, and true monsters we keep pretending are just human men in expensive suits.

Every story is a work of fiction while every figure is distorted through metaphor, satire, spiritual chaos, and the funhouse mirror of astrology. The Astro-Crypt exists for the wild dark rides that cut familiar symbols down to the bone, metaphorically, of course.

All stories are written by Grey Galaxie.

Now, Crypt-Walkers…let’s play pretend for just a moment...

Chapter 1

The First Trillionaire

There was once a man with so much money the number stopped behaving like math and started acting like its own weather system. A billion had always been too small for him. It actually sounded cute to him now, provincial even, like a child showing up to a war council with a wooden sword. A few of his millions could buy a mansion. More still, his billions could secure a company…a judge’s silence…a stack of senators, hell even a little island with frightened staff. Just being in possession of a billion could get you a university wing named after your least believable virtue.

He had passed that level long ago… He had become the world’s first trillionaire, and even still, somehow, there was never enough to fill the room inside him. His void.

The money came in while everything else fell apart.

Rockets bloomed into expensive fire while his solar powered cars recalled themselves like appliances asking for mercy. Still, no matter his failure…the money came in. It poured through the mysterious dark plumbing of capitalism.

Every failed promise became a temporary dip…

…Every public embarrassment became a meme, then a fresh valuation.

The man grew richer with each humiliation, which gave the humiliation a special flavor. People could mock him, investigate him, call him a fraud in ten languages, and the number beside his name still climbed like a fever.

This was always his favorite proof that he was right…and also his worst wound.

Because while the money obeyed, people did not.

That was the great insult at the center of his life. Machines were easy. They did what they were told or they were replaced. Markets only needed a story with enough smoke around it. Politicians came cheaper than parts, if you knew where to press.

Love remained stubborn and true affection had no interface. Admiration, real admiration, refused to load for him. The world knew him, and in that knowing the spell was spoiled.

At first, they called him a genius, and the word entered him like permission. It made the cruelty easier to sell. It turned exhaustion into sacrifice and gave investors a little altar to kneel beside. Once a man gets called genius often enough, people stop asking whether the room is on fire. They start asking if the fire is part of the vision.

Then the laughter began to change. It lost its nervous little edge. People laughed at him openly now.

Teenagers clipped his speeches into little digital shrines of secondhand embarrassment. Scientists corrected him with the calm fatigue of adults explaining scissors to a baby monkey. Former admirers made documentaries with titles that sounded like obituaries for a cult. Ex-employees wrote books while ex-lovers gave quotes and became ‘sources familiar with the matter’.

He hated that phrase.

‘Sources familiar with the matter.’ It sounded like betrayal to him.

Late at night, alone in one of his glass houses, he searched his name and watched the world disappoint him again.

He read every insult while he told himself he was studying sentiment. Market psychology. Narrative pressure. Reputation vectors…

On the screen a panel of experts discussed whether his Mars timeline belonged to engineering, fantasy, or untreated spiritual hunger.

The phrase made him sit forward.

Untreated spiritual hunger.

He replayed it. Said it out loud, chewed it then spit it right out.

The expert had said it softly, almost kindly, which made it worse.

He paused the video on her face and stared.

“Fucking r*tard,” he said.

The room accepted the words and gave nothing back.

The house had learned his moods. The doors unlocked before he reached them. The temperature adjusted itself around his irritation. His bed tracked his pulse. His mirrors corrected his skin tone and lied to him while his refrigerator knew his habits and judged him with expensive silence.

Everything around him responded.

Nothing around him loved him.

That was why Mars mattered. Mars could hold the fantasy no human room could keep intact anymore. Red dust. Silent horizon. No late-night host. No comment section. No scientist with kind eyes calling his hunger untreated. Just a planet, a camera, and the version of himself he still believed the universe owed him.

He did not want to visit Mars, as ‘visiting’ was a tourist word.

He wanted to arrive… to discover… He wanted the scarlet planet in the background while Earth witnessed him become inevitable. He imagined the feed from the helmet camera. The curved barren horizon. His voice traveling across millions of miles…thin, heroic and impossible to interrupt.

He imagined saying something that would be carved into textbooks. He had tried out several lines. Most were terrible. He blamed the A.I. speechwriters…

Then the screen shifted. A new clip began autoplaying. A late-night host stood in front of a graphic of mars with a tiny crown on it. The audience laughed before the joke landed, which meant they had arrived hungry for his demise.

The host clasped his hands.

“Good news for Earth! The world’s first trillionaire still wants to leave the planet to go to Mars. Bad news for Mars, obviously.”

The audience roared. His face was still. Onscreen, the host continued.

“He says he wants to ‘save humanity’. Which is interesting, because humanity has been asking for him to pay TAXES for years.”

More laughter.

He slammed his laptop shut with so much force the hinges cracked. Across the room, the largest screen remained on. It showed a live view from the restricted laboratory beneath the house. The lab was dark except for the surgical ring. At the center of the room sat the chair.

Above it hung the prototype crown of BrainChain: a halo of silver filaments, neural needles, polished ports, and black cables looped upward into the ceiling like roots growing in reverse.

The official version had been designed for commercial therapeutic applications. The investors liked the sound of those words, while regulators softened around them. Hope was wonderful packaging. A future where the locked-in could speak, the paralyzed could move, the brain could reach outward and touch the machine.

That was the version for the cameras. The version beneath his house had a different appetite. This version was…acceleration. No lag between thought and command. No soft human delay between wanting and making the world comply.

The engineers had called it unsafe. He argued it was simply unfinished.

They had said the interface overheated under emotional stress and the test subjects showed seizure cascades, memory bleed, delusion loops, identity fragmentation, compulsive command repetition, and a dangerous collapse between intention and hallucination. He said it sounded like they were using lesser minds.

Not long after, the lead scientist had resigned. Then two more followed.

The remaining team developed the haunted look of people who had seen the future and found legal liability standing in the doorway.

He had moved the project underground after that.

Privately funded.

Privately staffed.

‘The cleanest miracles were always built in rooms without windows’, he thought as he smiled to himself in congratulations of being so insightful. He then stood and walked toward the private elevator and made a note to share that bit of wisdom on his socials later.

The house lights followed him.

His reflection moved along the glass walls beside him. His gait was erratic and slightly hunched, his hair wild and thinning, his face pale from screens and sleeplessness. He appeared to be running on roughly equal parts ketamine and contempt for human empathy.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. When he looked, another clip had gone viral.

This one showed him stumbling over a basic technical question during an interview, then burying the moment under a flood of jargon so thick even his loyalists looked tired. Someone had added circus music. The edit had twenty-eight million views.

He watched it once. Then again.

Then he opened the comments. That was his mistake, of course.

A man can survive the low animal ache of being disliked by millions of strangers…but the comments are where the soul goes to get jumped in a dark alley.

He read until his breathing changed.

“Fraud.”

“Clown.”

“Lucky wallet with a podcast addiction.”

“Biggest ‘welfare queen’ in the country.”

“A man who confused inheritance with intelligence.”

A reply beneath that one had thousands of likes. It said,

“He’s what happens when a midlife crisis gets government contracts.”

The phone creaked in his hand.

He whispered, “Oh…They’ll see.”

The elevator doors opened. As he stepped inside, cold air from below washed over his clammy skin and made him shiver. Combined with his usual drug cocktail, it sent his head spinning and another involuntary jerk through his body. He steadied himself by pressing his cheek to the cool smooth metal of the elevator wall.

The doors closed without a sound, and the house carried him downward through concrete, steel, money, secrecy, and the last soft membrane between thought and consequence.

And far away, past satellites, shareholder faith, failed jokes, bad interviews, and the small wet loneliness inside the richest man alive, Mars turned slowly in the dark.

Red, silent, and yet unpurchased.

Before we descend into Chapter Two…

If you are enjoying Tales from the Astro-Crypt, I would love for you to subscribe to and support ‘Grey’s Galaxy’, where this strange little crypt of fiction is going to keep opening.

This series is free to read, but every subscription helps keep the stories coming. It tells the algorithm there are people out here who want their satire darker, their fiction sharper, their billionaires more haunted, and their astrology covered in a little red dust.

The God of Mars is only beginning.

Subscribe now

Chapter Two

God of Mars

The elevator released him into the laboratory as more cold air moved across his face. The scent of hot metal hit him first. Then antiseptic followed by ozone. The combo is the faint burnt sweetness of machines that had been left awake too long.

The lab beneath the house had no windows, no clocks, or soft blue posters with hopeful patients smiling beside words like ‘possibility’. The public labs had those things. This room had black glass walls, white surgical light, steel cabinets, a long polished work surface, and the chair.

It sat at the center. White. Reclined. Immaculate. Above it hung the BrainChain crown, silver filaments suspended in a perfect halo. The ports along the inner rim gleamed liked patient metal mouths.

As he crossed the floor the dark surface beneath him caught the movement of his legs, and the surgical style lights. A pale slice of his face appeared momentarily when he passed the polished console. The room made duplicates without ever giving him a full mirror and he preferred that. To him reflection was useful when it obeyed distance.

“Wake private protocol,” he demanded.

With that command, the walls came alive. Screens opened in rows: neural maps, cortical load estimates, motor and language pathways. The computer display cut though with a warning.

“Override.” he slurred, back to the computer.

“Override.”

“Override.”

The final warning appeared in red.

He gave a short, irritated sigh.

That one had been added for auditors.

He remembered the meeting. Lawyers. Clinical advisors. The kind of people who believed a future worth building should arrive with signatures and supervision.

They wanted a hard stop. He gave them a hard stop. Then he gave himself the phrase that opened it. He leaned back slightly and spoke the phrase as clearly as a vow.

“God of Mars.”

The lab went still. The words seemed to remain in the air for half a second, large and ridiculous, dressed in armor they had tailored for themselves.

The central screen darkened.

A red line appeared at the bottom edge.

The warning folded away.

The chair reclined.

He removed his jacket and placed it over the back of a stool. His shirt clung slightly between his shoulder blades, sticky with sweat and anticipation. He smoothed the front once, then lowered himself into the chair.

The leather was cold. A band settled across his chest. Two restraints slid over his wrists. Two secured his ankles. All made of polished steel. A final support curved across his forehead as the main crown descended.

He watched it in the black console beside him: the real halo lowering from above, the reflected halo rising from below. For one second, it looked as if the room had decided to crown him twice.

The first filament touched his scalp follow quickly by the needls. His mouth opened and a sound left him before language could dress it.

Low. Rough. Wet at the edge. He swallowed hard.

“Interface contact confirmed,” he said through gritted teeth.

The system began counting.

Pain flashed white behind his eyes.

The crown tightened.

The lights stretched into pale vertical lines while the ceiling seemed to lift. Beside him the polished console bent his face into a long oval, his mouth slightly open in the glass.

He smelled rain.

There was no rain beneath the house.

He smelled it anyway. Rain on hot stone. Rain on metal. Rain striking dust after a long drought.

Then came nausea. It rolled through him fast. Sweat gathered under his collar. He hated nausea. Pain could be made noble. Exhaustion could be framed as sacrifice. Nausea had no dignity. Nausea turned every emperor into a damp animal negotiating with the floor.

“Vestibular mapping,” he spat, again through his teeth.

The screen answered.

Good, a category.

The first mercy of control.

The lab tilted.

His fingers curled against the restraints.

The dark floor beneath the chair caught the pale movement of his shoes. His heel jerked once, a small ugly knock against the footrest.

He frowned.

“Motor calibration.”

The house entered him. It came all at once.

Locks. Cameras. Doors. Elevators. Windows. Servers. Kitchen screens. Security gates. Vehicle bays. The pool under the night sky. The lying mirrors in the hallways. The silent refrigerators. The sensors hidden in walls. Every obedient object above him lifted its face toward his thought.

He thought of the east corridor.

The lights there brightened.

He thought of the private garage.

A line of vehicles unlocked in perfect sequence.

He thought of the pool.

The underwater lights turned red.

He laughed. The sound cracked halfway through and became a cough. Warmth moved over his upper lip. He tried to sniff it back, then tasted copper. A thin red line slid toward his mouth.

He stared at it in the refection of the cabinet to his left for one irritated second, then licked it away.

“Minor vascular response.”

The monitor showed no emergency.

The monitor understood priorities.

The crown hummed into his teeth.

His skull filled with pressure. His thoughts began arriving before he finished thinking them. Commands completed themselves. Systems opened before he summoned them. The lab started to feel slow because the world was still stuck traveling through sequence.

He wanted the chair released.

The restraints clicked open.

He had not spoken.

His eyes widened.

That was new.

That was beautiful.

He held his breath and looked toward the surgical tray on the side table.

Move. He commanded it with his mind.

The tray trembled.

A delicate instrument rolled half an inch across the metal surface, then stopped.

He stared.

Move.

The instrument rolled again. This time it slid to the edge and dropped. It never hit the floor. It hung there in the air, silver and still, the light from above reflecting off its frame. His heart began pounding with such force the edges of the room pulsed.

He lifted one finger and the instrument rose. He lowered the finger and it followed.

He closed his hand. It shot across the room and struck the black glass wall with a clean metallic tick. For several seconds, he did nothing.

Then he smiled…a mad bloody smile.

“I am doing it! I am actually fucking doing it!”

BrainChain had crossed the border.

His brain could command a machine. A machine could command a room. A room could command matter through fields, charges, microcurrents, pressure arrays, responsive surfaces, magnetized architecture, invisible instruments…he did not need to understand every mechanism in that moment.

He would understand it soon.

BrainChain was already bringing him the answer.

The Mars file opened without a spoken command.

The crimson planet filled the wall.

While he had seen Mars in every possible version available, tonight the image felt nearer. As if the poles shone like exposed bone.

A wave of dizziness passed through him. He closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, the planet remained, as if he had not closed his eyes at all.

That was annoying…but also… could be useful. He opened his eyes and began to work.

The first problem had always been that crews needed a ton of resources. That is the thing with humans…they need. Most importantly his genius was being weighed down by democracy in miniature. A one-man journey solved the mess.

He lifted both hands. Screens rearranged around him.

Launch windows…Radiation models…Fuel ratios…Autonomous repair systems… he began a whirlwind of multiple project fixes at once.

His new plan: a single-pilot capsule built around BrainChain command, with every major system wired to thought response and every live feed routed through his ocular stream.

Earth would watch through his eyes.

That was the miracle.

No camera crew. The entire species would look outward from inside his skull. The idea struck him with such force that he gagged. He turned his head and spat bitter saliva toward the side of the chair. Some of it landed on the glossy floor.

The reflection beneath him trembled.

For one second, the red smear of Mars on the wall seemed to ripple inside the black shine below, and a pale shape moved there, low and wrong.

He blinked.

The floor held only light.

“Perceptual artifact.”

Of course.

He kept working.

The system showed him materials he had dismissed months ago. A thermal problem folded open. A propulsion delay split into three smaller locks. A flawed guidance model revealed a hidden shortcut. Every failure had been a puzzle with human fingerprints smudged all over it.

He stripped the fingerprints away.

The route emerged.

A solo launch.

A neural capsule.

A direct feed.

A symbolic mission wrapped in enough scientific language to make investors cry and governments compete for proximity.

He would call it humanity’s bravest leap.

That sounded good.

He saved it.

His nose bled again.

This time it reached his upper lip before he noticed.

The room felt too…warm?

The chair felt too far away, although he was still in it.

Or standing.

He checked.

Standing.

He was standing beside the console, hands spread over the black glass, screens blazing around him.

He did not remember leaving the chair. That was fine.

Memory lag was expected…probably.

The console reflected his hands, Mars, the white lights above. In the dark glass near his right wrist, something pale appeared close to the floor.

A glitching reflection of a face.

Eyes wide. Mouth opening and closing…gasping like a sick fish.

Then the screen shifted, and the reflection dissolved into data points.

He exhaled slowly through his own mouth.

He called the communications suite with a thought. The house answered. Staff devices lit upstairs. Emergency media channels opened. Encrypted scheduling systems populated. A press conference invitation drafted itself across six platforms, twelve languages, and several time zones. He watched the announcement form.

He disliked the phrasing.

Too accounting-class.

He edited it with a thought.

Better.

Still soft.

He changed it again.

Closer.

A live network accepted the feed request. Then another. Then another.

Within minutes, every major screen in the world had received a notice that he would be making an announcement of planetary importance. Planetary.

He liked that word.

The room flashed white.

His knees weakened.

For one second, the lab disappeared.

he felt cold against his cheek.

A face in the reflection, twisted, wet, furious, afraid.

Then he was standing again.

The crown had lifted.

The chair was behind him.

He looked at the message.

His pulse hammered. His stomach rolled. Blood dried above his lip.

The world had gone thin at the edges, as though reality itself had become a screen with bad contrast. He smiled anyway. Gummy and bloody. This was the cost of invention.

He changed his shirt before the press conference.

Or perhaps the house changed it for him.

The detail escaped him.

By the time the cameras opened, he stood before a wall of blood red planetary imagery, pale but upright, eyes bright, mouth steady, the kind of man the world had mocked only hours before because the world has always enjoyed laughing at prophets before asking them for directions.

The assembled press, investors and heads of state watched him from screens. Scientists watched with the tense expressions of people realizing a locked door had been opened from the wrong side.

He let them wait.

The silence grew large.

Then he spoke.

“Tonight, humanity stops asking whether Mars is possible.”

The line was good.

He felt it land.

“For generations, our species has looked up and wondered who would be brave enough to cross the distance. Committees studied it. Governments delayed it. Critics mocked it. Cowards called patience wisdom. I call it fear.”

The comment feeds surged.

He could feel them now, thousands of reactions touching the edge of his mind like insects hitting the windshield of a fast moving vehicle

He continued.

“I will go alone.”

The room outside the room erupted.

He heard it through networks, through feeds, through microphones blooming alive across the planet.

Gasps.

Questions.

Objections.

Applause.

He raised one hand, and every open microphone dampened at once.

The reporters froze.

He smiled faintly.

“Through BrainChain, Earth will see what I see. Every step. Every breath. Every first horizon. No edited feed. No institutional delay. The human species will look through my eyes as we arrive.”

We.

He used the word deliberately.

People loved being included in someone else’s gamble..

“Some people are born to explain the limits,” he said. “Some are born to cross them.”

He allowed a question to break through from a journalist in London.

“Are you saying this mission has already been approved?” the reporter asked him.

He looked directly into the camera.

“I am saying I no longer need anyone’s approval.”

Stay Tuned for Chapters 3-4-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Astrological Alchemist

A small content note before we get into this because I am not going to talk around the subject: TW: this piece discusses eating disorders, anorexia culture, extreme thinness, body checking, dieting, and the ways those things were marketed to an entire generation of girls. I have my own history here. I know how quickly an image can stop being an image and become an instruction. I know what it feels like when something that nearly destroyed you comes wandering back into culture wearing better lighting and pretending you have never met before.

Unfortunately for it, I remember its face.

I am a product of the 1980s, which means I hit my teenage years right around 1994.

Oh, what a fucking time.

Grunge was exploding. Heroin chic was crawling out of the underground and onto billboards. Fashion photographers were apparently holding meetings where everyone agreed women looked hottest when they appeared to have survived three consecutive Victorian illnesses. The supermodels were tiny. The actresses were tiny. The girls in the magazines were tiny. Television characters were tiny and still somehow talking about the five pounds they desperately needed to lose before prom.

Everywhere I looked, grown adults were professionally concerned with whether teenage girls could make themselves smaller.

We body checked our tiny arms against magazine photos. We examined hip bones, collarbones, thighs, waists. We learned the nutritional information in a package of crackers before we understood compound interest. We absorbed the idea that hunger was evidence of discipline and that a woman’s body was always one minor renovation away from finally deserving approval.

Being thin was presented as something between a personality trait and a moral achievement.

And because I was a teenage girl in the 1990s, I was basically issued an eating disorder with my first tube of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.

Nobody had to sit me down and explain the rules.

Culture, movies, magazines & advertising did it.

The casual conversations women had around us did it. Mothers who had been taught to hate their own bodies accidentally handed pieces of that inheritance to their daughters. Friends compared calories while girls complimented weight loss without asking why the weight had disappeared. Adults commented on children’s bodies like we were livestock being evaluated before auction. (I guess now we know we were and are… to the Epstein class.)

Then the internet arrived and somehow made the whole thing worse.

Eventually there was Tumblr.

If you were there, you already know.

Suddenly “Ana” could become your best friend.

Anorexia had a nickname, an aesthetic, a community and a goddamn mood board.

You could spend hours scrolling through black-and-white photographs of waists shot at crooked angles, skeletal backs, hollow stomachs, thigh gaps and girls who looked like they might disappear if they turned sideways.

Three dimensional to two dimensional just like that… ‘SNAPS’

There were photographs of meals that were barely meals. Seven frozen grapes arranged like somebody’s last supper. Ice. Coffee. Half an apple. Diet soda. Gum. Pictures of food presented alongside measurements and punishment and congratulations.

The sickness could cheer you on.

That was the technological mutation.

Eating disorders had always existed, but social media allowed sick people to find one another instantly and build entire communities around keeping one another sick. The algorithm did not care whether something was helping you recover or teaching you how to disappear. Engagement was engagement.

And teenage girls became extraordinarily engaging.

For a while, though, the cultural weather changed.

By the late 2000s and into the 2010s, body positivity began gaining ground. Brands discovered there was money in selling self-love. Different bodies began appearing in advertising. Curves came back into fashion. Stretch marks were photographed. Plus-sized creators built huge audiences. Women started questioning why the hell we had spent decades allowing complete strangers to determine whether our stomachs were socially acceptable.

Was it perfect?

Of course not.

Body positivity became profitable, which meant corporations immediately sanded off the dangerous parts and sold it back to us in flattering underwear. “Love yourself” was welcomed into the marketplace so long as you remained attractive enough while doing it.

Still, something changed.

Girls were hearing another language.

Bodies could be soft and lovely.

Bodies could be large and beautiful.

Bodies could age and be stunning.

Bodies could have scars and rolls and cellulite and muscle and hair and strange little asymmetries because apparently human beings are mammals and not digitally rendered beverage advertisements.

There was breathing room. Because some of those girls/fems that had been programmed became the mothers/teachers who would not pass it on.

Then, about five years ago, I started hearing the old song again.

It was faint at first.

Certain bodies began disappearing from campaigns. Celebrities started getting smaller. The exaggerated curves that had dominated the previous decade sudddenly looked ‘unfashionable’. Faces became sharper. Collar bones returned. Fashion silhouettes narrowed. The language around bodies shifted again, except this time it arrived disguised as wellness, optimization, longevity, clean living and effortless discipline.

I remember turning to my mother and saying something that sounded dramatic even to me at the time.

“They are going to make being sick and thin and weak fashionable again. They are going to infantilize women…again.”

And here we fucking are.

I wrote about this last year because I could feel the cycle forming. I called what was emerging a new version of Heroin Chic, except this incarnation, Ozempic Chic, had been polished for the algorithm. The 1990s version looked sick. This version looks expensive. The old aesthetic had smeared eyeliner and cigarettes. The new one has twelve-step skincare, Pilates socks, perfect lighting and a wellness vocabulary.

Scarcity got a skincare routine.

The astrology fascinated me because the cultural shift was happening while Neptune moved through the final degrees of Pisces and toward Aries, while Pluto established itself in Aquarius. Neptune governs glamour, illusion, projection and the stories we collectively fall under. Pisces can dissolve boundaries until an ideal becomes difficult to distinguish from reality. Aries brings the focus directly toward the physical body, vitality, identity and survival. Pluto in Aquarius adds something the 1990s simply did not have at this scale: algorithmic power.

Check out the full article here on my main page:

Cosmic Chaos

Glamour in the Age of Hunger

Content Note and Personal Context…

Read more

9 months ago · 75 likes · 19 comments · Grey Galaxie

Systems do not require a single set of cartoon villains rubbing their hands together in a conference room to produce predictable results. Culture, advertising, economics, celebrity, fashion, technology and politics can reinforce one another because there is money and power in insecurity.

And a population constantly preoccupied with correcting itself has considerably less time to ask who benefits from keeping everyone exhausted, hungry, broke and ashamed.

That was the argument underneath the piece I wrote last year. Throughout history, economic insecurity and aesthetics have repeatedly tangled themselves together. Scarcity gets romanticized. Restraint becomes fashionable. Discipline becomes virtuous. The public is encouraged to see deprivation as evidence of character instead of asking why deprivation exists in the first place.

We have already lost decades of women/fem lives to this bullshit.

Think about how many collective hours women have spent standing sideways in mirrors. Think about the conversations that never happened because everybody at the table was discussing carbohydrates. Think about the money and about the brain space.Think about the brilliant women who spent portions of their adolescence convinced that the circumference of their thighs was an urgent personal emergency.

I was one of them. And perhaps that is why I feel something different this time. I am 42 years old now. I have lived long enough to watch the supposedly permanent beauty standard change its mind approximately seventeen times.

The body they told me was unacceptable in one decade becomes fashionable in another. Breasts become fashionable and then unfashionable. Asses become voluptuous and then disappear. Eyebrows are removed completely and then grown back like endangered wildlife. Faces are filled and then dissolved. Waists rise. Waists fall. Women spend thousands of dollars altering themselves only to discover ten years later that the industry has changed the assignment ...again.

At some point you have to realize the test is rigged. You were never supposed to finish. A permanently satisfied woman is terrible for several industries. So I have been thinking about what rebellion looks like now. And I think it might be extraordinarily simple…

Become dangerously authentic.

Become revolutionarily, perfectly, imperfectly yourself.

Stop apologizing for having a body and how it appears to others.

Stop filtering every photograph because a machine decided human skin was embarrassing.

Stop waiting to be thinner before buying THE dress, taking THE picture, going swimming, having sex, wearing THE tank top, starting THE project, dating, dancing, traveling or allowing yourself to fucking exist visibly.

Your body right now is your body. This living, changing, aging, occasionally weird & stinky meat suit has carried you through every single day you have survived.

Treat it accordingly. Feed it. Rest it. Strengthen it. Use it. Take care of it because you live there, not because somebody convinced you the property value is dropping. (It is not, BTW, we are aging like fine wines babes.)

I have absolutely no interest in wilting for anyone. I want strength & muscle. I want nourishment. I want enough energy to think clearly when somebody is lying to me. I want women who can carry groceries, lift children, help neighbors, survive emergencies, build things, organize communities and remain standing when the world gets strange.

I want old women with wild hair and strong opinions. I want middle-aged women taking up entire rooms. I want young women who know an advertisement is trying to sell them something before it can convince them there is something wrong with their bodies. I want boys who are not being swallowed by impossible fitness culture. I want queer kids and trans kids and disabled kids and fat kids and skinny kids to understand that their humanity was never supposed to be a beauty contest in the first place.

Our children are growing up inside an algorithmic machine capable of identifying their insecurities faster than any advertising executive in 1994 could have dreamed. The machine watches what makes them pause. Then it feeds them more. That means our responsibility has changed. We have to teach media literacy alongside body autonomy. We have to tell children what advertising is doing while it is doing it. We have to stop talking about our own bodies like enemies in front of them. We have to stop complimenting weight loss automatically. We have to make food morally boring again. Cake does not have a criminal record. A potato has never betrayed the republic.

We can teach nourishment without creating fear. We can teach movement without teaching punishment. We can teach health while remembering that health exists across an enormous spectrum of bodies and circumstances. Most importantly, we can refuse to hand another generation the shame that was handed to us.

So no, I am not going through this shit again.I am not spending my forties trying to recreate the body I had when I was starving in my teens.I will not be allowing a celebrity transformation, fashion cycle, pharmaceutical trend or algorithm to convince me that disappearing is aspirational. And I am certainly not standing quietly while the same machine comes sniffing around our children.

You are already the real thing. That is what all these industries keep trying to imitate. A real human being is strange, inconsistent, textured, aging, hormonal, scarred, soft in places, hard in others, occasionally magnificent and occasionally wearing yesterday’s mascara while eating shredded cheese directly over the kitchen sink at 11:47 p.m.

That is life. That is the special sauce. The filtered version is the counterfeit.

Maybe the most revolutionary thing we can do during an era obsessed with artificial perfection is become increasingly difficult to manufacture.Authenticity cannot be mass produced very well.Neither can community. Neither can the particular sound of your laugh, the shape of your hands, the weird stories your family tells, the recipe somebody’s grandmother taught you, the way your face changes when you are genuinely delighted, or the hundred tiny things that make you recognizable to the people who love you.

Those things have no trend cycle.

I think that is where I am planting my flag now. I want to become so deeply myself that shame has nowhere convenient to attach. I choose to nourish myself because I have work to do. I will become strong because the future looks like it may require strong people. I do to protect children because adults failed spectacularly at protecting many of us. And I want every person reading this to know that you do not have to audition for the right to exist in your own body.

They can change the silhouette. They can change the algorithm.

They can bring back the low-rise jeans, although I personally believe some crimes should remain under international investigation.

I still do not have to participate…and neither do you.

We have already spent enough years trying to disappear. This time, I would like to see what happens when we stay.

Because if the culture is preparing another generation to shrink, then our job is to teach them how glorious it feels to take up their full, complicated, beautifully imperfect amount of space.

And I intend to lead by example.

Stay Stellar,

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & 1990’s Veteran

Cosmic Chaos

Glamour in the Age of Hunger

Content Note and Personal Context…

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9 months ago · 75 likes · 19 comments · Grey Galaxie

I keep thinking one good night of sleep will fix me.

Then I wake up and remember that being alive now requires seventeen passwords, four monthly subscriptions, two-factor authentication, a working knowledge of insurance terminology, and the patience of a saint trapped inside a customer-service chatbot.

This bone deep fatigue comes from more than a lack of sleep.

It comes from spending every day inside systems that have been made deliberately difficult, then watching those systems blame us for struggling to navigate them. Every ordinary task now arrives wrapped in paperwork, apps, fees, logins, automated menus, and vague warnings that something important will be canceled unless we act before midnight.

Parking requires an app. Seeing a doctor requires a portal. Buying groceries requires a loyalty account if you would like the price food used to cost. Watching one television show requires a forensic investigation into which streaming service currently owns it. The printer needs an internet connection because apparently ink has entered the surveillance industry.

I would like to push a button and have the button perform its one assigned duty.

This should not qualify as revolutionary politics, yet here we are.

Everything has been fed into the subscription machine. Music, movies, software, storage, security cameras, heated car seats, grocery delivery, exercise equipment. Companies sell us objects and then charge rent for their continued cooperation. We no longer own things. We maintain a series of financially demanding acquaintances.

My bank statement reads like I am supporting several tiny corporations through college.

Capitalism has squeezed every useful thing until there is barely a thing left. Once the original value is gone, someone in a glass conference room announces a premium tier. The basic version becomes intentionally irritating. The functional version costs another $9.99 a month. Canceling requires a pilgrimage through six menus and a final emotional interrogation…

Are you sure you want to leave?

Yes, BRAD. I came here with purpose.

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Meanwhile, convenience keeps creating more work. A company removes the cashier, hands the customer a scanner, raises the price, and calls the experience innovative. We perform unpaid labor everywhere we go. We check out our groceries, bag them, troubleshoot the machine, download the coupon, scan the receipt, and wait for an employee to confirm we are old enough to purchase cough medicine.

Then the screen asks whether we would like to leave a tip.

For whom, exactly? The ghost of labor past?

Somewhere along the way, basic participation in society became a part-time administrative job. Every week brings a form, renewal, price increase, update, policy change, or cheerful email announcing an exciting improvement that will somehow cost me more and offer less.

We are supposed to manage all of this while working, caregiving, cooking, cleaning, raising children, helping aging parents, maintaining relationships, answering messages, exercising, sleeping eight hours, and drinking enough water to become a decorative fountain.

Any failure is treated as evidence that we lack discipline.

Buy a planner. Build a routine. Wake up earlier. Meal prep on Sunday. Practice gratitude. Organize your inbox. Create a budget.

I know how arithmetic works.

The numbers simply hate me.

The assistance cliff forces people to perform economic acrobatics while exhausted. A small raise can cost a family food benefits, medical coverage, childcare support, or housing assistance worth far more than the increase. Success becomes another trapdoor. You work harder, receive a slightly larger paycheck, and discover that the reward is losing the fragile support keeping your family upright.

Then someone who bought a house for the price of a modern security deposit tells you to stop ordering coffee.

I am also worn down by the moral contradictions.

As children, we were taught that empathy made us good people. Share your toys. Include the lonely kid. Help anyone who gets hurt. Stand up to bullies. Care about the world. Every cartoon ended with a lesson about friendship, cooperation, or saving the planet through the combined force of teamwork and highly marketable accessories.

Adulthood delivered a different curriculum.

Protect what is yours. Keep moving. Do not get involved. Poverty reflects poor choices. Illness is unfortunate, although treatment must remain profitable. Homeless people are discussed as visual clutter. Hungry families become statistics that can be reduced by changing the definition of hunger.

We were raised on the idea that every human life has value, then placed inside an economy that calculates exactly how much suffering someone may endure before helping them becomes too expensive.

The conflict gnaws at me.

A person sleeps beneath an overpass while thousands of people pass above them, each privately terrified that one catastrophe could send them down there too. We avoid looking because recognition is dangerous. That person is somebody’s child. They may be somebody’s parent, sibling, grandparent, former coworker, class clown, first love, favorite aunt, neighborhood mechanic, or friend who once answered the phone at three in the morning.

They had a life before the sidewalk.

There were ordinary mornings. A favorite meal. A drawer full of mismatched socks. A place where their toothbrush lived. Plans for next month.

Then came the bad day.

Maybe it was an eviction, medical crisis, abusive relationship, job loss, untreated illness, addiction, death, divorce, or several disasters arriving together like they had formed a group chat.

Most of us are sprinting from our own version of that day.

The distance between stability and collapse is much shorter than polite society admits. One serious diagnosis can erase savings. One landlord can raise the rent beyond reach. One employer can remove health insurance with a meeting invite titled “Organizational Update.” One broken transmission can destroy a job, which destroys income, which destroys housing.

We pretend personal virtue builds an invisible shield against catastrophe.

It does not.

Hardworking people become homeless. Responsible people become sick. Careful people experience emergencies. Human life contains risk that no vision board can negotiate away.

Blaming people who fell through the floor allows everyone else to believe the floor is solid.

It also keeps us from asking why housing has become an investment vehicle, why wages remain detached from the cost of living, why medical debt exists, or why billionaires receive tax incentives while disabled people must repeatedly prove they remain disabled.

That last part is especially exhausting.

Society tells disabled people to embrace authenticity. Own your story. Ask for accommodations. Celebrate the body you have. Speak openly about your needs.

The applause lasts until those needs inconvenience someone.

A disability becomes less inspirational when it affects attendance, communication, energy, memory, food, movement, productivity, or the ability to smile through pain. Everyone enjoys a brave story with a clean ending. They become uncomfortable when the condition remains present on Tuesday.

Authenticity is welcome as branding.

Reality needs to submit a request in advance.

I am expected to accept myself while monitoring every bite, expression, sentence, choice, tone, reaction, and limitation. Love your body, although apparently it must remain within an approved range. Be honest, provided your honesty is pleasant. Ask for help, then prove you deserve it without appearing too capable or too impaired. Advocate for yourself calmly while somebody explains why your accommodation would create an administrative burden.

The rules contradict one another until existing feels like failing an exam nobody remembers assigning.

That pressure does something to a person.

It makes rest feel irresponsible. It turns pleasure into a reward that must be earned. You begin treating your body like an employee with disappointing quarterly numbers. Even moments of quiet become opportunities to review unfinished tasks.

Self-care gets folded into the same machinery.

Now rest needs equipment, tracking, content, and a subscription. A walk becomes a step goal. Sleep becomes a score. Meditation becomes a streak. A hobby becomes a side hustle. Someone will eventually ask whether the thing that makes you happy could be monetized.

Apparently joy must report earnings.

A bath can feel good. Journaling may help. Deep breathing has its place. None of these can repair an economy designed to extract more than human beings can sustainably give.

My nervous system is not confused about the conditions.

It has reviewed the evidence.

The cost of living keeps rising. The safety net has holes large enough to lose a family through. Every institution appears to have an automated menu designed by a minor demon. We are accessible at all times and supported almost never.

Of course people are exhausted.

Of course we are irritable, distracted, anxious, numb, forgetful, and hiding in the bathroom for ten minutes because it is the only room with a lock.

There may be nothing spiritually defective about you. Your body could be responding honestly to an unbearable pace.

That honesty deserves room.

You can admit that this is too much without immediately converting the admission into a recovery plan. You do not have to transform every collapse into a lesson. Some days hurt. Some seasons ask more than we possess. There are moments when the healthiest available response is putting your phone facedown and refusing to participate for an afternoon.

Leave the dishes where they are.

Let the message wait.

Eat whatever requires the fewest decisions.

Sit outside. Put your face toward the sun. Press your toes into the dirt. Feel the planet holding you without asking for an account number.

The world may call this laziness because exhausted people are easier to control when they feel guilty about resting. Fatigue keeps us isolated and reactive. It drains the energy required to organize, create, help one another, question authority, attend meetings, build alternatives, or imagine a life beyond constant survival.

Rest returns a small piece of us to ourselves.

Once a person has enough breath to look around, the absurdity becomes difficult to ignore. Basic needs have been turned into markets. Human vulnerability has been turned into revenue. Every crisis contains a sales opportunity for someone standing safely outside it.

That realization carries anger.

Good.

Anger has energy inside it. It notices where the boundaries were crossed. It recognizes exploitation before politeness can explain it away. Anger can become a door, especially when tired people start comparing notes and discover their private failures have matching logos.

We were never struggling alone.

The machine simply handed each of us an individual invoice.

I do not want to become less empathetic so this world feels easier to tolerate. I want empathy to regain its proper place as a survival skill. We need one another. Every person will require care eventually. Bodies age. Jobs end. Families change. Illness arrives. Grief rearranges the furniture without asking permission.

Dependence is part of being human.

A decent society would plan for that.

It would make room for weakness, recovery, disability, caregiving, children, elders, emergencies, and bad days. It would understand that housing, food, medicine, and rest form the foundation of human dignity.

Until that world exists, we can begin by refusing the shame.

Your exhaustion makes perfect sense.

You have been carrying the weight of systems that keep adding bricks and selling lighter backpacks.

Put something down.

The revolution can wait while you sit in the grass.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Tired Bitch

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Somewhere along the winding road of becoming a ‘responsible adult’, many of us started treating the feeling of delight like an embarrassing flaw in our personalities. Very early in our conscious existence, we learned to soften our innate excitement before anyone could mock us for it. Some of us stopped pointing out unusual birds over head. Some just ignore the splendor of a moon hanging so low it looks like a giant spotlight in the sky. Other times we get to witness a dog in rain boots and have the audacity to continue walking as though the universe had not gifted us with a tiny miracle in our path.

I would like to reverse this fucking terrible decision…

The world is already absurd. Billionaires are building bunkers while ordinary people compare the rising cost of food. Have you noticed that every single appliance need an app? We are living through a period of history that feels like who ever is in charge spilled their drink on the control panel, and our cultural response has been to become increasingly serious…while scrolling ourselves into what I call a ‘spiritual rigor mortis.’

I REFUSE!

It is my desire to be the kind of person who can find temporary restoration in a perfectly shaped cloud. I want to be halted in a grocery parking lot by the sight of a most theatrical sunset. I want to hear someone exclaim that ‘There is a frog outside!’, while I respond with the appropriate level of frantic urgency it calls for.

The frog has ARRIVED people! Clear my schedule.

Being easily delighted does not in any way require a perfectly curated, beautiful life. Delight is actually quite small, inconvenient and wildly unprofessional. It can interrupt the argument you were rehearsing in the shower. You may find it in the cactus that grew up inside the center of the one way street sign.

@jaycee_charlesJust AZ thingsss🌵#fypシ #foryou #fylpシviral🖤tiktok #arizona

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Maybe you found it in the stranger’s laugh that is so ridiculous you have to laugh too. Delight can pierce grief, rage, exhaustion and the sudden realization we are all having: that society has been placed into the hands of people who can and will fail this group project.

Come to think of it, we have been programmed to respect happiness only once it becomes expensive enough to be exclusive. Joy over a vacation…acceptable👍🏼. You can photograph a luxury purchase and share that delight for status and likes. Getting extremely excited because your toast came out the perfect shade of brown appears unserious, which is EXACTLY why I trust it. We need to allow delight to appear whether the world believes we deserve it or not. It is not for them anyway, it is yours. YOUR DELIGHT.

Oh, I know…! Capitalism hates emotion it cannot paywall. So naturally, it attempts to sell it back us. That vanilla creme candle on your desk. The Seasonal drink. Maybe you even subscribe to the monthly box of objects, chosen by an algorithm that watched you once pause on a video about cottagecore. Listen, I 100% support the occasional ‘little treat’. Some of my worst weeks are held together by iced coffee and spite, and I respect the structural integrity of both. Still, delight existed FAR BEFORE the promotional codes.

Millennials have understood this little-treat economy long before it donned its name. We all came of age beneath a ‘promise’ that was already rotting at its core. They said ‘Work hard, buy a home, build a stable career that fulfills you, save for retirement and raise your family ‘ within some previously recognizable version of security. All while wages stall, student debt follows us all into our middle age and housing prices spiked to unattainable heights. Every ‘once in a life time’ disaster felt like it arrived with the frequency of a stead tide bashing the shore line. (It is us….we are the shoreline.)

For most of us, a five-million-dollar home was NEVER on the table. Even the idea that we could rise above the cost of living to afford a house with at the bare minimum, functioning plumbing, feels more like fantasy literature. We have all watched the adulthood our grandparents described move farther and farther away while we are actively chasing it. Plenty of us eventually stopped organizing every single thing in our lives around a future reward that looks more and more like it may never arrive.

So, we bought the little treat…

We purchased out ice coffees in the cool novelty cups. Adopted the house plants with unreasonable names and that tiny little ghost figure that lives on your bookshelf all year round. (It’s me I have the ghost figure. 😜) We filled our rented homes with string lights, thrifted art, our favorite crystals, banned books and furniture from Ikea assembled with the wrong screwdriver. All this because permanence is currently sold out and our rooms deserve some personality.

Society mocks millennials for this CONSTANTLY! The right blamed avocado toast for the housing crisis as though us young folks skipping brunch could have somehow manifested a down payment in an economy where a starter home costs the entire GDP of a small island. Eyes are rolled at adults who collect toys or visit theme parks. They judge off the playful clothes or how we can become emotionally invested in seasonal beverages. No matter how you look at it, the criticism always carries the same sour assumption:

Adulthood should make you harder, quieter and much easier to disappoint.

Not to take away from the unbelievable generational trauma every American deals with…but millennials have really had a shit hand. We have endured recession, war, political instability, a pandemic, non stop climate anxiety, layoffs, unaffordable housing, skinny jeans, and enough horrendous historic events to exhaust several historians. Somewhere, somehow, between one catastrophe to the other, we became unusually good at finding reasons to just enjoy a Tuesday. We ushered in meme culture while whole institutions collapsed before our eyes. We turned a gift of grocery store flowers into an occasion and realized that joy could no longer remain locked behind the fantasy of our ‘someday.’

I have a sneaking suspicion that this continued access to whimsy is one of the very reasons people remain so damn irritated with millennials. Whimsy suggests the ‘powers that be’ have failed to consume the whole of their soul. A grown adult collecting Care Bears has retained some territory the market cannot fully claim. Imagine how mad the ruling class would be if they knew how you dance in your kitchen even when the world is falling apart around you. That shows the machine you are still alive inside this disaster.

The fall back is when the little treat becomes another purchase used to numb and sooth our lives that desperately need structural change. A candle is not going to fix housing policy as a whole but I can make the space you live in smell less like what your neighbor used to smoke. A treat offers us a pause, but our deeper relationships with each other offer something far more important.

A mansion cannot manufacture THAT kind of spiritual safety. Expensive furniture is not and will never be able to replace the companionship of someone who knows which version of your laugh means you are about to lose control completely. Your ‘status’ loses importance when you are blessed with a friend who has snacks and has taken the time to remember the ENTIRE mythology of your worst ex.

Since youth we have been programmed to measure our personal wealth through property, savings and luxury. It all became a visual proof of our obedience to the game of capitalism. Yet, somehow, many people who live inside the beautiful homes are profoundly lonely. Meanwhile, here I am sitting on my kitchen floor in my rented home eating grocery store pie beside my beloved husband laughing until the original problem we were facing completely loses jurisdiction.

That is RICH too…

There is so much wealth in knowing which friend will sit beside you when you cry and which one (the Scorpio no doubt) will come with two shovels, a ‘cardio’ playlist and their location turned off.

I would rather have a circle of people who I can be entirely authentic with than spend my life performing ‘success’ for fucking strangers. I want to laugh too loudly around an old beat up kitchen table, in a small cozy home rather than taking my coffee in a beige kitchen large enough to have a second smaller beige kitchen.

Looking at it that way, maybe us millennials did not ‘fail to grow up’ correctly. Maybe we learned to build a life that is meaningful with the materials available to us. We live in liminal spaces we make our own, formed found families through mutual aid, community and friendship. Most importantly we refused to wait for the world to become stable BEFORE giving ourselves permission to delight in life. I think that mindset is worth adopting across all generations. Keep that little treat if your budget allows. PROTECT YOUR WHIMSY! Build remarkable friendships that exist comfortably through and in stillness. Stop postponing delight till you have reached stupid capitalistic economic milestones… we are just now figuring are designed to keep moving farther and farther away.

Objects with no real life ‘meaningful purpose’ may actually be caring more of our civilizations than we ever realize. Think of it: sun catchers, novelty lamps, decorative mushrooms. You know, tchotchkes. Frequently dismissed as clutter by people who have homes that honestly resemble the waiting room for an expensive dentist. No thank you. A ridiculous lampshade can and will change the morale of a room. This is actual science to me.

Many humans have become afraid of showing enthusiasm, as that is the very thing that opens you up to reveal your tender sides. Openly adoring something creates an opportunity for others to sneer and judge you. To shame you. Cynicism offers us protection. The armor of indifference works while also blocking out the sunlight that ignites our souls.

Caring carries risk. It is important to remember that your personal delight does not require a jury’s approval. You are allowed to enjoy garden gnomes even if the person across the street from you has no discernible whimsical infrastructure. Children have always understood this instinctively. Always finding the closest cool rock and then they act like they found actual treasure, because they did…to them. Out here building an entire afternoon around a cardboard box. Every single object remains a possible portal utill the time comes for someone to teach them to hurry up.

If you think about it, adults hurry past almost all of their own lives.

We look at the phone while drinking the iced coffee we were dying for at dawn. Snapping a picture of our food before we eat, or worse, attending an event and thinking only about how it will look later on social media. Even joy feels unfinished when it is filtered, captioned posted and offered up to the algorithm for its judgment. Some moments deserve to remain undocumented and unshared. They can exist momentarily in your mind and then disappear before becoming content.

Reclaiming delight is also accepting that we may enjoy things…badly. You can paint ugly flowers and sing with the confidence of a person who never met the correct note and simply does not care. Hobbies lose oxygen when we demand excellence from them. Besides, I miss doing things just because they made an afternoon more interesting. I believe there is a certain type of freedom to becoming mediocre at something with enthusiasm.

There is also a tenderness in reveling in delight at the end of a hard time. Grief can make joy feel disloyal. Like a giggle in a funeral. Then living in survival mode narrows our field of vision until we only see what we must to continue to survive. Bills, appointments, threats, responsibilities. Your nervous system keeps watch while the small lovely things keep quietly passing you by.

We have enough reasons to become numb. The supply chain for despair appears fully operational.

Delight asks us to remain porous anyway. It invites the ridiculous, beautiful and strangely shaped pieces of the world to reach us before cynicism performs a security check.

The world is already absurd. We may as well fall in love with some of it.

What makes you feel rich when money is removed from the measurement?

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Delighted Millennial

One may assume it is just het-straight women that have been increasing reading about shadow kings, dragon riders, cursed princes, immortal assassins, forbidden magic and devastatingly beautiful creatures who would tear open the fabric of the universe before ever sending a text that says “you up?” Honestly the audience reaches far beyond straight women dreaming about fictional men. Queer women, nonbinary readers, bissexual readers, trans readers and plenty of people whose desires refuse to fit neatly into a marketing category are finding something inside these stories that the modern dating world has become remarkably bad at providing.

True romance requires more than access to another person. It needs tension, curiosity, attention, risk and enough unstructured time for two people to slowly discover who they are around each other. Think slow burn, enemies to lovers time movement. Our current social landscape works against nearly every part of that process. Physical gathering places keep disappearing or becoming too expensive to visit casually. Bookstores close. Small music venues disappear. Community groups move online. Cafes expect customers to order, drink and leave. Bars cost half a utility bill. Public spaces are treated as suspicious unless someone is purchasing something. Work schedules are chaotic, people are exhausted, and lingering anywhere without a commercial purpose has become an act of minor rebellion. The death of second spies has become the death of real life romance.

There are fewer places where people can exist near each other long enough for attraction to develop naturally. We rarely get to notice how someone treats the server, whether they make everyone at the table feel included or how their face lights up when they speak on something they love. As a whole, we have fewer opportunities to witness someone being kind when there is no romantic reward attached. That kind of information used to arrive through proximity, community and repetition. Over time attraction happens naturally. Now we receive six photographs, four stupid prompts, a list of favorite television shows and a declaration that someone is fluent in sarcasm and got a ‘big fish’ last weekend with the boys.

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Dating profiles ask people to compress an entire personality into a handful of flattering images and sentences engineered to attract attention. (Do not even get me started on when their profile picture is a GROUP SHOT?!) Social media allows us to build versions of ourselves with careful curated angles, edited histories and excellent taste in reposted passive aggressive swipes at the ex. People learn which identities receive approval and begin shaping themselves accordingly. Honestly though, some truly are simply nervous and trying their best while others become experts at presenting exactly what their intended target wants to see.

Predatory people thrive in environments where performance carries more weight than observable behavior. (Like the presidency…) They can read the language of emotional safety without ever even practicing it themselves. Calling themselves feminists, spiritually grounded, trauma-informed, politically conscious, monogamous, polyamorous or devoted to personal growth while quoting memorized vocabulary and remaining completely untouched by its meaning. The profile says they value communication but their communication style turns out to be disappearing for four days, returning with a meme and behaving as though your in the wring for the ghosting.

Honestly, this exact dynamic appears across every kind of dating. Queer relationships are fully capable of producing manipulation, emotional avoidance, power games and people who use progressive language as decorative camouflage. Sometimes the person ruining your nervous system has excellent eyeliner and a copy of The Body Keeps the Score visible behind them during video calls. Removing heterosexuality does not automatically remove bad behavior. Humanity contains multitudes, and several thousand of those multitudes need serious therapy before downloading another dating app. ( Or jail….jail works too🤷🏻‍♀️)

When the relationship finally enters the physical world, the curated identity begins to crack. It is too hard to hold it all together. The emotionally intelligent person from the profile you swiped on cannot and will not tolerate a boundary. Yikes! Or the self-described empath you matched with shows no actual curiosity about your feelings. You slowly realize that the person sitting across from you has the emotional maturity of a snail, although the snail has the decency to carry its own baggage around on HIS own back.

Plenty of people have reached the point where this arrangement sounds far less appealing than spending $4.99 on an e-book about a terrifying immortal who falls first, falls harder, pines for three hundred pages, makes one catastrophic mistake and then grovels with the commitment of a man who understands there will be no sequel unless he gets his act together.

Please and thank you.

And believe me, the grovel matters! It provides evidence that the rupture registered. The character understands that harm occurred, experience consequences and they change their behavior. (😳)There is no announcing that apologies are difficult because their

‘fAmIlY nEvEr TaLkEd AbOuT fEeLiNgS’

and then expect the heroine to award them partial credit for self-awareness. The fantasy allows repair to carry weight. Love cannot survive through vague promises and a temporary improvement that lasts until everyone stops being angry.

Romantasy also gives desire room to become…enormous. Attraction is granted permission to change the story. Longing influences decisions while burgeoning love rearranges loyalties, destabilizes kingdoms and forces characters to confront the parts of themselves they spent centuries avoiding. (Le, swoon.) That intensity can look ridiculous beside ordinary life, where half the dating pool behaves as though replying within twenty-four hours would compromise their negotiating position. It makes looking for a partner feel like your holding your sexual concent hostage FROM THEM and they have very specific ways to trick you out of it. Ghost her till she chases you….never text too early or you look weak and needy. Be an ALPHA…..🤮

These stories also provide something that has become difficult to find in algorithmic dating…sustained attention. The books love interest notices details and actually remember conversations. They understand that the protagonist has an interior life containing ambition, grief, rage, history and desire AND their attraction develops through said observation. Even when the characters begin as enemies, they are paying attention to each other with an intensity that most dating apps cannot manufacture, and most men are incapable of mustering.

That attention is deeply erotic because many femme-presenting people have spent THEIR LIVES being looked at without feeling seen. There is an enormous difference between being found attractive and being truly understood. One involves the surface. The other requires effort, patience and the dangerous possibility of genuine intimacy. 😉

The fantasy is rarely about finding a flawless partner. Romantasy love interests are frequently damaged, morally grey, questionable and carrying enough unresolved trauma to keep an entire graduate psychology program employed. Readers are perfectly capable of handling flaws. They want those flaws to exist inside a character who can learn, choose differently and take responsibility when their damage spills onto somebody else. ( My first crush was Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre-Dame …)

A dark past can be compelling…but refusal to grow becomes exhausting by chapter three.

Critics often treat romantasy readers as people with unrealistic expectations who have become ‘too immersed in fictional relationships’ to appreciate ordinary human connection. This criticism gives modern dating culture way, way more credit than it has earned. Most of us a re MORE THAN AWARE that a real partner will not command a dragon army, communicate telepathically or destroy an enemy kingdom before breakfast. (Pouts) However…the emotionally intelligent parts remain entirely fucking possible for these men. Remembering a birthday requires ZERO hard or soft magic system rules. Apologizing without manipulation does not demand a blood oath. Mutual effort should be achievable without locating an ancient sword.

The popularity of these books reveals a growing disconnect between what people crave and what contemporary dating consistently under-delivers. People want community, chemistry and time to know one another beyond a static profile. They want partners who arrive as adults rather than renovation projects with excellent hair. They want desire that contains curiosity. They want relationships where emotional labor moves in both directions.

Instead, the world keeps handing them screens, subscriptions, curated identities and people who learned the correct language without developing the corresponding humanity.

So yes, plenty of femme-presenting people would rather pick up an e-reader and spend $4.99 watching someone fall first, fall harder, pine, grovel and earn the love they nearly lost. Reality has offered them enough ambiguous situationships, strategic silence and grown adults who need to be walked through empathy using visual aids.

The publishing industry calls romantasy an escape. Personally. I think it may be closer to a consumer complaint written in dragons, daggers and extremely detailed descriptions of muscular forearms.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Romantacy Connoisseur

There is a version of you that many people have already agreed upon.

She is helpful. She is accessible. She knows when to swallow the sentence forming behind her teeth. She can absorb an insult, manage the emotional temperature of a room, solve a crisis she did not create, and still remember who needs a birthday card next week. People describe her as strong because the word keeps them from having to ask how much weight they have placed in her arms.

She has become so skilled at carrying everyone that her exhaustion looks like a personality.

This version of you may be loved. She may also be useful in ways that have very little to do with love. Her reliability keeps families moving, workplaces functioning, friendships intact, and partners protected from the consequences of their own inattention. She is praised whenever she makes herself easy to need.

Then something inside her begins to shift.

Sometimes the change arrives through grief. Sometimes illness tears open the calendar and reveals how little of her time has ever belonged to her. Other times she reaches an age she once considered impossibly far away and realizes that her future has quietly become her present. A relationship ends. A child grows older. A body refuses another demand. A dream she buried starts knocking from beneath the floorboards.

The awakening can feel dramatic from the inside, though it often begins with a very small refusal.

She stops answering immediately, declines the invitation, leaves the dish in the sink, and maybe even asks the person who created the problem to participate in solving it.

She looks at an obligation she has performed for years and realizes that nobody ever formally assigned it to her. Everyone simply became accustomed to watching her do it.

Once she sees this arrangement clearly, returning to unconscious obedience becomes difficult. The machinery has been exposed. Half of adulthood is discovering how many sacred duties were invented by somebody who benefited from your compliance.

The people around you may feel the change before you have language for it. They notice the delayed response, the missing apology, the unfamiliar confidence in your voice. They may say you seem distant. They may ask why everything has to become an issue now. They may accuse you of changing, as though remaining exactly the same was part of a contract you signed in invisible ink.

They are correct about one thing.

You are changing.

Growth changes the terms of your relationships because every relationship was built around a particular version of you. Some people know how to love a living person. Others know how to interact with a role. When you step outside that role, they experience the loss of access as rejection.

Their disappointment does not automatically mean you have harmed them. Sometimes disappointment is the emotional sound a person makes when your freedom interrupts their convenience.

Many women spend years trying to evolve without disturbing anybody. We attempt to grow quietly, carefully, and politely, trimming each new branch before it reaches a neighbor’s fence. We want the transformed life while preserving every old arrangement. We hope to become more powerful without forcing anyone to confront how comfortable they were with our powerlessness.

Life rarely offers that bargain.

Every real transformation creates movement beyond your own body. The furniture shifts. The family mythology develops a crack. Someone who believed you would always remain available must reconsider what they are entitled to receive. Someone who relied on your silence may suddenly have to hear themselves speak.

This is where guilt enters the room dressed as morality.

Guilt tells you that discomfort is evidence of wrongdoing. It insists that another person’s reaction must become your final authority. It drags every old story into the present and asks whether you are selfish, difficult, ungrateful, unstable, cold, dramatic, arrogant, or cruel.

Guilt becomes especially persuasive when you have spent a lifetime receiving praise for self-erasure. The nervous system remembers that approval once meant safety. Even a healthy decision can feel dangerous when obedience has been your oldest survival language.

You may feel fear as you begin choosing yourself. That fear deserves tenderness, though it does not deserve control of the steering wheel.

The life waiting for you will require decisions that your previous identity could never make. You cannot enter a larger future while remaining permanently committed to every expectation formed around your smaller one. Eventually, you must decide whether your life will be shaped by your deepest knowing or by the reactions of people who never had to live inside your consequences.

Someone may misunderstand you.

Someone may even decide that your boundary proves you never cared, because acknowledging your exhaustion would require them to examine their own behavior.

Let them have their incomplete interpretation.

You have spent enough time serving as the public relations department for everybody else’s comfort.

The next version of you deserves more than secret admiration. She deserves material support. She needs hours in the calendar, room in the budget, protection around her energy, and choices that reflect the future you keep claiming you want. Inspiration can open the door, though eventually your habits must walk through it.

You are allowed to become a human whose life finally fits their spirit.

You are allowed to stop auditioning for roles that require your disappearance.

MOST IMPORTANTLY…you are allowed to disappoint the people who were depending on you to remain afraid.

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Who Benefits From the Version of You That Exists Now?

Before you can change a pattern, you need to understand the ecosystem surrounding it.

Every identity creates a structure. The dependable daughter becomes the person everyone calls during a crisis. The endlessly understanding partner absorbs behavior nobody else would tolerate. The agreeable employee receives additional work because management knows she will complete it without demanding recognition. The emotionally fluent friend becomes an unpaid emergency service for people who disappear whenever her own life catches fire.

These roles often contain genuine care. They may also contain exploitation, avoidance, and entitlement. Most human arrangements carry several truths at once.

The central question is simple:

Who receives comfort, stability, access, labor, silence, money, protection, or emotional regulation from your current limitations?

Write down the names that immediately arise. Resist the urge to edit yourself into generosity before the trruth has finished speaking. You can love someone deeply while acknowledging that they benefit from your lack of boundaries. You can recognize another person’s struggles while still refusing to become the infrastructure supporting their refusal to change.

Ask yourself:

Where am I performing competence so consistently that nobody notices I need help?

Who contacts me primarily when they need something?

Which relationship requires me to remain confused, apologetic, available, financially generous, sexually accommodating, emotionally quiet, or professionally small?

What would change for this person if I became fully loyal to my own life?

The answer may reveal why your growth has been met with resistance.

The Reaction You Are Trying to Prevent

Many of us say we fear conflict, though the deeper fear is usually more specific.

Perhaps you fear being called selfish. Perhaps you fear anger, withdrawal, gossip, punishment, abandonment, ridicule, or the icy silence that once trained you to surrender. A family member may become theatrical. A partner may become wounded. A friend may suddenly remember every favor they have ever performed. A manager may question your commitment because you stopped donating unpaid labor.

Name the exact reaction.

Vague fear becomes enormous because it has no edges. Specific fear can be examined.

Complete this sentence:

If I change, I am afraid that __________ will __________.

Then complete this one:

If that happens, I will need __________.

The second sentence is where your power begins returning.

You may need savings before leaving a job. You may need a therapist, a trusted friend, transportation, childcare, legal information, a locked door, a separate bank account, or a prepared sentence you can repeat when someone attempts to pull you into an old argument. Spiritual courage becomes more effective when it has practical support. Even revolution needs snacks and a backup charger.

Responsibility Versus Emotional Captivity

Healthy responsibility considers how our actions affect others. Emotional captivity requires us to organize our entire lives around preventing other people from experiencing difficult feelings.

You can communicate clearly, behave with integrity, and remain compassionate. You cannot guarantee that everyone will approve of a decision that reduces their access to you.

To separate responsibility from captivity, ask:

Did I make a promise that I am now breaking, or did this person form an expectation I never freely agreed to?

Am I preventing genuine harm, or am I preventing disappointment?

Does this person need my help, or have they become accustomed to avoiding discomfort because I always intervene?

Would I advise someone I love to continue living under this arrangement?

Am I staying because the choice reflects my values, oor because I fear the story someone will tell about me?

Your answers may be uncomfortable. Let them remain honest.

The Relationship Audit

Choose one relationship where you feel the pressure to remain a former version of yourself. Write the person’s name at the top of a page and answer the following questions in full sentences.

Who am I expected to be in this relationship?

Describe the role. Do not describe your entire personality. Focus on the function you perform.

What do I receive from maintaining this role?

Include affection, belonging, financial security, identity, social approval, familiarity, and the avoidance of conflict. Self-abandonment usually survives because it offers some form of protection.

What does this role cost me?

Name the effects on your body, time, finances, creativity, sexuality, confidence, health, and future.

What truth have I been avoiding?

Allow the answer to be plain. Eloquence can sometimes become another hiding place.

What boundary would change the structure of this relationship?

Choose something observable. “Protect my peace” is a beautiful intention, though it leaves too much room for interpretation. “I will no longer answer work messages after 6:00 p.m.” gives your nervous system a clear instruction.

What support do I need before setting it?

Build the foundation first whenever safety, housing, money, health, employment, or custody could be affected.

Choose One Boundary That Can Begin Now

A life rarely changes through one magnificent declaration. Change becomes durable through repeated decisions that teach your body a new definition of safety.

Choose a boundary small enough to practice and meaningful enough to alter the pattern.

You might wait before responding instead of answering from panic.

You might stop explaining after you have already given a clear answer.

You might allow another adult to solve the inconvenience created by your refusal.

You might place a price on labor you have been giving away.

You might leave an event when your body tells you it has reached capacity.

You might stop volunteering personal information to sommeone who repeatedly uses it as ammunition.

You might decline without inventing an emergency dramatic enough to justify having needs.

The first boundary often feels awkward because you are learning a new movement. Awkwardness is part of the process. You were never supposed to emerge from a lifetime of conditioning with flawless form.

A Ritual for Releasing the Comfortable Version of You

You will need a bowl of water, a small piece of paper, and a candle if flame is safe for your space.

Write the role you are ready to release on the paper. Keep it direct:

The daughter who fixes everything.

The partner who accepts silence as communication.

The friend who is available without reciprocity.

The woman who must be liked before she can be free.

Place the paper beneath the bowl of water. Sit with your hands around the bowl and remember the version of you who learned this role. She was intelligent. She was adaptive. She found a way to survive within the conditions available to her.

Thank her without asking her to continue.

Say:

You carried me through a life that required you. I release you from carrying me into the life that comes next.

Light the candle and look at the reflection moving across the water. Imagine your future self standing on the other side of a threshold. Do not demand that she explain the entire path. Ask her for one action.

Write down the first clear answer that arrives.

Keep the paper beneath the bowl overnight. In the morning, tear it into small pieces and discard it. Pour the water into the earth or down the drain while naming the boundary you have chosen.

Then practice it.

Ritual opens the conversation. Action changes the arrangement.

The Price of Becoming Visible to Yourself

There may be a season when the people around you struggle to recognize you.

Let that season reveal who is willing to become reacquainted.

The people capable of loving your growth will ask questions. They will adjust. They may have feelings, and they will take responsibility for those feelings without turning them into weapons. They will become curious about the person emerging in front of them.

Others may keep searching for the old door.

You do not have to reopen it.

Your life is already asking for more honesty than your former identity could hold. The future you sense is not circling you by accident. It has arrived because some part of you is finally strong enough to participate in creating it.

There will be grief. There will also be relief.

There will be people who call your freedom a betrayal because they never imagined you would choose a life beyond the reach of their expectations.

Disappoint them my love…

The stars have survived every human misunderstanding.

You can survive this one.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Re-inventor

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Every week, the internet discovers a woman it cannot tolerate.

Sometimes she is a celebrity. Sometimes she is a politician, an influencer, an athlete, a journalist, or an ordinary woman whose worst fifteen seconds escaped containment. She said something awkward. She looked irritated. She promoted herself too confidently. She failed to smile while receiving something other people believed she should be grateful for.

By Tuesday, strangers are diagnosing her. By Wednesday, they have located an old interview, a former friend, and three facial expressions that allegedly prove she has always been evil. By Thursday, people are creating long-form content about why hating her is actually an act of social responsibility.

Then Monday arrives, and the internet needs another woman.

The cycle usually begins with something small enough to fit inside a clip. She answers a question badly, laughs at the wrong moment, launches a product with too much confidence, appears bored beside her husband, or reveals that she has the same unfortunate personality traits found in millions of ordinary people who have never had their worst moment edited into vertical video. The original offense matters for several hours. After that, the crowd begins building a much larger woman around it.

Within a day, strangers claim to understand her marriage, childhood, motives, politics, insecurities, parenting, friendships, finances, private resentments, and probable behavior around restaurant staff. A woman can reveal her entire soul through a four-second eye movement now. Technology has advanced beautifully. We still cannot make a printer work without a blood sacrifice, yet the public can diagnose narcissistic personality disorder from a red-carpet interview before lunch.

The internet rarely settles for finding a woman irritating. Irritation feels too flimsy to support a week of content, so it has to be inflated into a social emergency. Her voice becomes evidence of manipulation. Her confidence becomes proof of entitlement. Her awkwardness becomes calculated. Her silence becomes threatening. Soon, people who began with “I just do not like her vibe” are speaking as though they have uncovered an organized crime syndicate operating through a skin-care brand.

The Weekly Public Trial

The weekly trial has no official judge, though several million people apply for the position immediately. A clip circulates, someone supplies the most hostile possible interpretation, and every platform begins reproducing the same conclusion with minor cosmetic changes. The reaction videos arrive first because outrage has a short shelf life and creators know the fruit must be picked before context wanders in and ruins the harvest.

Each new post claims to add something, though much of the material consists of people repeating one another with increasingly dramatic facial expressions. A creator leans toward the camera and announces that “something has always felt off.” Another explains that she has remained silent long enough, despite first hearing the woman’s name that morning. A podcast assembles three people who agree completely and calls the result a conversation. By evening, the story has developed side plots, supporting villains, fan theories, and enough amateur mental health analysis to frighten an actual psychologist.

The crowd begins combing through old interviews because a woman’s past must contain clues. Every laugh becomes suspicious in retrospect. Every ambitious statement confirms the theory that she had been plotting her rise since childhood. Someone finds an old photograph in which she appears to be standing slightly apart from another woman, and the distance between their shoulders becomes evidence of a feud. A former classmate remembers that she was “intense.”

INTENSE you say?! The prosecution rests.

This process produces the illusion that the public has discovered something hidden. In reality, they have assembled a fictional character from fragments and then punished the real woman for resembling her. The story becomes more satisfying once complexity has been removed. A flawed person is difficult to market. A villain is easy to merchandise.

The Apology Has Already Failed

Once the public has decided that the woman is the week’s designated problem, every response becomes additional evidence. A quick apology looks rehearsed. A delayed apology suggests arrogance. A long explanation becomes manipulation, while a short statement proves she does not care. Tears can be framed as emotional blackmail, and composure gives the internet permission to call her cold. Silence leaves a vacuum large enough for thousands of people to insert their favorite theory.

The apology itself becomes a second event because the audience has already developed an appetite. An apology that resolves the issue offers very little content. A failed apology can support several days of reaction clips, expert analysis from people with no relevant expertise, and solemn declarations about “what this says about our culture.” The machine prefers failure because failure has sequels, and sequels pay the bills.

At that point, the process has moved far beyond any interest in repair. The woman has become an entertainment property, and her distress is simply the next episode. The audience may describe this as accountability because cruelty feels cleaner after a moral label has been glued to it.

The Algorithm Has No Conscience, Only Analytics

The platforms reward whatever keeps people looking. Anger produces comments, comments produce circulation, and circulation invites more people to join the argument. The algorithm does not register that a human being is being publicly dismantled. It registers excellent engagement.

The speed of the cycle also rewards certainty. Nuance and critical thinking requires reading, checking, and occasionally admitting that a situation remains unclear. Certainty requires a microphone and the confidence of a man explaining cryptocurrency at Thanksgiving. The person who posts first often defines the story, and later corrections struggle to compete with the emotional satisfaction of the original accusation.

This explains why vague claims travel so well. “Something about her feels off” gives the audience an invitation to supply its own evidence. The statement cannot be disproven because it does not actually say anything. It functions like a haunted house with an open floor plan. Everyone can furnish it with whatever fear, resentment, jealousy, or suspicion they brought with them.

Shared Contempt Feels Like Belonging

The weekly villain gives strangers a temporary community. People who disagree about everything else can gather around the pleasure of condemning the same woman. Political enemies pause their feud. Generational warfare takes the afternoon off. Thousands of people experience the warmth of agreement because an actress looked ungrateful during an awards ceremony.

Hating someone together creates intimacy quickly. It produces inside jokes, shared references, nicknames, reaction images, and the intoxicating feeling that the group understands something hidden from everyone else. The target becomes a social bond. Her face functions like a campfire, though she is the one burning.

This is one reason the reaction grows so quickly beyond the original event. The crowd needs more material to sustain the connection. A brief discussion of conduct has an ending. A total examination of a woman’s character can continue indefinitely. Her relationships, body, career, children, wardrobe, facial expressions, and old statements all become communal property.

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Women Participate Because the System Rewards Participation

Men do not perform all the labor in these public punishments. Women often become the most enthusiastic investigators, prosecutors, and executioners. This makes the subject more uncomfortable, though discomfort does not make it less true.

The reward never lasts. The same crowd applauding one woman for her judgment today may decide tomorrow that her tone was smug. The border around acceptable femininity moves constantly because instability keeps women watching one another. Nobody can relax when the rules change according to who the public has decided to punish.

The arrangement works because each participant believes she understands how to avoid becoming the target. She will remain gracious enough, modest enough, attractive in the approved way, honest without becoming abrasive, and successful without appearing hungry. History has repeatedly demonstrated the reliability of this plan, usually moments before the village changes its mind. We call her the ‘Pick Me’, and every woman on earth has been ‘her’ at some point, though some more than others.

Visibility Turns Into Surveillance

Women who build public platforms learn that strangers can create a complete personality from scraps. A sentence becomes a worldview. A bad day becomes a diagnosis. Success inspires an audit. Anger turns into evidence that she has always been unstable. The audience collects fragments, fills the empty spaces with projection, and treats the finished fiction as fact.

The expectations placed on visible women contradict one another so thoroughly that failure becomes inevitable. She must appear confident while avoiding arrogance, vulnerable while remaining easy to consume, intelligent without making anyone feel inferior, attractive without acknowledging her own attractiveness, and ambitious without ever revealing that she wanted success. She must share enough to feel authentic while preserving enough mystery to remain interesting. The job description reads like something written by a committee of ghosts who all hate each other.

The Same Ancient Woman Keeps Returning

The internet changes names and faces, though the accusations remain remarkably old. The ambitious woman still wants too much. The sexual woman still cannot be trusted. The emotional woman still lacks credibility. The composed woman still frightens people because a calm woman must be hiding something. The mother remains responsible for every difficulty in her children’s lives, and the woman without children remains responsible for the collapse of civilization.

These roles existed long before social media. The village once used words like witch, shrew, temptress, harlot, bad mother, dangerous widow, and nasty woman. The current language sounds more therapeutic. The public now calls her toxic, narcissistic, manipulative, problematic, or unsafe. The vocabulary has improved. The bonfire remains operational.

Technology widened the village and accelerated the punishment. One rumor can reach millions before the woman has time to understand what happened. A crowd once needed a town square. Now it needs Wi-Fi and a ring light.

Sometimes She Is Simply Annoying

A great deal of online moral panic begins with ordinary dislike. The woman’s voice irritates people. Her laugh feels forced. Her enthusiasm seems exhausting. She promotes herself too often, tells stories badly, or possesses a personality that makes certain viewers want to crawl out of their own skin.

Annoyance is a normal human response. Some people disturb our peace without violating a single law or moral principle. Personal chemistry has shadows. Taste exists. The block button was invented for a reason and remains tragically underused.

The internet dislikes leaving irritation in its natural form because “I find her annoying” does not justify a week of cruelty. The feeling must be upgraded into analysis. Her laugh becomes evidence of dishonesty. Her self-promotion becomes a symptom of narcissism. Her confidence becomes a cultural threat. Soon, an influencer’s facial expression is carrying the full weight of Western decline.

The Weekly Villain Absorbs Anger That Belongs Elsewhere

A visible woman offers an easy target during a period filled with systems that are difficult to understand and even harder to confront. Governments, corporations, labor exploitation, housing crises, medical debt, and institutional collapse involve paperwork, history, money, and organized power. A woman has a face.

The public can spend days analyzing whether her expression seemed sincere while powerful institutions quietly remove another load-bearing wall from society. People feel active because they have commented, shared, condemned, and selected a side. The emotional sensation resembles participation, though very little has changed beyond one woman receiving thousands of messages from strangers.

The Crowd Leaves. The Damage Stays.

The internet experiences the scandal as a temporary event. The woman experiences it as an alteration to her life. Search results preserve the accusations. Edited clips continue circulating after context appears. Strangers discover the controversy months later and assume that volume must equal truth.

Work disappears. Relationships strain. Family members receive threats. Children encounter videos dissecting their mother’s character. The participants move on without ceremony because a new target has already appeared. They forget what they posted and rarely return to correct it.

Each person tells themselves that their contribution was small. One comment, one joke, one share, one speculative video. Thousands of small contributions still create an avalanche. Everyone throws a stone and later wonders who damaged the house.

The screen creates emotional distance. The target appears as an image, a username, or a clip, so the audience forgets that she has a body and a nervous system. People demand accountability while behaving in ways they would recognize as harassment in any other setting. Moral language grants them permission to ignore the contradiction.

Monday Always Comes

Another woman will appear soon. She may have done something harmful, foolish, selfish, embarrassing, or merely irritating. The facts may deserve attention. The scale of the response deserves attention too.

The important questions remain simple. What actually happened? Who was harmed? Which claims have been verified? How far has the reaction expanded beyond the conduct? Has the conversation moved into her appearance, sexuality, motherhood, age, mental health, or family? Are people discussing consequences, or are they enjoying destruction?

Nobody has to defend every woman. Some women have earned consequences with both hands and a loyalty card. (Pam Bondy we are looking at you) Refusing the spectacle does not require declaring everyone innocent. It requires recognizing when criticism has become recreation.

A functioning culture should be capable of discussing harm without converting a person into communal entertainment. It should also be capable of admitting that someone is annoying and proceeding with the day.

The internet needs a new woman to hate every week because rage creates profit, belonging, distraction, and content. The ritual survives because participation feels easy, righteous, and briefly satisfying.

Monday always comes, and the timeline will present another woman for inspection. Before joining the crowd, it may be worth checking whether anyone has already begun measuring you for the stake.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Exhausted Feminist

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The Cancer New Moon has me thinking about my great-grandmother Mary.

She was born on August 18, 1921, and lived in a home with a dirt floor during the Great Depression. That is one of those details that changes the way I look at every story about her. A dirt floor is not just poverty. It is dust in the body. It is survival before language. It is the kind of beginning that teaches a person to see mess as threat, waste as sin, and comfort as something other people get.

Mary was a self-taught lap guitarist. She played in a band called The Three Marys, because all three women in the band were named Mary, obviously. That part of her life feels almost impossible to square with the woman I remember, the strict one, the sharp one, the woman who always seemed to have a rule waiting behind her teeth.

I remember her sewing. I remember her cleaning. I remember the feeling that if you were near Mary, you were probably one step away from being out of line.

My mom called her “nasty nice,” which is a painfully accurate family phrase. Mary could be kind, helpful, and present. She could also make you feel corrected before you had even done anything wrong. Her care had edges.

She had sayings that stayed in the family.

“Accidents do not happen by themselves, they are helped.”

“Children should be seen and not heard.”

As a child, I heard those as rules. Now I hear a whole nervous system inside them.

This Cancer season is making me sit with that difference. The Sun in Cancer pulls light into the family room. The New Moon in Cancer brings up the origin stories we carry in our bodies. Mercury retrograde in Cancer makes the old phrases come back with new meaning. The memory is no longer just about what happened. It starts asking what shaped the person who said it.

I do not want to rush past that question.

Before I unpack what Mary carried forward, I want to understand what had already been packed into her.

That does not mean I want to excuse her. It means I want to start in the right room.

Mary was a white woman raised in a racist, patriarchal, deeply misogynistic time. She would have been taught racial hierarchy as normal. She would have been taught that men held authority, women maintained order, children obeyed, and good people knew their place. In that kind of world, a woman could be crushed by patriarchy while still being trained to protect it. She could be limited by sexism while still upholding racism. She could be harmed by the rules and still pass those rules down with conviction.

That is the ancestral knot I am trying to study.

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It would be easy to begin with anger. Honestly, anger would make sense. There is real ancestral trauma in the racism white families normalized, the misogyny women enforced on each other, the silence expected from children, and the rigid respectability that made everyone perform goodness instead of becoming whole.

Still, something in me wants to understand Mary’s mind before I open the deeper shadow.

Looking back now, I wonder about autism. I wonder about OCD. I wonder about trauma. I wonder about a sensitive, overstimulated, unsupported woman who had no diagnosis, no accommodations, no soft framework, no permission to say, “The world feels too loud and I need help making order out of it.”

She had cleaning.

She had sewing.

She had rules.

She had blunt comments.

She had control.

In another time, maybe someone would have noticed that her need for order was not just personality. Maybe someone would have seen that her sharpness had roots. Maybe someone would have helped her separate structure from fear. Instead, she lived in an era where struggle was treated as moral training, women were expected to endure, and difference was often punished before it was understood.

So I keep thinking about the lap guitar.

That detail gives me another Mary.

Not a softer Mary exactly. A fuller one. A woman with rhythm. A woman who taught herself. A woman who could make something out of repetition, pressure, precision, and sound. The same hands that scrubbed and sewed also played music. The same mind that watched for disorder could follow pattern. Somewhere inside the strictness was an artist who found a way to make a little room for beauty.

That is where the grief comes in.

What could she have been if the world had given her language for her mind?

What could she have done if she had been allowed to be strange without being shamed, precise without being feared, sensitive without being hardened, talented without being swallowed by survival?

I cannot answer that. I can only feel the ache of it.

At the same time, I cannot let the ache turn into innocence. Mary was shaped by her time, and she also carried that time forward. The racism, the patriarchal ideals, the belief that children should stay quiet, the constant pressure to behave, the fear of being out of line, those things do not disappear because I can now see her pain more clearly.

This is where ancestral shadow work has to grow teeth.

It asks me to hold more than one truth at once. Mary was formed by poverty, misogyny, racism, ableism, and survival culture. She also likely upheld parts of that same machinery. She may have deserved support she never received. She still passed down beliefs and behaviors that require honest unpacking.

I think that order matters.

First, I want to understand the woman in her time.

Then I want to understand the damage her time taught her to normalize.

After that, I can look at what came through the family line and decide what ends here.

The “seen and not heard” rule ends here.

The idea that children are problems to control ends here.

The belief that cleanliness is morality ends here.

The racist inheritance has to be named, studied, and pulled up by the root.

The patriarchal training has to be questioned wherever it hides, especially when it wears an apron and calls itself family values.

That is the work this Cancer New Moon is bringing me into. It is not sentimental ancestor worship. It is a return to the family room with better eyes. It is memory with a flashlight. It is the willingness to see Mary as a whole person without letting the systems she upheld sneak past me unchallenged.

I keep thinking about that dirt floor.

I keep thinking about how much a person learns from the ground beneath them.

Mary came from scarcity, control, racial conditioning, gendered obedience, and a world that did not know what to do with women who were wired differently. She also came with music in her hands. That is the part I do not want to lose while I do the harder work.

The shadow is real.

The gift is real too.

Under this Cancer New Moon, I am trying to tell the truth without flattening the dead into saints or villains. Mary was a woman of her time. That time was cruel. That time was racist. That time was patriarchal. That time trained people to survive through control.

Now I get to ask what my time requires of me.

I can remember her skill without repeating her silence.

I can study her hardship without excusing her harm.

I can honor the lap guitar without inheriting the rulebook.

And maybe that is how the ancestral work begins, by looking at the woman who made everyone stay in line and finally asking who taught her the line was the only thing keeping the whole world from falling apart.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Ancestral Worker

The trick is thinking the Crone Era arrives last.

That is the little box society hands us, wrapped in mythology and dust. First we are Maiden, bright and blooming. Then we are Mother, useful and endlessly giving. Eventually we are Crone, wise enough to be feared, dismissed, or hidden in the corner like an inconvenient family heirloom.

Cute structure.

Suspicious politics.

I do not think the Divine Feminine moves in a straight line anymore. I think the Maiden, Mother, and Crone are braided through us at the same time, rising and receding depending on the room, the wound, the work, the desire, the grief, the spell, the person standing in front of us, and the version of ourselves trying to be born.

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A woman can be in her Maiden while learning a new language, taking a risk, falling in love with an idea, starting over after the world swore she was finished.

She can be in her Mother while building a business, protecting a friend, tending a community, feeding an art form, raising herself from the emotional floor after everyone else left the room.

She can be in her Crone the moment her body recognizes a pattern before her mind finishes explaining it.

That last part matters to me.

Because the Crone is not only age.

The Crone is recognition.

She is the ancient little bell inside the body that rings before the lie gets comfortable. She shows up as a stomach turning during a conversation everyone else is calling harmless. She arrives through the sudden exhaustion that comes from pretending not to know. She sharpens the moment a familiar manipulation walks in wearing a different hat.

You might be in your Crone Era while also beginning again.

You might be nurturing something fragile while your inner elder guards the gate.

You might be terrified, curious, furious, hopeful, protective, and done all in the same hour because the self is not a filing cabinet. It is a living altar with many flames.

But once we look at life as a circle, something opens.

The younger woman can learn from the elder without feeling erased.

The elder can return to wonder without being treated like a joke.

The one who never had children can still carry Mother energy strong enough to keep a whole room alive.

The grieving girl can hold Crone knowing because pain sometimes teaches the body faster than time does.

So how do you know when you’re in your Crone Era?

Maybe it is not a permanent address.

Maybe it is the moment the part of you that remembers steps forward.

Maybe it is the hour your body stops negotiating with a pattern your soul already recognized.

Maybe it is less about becoming the Crone forever and more about hearing her clearly when she speaks.

Because we are not one archetype moving through one timeline.

We are Maiden, Mother, and Crone in motion.

A circle.

A spiral.

A quantum little mess of memory, becoming, protection, hunger, grief, and rebirth.

The Crone Era begins whenever the part of you that knows refuses to be quiet for the part of you that wants to be accepted.

So let me ask this differently:

Where is your Crone speaking right now, and what younger part of you is she trying to protect?

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Crone Mother Maiden

Some people peak early.

They come out of the gate polished, moisturized, correctly networked, and somehow already fluent in retirement accounts. They know their five-year plan. They have matching towels. Their LinkedIn looks like it was blessed by a committee of ambitious uncles.

Good for them. Truly.

We are simmered in strange jobs, weird friendships, family obligations, heartbreak, financial chaos, identity molting, and at least one era where our bangs were not supervised by a benevolent force. We do not become ourselves all at once. We become ourselves the way soup becomes soup, through heat, time, seasoning, and the occasional scream into a wooden spoon.

There is a particular kind of shame that comes with feeling like you are late to your own life.

You look around and everyone else seems to have arrived somewhere. They have careers with titles that sound real. They have houses with baseboards. They have vacation photos where their children are wearing linen. Meanwhile, you are standing in the ruins of Plan A, holding the smoking remains of Plan B, wondering if Plan C accepts payment plans.

And the world is not gentle about it.

We are taught to worship the early bloomer. The prodigy. The young genius. The person who knew who they were at fifteen and then monetized it by twenty-three. We love a clean origin story because it makes success look like destiny instead of labor, luck, timing, support, and a very good publicist.

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A late bloomer is not someone who failed to launch.

A late bloomer is someone who refused to let a bad season become a permanent address.

There is a depth that only comes from taking the long way. You learn what you actually want because you have already chased what you were supposed to want and found it spiritually beige. You learn the difference between attention and love. You learn that being chosen is not the same as being safe. You learn that money is important, but selling your whole soul for stability will still leave you haunted in a nicer kitchen.

The people who peak early often spend their lives protecting the version of themselves that got rewarded. Late bloomers get to become more honest. We shed more skins]and embarrass ourselves into wisdom. We develop taste. We get funnier because if you survive enough absurdity, comedy becomes a survival organ.

By the time a late bloomer starts blooming, the roots are deep.

That is the part nobody sees.

They see the flower and call it sudden. They see the confidence and call it luck. They see the art, the voice, the beauty, the reinvention, the new life, the new love, the new work, and they say, “Where did this come from?”

It came from years underground.

It came from every time you thought nothing was happening.

It came from the grief that softened you without making you weak. It came from the anger that taught you where the fence should go. It was hand delivered by the loneliness that forced you to meet yourself without a crowd. It sprouted from the days you were not thriving, not glowing, not manifesting, not becoming content for anyone, just surviving with a stubborn little pilot light inside your ribs.

That counts.

The underground years count.

The false starts count.

The weird jobs count.

The relationships that taught you never again count.

The art you made badly before you made it beautifully counts.

It is made of rot, scraps, endings, skins, waste, weather, and patience. Then one day, something green has the audacity to rise from it.

That is the late bloomer’s gospel.

You are not behind or expired.

You are not too old to become fascinating.

You are not too late to make the thing, write the book, change the work, leave the room, start the channel, paint the walls, fall in love, become visible, get paid, get free, or finally stop pretending you are fine with a life that fits like wet denim.

Maybe you were not supposed to peak early.

Instead you were slow cooked to gather flavor.

Perhaps you were supposed to become strange and seasoned and specific. Perhaps our life needed time to burn off the fake desires, the inherited fears, the people-pleasing, the performance, the need to be approved by people who would not recognize magic unless it bit them in the ankle.

Some people arrive shiny.

Some people arrive real.

And real takes longer.

So here is to the slow-cooked ones. The late bloomers. The delayed dreamers. The people who had to become their own rescue party before they could become their own revolution.

The gods did not forget you.

They left you on low heat because they knew you were going to be rich, complicated, tender, dangerous, and absolutely impossible to serve bland.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Delayed Dreamer

This memory kicks the door open wearing gym shorts, holding a Scooby-Doo lunch pail, and yelling, “Remember when your menstrual cycle became a law enforcement event?”

Because yes, that happened.

When I was around fifteen, I carried a Scooby-Doo lunch pail to school. Not just any Scooby-Doo lunch pail either. This thing was shaped like the Mystery Machine, because apparently I was not a teenager so much as a tiny archivist of cartoon crime-solving culture.

Other girls had cute purses. Some had sporty backpacks. Some had lip gloss, compact mirrors, and the kind of casual social ease that suggested they had been handed a manual at birth.

I had the Mystery Machine.

And honestly? I was Iconic.

I took my lunch to school in it regularly, because I was committed to the bit before I knew what a bit was. I was also the kind of kid who went to church all the time, got good grades, did not miss school, and lived somewhere between teacher’s pet and anxious Presbyterian woodland creature.

I was not a troublemaker.

I was not rebellious in any useful way.

I was the kind of girl who could break a rule accidentally and then spend six months spiritually cross-examining herself about it. You know… deeply religiously indoctrinated.

Which is important context for the day the drug dogs found my period.

That morning, I got dressed for school and ran into a classic teenage laundry emergency. I reached into my drawer and realized the only clean thing available in the underwear department was a pair of bikini bottoms.

Now, some people might have taken this as a sign to rethink the day.

Not me.

I looked at the bikini bottoms, weighed my options, and decided they were close enough to underwear. They were comfortable, clean and most importantly, available. At fifteen, that was basically a strategic plan.

So off I went to school, knowingly dressed for both second period and a sudden invitation to a pool party.

Everything was fine until midway through the day, when my period arrived like a horror movie villain who had read my schedule and chosen full blown violence.

Of course, it was not a polite little period either. OH NO! There was not a soft announcement. Not a delicate whisper from my uterus.

Nope.

This was a full on contentious congressional hearing in... my... pants.

Luckily, because teenage girls are often one tampon/pad away from becoming emergency logistics managers, I had a change of clothes in my gym locker. I went to the locker room during lunch, changed in the girls’ bathroom because I hated changing in front of people, and tried to recover my dignity in private.

The bikini bottoms, however, were one of my favorites.

I could not just throw them away. They were part of a set. A beloved set. A set that had not consented to become menstrual evidence. Not to mention how hard it was a teenager in the 90’s to find a bathing suit that you felt good in. I simply could not dispose of them.

So I did what made sense to my fifteen-year-old brain. I wrapped them in on themselves, put them inside my Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine lunch pail, and told myself I would take them home and rinse them out later.

A sensible plan…

A practical plan…

A plan with one tiny flaw.

I put the lunch pail back in my locker.

Then I went to history class.

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About an hour later, the announcement came over the school speaker. The drug dogs were on campus. They were checking backpacks, classrooms, lockers, all the usual teenage surveillance theater.

Everyone started joking around. Who was going to get caught? Who had weed? Who had something weird in their backpack? It was one of those moments where the whole class turns into a badly written teen movie and everyone suddenly becomes a detective.

I laughed along, because I had no reason to worry.

I was a church girl. A good student. A nervous little rule-follower with clean grades and a cartoon lunchbox.

Then the speaker crackled again.

My principal called my name.

He told me to report to the locker room.

The room went quiet in the way only a high school classroom can go quiet. Not silent exactly. More like every gossip antenna in the building had suddenly extended through the ceiling.

My teacher looked shocked.

I looked shocked.

I think my soul briefly left my body and tried to transfer schools.

I remember looking around like, “Me?”

And yes. Me.

My teacher, who knew me as a very reliable little academic creature, seemed fascinated. Not angry. Not suspicious exactly. Curious. The kind of curious that says, “Well, this is unexpected. Please bring back details.”

I told him I would explain when I got back.

Reader, I would not be explaining anything when I got back.

I walked to the locker room with my stomach twisting itself into balloon animals. By the time I got there, I found my principal, a police officer, two or three firefighters, and a drug dog.

All men.

All large.

All staring at me.

I am maybe 5’4” or 5’5”, standing there in front of this wall of adult male authority, while a dog treated my locker like it had just discovered a working meth lab.

My principal told me the dog had alerted on my locker.

And here is where my brain, a reasonable and healthy organ, could have said,

“Oh, right, the blood-soaked bikini bottoms in the Scooby-Doo lunch pail.”

Instead, my brain chose panic.

I completely forgot what was in there.

The moment they said the dog alerted, I became convinced that perhaps I was secretly on drugs.

Had I ever done drugs? No.

Had I ever seen drugs? Also mostly no, unless we are counting the vague anti-drug posters at school where every teenager looked like they were being haunted by bad lighting and black eyeliner.

Suddenly I was standing there thinking, “What if there are drugs in my locker? What if I have drugs and don’t know it? What if I am a criminal sleeper agent? What if someone planted something? What if my Scooby-Doo lunch pail has a dark side?”

The firefighter asked if there was anything in my locker that could hurt him.

A normal person would say no.

I said something like, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Which is, historically, not the best answer to give a firefighter about to open a locker that a drug dog has alerted on.

He looked at me like I had just admitted to storing a rabies infected raccoon between my gym shoes and algebra notes.

“What do you mean you don’t think so?”, he barked.

My nervous system had already thrown itself into the sea. I was sweating. My face was hot. My mouth stopped working. Every word I said made me sound more suspicious, which made me panic harder, which made me look even more suspicious.

Then the firefighter opened my locker.

First of all, I need to say in my defense that my locker was a mess and NOT a cute mess. No charming teen-movie mess with one loose notebook and a hoodie.

It was bad, bad, friend.

It looked like a tornado had been homeschooled in there. (I was an undiagnosed AuDHD and was struggling with organization.)

I was immediately embarrassed on a spiritual level. Before they even found anything, I was already thinking,

“Please do not judge me by the ecosystem I have cultivated in this metal cabinet.”

Then he started going through my stuff.

And then he pulled out the Scooby-Doo lunch pail.

The Mystery Machine had entered evidence.

The dog alerted again.

That is when it clicked.

My blood left my face. My uterus, the original criminal, offered no help.

My principal looked at me and asked if there was anything he should know.

I froze.

Because how do you explain this?

How do you stand in front of your principal, a cop, firefighters, and a drug dog and say,

“Yes, gentlemen, inside the cartoon van is my period”?

You don’t.

You simply leave your body and let the scene become folklore.

The firefighter opened the lunch pail.

He saw the bikini bottoms.

He saw the blood.

He showed the cop.

The cop made the face…

You know THE face.

The face men make when confronted with period blood, as if they have just seen the forbidden cave painting of womanhood and may never emotionally recover.

The lunch pail was slammed shut with the urgency of a bomb squad.

Suddenly everyone got very polite.

The energy changed so fast it should have made a sound.

One minute, I was possibly a teenage drug mule with a quirky church girl Scooby-Doo aesthetic. The next minute, I was a menstruating girl surrounded by grown men who had just realized they had accidentally investigated my blood soaked underwear.

They apologized for pulling me out of class.

My principal looked confused at first, because he had not seen inside the lunch pail clearly. The police officer leaned over and whispered to him.

Then every man looked away from me.

Every. Single. One.

Not in a casual way either. In the sacred male tradition of pretending menstruation is a curse from an ancient swamp witch and eye contact might spread it.

I wanted the floor to open.

I wanted a meteor.

But no.

I had to walk back to class.

When I returned, everyone wanted to know what happened.

This was my chance. I could have told the truth.

Instead, I said, “False alarm.”

And sat down.

Which, technically, was true.

The alarm was false.

The blood ,however, was extremely real.

At the time, I was mortified. Full-body shame. Soul-level embarrassment. The kind of teenage humiliation that feels like it will follow you into your obituary.

Now, with the mercy of adulthood, I can see how funny it was.

A drug dog alerted on my locker, and a group of grown men prepared themselves to uncover narcotics, weapons, danger, scandal, corruption, and teenage rebellion.

Instead, they found my period in a Scooby-Doo lunch pail.

There is something almost poetic about it.

The institution came sniffing for crime and found biology.

The men came looking for contraband and found the one bodily function they were least prepared to handle.

The dog was just doing his job, but honestly, I do wonder what that dog thought he discovered. Was he trained for drugs? Blood? Fear? Or JUST the scent of a teenage girl having the worst Tuesday of her life?

We may never know.

What I do know is that patriarchy loves to act very brave until a uterus enters the chat.

A cop, firefighters, a principal, and a drug dog all gathered around a locker like they were about to crack a major case. Then one pair of blood-stained bikini bottoms shut the whole operation down.

If I could go back now, I would be kinder to that fifteen-year-old version of me. I would tell her she did nothing wrong. I would tell her periods are not shameful. I would tell her that sometimes the most embarrassing thing that ever happens to you becomes one of your best stories.

I would also tell her to maybe buy more underwear, or at the very least do her laundry more.

And maybe not use the Mystery Machine as a temporary biohazard container.

But mostly, I would tell her this:

Sweet girl, you were never the criminal.

You were just bleeding in a world run by men who think the female body is suspicious until proven otherwise.

And honestly?

The lunch pail handled it WAY better than they did.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Inner Mortified Teenager

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I was not a casual Care Bears child…

I was a Care Bears child with my whole chest. I loved them in the way little kids love the things that find them before the world has finished explaining pain. The colors, the symbols, the clouds, the tiny emotional rescue missions. It all went somewhere deep in me. Not just into memory. Into the wiring of my psyche.

They taught me that a person becoming cold was not something to mock. It was a warning flare. They taught me that loneliness could become dangerous if nobody answered it. They taught me that cruelty was often a symptom of something frozen underneath. They taught me that friendship was action, not aesthetic. You did not simply feel bad for someone. You showed up. You gathered. You stared the darkness down with your whole strange little heart.

And honestly?

I still think about those lessons.

When someone tells me I care too much, I hear the theme song.

When I am told my empathy is too big, too inconvenient, too porous, too much of a problem for the clean little machinery of adulthood, I practice my inner Care Bear stare. I still think about them when people act like hardening yourself is maturity, as if becoming less moved by suffering is some grand spiritual promotion. Fuck that.

I have high empathy. Listen babes, I am not talking cute empathy. Not “aww, she’s sensitive” empathy. I mean the kind where the room has weather, where someone’s silence has a texture. You know, the kind where I can feel the bruise in a conversation before anyone admits there is an injury.

And for most of my adult life, the world has treated that like a defect.

Care less.

Detach more.

Stop crying.

Do not take it so personally.

You cannot save everyone.

Grow thicker skin.

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I do not care because I think I am a savior. I care because I am alive, and being alive near other living things comes with a moral static in the air. And, boy am I sorry for anyone who cannot feel that static.

The Care Bears gave me a language for that before I had one.

They made caring feel like magic because, for a child, it IS magic. A sad person feels less alone. A scared person gets a hand. A mean person gets interrupted before their coldness becomes a kingdom. That is not weakness. That is civilization in its smallest, purest form.

But adulthood is where the lesson got twisted.

Because the same world that told us to care as children now tells us we are foolish for caring as adults. It sold us tenderness in plush form, then asked us to become efficient little machines with no grief, no outrage, no moral gag reflex. It praised kindness when it was marketable and punished it when it became inconvenient.

Care about your family, but do not ask why caregiving is unpaid.

Care about your job, but do not ask why loyalty only flows upward.

Care about the planet, but do not make anyone uncomfortable at dinner.

Care about injustice, but not so loudly that it ruins the branding.

Care about people, but please do not expect the systems hurting them to change.

So when people tell me to harden myself, I hear the old villain logic sneaking in through a side door. I hear Professor Coldheart with a performance review. I hear the Land Without Feelings calling itself professionalism. I hear emotional numbness pretending it is wisdom.

And I am not interested…

I do not want to become less empathic. I want to become more precise with my empathy. I want my care to have teeth. I want my tenderness to know where the exits are. I want to stop pouring my whole ocean into people who only brought a thimble and a leak.

That is the adulthood version of the Care Bear Stare.

Not endless giving. Not self-erasure. Not bleeding yourself dry because someone else refuses to develop a conscience.

The grown-up Care Bear Stare is discernment.

It is still caring, but with boundaries.

It is still tenderness, but with a locked door when needed.

It is still believing coldness can be challenged, while finally admitting that some people are not frozen because they are wounded. Some people are frozen because it benefits them.

The Country Sold Us Care, Then Punished Us for Believing It

Here is the part that makes me want to flip a tiny pastel table in Care-a-Lot.

A whole country helped raise us on cartoons where the moral lesson was obvious: care about people. Notice pain. Do not let coldness win. Friendship is not decorative. Kindness is not weakness. Feelings are signals. Cruelty spreads when nobody interrupts it.

Then we became adults and were told those same instincts made us fragile.

That is suspicious.

Not mysterious. Suspicious.

Because America loves moral lessons when they are aimed at children. Children are allowed to believe in sharing because they do not own anything yet. Children are allowed to believe in fairness because they cannot audit a corporation. Children are allowed to believe villains should be stopped because they have not yet noticed how many villains have speaking fees, lobbyists, board seats, and a very tasteful kitchen renovation.

We were taught that a world without feelings was a nightmare. Then we entered adulthood and discovered entire industries are built to produce one. Workplaces call burnout dedication. Families call emotional labor love. Politicians call cruelty strength. Algorithms turn suffering into content. Comment sections teach people to practice indifference like scales on a piano.

And when we react like people who were taught not to abandon each other, they tell us we are the problem.

Too sensitive, empathic, emotional, invested. Too unable to let things go.

“You need a safe space, snowflake?”

But maybe we are not unable to let things go…maybe we are unwilling to pretend the wound is not bleeding out.

The Care Bears taught us that coldness was the danger. Adulthood taught us coldness was often just the business model.

Millennials came of age into the Great Recession, student debt, unstable work, unaffordable housing, endless war, climate anxiety, and the collapse of the old social promises. Pew Research described millennials in 2014 as having higher student debt, poverty, and unemployment, along with lower wealth and personal income than Gen X or Boomers had at comparable life stages. The St. Louis Fed later found that families headed by people born in the 1980s were still 34 percent below predicted wealth levels in 2016 after the Great Recession.

And maybe that is why so many of us are exhausted now. Not because empathy is the wound, but because empathy has been forced to operate inside systems designed to punish it. We are trying to Care Bear Stare a machine that runs on numbness, and then people act shocked when our nervous systems start smoking like an old toaster in a thunderstorm.

Still, I do not think the answer is to harden.

I think the answer is to stop confusing softness with access.

Care can have a locked gate.

Empathy can carry a blade.

Tenderness can refuse the assignment.

The grown-up Care Bear Stare is not pouring yourself into every empty person/corporation who learned your compassion could be used as free heat. It is looking directly at the cold thing and naming it.

Not every frozen heart is waiting to be loved back to life.

Some are simply guarding their freezers.

Stay Stellar

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Cool Aunty

This month, I had a spontaneous miscarriage.

I did not know I was pregnant.

There was no dramatic scene. Just my body, doing what bodies do sometimes, quietly and violently, without asking permission from me let alone a legislature.

That is the part people who write these bills never seem to understand. Pregnancy is not always announced by a glowing test and a soft-focus commercial. Sometimes it arrives and leaves before you even know it has crossed the threshold. Sometimes your body is the only witness. Sometimes the first sign of pregnancy IS the loss.

And under North Carolina’s House Bill 1232, that ordinary human terror could become something else.

Suspicion.

Evidence.

A question for the state.

HB 1232 is not just another abortion restriction dressed in Sunday shoes, but a proposed constitutional amendment that would declare life begins at fertilization and that this fertilized life is a legal person entitled to state protection. Then the bill goes further. It says anyone who willfully seeks to destroy that life, at any stage, by any means, could be held accountable for attempted murder or first-degree murder.

Read that again, slowly, because the horror lives in the plumbing.

At fertilization.

At any stage.

By any means.

This is how a miscarriage becomes legally haunting.

There is another piece of this bill that should make every hair on your body stand up.

HB 1232 does not stop at declaring life begins at fertilization or at calling a fertilized egg an individual person. It goes on to say that “any person” has the right to defend their own life or the life of “another person,” even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person.

Sit with that language.

Any person.

Another person.

Deadly force.

Now remember what the bill has already done. It has defined the fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus as a person under the North Carolina Constitution.

So what happens when an abusive partner decides he is “defending the baby”?

What happens when a family member believes a pregnant person drank something, took something, searched something, said something, planned something, ordered something, or simply did not behave like the state-approved vessel they wanted her to be?

What happens when some anti-abortion extremist decides the pregnant person is the threat?

The bill does not clearly close that door.

That is the horror.

No, it does not explicitly say, “You can kill a pregnant person if you believe she is harming the fetus.” But it hands dangerous people a match, points at the body, and writes “deadly force” into the constitutional language.

Existing self-defense law is supposed to require reasonableness. It is supposed to require necessity. It is supposed to require an imminent threat. But HB 1232 is not ordinary statutory language. It is an attempt to build fetal personhood into the constitutional foundation of the state, and once you do that, every person with a grudge, a gun, a fucking God complex, or a controlling relationship to a pregnant person can start imagining themselves as the hero in a courtroom story.

That is not pro-life.

That is how you turn pregnancy into a hostage situation.

With this wording they are creating a constitutional trapdoor under every pregnancy, known or unknown, wanted or unwanted, viable or doomed, and then leaves doctors, patients, pharmacists, prosecutors, police, abusive partners, and political opportunists to argue over who fell through it.

If I had lived under this language, what would have happened to me?

Would a doctor have treated me like a grieving patient, or like a woman whose story needed verification?

Would I have been asked when I last bled, when I last had sex, what medications I took, whether I used herbs, whether I drank, whether I Googled anything, whether I knew, whether I suspected, whether I “willfully” did something my own body did without my consent?

Would someone have decided my ignorance was suspicious?

Would my phone become a witness?

Would my search history become a confession?

Would my miscarriage need to prove itself innocent before I was allowed to be held and grieve?

That is the rot at the center of fertilization-personhood laws. They do not merely ban abortion. They create a legal climate where every pregnancy loss can be treated like a possible crime, especially if the person losing the pregnancy is poor, young, Black, brown, queer, disabled, undocumented, isolated, abused, addicted, already surveilled, or simply unlucky enough to meet the wrong person on the wrong day in the wrong emergency room.

The state does not need to prosecute every miscarriage for the terror to work. It only needs people to know it could.

That is how authoritarian law operates. It does not need to kick every door down. Sometimes it just hangs a boot over the crib, over the toilet, over the exam table, over the trash can where the bloodied pad sits wrapped in paper.

The looming threat does the governing.

And doctors feel it too. Miscarriage care and abortion care are not separate planets. They share medications. They share procedures. They share the same medical reality: sometimes a uterus needs to be emptied because a pregnancy has ended, is ending, or cannot safely continue. But when politicians criminalize abortion with murder language, they do not just scare patients. They scare clinicians into hesitation. They turn timely care into a legal negotiation. They make the safest option wait outside while lawyers check the locks.

So let me say the quiet part with my whole chest.

I had a miscarriage this month.

I did not know I was pregnant.

And I should not have to imagine whether a bill like HB 1232 would have made me explain my blood to the government.

No one should.

Not one woman. Not one girl. Not one trans man. Not one nonbinary person. Not one mother who wanted the pregnancy. Not one person who did not. Not one person who never got the chance to know what they wanted before their body made the announcement in grief.

This is not “pro-life.”

This is the state trying to crawl inside the most private room of the body and install a witness stand.

This is reproductive surveillance with a halo stapled to it.

This is what happens when people who do not understand pregnancy are allowed to legislate pregnancy as if biology is obedient, as if loss is suspicious, as if the body keeps clean paperwork for men with gavels.

HB 1232 has not passed.

Good.

Now keep your eyes on it.

Because this month, my body reminded me that pregnancy can begin and end in secret.

North Carolina’s HB 1232 reminded me that the state is trying to punish even the secrets.

Stay Stellar-

Grey Galaxie

Your resident Chaos Witch & Crystal Mommy