Fear is the food of the Survival Self
full moon in capricorn; you're invited to a funeral.
It’s been a hard week. The full moon in capricorn is happening as I write this. It’s the first lunation ruled by Saturn fallen in aries. I thought I was going to write a eulogy for the (ongoing) death of my Survival Self but I’m not ready to say goodbye yet. I’ll have to be ready by Sunday because the Dream Papi and I are having a funeral to burn our shame and bury our survival. I’m supposed to start bleeding on that day, too. So it’s not time to let go, yet.1
I’m scared to let go. I changed one of my device access codes from EXPAND to SOFTEN because confronting my fear everyday gives me a sense of power. I’m afraid of softening. I’m afraid that if I’m not afraid, I’ll fall asleep and something bad will happen. I can’t fall asleep again. I have to stay awake. I don’t want anything bad to happen. I have to make sure nothing bad happens to anyone I love, too. Or else I’ve failed them with my lack of fear. Fear is the food of the Survival Self. A terror that runs up from your coccyx through your sacrum and all the way up your spine is the electricity that keeps them alive, like bringing someone back from the dead. It’s nauseating and discombobulating but at least you’re awake and the body is remembering everything bad that’s ever happened.
People ask me why I’m not famous and tell me how life-changing my work is. It’s not that I don’t know there’s no one like me. I’ve had to realize the hard way that I’m a genius through the envy, jealousy, competition, and destructive conflicts others have taken up with me. But what they don’t know is that the other night I woke up from a nightmare where I had bought a house only to find it was haunted by some angry, famined woman who wouldn’t let go. I had been looking at houses for the first time in my life before I fell asleep. I know who that woman is, so hungry for home she wouldn’t leave hell. It haunts me.
It haunts me to have anything because while most of my contemporaries were traveling the world, going to college, having adventures and coming of age, I was losing almost everything and almost everyone. While they were wondering what to do with their lives, I was running through time for mine. While they were getting academic accolades and social climbing credentials, I was working three jobs— partly to keep the roof over my family’s head and partly so I wouldn’t have to be home where it smelled like smoke one night because my mother had lit something on fire after finding drugs and guns hidden in the ceiling of the basement during a nasty divorce. I didn’t want to be there when my 53 year old stepfather brought his 18 year old future wife over again because he couldn’t wait for my mother and I to move out of my childhood home. I didn’t want to be home and there’s a part of me that hasn’t wanted to be home since (maybe has never been home) because my god, is the body a place of horror when you have a pain body of memory like I do.
I don’t resent the people I’ve compared myself to and I don’t pretend to know the intimate details of their lives (though survivors of a certain kind tend to recognize each other), I only resented that I made the unfair comparison in the first place. I thought I hated myself but really I hated what happened to me. I thought I was ashamed of my sins, my hard feelings and dysfunctional choices, but I was really ashamed of my light. The only thing I was punished for more than my mistakes was my purity, my open heart, my generous love. I thought I was afraid of people seeing that I don’t measure up to any linear standards but really I was afraid of you seeing that I’m immeasurable. I grew tired of being punished, so I grew wary of being seen. The only thing more terrifying than being seen was being seen having anything worth being because I learned in my 20’s that that’s when the real rage is incited. But reality is a mirror and with enough rainfall it washed clean and I saw that the only person left punishing me was me.
Now it’s 2025.