How do you have the time to rest? (I'm actually the High Priestess, that's how)
Pomegranate seeds from my Underworld (aka a wasteland of my productivity culture shadows)
My brand, an extension of me, is famous, thriving and successful. I have a circle of loving, trusted and devoted customers that come back every time I drop a collection. I’ve been mentioned by publications everyone would like to be seen in. I tell people I love my rest and my naps, and they’re shaking. “How do you manage the time? Who has the time?”
Is it really about time? I don’t think it’s always about time management. I think it’s about how much you can trust yourself and trust the universe. Having “time” to rest is a construct most of us are creating, most of us. It’s about the stories we carry about what we’re worthy of, what we deserve. Stories of how we were taught to have relationship with ourselves. Stories we hold about how we can and cannot dare to measure our worth and value, stories that taught us only one way to worth and value that is Correct, Good and Right - and the one way being suffering, crucifying yourself at the altar of productivity.
Being well rested as a necessary creative, spiritual, emotional, energetic and physical fuel in order to be successful is an unlearning that is not for the weak. Definitely not under patriarchal capitalism that is designed to shun, shame and exile the feminine (or the feminine within), while also building itself off of and constantly extracting from us - especially from the feminine. This, while guilting and paywalling replenishment behind a very high barrier to entry.
I still have days when my unconscious mind will make me behave in ways that basically assert this - unless you’re bone tired, brain fried, swimming in cortisol, just dead depleted and almost unwell, you’ve not done enough to deserve relaxing, enjoying or resting. You’ve just not done enough, and you must question why you didn’t do more, every time you live a day where you haven’t microdosed on burnout and extremities. Unless your work has felt ‘struggling, suffering and stressing’ enough to make you want to escape into alcohol or binge watching or utter rotting of any kind, you’ve probably just not done enough.
I’m one of those people who has inherited the story of “Working Weekday is equal to bad/sad/mad. Holiday Weekend is equal to good/happy.”
Monday sucks. Sunday night scaries. I only ever felt this about going to school, as a child. Then I grew up and became a designer, and I never again felt like that.
Imagine how much it trips me up as a creative who studied to work at something she loves to do, and now feels like nothing she does ever feels enough because every example of ‘work’ she has ever seen around her seem to represent that if she isn’t miserably working and living to escape to the weeekend, that’s not work. It isn’t hard, worthy, real work at all because it isn’t hard all the time, nor is it inspiring complaints. Imagine how confusing it is to do what you love as your work, and constantly question if you’re never going to be enough, because you never speak of your work as a lament.
Sometimes I actually wonder if I’m the crazy one for not suffering at work. Too ‘privileged’ to dare to take up space by asking this question.
Sometimes I catch how my unconscious mind will deliberately create suffering, strife, toil and hardship where there actually needn’t be, just to feel like the work is worthy, because this is the only way I was taught and shown ‘work’ to mean, all my life. According to my conditioning, according to every social conversation I seem to find myself in, work is supposed to be a conversation of difficulty and suffering, and taking every opportunity to ‘flex’ your ‘hustling’ and how you live the hardest life of all. How even when you speak of your blessings, or even if a certain aspect of your life gets to be easy sometimes, you’re supposed to make that sound harder than it is in order to be approved of, accepted and liked. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the bitch for not enjoying just how much most of us love making ourself cushy in self-victimisation.
Destroy yourself in tiny doses everyday to ‘deserve’ an intense hit of hurried, disembodied debauchery with a night out, a tiny vacation or a tiny weekend, that will never, ever actually be enough for your nervous system to actually calm down. This is normal. And good.
My self-concept likes to sit in Queen Bee, not hive insect. I believe in working smart most of the time, not working hard all the time. I believe in rest, replenishment and a sincere devotion to pleasure, as fuel for working hard on the right things. I believe in working discerningly, intentionally, mindfully, and expending my energy like it’s sacred, because it is. We have all struggled and suffered, but I know for a fact that a lot of that is also what we generate by ourselves - because we’re so attached to our comforting victim narratives, and especially to the false conditioning that only struggling and suffering can make us deserving of existing. I detest shouting from the rooftops about working hard all the time and seeking medals of validation for it from a culture that requires me to struggle, suffer and constantly be available for extraction from as a woman in order to get one drop of worth and value in return. I feel contracted, sad and tapped out at those lunches where the topic of conversation is a competition about who burnt themselves out the most, and how much life sucks is a device of humour.
I don’t wish to participate in whining about how hard things were, when someone compliments me, or my creations, or my work. On purpose. This is how I show up as the trickster, the troublemaker, the glitch, the evil woman. I don’t give people the pleasure of receiving the required performance of aggrandising how much struggling and suffering I have “paid” in. I just don’t go on and on about the hardest things I’ve done, I just don’t. Especially not in a conversational dynamic that puts me in proving/convincing/explaining energy.
Why should I immediately run to provide justifications of misery and suffering whenever something good in my life is spoken of, or whenever good things are allowed to exist in my life? Why is that evidence required from me in order to have something that feels good, as a human being? We were put on this Earth to learn things, feel good, enjoy the five senses and marvel at the delights of the human experience most of the time if not all. We were put on this Earth to feel good and enjoy things.
It’s so sad how whenever someone calls me lucky - which I really am - I’m supposed to feel offended? I have been doing gratitude lists all my life, it was a game I played with myself as a daydreaming single child, before ‘gratitude lists’ even were exposed to me as a wellness concept. If there’s one thing I know, it’s paying close, deep, intimate attention to my daily life, even in the darkest and hardest of seasons, and always, always finding things to feel grateful for and feel lucky about. I am well practiced in feeling lucky, for I am well versed in gratitude as energy.
Funnily enough (to the gods), my close friends whose souls chose bodies that had them born into generational wealth are the very people who have the highest number of wrestling matches with the word “lucky.”
When someone praises me in anyway or comments on my being in a good season in life in any way, I’m supposed to rush to provide examples of how much difficulty, violence and strife there also existed? For what? To coddle them? To ensure that the widely accepted ‘normal’ is maintained aka nobody must dare feel good unless they have enough precedent misery, effort and injury to provide?
I was born inherently worthy and valuable, and they don’t like it when I know that.
I’m a woman. Why should I align to everything always being hard? Why should I always put myself in hard situations? When I know that my feminine essence thrives in safety, stability, love, beauty, pleasure and softness, that I am the biggest gift to the world when I pour from that place?
Even the way that we birth life into this world is hard, of course, but it is also the most tender, vulnerable thing we’ll ever do, at once.
What if I, like the French, don’t want to talk about work when I’m not at work? What if I believe that calling myself lucky is honouring the Universe?
Wherever I go, whatever I do, the Universe and the Divine are always protecting me. Gently redirecting me. I take two steps, and Spirit helps me take the next four. Sometimes, the Divine is sending me cute little treats and gifts. Miracles. Narrow saves. Synchronicity. Why would I look a gift horse in the mouth and send it back, aggressively fight someone calling me lucky? Because I shouldn’t want to be associated with lucky? I should want to have walked on broken glass shards all my life and made it thru fire every week to be deserving of simple, human things like taking up space, thriving and feeling good about myself? It’s truly crazy to me that being loved upon by the Universe (aka lucky) must mean that I am being called lazy and worthless, lol.
If I tell the Universe, “I’m not lucky, I work hard, ok? I want to do it all by myself and I will do it all by myself. Bitch.”
The Universe, benevolent and loving as it is, as well as all my gods and goddesses, will respectfully step out of the way and leave me to do exactly what I asked for. "Okay, you do that.” To me, sounds like the most utterly foolish thing to do as a creative being.
I wasn’t born as a creature with a portal between her legs that bridges Spirit and Matter to do petty things like proving I Do it All By Myself. Proving how I unendingly bleed, suffer and struggle, ardently and relentlessly, every moment of my life, as if only that can make me enough.
It serves no one. It especially doesn’t serve me. And it drains me. I don’t deserve to be loved and appreciated *only* through painful service to others, be it to the family unit or be it to capitalism.
Nobody would receive the beauty, creativity, brilliance and joy that they do from me if I hadn’t had sleep, nourishment, pleasure, tiny moments of rest and care in 15 days or years.
Nobody would receive my talents and my gifts if I didn’t do this one most important thing - work upon myself to shamelessly, ardently heal hyperindependence and learn how to receive help, gifts and some more help. To develop the intuition to discern trustworthy, well intentioned, good help and only allow those people the gift of feeling good about pouring into and helping me. (Read: That link goes to soothing butter for a hyperindepence rash).
To deeply unAmericanize my mind (or, call it unravelling patriarchal capitalist conditioning and the almost worldwide exile of the feminine) into accepting and realising that no one ever does it all by themselves nor were we designed to, we all rely on community and on the thousand unseen helping hands of the Universe. If we are profoundly sick, lonely and diseased today, it is because we went against this design.
None of those accolades that decorate my business would be here without this. Without healing my relationship to rest, pleasure, luxury, femininity and receiving well.
There’s a reason this piece doesn’t come with disclaimers, doesn’t attempt to be inclusive for all who read it, and doesn’t try to Universalize and Generalize my feelings nor make myself relatable. Because sometimes, I need to talk about my. experience. You already know about the subjectivity of all things, and how to take them with a pinch of salt or a shot of whiskey. And if it’s deeply uncomfortable for you to do that, maybe my writing or my way of living is just absolutely not for you, and that’s just fine.
Talking about yourself as a woman on the internet (or at a table) in a manner that fully lets your experience take up space, nowadays, feels like narrating the darker, wilder origin versions of all the fairy tales before they were sanitised and Christianised by those who were invested in erasing the pagan ancestry of humanity. Maybe, even just being yourself.
Words by
of , and a card I felt goes just right with them. I’m beginning to learn a lot from her, and one of my favourite of her pomegranate seeds of wisdom is this - we cannot be magnetic without being polarising. If we are repelling no one, that’s actually something to worry about.There’s more on this vein, and my cheeky experiences of existing in a productivity culture ‘normal’ that feels dried out, exasperating and simply doesn’t sit right with my heart and womb. In the piece below, I am exploring my answer to the overrated, omnipresent question that hangs over every human excursion outside the house where one encounters new humans - what do you do? I was a mildly nicer girl when I wrote it, and my Leo midheaven spirit wasn’t in her juiciest Rihanna energy as she is right now with the sun and moon both in Leo. You may find more comforting disclaimers ;)
“We were put on this Earth to feel good and enjoy things.” I worship at your altar 🧎♀️➡️🛐 thank you for speaking Truth for us all, glorious Leo midheaven 🦁
Unapologetically recognising your inherent worth for rest and pleasure as a being of this Earth is a celebration and a reclamation. No disclaimers necessary. I adore your energy Oorja. This is amazing ❤️🔥