Hello, dear readers! I hope you're all hanging in there in what continues to be a wild timeline.
I've been thinking a lot about the idea of alignment lately.
When I got laid off from my day job in March, I was upset. It was unexpected, and how it happened felt pretty insulting, if I'm honest. And yet, at the same time...I was also relieved. I had been fighting through the ever-increasing values dissonance between myself and my employer for a long time. The job was paying my bills, but it also felt like it was slowly eroding my soul.
Four and a half months later, I'm still unemployed. And it's stressful, because unemployment pays a fraction of what I was making before, and while we're managing right now, it's been a painful adjustment in many ways. At the same time, I...don't miss having a traditional full time day job. While I'm still actively looking for work, I'm also enjoying having space and time to do more of the things that light me up. I've been writing so many songs, and I'm looking at ways to make my spiritual companionship and tarot reading practices a larger, more sustaining part of my life.
Because the more I dig into those things, the more I feel a sense of alignment. Whereas working in tech often left me feeling exhausted and disjointed and disconnected from my truest self, sitting with people in companionship sessions or tarot readings leaves me energized and focused and fully present in myself. And it's not just that I feel connected to my truest self...I feel a clearer sense of connection to the larger web of existence. It's like...okay, to put it as a rather silly analogy, if the connection between me and that larger web could be represented by a garden hose, the work I was doing previously was putting a bend in the hose that was preventing the flow of connection, and the more I do this work, the more that hose opens back up.
Last weekend, I did my first full-day tarot pop-up at a makers' market at a local vintage shop. I did 13 tarot readings in 6 hours, the most readings I've ever done in a day and the most readings I've ever done for strangers. By the end of the day, I was physically exhausted - I did not do an adequate job of eating or hydrating throughout the day - but emotionally I felt incredible. I actually texted one of my closest friends halfway through the day to say "goddamnit, this is what I want to be doing with my life." I expected that the next day I'd be too tired to do anything, but I actually woke up feeling fantastic, more energetic than usual.
I had told myself for a long time that if I put more energy into spiritual companionship and tarot and let them become a bigger part of my life, that I'd burn out from engaging in that level of care work. But the longer I sit with it, and the more experiences I have like last weekend...the less I believe that. The reality is that this work is life-giving for me. It's nourishing and energizing and feels deeply connected to purpose.
My own spiritual director asked me this week what "connected to purpose" meant to me. It is an odd question to answer as someone who has a pretty agnostic / ambivalent attitude about the possible existence of any sort of personal higher power, because despite that general ambivalence, I do feel, for lack of a better word, called to this. I don't know by whom or what I am being called, exactly, but...when I do this work, I get this overwhelming sense of being in the right place at the right time, like this is where I'm meant to be. (I have complicated feelings about the concept of fate, too, so that statement also feels a little strange.) There's a sense of rightness to it, like I can feel myself aligning with my truest self and with something beyond me.
So I'm starting to shift how I'm approaching my job search. I'm still looking, but with more of an eye to how I can balance a regular job with doing more of the work I want to be doing in the world.
And I won't lie...it's scary. Admitting that this is what I want is scary, because what if it doesn't work out? What if letting myself want this means I let myself get my heart broken? And yet...it feels increasingly worth that risk if it means I can live in this sense of alignment with myself and my values.
Thanks for reading! I wanted to wrap up this newsletter / blog with a business announcement: I'm running a series of tarot journaling workshops in August! This series will be on Zoom, and will focus on each of the Aces in the tarot. More information can be found toward the bottom of the page here, which is also where you can register for the workshops. Feel free to reach out with any questions!