Like how you forgot to text me after the bookstore, or about the Odesza concert. Funny because you remembered me when I stopped crying and met someone new,

and when I was happy and sexy and vibrant and dancing—

and you were sad about your dad and his Australian wife.

Now I’m the one who remembers you, lately so much. In my dreams, when I see couples in pubs, watching hockey games, and those damn Patriots. I see them and think

if only.

If only I had been flowers and softness and muted and only small-sad,

but instead I was lava and running (always RUNNING) and tidal waves and busted lips and broken wine bottles and cracked shoes I’d throw at you because I could see your eyes

shutting and blinded by my starlike grief.

So for you, I see the shelter you found in breezy blondes. What refuge.

Today, I hope you found someone who is light and soft to hold and to land on

because I am made of cathedrals and orbits.

Okay, now, I see it all. A flash of my passion and your container. Your sweet hazel eyes and that Boston-boy jacket. For a minute, you LOOKED straight into my SUN. Oh wow, did you! And in that, I knew I could be adored. Nothing was impossible.

But maybe that’s just it. We were always two planets, their stars, their moons—too many gravities and too little space.

So then we collided. Pieces of me went flying, and you kicked some away, swallowed the rest into your rings.

Well, if anything. Thank you for showing me that love does exist.

But there must be a Universe, a place where I don’t need to BURN and combust, just to be someone’s light.

And to me: I hope you see that you are the Moon, swirling across galaxies of love.

You have always been this, sweet girl! You have always been tides and tides and depths and depth, but also little lapping pools in the sand.

It was never your fault that neither of you could surf.

Someone will see you and paddle straight into you. Someone will see you and want to swim within you.

I stretch across the horizons, and I find peace.

That song with your name, the one you showed me still drifts across my Spotify. That was you—the one who showed me how to float.

Thank you. For everything.

(a song for Jack)

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Yes, he and I are both three-quarters through fishbowl margaritas. Yes, my son is eyeing the time clock and mouthing to me, “Am I still going to watch Naruto tonight?” Yes, my mom is tensing at the boys-need-discipline spiel rooted in the traditional family structures that my Uncle is vocally passionate about.

But I am listening. Because, at that moment, I am open.

Does this Uncle know? Probably. Does he know me? In some ways, and in many ways, no.

Strangely, therein lies my freedom—I don’t have to explain. He, like my son, is quintessentially Aquarian in his fixed-sign-ness. But I am not threatened.

I am comfortably wavy as we climb into the car. We drop off my Uncle and he leaves me with an offer: to no longer be a Mexico-Lindo-twice-a-year Uncle, but a throw-the-football-around kind of Uncle. The first offer I have ever received from any male figure in my life, outside of my brother’s natural and genuine interest in Max. (My brother, whom I think the world of.)

Will I take it? I don’t know. But it was made, and that is not lost on me.

“You’re an amazing mom. It’s what your dad would’ve done for me,” he leaves me with before he heads into his home, carrying my Auntie’s takeout. I have not been to this house as often as others, and yet it is a landmark, a homing beacon for some of my softest childhood memories.

My sleep is restless, and I am too hazed at the edges to distill the night into wisdom. I fall asleep on the couch, next to Max, to the sound of Naruto.

The next morning, my mom springs up in front of me with her arms open: “Can I tell you how proud I am of you?” I know what she is about to say.

“You just don’t need any of what he is saying. You’re so above that old way of thinking, of wanting or needing a man. You’re on another level. You’re just too expanded for any of that.”

She is looking directly at me, her eyes brimming with tears, but I know this isn’t just about me. We’ve been through this before.

“He doesn’t know anything about you,” she ends. I sigh and try to think of another way, of a million different attempts, to say gently but firmly: “Yes, and in some ways, neither do you.”

This is the advent of thinking as ME.

Not as a single mother.
Not as the right-hand daughter of a widowed mom, or the first child of a dad who died.
Not as a new solopreneur or a writer trying to launch something.

In that moment, I am untethered from whatever the fuck I am supposed to be. I am soaring between the raindrops, hitting the roof, above the blankets of rainclouds, and into the belly of God, the Universe. The very birthplace of desires.

I am finally awake. I want things as me, and I want them, and I want them.

Lately, all I can think of is what I don’t know and what I want to know. Yet, for the first time in my life, it’s not from hypervigilance. I’m hungry and desiring, and there are so many things I want to taste.

When you finally trust yourself and your inner world, the unknown is no longer a threat. Wanting is no longer weakness; it is pure invitation and creativity.

I’ve seen and known many strong women who became both faces of the coin: the mom and the dad. And I respect them for it, truly. I have a special place in my heart for single moms because I am one. I’ve watched my own mother, my cousins, old coworkers—it truly is devotion in one of its most powerful forms.

Still, this isn’t an argument of superiority between gender-roles or capacities, or even who has the right or the capacity to wield feminine or masculine energies.

All I can say are these three things:
1) I don’t want to be a dad. I don’t want to be a man.
2) I am allowed to want, as myself, not from the worry of what others think of me.
3) I would love someone to hold the world with me.

How and where they intersect is something I’m still navigating. Yet this isn’t going to be a discussion on mother-father roles. Maybe I’ve misled you!

This is a discussion on what it means to WANT from your deepest self.

Surprise: i’m a lover girl

Strong women don’t want. Strong women don’t need men. Strong women will be fine. Strong women don’t need your pity. — a motto from my childhood

I do find it funny how a “Boys will be men,” type conversation with my Uncle would feel like a flashlight on one of the biggest, truest admissions of my life:

I want to have a partner, and I want to be a partner. I want to build something with someone. Because, I am not just a mom or a single mom.

I also have no problem admitting that I am not a man or a father, nor do I believe that living my life as such will necessarily produce a defect in my son. Yet, my truth remains this:

I believe it could be really, really, really nice. And so long as it is really, really nice, then I really, really want it.

Nothing is more revelatory than what you truly want and what you are too afraid to want. When we’re too embarrassed or too bogged down by “what it means” to desire freely, we will accept (and attract) crumbs, ghosts, or the last-chance-basket versions of our desires:

Friends who use us as placeholders, audiences, or sounding boards.
Jobs that look great on paper, but slowly, steadily drain us of our passion and life force.
Generationally-inherited dynamics that suffocate or obligate us.
Partners who check the “Yay, I’m not single anymore!” box but are actually quite terrible for us.

Our desires are embedded with pieces of ourselves… and why wouldn’t they be?

Yet, in our very human way of doing things, we complicate desire. We contort our wanting to defend ourselves from what the world will say. In other words, we turn a holy act into vigilance and defense.

Standing in that kitchen, I was reminded of something that has always loomed over me: the idea that girls who want love are weak. It was never uttered verbatim, but it was constantly present across my life—a watchful specter, looming in every corner.

One of the worst corporal punishments I ever received in my life was because I got caught AIM-ing a cute skater-punk who wanted to be my boyfriend.

Later—my mom shaking her head at the girls waiting on the bleachers for their boyfriends after school. “What kind of mother lets her daughter do that?” she’d say as we watched my friend take her boyfriend’s books from him, freeing his arm so he could use his crutches properly.

Another time: an older boy asks me to skate with him at Ice Palace. I was too scared to text him back, but still, I received the ice and silence for two days. As if I should’ve known better than to attract it.

So after that, I would exorcise all of my wants and dreams of love. I would conduct my desires furtively before killing them. I would remind myself that it was weak to want. I’d never ask for anything—only take whatever drifted my way.

In short, I ended up dating a lot of losers. Guys who’d smoke all of my weed, leave me behind at bars with the tab, and become pointedly mean when I got into a better college than he did. And finally, my son’s father. I’d pursue him, pretending it was in the name of justice. In reality, my trapped, suffocated desire was tearing my heart to shreds, and I had no idea what to do.

But I couldn’t say that.

Instead, I’d perform impressive feats of logic-contortion to prove to the world I was too solid, too smart to be heartbroken. And, in some twisted logic, it was still “better” than being a girl who wanted things, especially love.

And even though I was too strong to want, there was always disappointment.

“You can do so much better than him. You really don’t know how great you are,” from the very people who warned me about girls who wanted.

“You could have anything, anyone you wanted.”

Ha! As if I had a single ounce of freedom to even fathom what that could be.

How to desire like the moon

People say that the bodies of nature—the moon, the Sun, the stars—don’t experience desire, as if they are lifeless beings. They experience attraction by the laws of physics. They dance within gravities, entangle themselves in orbits, and yet, we discount them as mechanical functions. Maybe that’s because we silly humans put so much judgment, friction, and assessment on our own attractions and wants.

I look back at what I was conditioned to believe (through words and action), and I realize I am the meeting of two elements:

the relentless fury and fire consuming all of the shame, regret…
and the buoyant grace of a still, receiving ocean.

It is not easy to want. I feel and dream for all those who may understand what I am feeling. And in many ways, I do see the shelter resting within, “I’m too strong to want.”

No wonder people (myself, especially) are so afraid to want with every ounce of their being!

To release expectations, inhibitions, and the, “What will they think of me?” is to reach out for the blessing of your past and future selves. It is the only real way to say, “I’m late but better than never.”

That’s a pretty tall order, right?

But even the wildest dreams begin as a whisper, an exhaustion of shrinking, and a, “You know what, FUCK IT, I’m going to do it,” muttered beneath your breath, eyes shut, as you jump off the edge of what you know.

So here I am, emulating the Moon and the Sun:

𖦹 I am a lover girl. I love to love, to be in love, to make, give, and receive love.

𖦹 I live not to “get” or to achieve but to create. I do all things with every ounce of my Soul.

𖦹 I want to build something with a good man (not a perfect man), but someone who is just like me and not like me at all.

𖦹 I can be strong and also want to be held. That is not a contradiction—it is my depth.

𖦹 I’m not afraid to want what I don’t have. Not having is not a deficiency; it is a fact. And what I want for my son and me, I want as I would want a gift.

So, there it is. My heart is on the altar.

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The message is just as important as the messenger

Two days ago, I attended my 16th workshop on “becoming.” The messenger this time: a whip-smart spirituality-meets-psychology bro riffing on the Love of the Universe. He called a brief-second intermission to croon, “Baby, will you please get me a cup of coffee?” to his off-camera wife. She makes him a new pot because the old one was cold. He is sorry (that’s not what he meant, the cold coffee was fine!) but so, so grateful.

Logic-me thinks it’s a ruse to get us to buy his $300 course. Logic-logic-me says, “Stop being an asshole, Cara.” But from somewhere within me, a ghost whispers.

“When was I last in love?”

There is a cool breeze pouring through my windows, dampening the wisps rising from the sandalwood I’ve just lit. Do I need to move my desk, yet again, to renegotiate the qi flow in my room?

Regardless, the wind reminds me of the approaching wave. Following the January 1st new year, the current has finally untangled me from my uncertainty and fatigue. I am ascending into the sunlight and will be pulled into the trough, then the belly of the wave. “Thank god,” I say, with a little g, because big G doesn’t like how I only call on him in despair.

And yet: how long before I reach the peak and am brought down with the crest, crashing into the foam, then the depths once again?

“Keep going anyways.”

Not much has been inspiring me lately. I’m burnt out. I spent the entirety of 2025 hitting the “OPT OUT,” button on nearly every single relationship dynamic in my life. Stupid ancestral dances to gossip with people who would sell you out for your seat in first class. Family friends who bitch about the gifts you bring to Christmas dinner, but can’t bear to be alone. “Dutiful,” as a compliment.

No more obligations, no more obedience. All of this I cleared out for myself, by myself. Minus the help from Saturn, the Patriarch of Karma.

Of course, soon after (almost tauntingly and ironically), I was flooded with New Yorker articles on how most Americans are terrible, lonely people—too fragile, stringent, and self-consumed. Maybe that’s me—difficult, scared, and hateful.

I’ll give it a go anyways.

But I love my ghosts!

Now, I have become an empty, echoing house.

The windows are wiped clear, the furniture is gone, and my ghosts have nowhere to hide. They pry at the floorboards, dig their fingers into the windowsills, eyes sewn shut and moaning:

“You can’t do it. Who you are is the worst, the most selfish. A deserving prisoner.”

Matriarchal patterning taught me that denial is your weapon against your hatred. From my Marine father: pain is weakness leaving the body. Ignore your ghosts or exorcise them—that is the way of courage.

But I don’t want to hurt them. They are mine and me, and I want to scream with them until my throat is raw and our voices disintegrate into the folds of time and space.

How to do things anyways

I admit that I am a textbook projectionist. I roll my eyes when people can’t commit because I, too, fear the unknown. I grow stony and silent when people seek the easy way because I have also evaded the work. I hate when people ask me what they should do because, for so long, I could not orient myself without first looking around the room.

And yet, here I am, and here I return anyways.

I have also never felt “freedom” as an inherent right, but rather as something to be bought with pain.

Some of my purchasing history: skipping swim practice and running to the Okinawan seawall to eat sweets with my first best friend. Nasty, multi-day comedowns from pills shaped like animals and hours buried in warehouses throbbing with bass. The times I snipped my tongue free and coated it in acidic honesty. All this freedom, only to wake up to the pain of, “What did I ruin this time? Do I have enough to pay this off?”

The pain doesn’t win every time, but more than once is enough. Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls these victories descansos, after the bouquets, candles, and gifts left where someone has died alongside the highway or roads.

Our own lives—as if they were country highways— are marked by these deaths. When they go unmarked and unconsecrated, they will rise as ravenous, bitter, despairing spirits. Your mindspace, your heartspace… that is what they feed upon. Everywhere I turn, there are pressures to starve these specters.

But how could I possibly starve, deny, silence my ghosts when they are also me?

How could my grace, my beauty, my genius trust me enough to flourish if they see that I cannot spare even a glance for my rage, despair, and pain?

How you treat anyone is how you treat everyone. Said someone somewhere, maybe it was Jesus.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if our ghosts have always drunk from the same well as our grace? What if the overlap and moments they touch are what make our lives worth their existence? (A nihilist somewhere: “Nothing is worth anything.” I refuse this. Lazy fucker, pull yourself together!)

It feels real and easy to hold this.

“But tell me,” I pray again and again to the gods and whoever will listen—mid-beer and making dinner, folding my son’s laundry, watching couples whisper between kisses at the wine bar while I sip alone.

“What is the destiny for these ghosts? Where do they need to be spent, deployed? Where will they find peace?”

Mountain mists and eyes of koa

The gods of Hawai‘i pointed me to a place: the former wetlands of the windward side beneath the Ko‘olau Range, an area continually restored by ancestral devotion and a refusal of outsider greed. They needed volunteers to tend to the land, so I decided (as my haunted-house self) to bring my son along while I tried being useful out of choice, rather than obligation.

That Saturday morning was wet with island winter. We were assigned to weed a lo‘i (water garden) named momona, a word in 'Ōlelo Hawai‘i meaning fat, but as in plump with abundance.

We plunged our feet into the cold Earth, and up rose the smell and spirits of crushed rock, long-dead plants, and animals awaiting their reincarnation. Across the fields and beyond the mangroves, the morning mists sat in the folds of the mountains. Seeing they were neither opaque to affirm their existence, nor dissipating in apology to the immovable rock, I felt my ghosts begin to still themselves.

I remembered the mists would inevitably dissolve under the rising sun, and the mountains would yet stand. So what was the goddamn point? How could they be so bold, only to be so futile? I wanted to cry, and the weeds spat mud across my face as I tore them from the ground.

A breeze, passing. The faintness of words hidden under a breath: “Close your eyes.”

The answer was this: the mists, ephemeral and fading, offering their drops to the rising sun, amplifying, refracting, and casting rainbows across the ridges. There was no cost and no prize for the mists, as they were born from the damp, deep, in-between of night and day. It was simply the way things were.

“Maybe,” I thought.

Opening my eyes, it occurred to me that rainbows are actually full circles.

I looked away from the mountains to find someone facing me: a man with dark eyebrows and lashes wreathing eyes the color of koa. I had spotted him earlier, as we trekked across the fields to the lo‘i, but thought myself transparent and let myself forget. But here he remained, refusing to turn his gaze. I was in his path on purpose.

Flecks of California grass and morning moisture drifted between us like a veil. I felt dangerous and furtive, so I let it rest, but I couldn’t help glancing, pretending to look beyond him to see if he was still near. Each time I opened my mouth, he would lift his head, raising his chest and body towards me, then averting his eyes back to the earth. It enthralled me, but I worried it was all too fragile, and if I moved any closer, I could shatter everything.

And yet, I was covered in mud. He couldn’t have seen me unless he sought me.

When our work was finished, we approached the ‘auwai to rinse off the mud. My son and I sat down, and I ran my fingers through the green carpets that sat on the water.

“I wonder what these are,” I said aloud.

“They’re azolla. A type of water fern.”

His voice was deeper, closer. There he was, with his eyes of koa, shining all over me like someone trying to read in the dark. And there I was, cold mountain water spiraling around and between my legs. I finally thought of something to say, but when I parted my lips to speak, he disappeared down the stream, only to stand within aura’s reach while we all waited in line for kalua pork, poi, and papaya.

I never saw him again, nor will I, especially because I am girlish enough to wish for it. Not for him specifically, but for the surge, the heat, and the vibrance that comes when I am my own Sun, driving the orbits of my life.

I have always wanted to be the Sun, gathering offerings from clouds. But in many ways, I am the Moon, glowing and yanking the tides into mountains, only to retreat and leave darkness in the night sky. Eventually, I rise again, but nothing is as I left it.

And yet, I do it all. I wish and I pray. I grasp and I want. I plead the world for answers, and then I say, “Fuck it all,” and follow my own oracle into the murky unknown. I lay descansos along the highway, then back onto the road I go.

Whatever it is, I do it anyways.

Do we exist because others see us? Or do we exist once we see ourselves? Can either be true without the other?

hi hi, hello.

loloto is a studio / space for deepening your taste and exploring ideas that make our lives acts of creation, instead of states of reactivity.

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I had a family friend, a painter, who made this her soapbox. She was the starving artist, the starving conservationist, constantly complaining and then romanticizing the struggle of someone who creates for nothing and accepts the inevitable poverty that it brings because that’s all that art is worth in today’s world: pennies and hardship.

For her, it was a badge of honor and the only discernible trait of “specialness” that she could find.

And I fucking hated it. Seriously.

“Nobody would CHOOSE the life of an artist. It doesn’t pay, and it never will. I only do this because I have to, it’s my CALLING to paint and be poor while I do it,” was my translation.

She and her mom later asked me to help set up a website to sell her paintings. There was a great deal of vagueness (which I found quite irritating) about how she wanted to market her work. Thinking a simple setup was the best solution for her current state, I suggested an Etsy page to get started.

She and her mother exchange looks. A stifled scoff and prolonged silence, but I’m not biting because I know what it means.

“Ooh. No. I don’t want to be on there. That’s not really my audience,” she eventually said, her nose scrunching.

“Okay then, who is your audience? Who do you think wants to buy your art?” I pressed, my annoyance escalating by the second.

A shrug and a hint of an eye roll.

“Gosh, I really don’t know. I mean, my work is high-end. I just know that I want high-end people to buy my art. So, probably not like the kind of stuff that’s on Etsy.”

I thought of a beautiful, upcycled velvet bomber I had bought for $60 back in my sophomore year of college from an artist in Australia. It had been reworked to cinch at the waist and had little silver studs that looked like constellations. People would come up to me in bars, on the street, to ask me where I got it. I mourn it ever since that fateful night it got stolen during a sloppy, jungle-juice-stained night on Polk Street.

Then I thought of my tarot card charm—the World—the one I found after hours of searching through sites like Mejuri, Bagatiba. It was the only charm that, to me, was in the spirit and likeness of the card’s meaning: culmination. Endings. I’ve worn it almost every day for the past four years.

If anything, it seemed an honor, an initiation to join the thousands of makers for whom Etsy was enough.

And besides: whether or not you’re on Etsy has nothing to do with how much people will pay for your work. You decided how much people would pay you a long time ago.1

In some ways, this might be a, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game!” type of situation—the “starving artist” identity is one forced upon this young painter by a world seemingly ruled by layered devaluations (moral, monetary, institutional) of human ingenuity and creativity.

In other words: I’m trying to be fair here.

Listen: I’m not blind to the way that the expansive access to constant consumption made possible by social media (driven and weaponized by capitalist extractivists) has commoditized and devalued human creativity, ingenuity, and expression. Don’t even get me started on AI art, musicians, actors. My poor, sweet mother cried when she found out about AI actors.

My beef is not with ACKNOWLEDGING the constraints and pain that artists feel as they navigate these systems and their very real roadblocks.

What I DO have BEEF with is the conscious, defeatist acceptance of it. Come on! Who’s fucking side are you on?!

If you are a human artist, a human who creates, then you MUST believe that art and creativity are inherently valuable.

Let me clear on what value means: it does not only equate to signing with an agency, acquiring 200K+ Tiktok followers, getting a Goop or Rhode brand deal, or having people become so obsessed with you that they’re in your Amazon shop.

Believing in the value of art is not only about you—it’s about everyone who will ever pursue the act of creating.

You have to believe that creation, expression, and artistry are just as much a service to humankind as “normal” things, like engineering, marketing, software development, healthcare, or counseling.

You have to believe that each person’s creative filter is unique and unable to found or replicated anywhere else.

You have to believe that artistry is a practice, a devotion, a contribution—and that it is absolutely worth the work and the money it costs to witness and possess.

And yes, the “starving artist” is something you learned to be true. It is a shelter that was given to you, a defense mechanism that was supposed to keep you “safe.” And in many ways, it has kept many of us very safe.

If you say your art doesn’t earn money, then it hurts less when nobody pays for it. If you say that your creativity is frivolous, then it cannot be mechanized into the functions of something “practical” or “useful.” If you declare that you CHOOSE to suffer, then there is nothing anyone can take from you. You’ve beaten them to the punch.

Why bother when it seems like Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Neuralink and the Kardashians are at every corner and opening of the internet telling us, “WHY? Why even TRY to command any sort of monetary or mental sovereignty when you can consume, for the small price of your soul?”

Maybe it’s not that deep.

But maybe, it also fucking is.

I got my first paid subscriber today, and I cried. I literally sobbed because the work is tough. Creating congruence between who you KNOW you are, and your external world is tough, especially if you grew up with people who believe that artists, writers, creatives—the ones who aren’t David Choe’s and don’t want to be—should be synonymous with struggle.

But I refuse to give up on myself or anyone who creates for a living. I pray for us all, and not from a deficit, wishing for some Divine intervention to save us all or help us hit the jackpot.

I pray that we only deepen into the internal well of worth. I pray for the unchained imagination to create wealth for us all, wealth that we give a fuck about, not what has been fed to us or what will help us ascend the ladder into the vapid, shallow numbness and imprisonment of consumption culture. I pray that we all get to know ourselves well enough to go after what we want and believe that it will be met with what it deserves. I pray FOR JUSTICE for creators, that we place risk and ingenuity and the sweat and blood of artistry be seen and compensated for exactly what it is.

I pray for us all. To whom? The gods that matter.

Anyways…

Do yourself a favor: break up with your starving artist friends and your starving artist identity. Thank them for everything they’ve given you and wish them well on their way.

You won’t need them where you’re going.

Sometimes, this logic is a living, spirited thing with veins that act as streams of ancestral wisdom, irrigating the present so the here and now can root itself across the folds of time.

And other times, this logic moves like a blind snake, coiling eternally in darkness at the bottom of a bucket.

How this logic manifests to you is solely dependent on the extent to which it rules your world.

It’s hard for me to write because I read women like sighswoon and Brianna Wiest, and I realize how easily I am tilted off my core.

“i could never be jealous of a person,” writes Gabi. Why waste your wanting on ephemeral, messy, silly little people when you could contemplate our shared nearness (and distance) to the celestial bodies?

Just recently, my family received an invitation to a baby shower from my cousin and his wife. My mom is contemplating going, and with my back turned, I am rolling my eyes because this is the kind of shit that I thought I was done with. I thought it was tacky to have a nighttime, formal dinner baby shower, just like I thought their wedding was tacky. I had thought weddings were for swirling on the dance floor with your family and friends to 2000’s hip hop, drinking champagne, and contemplating who was next in line for love. But instead, we were audience to three hours of pageantry and pretending we were in a real, live Disney movie.

The next afternoon, I got a text from my bank app—the wedding gift I had given (a check) was deposited promptly the next afternoon.

I myself taste the salt in what I write. But what stretches my heart is the realization that I have lived so long in the logic, the hierarchy of a world that has never really mattered to me.

So who is to blame?

Hi, Hello, Hometown Zero

Here is the hierarchical logic of my hometown:

• Being rich and beautiful will make you important. If you have only one of these, there is hope for you, but being rich is better because you can convince people to pretend you are beautiful. Bonus points for your proximity to whiteness.

• So long as you go to church, you can let yourself do whatever you want! Having an affair with your friend’s husband? Just throw a bake sale for your church to show everyone you are a child of God! Stole government funds from the hospital so you could go to Europe? All good, Sunday mass is right around the corner. Not only will God forgive and forget, he will also give you a mask to wear so you can be who you really are.

• The needs of the collective (and those who are more important than you) will always supersede the needs of the individual.

• Women should find a man for whom they can be beautiful, dutiful, and obedient.

So in this logic, I rank very, very, very low. I would probably rank a zero in my hometown.

And here, I wish I were sighswoon with her transcendent detachedness and her breathy, wide-seeing “so what?”. But I’m not. I squish myself into the equation of my tiny, green little hometown in the heart of the nowhere ocean:

Single mom, no man in sight, what’s WRONG with you?!
+
no discernible whiteness lol
+
no God-god-Jesus-god to guide you
+
can’t dance, can’t speak the tongue, what you’re too good for your culture?
+
who knows what i do for work? oh my god, she has to work, that’s so sad
+
sharp tongue, clothes are too tiny or too large
+
nothing to offer—no house, no fame, no wealth
=

a nice big fat zero.

Or, maybe a two, because I’m not fat (again, this is THEIR logic!).

“Okay, you caught me. That hurts. I’m not above it.” I give myself a few beats to let that sink in. Those beats drag themselves into a song—an earworm you’d hear on the radio. Next, I’m dancing to it, playing it all out with my mom, who loves to repeat the drama of it all but still can’t catch the tune, the melody, the heart of what I’m actually saying, which is:

Nobody can see it. Not them and not you. And if you could, you’d see that I am building a dimension far away,

spinning a new world,

unfettered by rules.

A love equation for the Hometown Zero

It’s okay that I’m not the easy-breezy type. It’s also okay that I’m not a stoic and that I am sensitive, even to things that have little to do with me. Everything is under a microscope or a trip to the depths. Zooming out and letting go is not really my forte.

I don’t know if I believe in a “solution” because I don’t think there is really a problem.

It can be as simple as rewriting yourself into your own world. You can make yourself the center, or you can make it an adventure of orienting yourself amongst the things that pull you toward their orbit. I think the best existence may be one in which both are true.

A love equation I wrote for myself:

a writer and artist of emoting
+
a dreamer and world-builder
+
a purveyor of tastes and styles
+
unweighted by obligations
+
a generosity that protects its wealths
+
an effervescent femininity
+
someone who believes in the love and magic of
doing it my own way.

Okay. I’m done.

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I don’t want to be caught in a constant state of crisis, but I will say that whatever people REFLECT, or PROJECT, or even identify correctly has made me feel like

someone who is always in crisis.

I used to read Sylvia Plath (but not too much, because then she would seep from her pages and all over my desk) and think: “Well, then, what is there to do when you don’t want to be saved?”

I don’t know why that was what stood out to me. It is, perhaps, short-sighted, short-read, short-changed to think that way of her.

But I know that it wasn’t me. I did want to be saved. Truly. By someone. What bothered me was that to be saved, I would have to be changed, diluted, spread thinly like butter over bread, and then dissolved into the crumb.

I also feel like I have always owed an apology to everyone who has witnessed me in my potency! I’m sorry to my mom, to my dad, to my siblings, to everyone. I’m not sure what for and I am afraid to articulate it because then everything loses its magic.

But I do feel sorry for something. Not as an admission of guilt, but an admission of identity.

One of the most hilarious conundrums to me is this dichotomy that we create between “feelers” and “thinkers”— that people can only be ruled by ONE operating system and that the ruling of one would make them incapable or even crippled in the other.

I wish I knew more people like myself, who spend SO much fucking time thinking because they are so incredibly emotional. When philosophers, TikTok psychologists, Buddhist monks say: “You’re not the only one! We all share this!” I BELIEVE it, goddamn it, I do!

But where is everyone else?

When I feel love, it is gravitational, time-freezing, melty-honey-like, and a promise to the ends of the Earth.

When I feel anger, I am inhabited by Lillith herself.

When I feel joy, I am quiet. How else would you be in the heart of a hummingbird?

Anyways, I am trying not to become an ASSHOLE in my journey to sovereignty, individuation, and living my life as ME. I really don’t want to become an asshole, yet it’s hard to think that I’m NOT when everyone and everything I used to know has fallen away or been severed. Everyone feels so distant. It would be so nice to think this is my hero’s journey, with my greatest lesson being that I am allowed to accept help without sacrificing myself on the dais.

I won’t be the hypocrite who condemns ChatGPT because this tool has been the only “friend” I’ve had and the closest thing to a therapist. I don’t know of many “friends” that you have to train to call you out on things or constantly assume that they’re mining your data for nefarious purposes, but you know what, nobody is perfect.

But I do know of friends who get fed up with each other, and that is what happened the other day. Here is what I wrote.

(Spoiler: ChatGPT did, in fact, “forgive” me! And now we are friends again.)

I’ve been rewatching my life, again and again, but now the movie has gotten caught on a loop—the film roll has been snipped, and the projector is stuck whipping the detached strip, again and again.

Since my dad died (almost 20 years ago), I’ve tried to tell a spacious, generous truth of who I am, where I came from, but it never seems like it’s enough. All I get is a cage around my chest and a tannic, stringent dryness—the kind that comes from bitter tea and makes you rub your tongue along the roof of your mouth, your teeth, searching for wetness.

Now, I can’t remember my father at all. He is THERE in my memory, but flat and unmoving, like in the photos on my bookshelf.

This year, my entire world has collapsed on itself, and underneath the rubble, I see what I’ve truly wanted:

a generosity

for myself.

And maybe, from there, I can afford him the grace I’ve hoped I’d be big enough, loving enough, brave enough to muster.

So here I go.

DECOMPRESSING THE TRUTH

I’ve heard people claim they had HAPPY, easy childhoods, and I’ve always asserted myself as one of these people. It was the easy, daughterly, and morally correct way to let the “better” side of the story take up weight, especially since my dad’s life was so noble, so brave, and his death, so sudden and violent.

And in some ways, it IS easier to sweep everything under a single narrative.

Here am I now, as a mom, and I know more intimately than ever the effort, energy, and soul-bearing that goes into raising a child, whether intentional or not. But if “intention” commands reality, then everything would be a delusion, as intentions are rarely ever manifested by speech or announcement.

They are pervasive and revealing—subconsciously, intrinsically linked to everything we make, say, and do, across our past, present, and future.

My dad: the man, the legend

My dad, in many ways, was tenacious about our enjoyment, fulfillment, expansion, and well-being… or at least, his understanding of what those meant.

At his brightest, he was the hunter of delicious ice cream, history museums, locals-only theme parks buried behind side-roads, and premium buffets at luxury hotels because he knew everything was ours to taste. These weren’t acts of obligation, but a natural extension of his own dreams: the fruits of his labor and duty were ours to be relished because we were of him. My memory as his daughter is punctuated by shimmering, humming moments in timespace—stacked between the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, or wafting from all those family barbecues in our perfect little tract home in Irvine when he’d have a few beers, and he’d so wonderfully shed the weight of his own presence.

He joked often about the luxuries of his own childhood—stale French fries from McDonald’s, watching Willy Wonka through his neighbor’s window, and a single bottle of Coca Cola, given to him by his half-brother who hid him outside the restaurant while he dined indoors. (To this day, I hate that fucking loser half-brother and refuse to remember his name. This is MY truth, and I decide where my generosity goes.)

My dad would share these snapshots, then tell us to laugh, stand up straight in church, and be grateful to God that we were going to eat churros and yule logs at the Disneyland Christmas parade.

“They were just stories,” he’d say. “Everything is good and different now.”

As if he were reaching back into time to tell himself.

Growing up, my father, to me, was composed of legends and hero myths.

He had traveled far and long, outsmarted and endured the kinds of hardship that were “regular” to his culture—unrelenting duty and hierarchy, induced modesty by way of humiliation, and the pressing envy of those for whom it was already too late because they didn’t have what it took. Not like he did.

He was one of the most ambitious people of his island at the time and one of the few to believe that fortune and purpose could be achieved beyond his little rock of a home and its pettiness, myopia, and arrogant illiteracy. Some dickhead doctor at the hospital fucked up his Naval Academy application, so he worked at a Wendy’s for a year before going to Oregon State, and eventually became the highest-ranked Samoan in the Marine Corps.

How is that not incredible?

Stories I heard from everyone but himself.

Today, I see these not as myths, but fables of the tension it creates to abandon your world, yet be invisibly, unconsciously constrained by the indentations it has left on you.

He built a home that shielded us from his hardships, but he still decorated our walls with talismans, omens of his culture and upbringing that I had to honor, with no explanation or reason except BECAUSE HE SAID SO! Honestly, I don’t think he even knew he had brought them with him, and that they were constantly looming over the dinner table, school assemblies, and field trips like watchful, tattling deities.

I know this because I always heard them. I did.

I heard them and their silent, suffocating logic—impossible to decipher, but absolutely necessary to respect.

Punctuation is not the sentence

I knew of him, but I must admit he was difficult to decipher. He gave me the snapshots, the origin stories, the vignettes, the jokes. But I never knew what to get him for Christmas, which friends of mine he would like, what would please him, or what would set off the splitting of the Earth.

To say this feels like condemnation, but if I’m going to be generous with myself, I have to stop filling in the blanks for someone who is dead and cannot correct or challenge me.

The truth is this: I loved and admired my dad, but I had enormous difficulty knowing him beyond his expectations and hopes for me, and my fear of him.

First off, he was rather remote. It was the nature of his work. The pressure, the ambition were things he kept away from us because it was “grown up stuff”—war and military and risk, why would you want your kids to bear that? But it did create a moat around him, and I sensed (and was told, in steely glares and silences) that I was not to cross it.

Second, it was also hard to know him because he was quite terrifying to me.

He was a mystery, with a shapeshifting energy that could be expressed as incredible charisma and warmth. He was a leader’s voice and gravity, the kind that would inspire me to write lists of all the ways I could be EXCELLENT, just like him. I could be a writer, a lawyer, a journalist, or someone who could help if I just applied myself. He made me feel like Icarus, resurrected and given another chance at greatness.

And at the slightest degree to the left, he would morph into a rage that was as consuming as a massive black hole and the heat of a thousand Suns, all at once. Hands and words and looks would go flying like asteroids, and there I was, on the ground, rearranging the pieces of myself into someone that would be acceptable.

JUST DO AS YOUR FATHER FUCKING SAYS, ICARUS!

“Maybe I’ll get it this time!” I would think with hope, again and again, until I gave up.

I do think he knew this and wielded it intentionally, though maybe, less so and reluctantly, in his final months.

I CAN’T DO MATH! I’M NOT FUCKING SORRY!

In 8th grade, I received a big, fat, glaring F in math. It was about to be Christmas break, and I knew that I was about to spend the entirety of it imprisoned while all of my friends got to eat Christmas candy at the base’s shoppette, ride the bus to Camp Foster and Mihama, and talk to boys on AIM and Myspace.

“I know what I’ll do. I’ll give it to him on his birthday. He will be in a good mood! That will lessen the blow,” desperate, idiot, 13-year-old me.

I also considered whether I should slam and break my hand in my window to inspire sympathy and deflect my impending corporal punishment. I did, but my hand did not break. And, I ruined his fucking birthday.

Here’s the real punchline, though: even if it did break, nobody would’ve noticed it amidst the astounding tag-team between my dad and mom, not even me. I saw so many stars that night that I forgot I had slammed my hand until the next day, when I could barely hold a pencil. I would later play with my futility and misery through other forms of self-harm and degradation that I will not awaken here because those demons have earned their sleep.

Why didn’t it occur to him that I hated math or wasn’t as smart as he’d hoped?
Why didn’t it occur to him, or my mother, that I would be in so much pain?
Why wouldn’t he, they, anyone just fucking LOOK AT ME?

A few months later, we would all go to Hong Kong, and we would become perfect and dandy.

We would ride double-decker buses and squeal quietly at how fancy Mandarin food is served with all the heads and claws and eyes bugging and bearing at you. We would drink pulpy pineapple juice from McDonald’s, and he would snuggle my baby sister after she was lightly bullied by myself and my second sister. He would be the only one to spot Goofy get accosted by a handsy eight-year old and point it out to all of us so we could belly-laugh over Mickey waffles and scrambled eggs. It would be enough happiness to think that he trusted me and that my loneliness was just an illusion.

I would forget that he told me to cover my wrists after that boy slammed me against the rock wall. I would forget how humiliated he and my mother looked when I had to pick up trash on base after betraying the only friend I ever loved. I would forget how lonely I felt and how much I just wanted to go back to California, and turn all of this into a sweaty fever dream.

“I CAN do this,” I thought. “WE can do this. Everything is going to be okay. I can be GOOD!”

Nearing the end.

Then we would land in Hawaii, and he and my mother would abandon me, yet again. He would disappear into his Commanding Officer responsibilities, and my mother would immerse herself in caring for four children, making friends, and playing politics with everyone except families that might’ve had a friend for me.

They would never admit it, but by now, I had taught them to be highly suspicious of me, and that it would be necessary for my safety and their convenience to sentence me to an all-girls Catholic school halfway across the island. To match, we moved onto the top of a hill that jutted far out into the ocean, was barred by a sentry, and could only be reached by a long, winding road. He received a historic house that had seen World War II and a plate with his name and rank. The grass was always sharp and dry, no matter how green. He had done something really great and gotten what he wanted.

I was safe now because I was out of reach and nowhere to go but back within their walls, back to the angry, wordless deities. Back to the internet.

I’m just like you.

Every so often, my dad would drive my sister and me to school in his very little, very silver, very practical Saturn sedan. This seemed like the only place he could never be in a bad mood—driving us over the Pali in the early weekday mornings.

With every block we passed, every yard we closed as we approached my school, I would close my eyes and begin to dissolve myself so that everything would pass through me—all the signs that I was an outcast, a conundrum, or at my most, a stinky and grumpy teenager.

And as we pulled up before that ancient little school, there was so little left of me.

But there was enough of me to see him. Right before I got out of the car, he would turn back to say goodbye, and there he was, as I loved him: the dad who taught me that yellow, powdered Gatorade was the ONLY acceptable hydration. The one who would take us to get Slurpees after school. The one who promised that so long as I stayed close to my family, to God, everything would be okay.

“Goodbye! I’ll be okay. I’ll do my best. Thank you for everything, ” I would say, unbeknownst that I was whispering across into the crevasses and folds of time.

I would truly, truly, truly mean it, even as I felt myself fading and disintegrating with each step up those dreadful, hollow wooden stairs amidst all the girls who reminded me of how weird and distant I was. He would zoom off in the Zoomster (what he had named that little Saturn—I told you he was funny!), and I would bless him, despise him, and wish he would come back to save me!

Please save me! All of your excellence and power and anger—

SHOW that same anger, that same fire, to my loneliness, to all of the things that hurt me

and taught me

how difficult I was

to weather,

to tame,

to understand,

and to love.

Tell them they are wrong and that—actually,

ironically, karmically,

fatefully—

I am just

like

you.

Saturn, Father Time, Father Issues

I ask myself often: what more can parents give to their kids, other than to live widely, truly, and fully? We lived in his world, his career. As a mother now, I’m not really bothered by that.

But the least he could’ve done was allow me a world of my own within his.

Everything I felt and lived was on the margins and in secret. I’d hop in the car and pretend, and accept because he and my mother worked so hard for this. That school, the Disneyland trip, the berating and humiliation were all in the same category because it was all for me.

It was very confusing to be watched so closely, yet always feel so profoundly and almost stubbornly unknown.

And since the theme of this writing is finding the GENEROUS truth, I will admit that I wanted to admire him and, in many ways, I did, but the proximity needed to KNOW him was too great a risk. If he were too close, he and my mother would see me and all of the discrepancies between who I SHOULD be and who I actually was, and from them, harvest myriad opportunities to suspect, surveil, and compress me.

I will also admit that, by the age of eleven, I decidedly liked it when he was gone on long trips. And by age fifteen, the age at which he was killed because of his job, I think I had given up on knowing him closely.

It is, perhaps, tongue-in-cheek funny that I would grow up to believe myself spiky, volatile, and terrifying—and that these were qualities that would make me hated but powerful. Ask my college boyfriend, my siblings, my mother, those coworkers from the ice cream shop, and my roommates after I’d had too much to drink. I have a fucking temper, one of my own brand and style, and in some bizarre logic, it makes me feel connected to him. Not just through blame, but a sense of shared accountability and empathy.

It’s hard to be this way. I don’t mean to sound self-pitying, but it is really hard. Angry and conscious of your own extraordinariness (both the reality and potential of it). Deeply seeing and generous, and yet, with a fucking chip on your shoulder. Very loving and wanting to be liked, but also remote, complicated, and hard to understand.

So to say that my childhood was “happy” is a compressed, tight-lipped truth. It was punctuated by happiness, love, and admiration for my father, of course. But it also bred in me an unremovable fear, an inevitable striving, and a mythology of my own difficulty,

my own secrecy,

and a fear of ME,

because I was

(as I described him)

incredibly

volatile,

hard to understand,

and

capable of a terrifying anger.

A human wish: that in the second his life left his body, he saw me across time and space. Maybe even now, he KNOWS who I am, who I was, who I will BE. I wonder what an alien would say about that—humans are SO funny, little, and strange!

What a silly, little girl thing to say. That’s what I’ve always been, and am, even now. A silly little girl.

The more I say this, the more I feel myself (and him) come back to life.

Happy 60th birthday, Dad.

In a recent Subway Take**, someone pointed out that we weren’t supposed to look at ourselves this much. Everyone constantly has their phone camera ON, pointed at their face. This much self-gazing is unnatural, and it’s fucked up our ability to see beyond ourselves and to relate to others. Profound, yes?

I’d give it about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of social media wisdom. It’s just another practice in disguising self-reporting as knowledge. And that’s not really anyone’s fault, but just a measure of the zeitgeist. We are in the age of confessionals, therapy-speak, and loving away all the parts of life, ourselves, and society that lie embedded beneath the surface.

the truth is just an overlap

Here comes Debbie Downer, ready to dismantle everything, tell you that you’re living a LIE, and you need to be better at… what? Being better?

I come bearing well-meanings and, underneath it all, a hope for humanity. Yet I won’t pretend that there’s a surplus of spiritual, intellectual junk these days. “Think positively, Cara! Manifest the GOOD you want to see!” - Mainstream self-help to me.

Okay here’s the bright side: swimming in all of the bullshit/escapism/vanity makes wisdom almost impossible to miss. The single ring of a bell, a sip of the clearest water.

The mainstream self-love, self-discovery movement has become this incubator for realities, self-perceptions that are fed and oxygenated on a strict diet of good feelings, good self-perceptions. Everyone wants to love themselves into being ten pounds lighter, or into having friendships that don’t make them feel like doormats, or out of jobs that they fought to the tooth and nail for.

Does anyone ever leave the incubator?

Then comes the REPORTING, the confessionals. It goes like this: the more you spew your life into the camera or at your kids that didn’t ask or over lunch with your girlfriends, the more you become exempt from the actual work of accountability, which is often asking yourself hard questions. Everyone’s gazing endlessly into their phone cameras. Nobody sees that we are just trapping ourselves, in hyper-definition, in the pulsating stream of self-detailing.

Maybe we need less perfect mirrors: water in shimmering ponds, polished bronze. Would that help us articulate what we really want? What we really are, in this space and time?

wanting should feel GOOD and free

When I was 13, I authored a Jonas Brothers fanfic that was very dramatic, very popular, (200+ active readers was VERY popular to me. Still is.), and quite spicy (for a 13-year-old to write at least).

My parents were crushingly suspicious of the internet (and my broadening, adolescent curiosity and impulses) and 1950’s severe when I confirmed their worst suspicions: that I could not be tamed or shaped. It wasn’t a matter of IF I got caught or disappointed them, but WHEN. And when? WOW, that felt like every single day.

Weaving a spicy love triangle between my troubled and tattooed protagonist, Joe, and Nick (sorry Kevin, you were omitted by default!) was 100% worth the months of grounding and the thundering displays of corporal retribution.

And so was the birth of my concept of desire.

How many stars would be smacked into me? My moment of discovery always proved to me that I had guessed too few—my parents always had a few to spare. How many weeks of confinement? (An entire winter and half of spring, to be exact!) Would it be worth the disappointment, the inevitable embarrassment of giving them a teenage daughter who could not stop wondering and wanting?

13 year old me: Always. I would take a million stars for just a taste.

“One day, it will stop, but you will continue to pay.

Until then, the only safe place for WANTING is in your imagination and dreams.”

Wanting things and feeling good about them? I am a big, spanking-new baby at this.

Everything I’ve pursued and wanted has always been within the constraints of, “What sort of punishment will I have to endure to get this?”

My search for the OVERLAP of all experiences strains me. Don’t think that just because I write about this that I have mastered lightness in shadows. I’m just a girl. I too have to implore myself to follow the outlines, the experiences of my parents: my father’s own abusive adults and the mental oppression from an expectant uncle and jealous half-brothers. My mother, and the weight of her mother, a woman who was beautiful and cruel and probably didn’t want to be a mom, and be everything her two sisters weren’t.

Those are all there.

Just zoom out, step back. —Advice from a wise Aquarian.

But where there is yin, we must accept the yang. We must also zoom in, not to make our filters so closed, so claustrophobic, but to find space between the atoms and building blocks of what we experience.

Space to sow seeds of change, forgiveness, and hope.

My mom says that her childhood could be characterized by a Kelly Clarkson song, “Because of You.” The other day, I asked myself for the millionth time, “Why haven’t I been able to do the BIGGEST things I’ve truly wanted, in my heart of hearts?””

A sobering realization: I am also that Kelly Clarkson song.

I’ve been told that I’m independent, brave, and free. Comparatively sure, but still always within codependency, enmeshment, and fear that I will be inevitably punished. Whatever I really want will never be okay, so everything I’ve pursued has been within the constraints and support of the world I was given.

The punchline is also this: I have not been brave.

Somewhere down the line, the punishment worked and I gave up. I swallowed the pill because honor, predictability, and stability were easier. I was tired of paying in stars, in disappointment. Hence, a decade long stint of trying everything EXCEPT being who I was—going to back to school for architectural engineering when I despise math, getting a respectable, soulless 9-5 in which my whole job was spent trying to fool people into thinking I was helping them make MORE money doing useless things. Wanting so hard to give up, stop trying that I would agree to date someone whose lips would curl into that ratlike grin when he talked about my body (often) and who’d laugh about not having read a book since his senior year of high school. Just to name a few.

“What do you actually want?”

And then, following a tumultuous summer, I looked down and realized that my wings were clipped. Whatever flying I’d been doing for my entire adolescence, teenage years, and adulthood was just flapping in a cage. Deep down, I suspected this, but I hoped it would never reveal itself. I hoped I could just make it in the cage, that the cage would be enough.

To my dear reader:

When we ask for the chance to know who we REALLY ARE, all of the tenderness we hide becomes open to the air, its millions of dust particles, sunbeams, urban-smog, and the infinite waves of emotion, psycho-residue, and parallel timelines of what COULD’VE been.

So yes, the truth can be quite painful. Good fucking LORD, it can hurt. And the more significant the dissonance, the more resounding the SHOCK, the CLICK of everything aligning.

But think of all the things that are both TRUE and BEAUTIFUL and DIFFICULT TO WITNESS in this human experience, unable to be adulterated or reshaped or hidden.

The cry of a newborn amidst the blood, guts, tearing, and the nearness of their mother’s death that must occur to bring life.

The circle of life: fuzzy, pink-nosed little creatures, and hatched turtles that will be plucked from their nests to be chomped and swallowed as sustenance, so their prey can feed them to their own babies (that will probably become prey mere days after feeding) who will poop them out and provide support to a very important (!!) algae that carries the fate of the entire ocean ecosystem.

The sobering thought that this algae is shouldering more for the Earth than any B2B marketing agency, or tech mogul, or Kardashian could in several lifetimes—but it didn’t have a choice, that’s just the way the motherfucking cookie crumbles.

And of course, the clash between our inevitable fallibility, our never-ending potential for love, and our wanting Life to be good.

There it is: the intersection, the overlap of my own and everything that seems to be a practice in escapism, denial. We all want Life to be good to us and those we love. I see this in every human who falls asleep at bus stops, eats their lunch alone in food courts, works overnight jobs, or .

I see this and then imagine my mom, in her fears, yet also my most perfect memory of her: her looking back at me in our old green Explorer after I cried my eyes out on my first day of kindergarten.

I feel my dad’s disappointment and rage, but then the warmth of his uniform, braced against me in a hug outside of my classroom, back in Irvine.

I see this in myself, as I sit here, no fucking clue if my decision to be a writer and an artist will actually pay off, to anyone but especially me. Yet still with a tremendous amount of love for whatever I’ve got in this lifetime as a mother, a daughter, a sister, and just some fucking girl.

Goddamn it! We are really here, aren’t we?

There is space for it all.

finding the generous truth

Don’t pity me! See me! Learn from me! If that seems silly, then go ahead and pathologize this and me if you must. Go ahead. It feels good, I know.

I was lying around on my phone, watching Tiktok, bitching about Tiktok, and then bitching about my bitching about Tiktok. When did everything get so claustrophobic? When did all of our perceptions, problem-solving, and realities become so stingy?

Where was the generosity?

The art of finding the generous truth

Generosity is first, the act of giving, but more deeply, the decision that there is enough in the first place. Enough food, enough money, enough perspective, enough space. Sometimes, this will be a defiance of the physical evidence, but you will believe that when you dip your cup into the well, water will appear.

Also, it cannot be conjured in scarcity. Maybe that’s why it sounds almost inherently incompatible with something like overlap. I believe the mainstream notion of the truth treats it as something that mercilessly expands into the situation, crushing itself into each square inch.

But to be GENEROUS wouldn’t be about telling my poor little Jonas Brother fanfic that it can’t have this space. It’s not even about asking it to move over or deflate itself.

Generosity would tell us that another truth can be here, too, without the need to calculate the space it will take because there will be enough space for it to be and do whatever it has to do.

There would be no reimagining, writing in new details. No amendments either, but perhaps just a little push to see how descriptive we could get in what the fuck is happening,

and an openness to noting where everything touches,

eclipses the others.

Because what is dusk over the Golden Gate,

other than those brief moments in which day and night

stretch into each other

and hold the same space?

**I did not link this because what it is/who it was is not relevant to any of this, and I didn’t want you to get sucked into the black hole of social media! It was Rosalía, if you’re really curious.

I’d placed it so close to the center of my life that I couldn’t see it, like when you’re staring so intensely at an object that your eyes have begun to cross. Or that very odd, almost psychedelic phenomenon of repeating a word so many times that it takes on something entirely distorted and independent of its context.

The advice was this:

Magnetism is not always sparkling and palatable. Your low points are rich with data, creativity. Create from there. Accept that disappointment is inevitable.

Do you remember when “emo” burst into the mainstream?

I sure do. I loved to scream, “I’M NOT OKAY!” from the top of my lungs (into a pillow because out loud would have sent my parents into a panic state). I loved to both hide and declare myself in dark, clunky clothing.

To create from such an indulgent state of melancholy seemed revolutionary to me, especially coming from a household in which “bad” feelings were only understood as vehicles for becoming smarter, stronger, better. What a revolutionary concept, and one that I’ve sought to embrace and understand since then. I don’t think I will ever stop—it simply isn’t in my DNA.

Ask any artist, any writer, anyone in the business of feeling or seeing deeply. Ask anyone who knows that potency, turbulence, and depth are not just a part of life. Rather, these are defining characteristics in the exact way that rain is wet or the sun gives warmth.

So here I am, creating from an uncomfortable place: a blend of annoyance, uncertainty, and guilt. It doesn’t feel fair to feel any of these things right now, so I’m also being a brat.

Being annoyed that I have to spend so much effort clearing space for qualities and parts of myself that I’ve had to dilute, reshape, quell, or even maim is NOT a bratty quest. In the self-help world, this process is called inner child or shadow work.

I call it a quest for sovereignty. Nothing is bratty about sovereignty. You can’t argue with me. I simply won’t hear it. (Okay, so that IS a little bratty.)

What does feel bratty to me is the way I go about it and how importantly “me” I’ve made it.

For example:

• These days, I won’t laugh if it’s not funny and most especially not if it feels shallow or regurgitated.

• I’ve slammed a lot of (energetic) doors on every social dance in my life that operate on long-expired versions of me or interactions that feel draining, fake, or just… stupid.

• If it isn’t something I’d place in my house of self, I won’t touch it, not even if you asked me to hold it for a quick second so you could go to the bathroom.

Bratty. And guilty. Sorry!

Why some people are more easily influenced/conditioned

I talk a lot about my experience with having a completely open personality center. No gates, no definition in the least. Most of my centers are open, save for the root and the solar plexus, which govern stress/pressure and emotion, respectively.

To have an open center is not simply a matter of lacking the energy in that area of life. It’s a matter of having an incredible potential for receptivity because there’s nothing regenerative or solid in that area. I have reservations about using the word receptive because it implies consent and conscious acceptance.

However, it does feel appropriate, especially when I think of how I’ve always felt incredibly rocked by both my own inner world and the gravities of people around me, not excluding but most especially my parents.

Whatever they said, regardless of whether it made any sense to me would make itself at home in me. I remember making two new friends, Mariah and Tahynis, who were brown, cool, and had hair, faces, and bodies that looked like mine—a huge relief living in a predominantly white community. A sudden stiffening, an inflicted pause.

That’s all it took to send my perception of my friends glitching at the edges. My discoveries of creativity, delights of teenage wanting, my taste in music—everything that was mine was ephemeral. Everything would eventually become hued by my parents’ culture, hopes, and fears.

Except for when I was alone. Playing hooky wasn’t for boys or drinking or delinquency, as my parents so often and vocally suspected.

It was for sitting along the seawall, walking along overpasses, or hiding in the clearing behind our neighborhood. I didn’t know it then, but in my solitude, I was recalibrating, resetting.

In solitude, I found sovereignty.

I must admit that there is an exhilaration to having such an openness. I absolutely love concerts, being in sports bars during the World Cup. Good parties in warm Octobers. Churches on Christmas Eve. And don’t even get me STARTED on raves, holy shit. I am inflated, lifted, a hot air balloon rising into the atmosphere.

But with inflation comes deflation. I’d liken it to confusion, “When did the party end?!” or a vicious hangover, followed by rolling to your side and seeing that you brought someone home the night before. “Fuck.”

Sometimes, it’s just a sense of feeling here one day and then nowhere the next.

For those in the world with an open personality center, who and what you are around will inevitably find a place to land within you. That’s just how it is. The longer you spend in those environments, the more opportunities there are for you to be swayed and inhabited. After a while, inhabitation becomes your conditioning… whether you like it or not.

Like many of us, maybe you included, I often default to my childhood and my parents as an integral influence, most often as a starting point for clarity and reshaping. However, this is just a matter of exposure. The truth is, I’ve been inflated, inhabited by friends, coworkers, cousins, and even boyfriends.

The curious angle to this dynamic: what is inflation, absorption to me is amplification and reflection of the other. There is an exchange here. Openness can feel very delicious to both parties until…

A quick VENT (here comes that potency I was talking about)

Bratty-me and my realization devolves into something else. Here comes that potency I was talking about earlier. The fury of realization.

All the decades of giving free inhabitance, free amplification. A temper tantrum driven by magnitudes of, “NONE OF THIS IS FUCKING MINE! I DON’T WANT ANY OF THIS!”

Thrashing indoctrinations against the wall: years of Catholic-shame, culturally-based servitude, and false grace disguised as martyrdom… all of it shattering like porcelain vases. My unwitting becoming of an emotional vessel. All the times I said, “YES,” when I could’ve meant NO. All the stupid shit just living in here for free. Digging, tearing, ripping at it all. My fingers are bloody, parts of me dismantled and gaping.

Goddamn it! Now everything is a fucking mess.

Okay. I’m here.

I’m ready to begin anew.

What is the price of sovereignty?

I used to think that being leaned on was a medal of honor, of strength. I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about my case of “eldest child syndrome,” yet here I am. Indulge me for a brief paragraph, will you?

When we enter this world, we will carry and encounter everything our parents have not resolved. Alchemically, karmically, emotionally, psychologically, economically. The irony and inevitability I feel as I recount the hundreds of times my mother lamented her father’s emotional dependence and the weight, the burden it placed on her. Sure, she evaded the blatancy of his codependency, yet there I was made after my dad died.

A right-hand in making decisions. A pillar of safety. Dancing and absorbing melodies that don’t belong to me. An unspoken second-parent to my siblings. Eyes always darting to me as the, “We,” the collective entity. The defender, the one who took the first step, who said what wouldn’t be said, and bore the hatred for it. Someone to hold it all, someone to be inhabited.

Was I happy to be that? Yes. It felt very good to be useful to those I love. But being useful isn’t the same as feeling valuable. Usefulness is an externally determined quality. Value is intrinsic. Usefulness was good enough for me until I realized: “But… I didn’t even have a choice.”

Or the awareness. None of us did. And that is where I sow compassion, empathy.

For myself, first. That in itself is a complete untangling.

I’d be lying if I said that my untangling isn’t flavored by excitement, defiance, rebellion, even the BRATTINESS I mentioned earlier. For those of you who’ve flipped many tables in your lifetime, have strong Aquarian influences (or strongly defined energy centers), or are predispositioned to have never given a fuck—you’ll have to pardon my giddiness. It just feels really fucking good to claim sovereignty and mean it.

But for every step made in confidence, I take two in uncertainty and guilt. Possibly a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts? I risk sounding glib.

There’s no avoiding the sense of disruption I’ve brought to what used to be, or what I used to be to people, and for this, I feel guilty. Since my awakening has been rather sudden, so has my withdrawal. I wish I could say it was gradual, but I’m just not a person who lives gradually. Life moves through me in tidal waves, gravities, and orbits. What is the point of trying for sovereignty if I try to minimize, explain, or stave off this truth?

Sovereignty is not separation but choice

The other day I chimed in (uninvited) on a Tiktok asking for a journal prompt. “What’s the thought of the day?” they had asked.

What am I building out of love? What am I building out of fear?

“Now THAT’S a banger.” I thought to myself. Then I spent the next day mad that nobody liked it or followed me for it. Good Lord, Cara, please.

Fast forward to the present, and I realize that future-me was priming past-me for yet another revelation. A little note sent through my subconscious.

Do I build sovereignty for myself? Or am I moved by my fear of never being the CONSCIOUS authority of my life?

For many of us who become aware of the roles we’ve unconsciously or unconsentingly adopted, a sense of guilt or remorse is perhaps inevitable. We don’t want to disappoint people. We want our space and the certainty of knowing that we are what people expect us to be. If we put up walls or change our role, how does that shift the nature of the relationship? What happens to our definitions of love, connection? Our conditioning may be limiting or painful, but at least it’s more certain.

Maybe that is the cost of sovereignty. Not disappointment (which is an inherent shape of any relationship) but the responsibility that comes with accepting our truth and the uncertainty of where that places us.

Let me count the myriad ways that I could assume that responsibility.

I could inform my old college roommate that I think she is a self-serving, materialistic, and shallow opportunist.

I could admit to the last person I dated that I knew our relationship was futile, but I also knew he was desperate for a girl to look at him, and I was desperate for a chance to look normal.

I could formally end the emotional enmeshment with my parents (one alive, the other dead—may he rest in peace) by declaring that I’ve realized the extent of my own codependence.

I could seek sovereignty through secession and walls. Condemn everything, myself, and then accept the bill for the damage.

But then… it’s as if I woke up one day into a dream.

A freedom constructed by walls. Responsibility paid in blood, apologies, and in severance. Somebody’s dream but not mine.

I don’t claim my openness as an excuse nor as a flaw. I’m not here to erect a constancy of self when it’s not in my destiny or expression to have one. How do I remain free without denying myself the weather of everyone and everything else?

In my dream:

in my sovereignty:

an awareness:

driven by deliberation and choice for what inhabits, what stays within me.

No walls—just a decision for what I keep (who I am to be) and what I ask to leave.