ep.1: The connection between sovereignty, guilt, and being very, VERY open.
Welcome to episode 1 of a real living girl! today we're talking about creativity when you feel like shit, open personality centers, and different ways of seeing sovereignty.
The best advice I’ve received in memory was something I’ve clung to so hard that I couldn’t see it anymore.
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.