Embracing Uncertainty

Every now and then, stories come along that are so perfectly timed we feel they must be uniquely gifted to our particular circumstances. Such was the case when I first stood at the bookstore and put my hands on “If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant For You” by Leigh Stein. I’ll admit to being baited by the title, which can always turn my head as someone who personally has spent quite a good deal of time conducting divinatory services for chat. We all want a custom message just for us, just for our particular anxieties or needs, it acts like a balm against a world that doesn't always give us the outcomes we hope for. My eyes raked over the plot, a tangle of influencers caught up in a competition to go viral first so they can save an old crumbling manor- and I felt an uncomfortable prickle from the topic of influencers again. My eyes glazed over and I put the book back where I thought it would be forgotten, just another audition that didn't quite make the cut with me.

In the following days, I went to theaters to see Obsession and took myself out on a nice solo date to do so. Although I had planned to make the day special, my life didn't cooperate and I picked a time that was so early I would have to jump right into the car before being able to think through the situation. Even though I was frantic as I booked the wrong showing, arriving at the theater a little disheveled, it quickly became obvious that the film and I were going to have an experience either way- my comfort be damned. As a film the soundtrack and scenes have a hypnotic quality that is uniquely soothing, and lulled me into the right state for inner work. The things that film did to me internally are impossible to describe here, but in the quiet pockets throughout my days since watching it, I have been finding myself thinking about the film with ever more intensity. At the end of the film I sat there and asked myself what I would choose with a One Wish Willow, and from some deep quiet part inside me, an obsessive voice said she would wish for me to choose her. Even typing it makes me cry, it hit me like a brick to the face and kept hurting the whole way home, I sat there horrified that this is what I'd choose- me. Although I had originally planned not to discuss any of it here, I find that I simply must- because it also influenced my decision to go back and retrieve “If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant For You” and give the book a proper shot with all its bizarre little synchronicities. 

The plot of Obsession is simple: a young man struggling with his attraction towards a good friend decides to make a fateful wish in a moment of frustration and insecurity, and unintentionally traps her inside of her body while an external version of her exists to service his every desire. It’s a horrifying case of remembering to be careful what one wishes for, and the entire film oozes dread that only someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies can feel at ease with- since it’s the default state of that brain type. I knew what would happen in every second of this film, I've not only lived inside being both versions of Nikki, Bear, Ian, and Sarah- I've also lived inside being the one observing these situations from the inside out. Every intrusive thought I could conjure came true, and none of it upset me as profoundly as the revelation of what I would wish for that hooked me at the end.

If the obsessive version of me could pluck a One Wish Willow out of its packet and wish for anything, you’d think I’d wish for Bushes to worship the ground I walk on. For Tyler to come back to life and allow us to live a happy and normal life, that wasn't plagued by his addiction issues. You'd think I'd wish for the attention or adoration of millions, so I could become a "successful streamer" and enjoy my life for real while I traveled and had fun with friends. Instead, when I asked that very private and secret part of myself, the woman who gets obsessed with people and topics at frequency, what she would wish for- she wished for me to become obsessed with her. I looked deep within myself in that moment, and my heart broke- because this whole time what that obsessing woman wishes is that I would turn around and look at her- not that a guy would. Not that we would have all the accoutrement that seems to scream "success", but for me to just pick her for once. Previously I was someone that would cut my arms and legs off if a man I was into asked me, just because it would be convenient for him, whatever was happening here was colossal in contrast. 

Previously- I had no boundaries, no standards, and my obsessive side knows it- so sitting in that theater it hit me like a landslide that I’ve been listening to the same woman crying for years who just wishes I would come out and let her into the house and talk to her, not that a magical door will open and suddenly these people and situations that haven’t chosen us will pick us. Why is it even I don't want to hang out with her, what's so bad about her, what's so wrong? I sat there having a full blown existential crisis, and simultaneously wondering why no one in this film actually went and checked on Nikki and asked her how she was doing- in spite of being the one they labeled that had a problem.

So when the next day my obsessive side asked me to go back to the bookstore and pluck up “If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant For You”, I did. It came out to $19.19 and was purchased at 10:10am. She and I smiled privately about it for the entire ride home. Once we began the book, she and I couldn’t put it down- it centers on a missing tarot reading influencer named Becca Chambers. Eerily, we relate to all the characters in this story the same way that we related to all the characters in Obsession. Here I will lay it out:

Obsession

Bear - fixated on controlling things/getting desired outcomes from a place of low self worth. Been there, tried that, turns out control isn't love.

Nikki (real) - trapped inside a body that will not listen and is doing things we don’t condone because of triggers. An entire prior relationship was literally me trying to escape the trap of being put in horrible situations where I couldn't even recognize my own actions anymore- they were so toxic. I tried so hard to kill myself, just like she does, because it would have been better than continuing to live this way.

Nikki (fake) - being helplessly attached to things that can never satisfy our needs. Completely lost every single part of myself that made me like myself for a guy, to the point where I put entire chapters of my life on hold and sought his validation and company at the expense of all others. Some days I'm still working to undo damage done to me by his opinions.

Ian - concerned friend witnessing the process who wants to intervene but can’t figure out how to. Watched a friend sink into the kind of post-situation limerence that can only produce major mental health issues, the whole time I was terrified for her and hoped she'd come through it. She did, last I heard she's happy and successful- if you ever see this, I'm so proud of you.

Sarah - concerned friend who feels they would have been the better choice to have been picked instead of another. Watching the person you love, loving someone else. Choosing someone else. At the expense of themselves, at the expense of everything you hold dear- I think this might be one of my top traumas. The whole time, I felt for Sarah, because Bear certainly wasn't a prize to go after emotionally. I wish she picked herself, I'm trying to.

If You’re Reading This It’s Meant For You

Dayna - struggling mid thirties dark artist on the fringe of the social scene trying to make a living and survive as she processes her aging in the face of influencer culture running rampant that seems to only prize youth. Endless ads for beauty creams, endless campaigns that make you feel like if you've aged a day past 30, you're old news. It can be a really toxic industry to work in entertainment, and never moreso than when you're surrounded by the wrong people- I'm thankful to be surrounded by my age group but I completely see the self worth spiral Dayna is stuck in.

Craig - bystander and online friend who believed in Dayna since she was young while quietly holding deep affection for her without acting on it. The desire not to be a creep while holding deep, intense emotions and private family events will resonate PROFOUNDLY for anyone who has ever had a parent or other relative struggle with addiction. The entire way through this book, I felt a twist of sadness for Craig- he was likely harmless the whole time.

Sean - Body dysmorphia, fixated on the idea of “perfection”. Tyler used to spend 4 hours in the gym per day training to be a bodybuilder, and I used to starve myself within an inch of functioning all while believing I was morbidly obese (which there is nothing wrong with, for the record). Body dysmorphia is the most relatable thing in the world to me.

Piper - Burned out mean girl with a famous parent who struggles with her mental health as a result. I've never intentionally set out to be a mean girl but definitely gave that off in my more anxious or sarcastic moments- it's a nightmare that lingers with me still and something I struggle to forgive myself for. I wonder how many of us set out on our own pursuits and never really gave a single thought to what the consequences of our poor mental health would be? I guarantee it's not just me.

Olivia - Orphaned from a huge tragedy and channels her actual emotions into dark content. I love dark art, I wish Olivia's content was real and existed. She's someone I'd be friends with in a heartbeat, I relate to her fragility, the struggles she encounters, the way she grapples with being unable to forgive herself. If I had to rate anyone in this book highly, it's her. It's almost too much for me to speak on, because I get it: how much of yourself will you show to the camera, before it just becomes torture porn?

Jake - Hiding his desires to quit educational plans altogether and move towards full time content creation, hiding quiet passions for Dayna. Jake doesn't have a family that believes in him, while I do. I relate to the sensation of feeling like you need to hide the creative parts of your life to avoid the scorn that might follow, but Jake is the least relatable character to me since there's a lot of moving parts going on behind the scenes. He has swarms of rabid fans that attack the mansion while he's there, trying to get at him, and all of them are women who would otherwise be living domestic lives. It's a strange predatory dance with him, where they simultaneously see him as their child and someone they want to fuck. Whatever is happening under that surface, I inherently don't like it.

Morgan - Keeping a secret she can’t tell anyone about, while simultaneously doing everything in her power to keep the house afloat and everyone working cohesively towards the same goal. On the fence about this character, even as I sit here writing this post. I like her style, a whole lot, she's edgy and a great stylist- but the thing is she strikes me as being incredibly manipulative due to her role in the story. Morgan doesn't disclose as much as she could have, and seems to be greedily profiting off keeping someone she considers a dear friend and a family she considers close at odds with each other and the outside world. It makes me hesitate, but I guess I get it, if I had a secret of that size to keep- I'd probably be cagey too.

Becca - Burned out tarot reader experiencing acute psychosis as she works with her deceased grandmother to channel incredible works of art, whose mental health becomes a spectacle as no one wants to value her for the person she is outside of what she provides them with. Genuinely talented and psychic individual. Oof yeah. This one hits in the chest, Becca is my most relatable character. I've been burned out of helping people with their divinatory stuff for awhile now, even pulled it off stream, because I started to intrusively hear and be told things I shouldn't possibly no off camera. It was a horrible space to be in, I was constantly stressing out and feeling the weight of other people's lives on my shoulders to a degree I really didn't enjoy, and the way it psychologically broke Becca is exactly what I feared would happen to me. Sometimes I still do fear it, especially as an occultist, the siren's song of not being able to detach from where others' issues end and mine begin- the pull of being inside another's energy instead of inhabiting my own. Spiritual psychosis is real, and it's easy in the world of content creation to let one's mental health slip to that degree. I was adamant about avoiding it, even if that meant closing down avenues of income, and I remain that way for my own wellbeing. I think it's impossible to be deeply gifted in the occult and not to some degree have to keep it behind the world's strictest boundaries. I've learned my lesson, and this character only served as an additional cautionary tale.

The entire cast of characters for both stories are enthralling, in a way that makes you salivate for more of their stories even though you know it’s being greedy and you can’t possibly eke more out than has been given. Finally channeling my intense obsessive nature into both of these narratives, I lost myself while swimming in the miasma of early adolescent memories of my own disappointments and joys. But what "Obsession" began runs far deeper than I had anticipated, as it created a sort of launchpad into two more films with equally significant messages.

If Step One was to access the reality that I've been outsourcing my validation onto colleagues and friends to feel whole as a creative, then Step Two was to recognize the way that my own unconscious behavior has been trapping me into repetitive loops that keep producing the same outcome. Finally, Step Three is the last and the message is simple, I have been afraid to own and use my own magic and it's high time I did.

If I thought June would be less intense and contemplation heavy than May, I should have thought again, for in the vacuous silence there have been so many revelations springing to the surface I do not know how to hold them. That surveillance does not equate with affection, that my body is more programmed to believe I am loved only if I am being worried about rather than enjoyed, that for so long my fuel source has been to keep pushing through barriers at high speeds in the hope things would even out in time. I have sourced my creativity, my passions, my thoughts- only from emergency and pain. Made loving stories out of behavior that has only produced hurt, and I have been shooting myself in the foot for years now.

Tumbling from Obsession to Backrooms to Weapons- the trajectory is obvious: all three films are about embracing the weird to find the solution, and if we trace back the root of the word "weird" to "wyrd" it becomes quite clear that wyrd equates to what is unexplainably magical. If I were to trace my own wyrdness and follow that, what would it look like, taste like, sound like? What would be embodied there, what is my particular flavor or being wyrd? These are questions that are impossible to answer in a single post, but there will be an ongoing theme that carries through the literature I read that operates in tandem.

So far my books have all centered on that theme:

• Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson

• If You're Seeing This It's Meant For You by Leigh Stein

• The Underworld by Susan Casey

• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

While I would normally take this opportunity to cover each of the books in depth with explanations, this post is primarily for the part of me that needs to write this out and think about it clearly reader, so please don't take my silence on the titles as some form of indictment. In fact, each one has produced surprisingly deep unconscious work that is being checked in real time with my therapist, and before I speak on any of the books or films at some great length in a public forum, it would seem wise to first consider what those thoughts would be with great care. At present, I am living inside of the revelations, gazing into the future with a gentle disquiet about what embracing my own magic is actually going to look like for me.

In simple point of fact, external validation has always felt delicious, especially when it's from desired parties. Sourcing my own validation by honoring my own boundaries and becoming my own sounding board has been rough, especially as I watch while those that are less attuned to me fall away like cardboard cutouts of the people that I once dreamed they were. In simple point of fact it was me who filled them full of my essence and then gazed at it and believed they were deep, I believed they resonated with my entire heart, and they didn't. They may have seen the words I wrote, or the thoughts I conveyed, but they didn't truly feel a resonant spark of excitement or real investment in my advancement.

This is not all my friends, mind you, but a select few whose goodness was entirely being fueled by my perception of that goodness. Whose depth was entirely my own essence wrapped in different clothing. A favorite quote from NBC's Hannibal springs to mind, "perception is a tool that's pointed on both ends", and it is accurate. Just as I was projecting all of that depth and goodness onto them, there is simultaneously now an opposing force revoking that from them unfairly in my mind- and it must be observed with some patience. It will take time for me to see things balance out: they are good people, but they may not be my flavor of good people that I can go to those depths with. Nikki's fixation on Bear in Obsession, artificial, and his real obsessive concept of her illustrated this point to me clearly. We often do not see others as they are, we see them in the light our brain unconsciously desires to in order to meet our needs.

The tangle that is the unconscious has been a knot that has been wrestled with inside my brain for years, primarily due to the fact that I dealt with some great turbulence in 2019 that everyone already knows about. As I sit here writing this, it's about to be the 7 year anniversary of my life as I knew it being thrown into the shredder. My ex partner died, I was violently assaulted, I left neuroscience, I left behind the illusion of stability and surety I had created for myself for a decade prior- and entered the waters of the wyrd (Weapons). The occult fell directly upon me like an anvil on my head unasked for , I needed to tell my ex partner one more time that he was an asshole for killing himself (Autobiography of a Corpse), and accidentally discovered an aptitude for necromancy inside myself (Vespertine). This aptitude for necromancy caused me to have a colossal fall from grace in neuroscience where I was previously convinced that there was nothing out there that could change my course (Backrooms), and I wound up on a near decade long journey into the depths of myself that very nearly took my life several times (The Underworld). From that place I developed a brand and identity that has shifted due to the levels of intensity it requires from me and my skill level (If You're Seeing This, It's Meant For You), and at last it has come to my attention that the feelings craving validation and solidarity that I have been seeking need to come from inside me, not everyone else (Obsession).

It has been a journey that has spanned me the very depths of hell to the very heights of believing I had at last found what I was searching for. I have come out of the fray alive, and ready to reconcile with the lessons that I am being shown, but reader: it has been an intense time period of reflection and deep inner searching. There is nothing about this terrain that is familiar to me, and when we ask the question what does my wyrdness look like- I admit to you right now that I have no idea. I'm both someone that works closely with the dead and in alignment to them, as well as someone that prizes empirical data and psychological feedback. I am both someone that has herself been obsessed with everything outside herself, and someone who recognizes her limitations and sets boundaries so that I'm not a danger to myself or others. I am many things, multitudes of them in fact, and "embracing my magic" sounds very trite when in reality I believe the core theme may be to embrace uncertainty. Though I have no idea where this road is leading me, I admit that I am done chasing a sense of certainty and definitive guidance.

The tarot cards have been stored away, I no longer seek divination, for whatever comes next is what I know that I will bring about by sticking close to what feels deeply right for me inside my body. I know that safety and security do not look like being treated as a threat, and I know that even though it will take time for my body to get there- I will someday be able to tolerate what is easy and gentle rather than shying away in terror.

So while this period has been chaotic, and I am sure this is as far from my usual presentation of books and media as we could possibly get, I am thankful for it. To the depths of my core, I look forward to reporting in from a place of grounded normalcy soon, should that rest stop appear on my horizon. In case it doesn't, stay tuned, things are about to get a lot more fun in here.