riding the Virgo season pendulum

on trauma drive, the Divine Feminine, and a little thing called the Bucket Theory

Hi lovelies,

Well, here we are again: September. I wake up dreaming poems, from poems that are dreams, and my hands are empty, but they feel full. I dream that I am boarding a train that glides matchstick gleaming across a glacial landscape. I dream of these lines coming into being. That which I know calls me back—but the things that are not yet familiar to me loom ahead, waiting to be made known. Waiting for glowing certainty.

As an Aries, I am an initiator. I feel best—especially if faced with a decision, a situation, or conflict—when moving forward, when taking action of some kind. Feeling “stuck” is not an option for me. As in, my heart is always restless. (*clears throat* my moon is in Sagittarius; if you, too, have Sagittarius and/or other mutable zodiac placements, I’m sure you know what I mean!).

But isn’t it true that “feeling stuck” is really only ever about feeling that way? We are not stuck; we can choose to move forward. Stuck is a mindset. And yet, we can stall for years if we’re not careful, doing all the running we can just to stay in one place.

Obviously, 2020 was one of those years, for reasons no one could have expected.¹

And yet, because I was on a tight schedule, working full-time and in grad school when the pandemic first hit (and because I was lucky enough not to be laid off from my job), I simply went on with everything I had going on—albeit virtually.

I was attending a low-residency MFA program, which meant I was working in the tech world (as I still am), while trudging off to my writing workshops and seminar classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. When the first shelter-in-place order was mandated in March, just weeks before my 29th birthday, I was already utterly exhausted; I was making my way through my thesis, which was a significant portion of my novel in progress, and remains the longest-ever piece of writing I’ve put forth into the world.

Maybe you really are supposed to show up before you’re ready. But the thing is that I never once felt ready, until I finally did. In fact, I considered giving up multiple times.

Soon, I felt lambasted with responsibility in a time of spiraling levels of unproductivity; I was chained to my screen and to my desk, escaping only to drift through the tree-lined trails of the forest where I lived in the Presidio. I’ll maintain to this day that living in the forest is the only thing that kept me going that year—that, and the couple of hawks that lived in one of the eucalyptus trees behind my house, whose piercing calls to each other convinced me, day in and day out, that I still had much to be thankful for. 

But what I didn’t realize, in my diligent pursuit of more pages, was that very often, I was writing the thing—but not actually feeling the thing. I also didn’t realize that all throughout 2020, I was intellectualizing; that as the world was going up in flames, I had so much I Needed To Get Done that I simply had to. A defense mechanism, if you will.

I didn’t allow myself to feel it all; there were too many pages of my thesis to write, too much work to do to get my word count up, too many chapters to edit, all layered atop Every Single Other Thing That Was Happening In The World, and it was completely overwhelming. And I almost dropped out of my program multiple times—although in December, I finally made it to the finish line.

For more reasons than one, that defense mechanism fell away in 2021. In 2021 I cried more than I had in the past two years put together. I kept writing, yes, but also threw myself wholeheartedly into the proclivities I thought would help better me as a person: going to therapy for the first time in years. Working with a life coach to release trauma and blockages that had been trapped in my body since I was 17 and 15 and 12 and 8 years old.

And I told myself that I didn’t miss any of those former versions of my Self. That I could go on and not look back, because for so long I didn’t like who I was—but I do now, and that’s what matters and why would I want to remember that mindset? Why would I want to go back to her, or her, or her?

Stubborn as I’ve always been, I attempted to convince myself—for days, weeks, months, years—that I didn’t miss her. (…which is why this newsletter is actually pretty significant.)

Lately, it seems the cultural needle has moved in the direction of so many of us reclaiming spaces of femininity and vulnerability. How empowering that can be! And I don’t mean in the toxic social media touting of the Divine Feminine as the be-all, end-all, which in actuality aids in the repression of other forms of expression—nor the binary of cisgender male versus female—but that we all have both the divine masculine and the Divine Feminine within us.

Living within a patriarchal and capitalist system means that we are taught to chase the constant male “doing” and achieving, as opposed to learning to exist, too, in the grace of female unfolding, the “being.”

We know this. Most of us are familiar with that creeping feeling that we are not doing enough or buying enough or making enough money, amongst other things. It’s enough, indeed, to make us feel that we are not enough. That simply existing isn’t, either: learning the lessons we are meant to learn, meeting the people we are meant to meet (who are sometimes lessons in human bodies too), and dreaming up the myriad things that we are meant to dream.

With all of this in mind, learning to find my way toward whatever modicum of balance I can—between the restlessness I feel, all the things I want to write and do and accomplish and be—and the calling toward rest and surrender is just that: a balancing act. A pendulum that swings in multifarious directions. An acceptance of the fact that not only is it okay to miss something and not want it back—but it can actually be a beautiful thing.

But how to do this during Virgo season in particular? And a Virgo season during which Mars has entered Gemini, at that. The clincher: Mars will remain in Gemini for a much longer period than the warrior planet typically stays in one sign—nearly 8 months instead of 6 weeks!—as it will be turning retrograde from October 30 until January 12, 2023, and remain in Gemini until the end of March. (I plan on sharing more about this soon.)

I can’t tell you exactly how I’ll feel in 8 months, but this is how I’m choosing to approach it now. I was listening to the Make Shift Happen podcast the other day, and this episode really stuck out to me. In the ep, host Samantha Daily spoke about something called the Bucket Theory—or the idea that each and every one of us have multiple buckets into which we compartmentalize our lives. These include general life stuff, work, relationships, and more. Maybe you have a small business you want to get off the ground, similar to the example she shared.

Or maybe you just started a silly little newsletter on Substack a few months ago (wink wink).

We each have so many buckets we are seeking growth in, but we only get one cup of water per day with which to water these buckets. So, if you aren’t seeing rapid growth in one bucket, it’s likely because you’ve been spreading your cup a little thin. You’ll eventually see that growth you’ve been seeking, but it’s certainly going to take longer than if, for example, you honed in on a few buckets at a time.

This is a particularly apt analogy during a time when the sense of collective distraction is probably the highest we’ve ever experienced in our lifetimes, and in fact, learning about the Bucket Theory touched a tingly little part of my brain that hasn’t felt motivated in a very long time. Not since the Year of Trauma Drive, anyway.

But it isn’t powered by trauma, or pain, or the need to accomplish because I’m afraid to let myself feel the things I needed to feel.

No, this is different.

Because when I pull back from watering certain buckets, I have more time, and energy, and nourishment, and space to gift the areas of my life that have been aching for that TLC. I have more time to rest, too. The kind of glorious and soul-affirming rest that I ran from for so long.

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Feel free to respond directly to this email to let me know what you thought of this week’s edition of Cosmic Kudos, or you can drop a comment under this post on my Substack! Thanks for engaging with me to help this newsletter grow ❤️

xx

Kimia

1. For some reason, I went back and forth on whether or not I should include the following passage in my newsletter this week. are people still writing about 2020? I thought. don’t we all just collectively want to move on? (and by that I mean the year 2020, and not the continuing pandemic, because of course we are all still grappling with the ramifications…) but then I realized, Fuck. am I feeding into that thing I’ve always hated, where because the way in which a specific event or circumstance is being discussed in the news cycle has shifted, because different, newer events and circumstances and disasters and viruses have piled on, the initial event is considered “irrelevant,” or at least people no longer want to talk about it with that original singular obsession. and I’m not saying the initial focus of attention should remain, because I don’t think it should. but I’ve always felt it was weird and insidious and personally untenable that we’re expected to move on from things at the same vicious speed of the news cycle—fast enough to give you whiplash, and certainly too fast, a majority of the time, for this rather slow-paced writer. all that is to say I’m leaving it in, because my grad school experience that year changed me, and because even though I’ve written and talked about it at length elsewhere, I haven’t shared about it on here yet.