Even without my own experiences to draw on, I would feel this way. That I do have my past as a reference only allows me to function in the face of the onslaught with no trace of doubt that people are capable of everything being alleged and worse.

It’s understandable that people don’t dwell on these matters unless forced by some accident of fate or personal injury. It is haunting in the depths, and no one should inhabit such darkness if they need not. But each of us are obliged to face the implications of such horrors when brought to light. To acknowledge how systems of oppression and wealth-worship have conspired to make them possible, likely, and stunningly common.

Racist, patriarchal, and capitalist ideology have colluded in plain sight; they conspire to convince us that people belong in a particular strata of value with rich white men at the apex. They forcefully impose the doctrine of injustice through religion, white nationalist tropes, and by manipulating the narrative of brutality to grant an illusory virtue to accompany compliance.

Never is this so manifestly apparent as when – as in this moment – the corruption and decay these systems uphold are exposed in ways that cannot be dismissed or denied.

Our nation is founded on violence and exploitation. In every advance toward “greatness” enormous harm has been done to indigenous, black, and vulnerable peoples. Women, children, and those with physical or behavioral challenges have all suffered direct and egregious abuses from those with the slightest power or authority over them. The system has been sustained by recruiting people to the idea that while such treatment is inevitable, it’s better to strive toward the position of the oppressor than the oppressed.

Thus can women reject the idea that they are equal and instead embrace misogyny. People within marginalized groups internalizing the racism they suffer under. Those being stripped of dignity and entitlements supported by their own contributions align themselves against their own interests to pursue a fantasy of negotiable superiority.

Freedom and plenty are characterized as a zero sum proposition; if you are free, then I am not. If someone has enough, someone else must go without. The necessary condition for racist patriarchal capitalism to succeed is to ensure enough people agree with this framing and then set them against each other.

All of this matters because under no other banner could what happened in the Epstein/Trump cabal be possible. It required a massive concentration of wealth, the dehumanization of women and children, and a system that will abet the actions of those who have leveraged their sociopathy for enormous profit.

So now we stand on a precipice.

It feels urgent nigh on impending calamity that we reckon with this moment. That we acknowledge both the sins of our past and the moral imperative to dismantle the tyrannical and corrupt authority of racist patriarchal capitalism. It is neither impossible nor without precedent. It merely requires that those who have long benefitted from the conferred privileges of the system be held to account and forced to relinquish them.

If we refuse to do so in the face of such overwhelming depravity, we deserve no less than to lose everything it has built as it burns down around us. Millions of pages of kindling ought to do the trick.

Both sides of my family have history of Strabismus (crossed eyes) and amblyopia (lazy eye). My father’s cousin and my mother’s brother both have eye alignment issues, though to a lesser degree. I was born, as you see, quite severely cross-eyed. Also, a red head, which is the more surprising of the two, in some ways.

When I was just shy of 3 years old, I had the first corrective surgery meant to address the condition. My mother was working for the State of Oregon in the Food Stamp office, and we had decent medical insurance, for which I am grateful.

Up to that point, I suffered from extreme double vision and had considerable difficulty navigating the world. My older sister, and the occasional adult when they noticed, would stop me from running full tilt into stationary objects my little brain could not accurately locate in 3 dimensional space.

After surgery, my left eye began dominating. It straightened out and began delivering reliable visual cues about the world around me. Unfortunately, my right eye didn’t follow suit. The repair on those muscles didn’t produce the alignment that would result in stereoscopic vision unaided. The ophthalmologists warned my mother that I would need to wear an eye patch over my stronger eye to allow my weaker eye to engage and start communicating fully with my brain.

Soon after, my mother quit her well-paying benefits delivering job because they announced that employees would need to submit to drug testing. As turned out to be extremely typical of her, she chose her life-long love of marijuana over financial stability and access to healthcare for her children.

Even without the ongoing supportive care of an eye doctor, the use of an eye patch was well within the scope of home treatment. And yet, she didn’t make me wear it. She told me later, when I asked her why, that the adhesive on the patches made my face break out. It is breathtaking to me now, that this was enough for her to simply abandon the effort to rehabilitate my vision.

As with a lot of things my mother said to me through the years, I didn’t think too deeply about it; she had a tendency to trot out glib and often cruel justifications for her actions that were usually best ignored.

I have come to the realization since her death how often those justifications were completely unsatisfying and frankly, bullshit. One of the many emotional epiphanies I have experienced in the wake of her passing is how much I had closed myself off from acknowledging any anger toward her.

She was a person profoundly unwilling to admit her own responsibility for the circumstances of her life. Challenging her on anything always resulted in heated conflict and often estrangement. The last time I did so, she chose to exclude me from her life completely and through its very end.

My desire to maintain and ultimately reconcile a relationship with her made it impossible to acknowledge any anger I might hold toward her, justified or otherwise. I did such a good job at this I had largely convinced myself I wasn’t angry at her at all.

Only once that reconciliation was made impossible by her death did all the safeguards protecting myself from those feelings give way. A dam broken by the flood of tears, unmended and ultimately abandoned in the rewilding of the river of my heart.

Last night, as I was driving somewhere in the dark night of 6:00 pm I was lamenting my aging eyesight. Like a thunderbolt, a realization split me open and gripped my heart so tightly I couldn’t draw full breath.

My mother failed me in many ways, but probably none so permanently and profoundly impactful as her neglect of my post-surgical eyesight recovery.

As a result of her inaction I am legally blind in one eye. I do not have depth perception. I have suffered significant social stigma – and a powerful associated anxiety – from having a lazy eye. I was mocked, ridiculed, and on the receiving end of incredibly cruel comments from both adults and children all through my childhood, My condition damaged my self-image tremendously for many years.

A little over a year ago, I underwent an additional surgery to correct the alignment of my eyes. Now, only someone who is actively looking for it would be able to notice the slight in-turning of my right eye.

Having corrected this has earnestly changed how I experience the world in a profound way. I am willing to make eye contact with strangers and have noticed a significant shift in how I encounter new people and how they respond to me in kind. I wonder – as I do about many things – how differently my life would have unfolded if my parents had been capable of or willing to take care of me. To address my physical, emotional, and intellectual needs.

I am grateful that I became the person who could, after all.

Labyrinthos says that my affirmation for this pull is

My compassion to myself sets the foundation for my compassion to others.

I think, in my case, it’s the other way around.

I am very good at evaluating other people’s behavior with a degree of objectivity that has caused more than one person to accuse me of being unfeeling, or more colloquially, a robot.

I see this as a true gift; to be able to take my own hurt feelings and set them aside long enough to analyze all factors at play has served me very well over the years. Not least because doing so has largely allowed me to navigate my life without carrying much anger.

I also understand how it has distanced me from my own feelings and caused a significant degree of estrangement from myself. Being too eager to think about how I should or am allowed to feel, rather than feeling what I feel.

This has also contributed to a pronounced imbalance in how easy I find it to be compassionate toward others than toward myself. I can rationalize, justify, and explain away actions that harmed me substantially, but only if someone else was the cause.

Because of course I should know better. Be wiser, less impulsive. Access my experience to teach me to make good choices.

So, I have been practicing self-compassion. It has been tremendously uncomfortable at times, but is becoming more often my default response. Yes, I am smart and should be able to wield my pattern recognition skills to my benefit! Yes, I am growing and putting significant effort into healing wounds I refused to acknowledge for decades.

And, the fact remains I suffer from CPTSD which can present with symptoms similar to both autism and ADHD. I have been coping with the behavioral and physiological effects of it my entire life without consciously knowing I was doing it.

My seeming inability to identify an appropriately compatible romantic partner. My tendency to procrastinate to a pathological degree. My habit of disengaging from conflict rather than conducting it with an eye toward resolution. These are things I had previously attributed to a deficiency of character and berated myself for them constantly.

Of course, I am ultimately responsible for my actions. It is just helpful to understand that there are other conditions influencing my tendency to act a particular way by default. I have been practicing with concerted effort to observe my behavior and feelings in the moment and then to make a conscious decision about how to proceed rather than simply reacting on an instinct profoundly trained to seek protection at all costs.

So, it stands to reason that this work can and should extend to how I treat myself. How by extending compassion to myself, I am better able to approach my life with an open heart, which is my highest goal.

I am very often in a hurry. I even wrote a song about it, once upon a time.

As I have gotten older, it has become easier to resist the urge to rush. Though I am still pathologically early most of the time, I do realize in a meaningful way that racing through my life has prevented me from both enjoying it and learning from it.

But the urge still exists. Particularly when what I am trying to hurry through is a painful journey of discovery. Spending the Dark Night of the Soul looking for a freeway on-ramp to enlightenment never really worked out; I might have convinced myself the darkness was in the rearview, but I didn’t take anything away from the trip. As though seeing the Grand Canyon from the expressway would give me any meaningful sense of having been there.

The Fool turned up this morning, and I know exactly what it is trying to say: you think you are further along than you are, so you might as well slow down and observe some of the scenery.

I have made incredible strides in the last few months. Examining my trauma with a clear and courageous eye. Confronting the incredibly complicated legacy of my relationship with my mother – and finally allowing myself to admit to the anger I feel about it. Being present with the uncomfortable feelings I have been accustomed to suppressing with a galloping host of coping mechanisms. Acknowledging how that has left me cut off and estranged from myself. Recognizing this is happening all the time, not just in response to relationship triggers.

And this has been very challenging. It has required a focus and change of perspective along with a willingness to persist in the face of considerable discomfort. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that part of me wants to believe I am nearly ready to crest a hill and celebrate my victorious accomplishments.

Hamilton Mountain, out in the Columbia River Gorge is notorious for its false summits. There are no less than 3 places on the trail that appear to be the top, but aren’t. I took this hike with Enzo almost 7 years ago and never actually made it to the peak. It is a long and challenging climb, and by the time I hit the 3rd bench and couldn’t identify the trail that continued up to the top, I said fuck it and called it a day.

Even still, the view from where we stopped was breathtaking. It was an accomplishment getting there and I was well-rewarded for my efforts. That being said, it has never stopped niggling the back of my mind that the hike was ultimately incomplete.

I feel like I am at the false summit of my emotional work. I have come a long way. I can see the tangible ways my life has improved and my progress is meaningful. The Fool simply reminds me of what I already know instinctively; as far as I have come, the journey is still underway. That taking time to rest and recover is important so that I may continue to climb.

For someone who spent the first 17 years of my life believing with complete confidence that I would grow up and become a professional vocalist, it was a hard landing to realize that:

1. I am kinda… lackadaisical sometimes. Being serious about a career in the arts requires both discipline and hustle. I can sometimes muster one or the other, but never yet in my life both simultaneously.
2. I did not prepare adequately for the possibility of college. Having no one in my immediate family who went to college, I didn’t know how student loans worked. I assumed you either had family well off enough to pay for you or you had to get scholarships. I could have, in theory, gotten some but my grades were… not great. See above.
3. I could not see a path to auditioning for operas or other chamber music opportunities without the pipeline of formally studying and obtaining a music degree.
4. I have never figured out how to sight read. It will not go in my brain. I have taken years of formal music education AND a separate music theory class to try and overcome this, to no avail. You absolutely must be able to sight read for auditions of this kind.
5. I had no notion whatsoever how hard it is to be a gigging musician. I mean, yikes.

By the time all of this hit home, I already had a baby and modified ambitions for my life.

But, it never stopped being true that my voice is my favorite thing about me.

Without the framework of a choir to belong to or any particular reason to train my voice in any organized way it fell into a certain degree of neglect. Not so much that most people could tell. Not so much that I couldn’t smoke everyone else at karaoke. But enough that I could tell.

In the last few years it has become much more pronounced that my voice is not what it used to be. I could still get to all the high notes but my voice didn’t come out flexible and effortless, it came with effort and limitations I had never experienced before. That my asthma medication caused laryngitis only added insult to injury.

It never once occurred to me there could be any other culprit than my own dereliction. I was heartsick about it for a long time, even as I re-trained my head voice and made a point to undertake singing practice regularly. I saw it as another example of my Gifted Child’s Wasted Potential.

And then

About 6 months I started estrogen replacement therapy. After my hysterectomy 10 years we tried it, but there were still endometrial lesions and it immediately made me really sick. This time, my provider reasoned, it had been long enough and with accompanying HRT, I should be able to take it without risk of a recurrence.

How is this relevant, you ask? One of the multitude of symptoms of low estrogen in women is for soft tissue to become less flexible and resilient. You know, like the soft tissue IN MY LARYNX.

Because I once again have the light and dancing quality in my voice that I had lost. It, like of other physical things, doesn’t come as effortlessly as it once did, but as long as I maintain my singing practice, my voice remains the magical creature it used to be.

Now, to work on the ol’ guitar playing…

While I would be the first to admit I am not a fan of mine, and our relationship is not fantastic, I have not been confused or conflicted about my thoughts and feeling with regard to him since I was 12 years old and he chose his meth-addicted girlfriend’s whims over my well-being.

Message received. I’m all set there.

Going through that experience really helped crystalize for me something I couldn’t quite grasp before; my dad did not like or care about me.

He loved me. In that way that a person who has children as kind of a vanity project and appreciates seeing an expression of themselves out in the world can love. But on a personal level, he did not like me.

Turns out, the feeling was mutual.

The upside of this is that I didn’t care anymore that he didn’t. I had so little respect for him that his approval was never of any value to me. I wasn’t interpreting his lack of connection or concern for me as a flaw or deficit in myself, but rather a complete failure of character on his part.

So. No daddy issues.

Mommy issues, on the other hand…

My mother had a very particular charm about her. She was funny and smart and charismatic while maintaining a complete disregard for propriety that made her seem like she was above the petty vagaries of guilt and societal expectations.

She referred to herself as a gypsy, but I think Bohemian probably captures the energy a little better. She had a pointed contempt for any stricture laid upon her pursuit of pleasure. She enjoyed her role as a rebel and sometime outlaw, relishing her refusal to let anyone tell her what to do.

She instilled in me a certain shamelessness I am very deeply grateful for. I do not carry the weight of her unrealized expectations nor that of having to care what anyone thinks of me. It was likely the best and only thing she really had to offer me as a mother.

As a child I loved my mother, of course, but I also liked her. Even though she was almost uniformly cold and frequently cruel, she was also very winning in her way. I wanted her approval, unlike that of my father.

I didn’t know I was doomed from the start until much later.

The first disappointment came in my not having been the boy she so desperately wanted. In the same way mother regularly told my older sister she had ruined her life, she told me I was supposed to be a boy. A boy she would have named Aaron Justice. And since I was NOT the boy she had anticipated, that she handed me to my father and said “This is your fault, you name her.”

She gave this little speech frequently. She said it in a tone that implied it was amusing, rather than cruel.

It wasn’t until much later that I came to understand how profoundly her internalized misogyny shaped our relationship. It simply would have been easier for her to love a boy. She centered men everywhere in her life, and I had deprived her of the chance to do that as a parent. She really never forgave me.

I have one vivid memory of tenderness between us. I think I remember not only because I craved such contact so much but because it was truly so vanishingly rare. It was the night before my 9th birthday. I was standing in the kitchen and she came up to me and picked me up in her arms and said “Oh, my little twinkie is turning 9.”

For her to initiate physical contact of any kind was very unusual. For it to be affectionate was almost unheard of. I am wont to joke that the only time anybody touched me as a kid was to hurt me, but its really not a joke.

Our relationship was complicated. While she was actively vicious to my sister, she was only occasionally intentionally cruel to me. She talked to me as though I was her equal from a very (probably inappropriately) young age. She took me seriously and didn’t act like the things I said were trivial just because I was a child. It helped me understand early on that my understanding of the world was valid and my judgement could be trusted.

Things got more complicated when I became an adolescent. She had always had a fondness for much younger men and suddenly she saw me as a rival for their attention. I tried in every way possible to assure her that I had NO INTEREST in drawing their regard and that if she thought that’s what was happening she should consider the problem to be the creepy guy she was dating, not her daughter walking through her house minding her own business.

Once I moved out and she no longer felt any pressure to actively parent me (not that there had been much of that to begin with) things got better. She was more able to communicate that she was rooting for me, even if it was in oblique terms. Once she turned to me and said “Oh Autumn. You know I’ve always thought you were the bee’s knees.”

This is earnestly one of the sweetest things she ever said to me. The fact that I absolutely did NOT know she felt that way until she said it, notwithstanding.

We navigated a lot of difficult and painful relationship dynamics. Fault-finding and recriminations were pretty common. There is no denying many of our patterns were toxic to me at best. But, I still loved her and wanted her in my life.

But, she was the keeper of my historical truth. She had known me all my days and even though her view of me was particular to her, I liked having her tell me from time to time how I was born exactly who I am in a tone of rare admiration.

I visited in January of 2015. I was on my way to Banff to fulfil a life long obsession to see the place. Her house was just under half way there so I stopped and spent the night at her place.

I recall a perfectly pleasant tone between us. She expressed mild concern that I’d be warm enough sleeping in the back of my SUV. I reassured her I had a plan and emergency funds for a hotel if it came to that.

I left very early in the morning and didn’t wake her to say goodbye. I had no notion it would be the last time I saw her. A little over a year later we had a conversation where I refused to play into her victim mentality and set a boundary firmly. She stopped talking to me, blocked me on social media, and refused to respond to even one of MANY attempts I made to contact her.

Little did I know it was that unforgivable.

I remained unhealed.

For a lot of years, I simply chose to suppress and ignore my mother wounds. I had other things I needed to be getting on with, and dwelling on distant pain didn’t seem like a good use of my emotional currency.

It had already begun to come to my attention that this approach wasn’t serving me. That just because I was ignoring the pain didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was touching and harming most of my relationships and I wanted it to change. I was cognizant to a certain degree of how these particular wounds – my mommy issues – were central to my understanding of how to give, receive, practice, and experience love.

I was in therapy and conducting deep emotional inquiry into these dark places when in June of 2025 she passed away due to complications from congestive heart failure secondary to a massive stroke.

Her death has cracked me open. In ways that are excruciating and necessary. Painful and absolutely liberating. It was almost as though I had to fully relinquish any hope of regaining her favor in order to question whether it was still what I wanted.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

It is hard to see in the dark. Not impossible in most cases, but difficult. Because of my amblyopia I am actually better able to see in extremely low light conditions than most people. Though this is of course a result of genetic chance and parental neglect, it is also peculiarly apt that it is so. I have a certain fearlessness in the face of shadow work. I can face difficulty and proceed without falling prey to hopelessness.

And while the darkness I have been dwelling in is more prolonged – as is the way of grief – it doesn’t feel dangerous or lonely there. It feels free of distraction. It feels essential and thus populated with only that which can endure long with little tending.

The new moon represents a time to depart from places where all use has passed. To move in darkness toward a future where intentions articulated will come to full flower.

So, on this new moon, I set my will to allow tenderness to inhabit me. I embrace the effort of dismantling limiting beliefs about what I deserve and what I can give to others. I embrace the courage to be my true soft self. I shed the mantle of who my mother told me I am to inhabit the truest self she never even met.

I create as I speak. So mote it be.