I used to take this very personally. I know better now.

Even though I DO know better, the closer I am to the person on the other end of the equation, the harder it is to remember.

I have felt this particularly keenly with regard to my father and the time we have been spending together of late.

My dad was not an ideal parent. He was inconsistent, frequently absent, and always self-serving. For many years, I refused to communicate with him as he remained an intense source of toxicity well into my adulthood.

About ten years ago, I relented on my no-contact position; mostly out of practicality. I wanted to attend birthday parties and family events where he might be present, and I had been avoiding them so I didn’t have to encounter him. I did tell him that his presence in my life was conditional. That he was not allowed to ever raise his voice to me. He accepted this with reasonable good grace and has kept to it, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

Recently, his health has been in significant decline and he is preparing to be transferred to hospice. I have had to consider how I want my relationship with him to proceed at the end of his life. Having lost my mother unexpectedly last June, I have a very present example of what grief and unresolved conflict can feel like. I know without question I want our remaining time together to be marked by a conscious effort to remain open-hearted and present with him, despite any element of our history.

This has been more challenging than I expected. He is not an easy person to be around, in many respects. He has a terrible temper that has only been softened a little by his illness. He is stubborn to a degree I find completely infuriating. He is also uniquely tone-deaf to the feelings of others.

He has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been very focused on the mistakes of the past. A not uncommon end-of-life posture, it has manifested in him being deeply preoccupied with certain events from my childhood for which he feels regret. These are memories that are quite traumatic, and not something I want to revisit with him. I am still working through my own interpretation of these memories and still feel tremendous vulnerability when confronting them. Given his temperament, he is completely incapable of being a safe space for this process and his need for forgiveness shouts down any competing emotional demands from anyone else.

I have forgiven him. I have expressed EXPLICITLY that I have forgiven him. Long since. Not due to any virtue of his, or even a change in the essential qualities in him that caused the initial harm, but for my own peace.

Nevertheless, every single time I have seen him in recent weeks, he brings up – again – some transgression of his for which he wants absolution.

This is undoubtedly in part because he has significant functional limitations on his memory. He genuinely doesn’t seem to remember we have already talked about this multiple times. Even still, it is excruciating to have the conversation repeating itself in a grim groundhog-day-like loop every time I see him.

I have made a significant effort to be patient and compassionate with him each time this happens. To engage in a way that might help him find some comfort or resolution, even if it came at a cost to my own peace of mind. It has only been in the last week that my therapist has helped me realize I do not necessarily need to continue to participate in this exercise.

I had been anticipating the next visit, prepared with a script about how I care about and love him, but that having this conversation over and over isn’t helping either of us and I’d like us to focus on happier things in our remaining time together.

Then, my sister texted.

My two younger sisters have a different relationship to our father than I do. They are significantly younger, and had a mother who was engaged enough to ensure he showed up for them in a healthier way than he did for me. While they each have their own difficult experiences of him, neither of them have had as much reason to protect themselves from him; physically or emotionally.

When he and I have had conflict in the past, they have taken his side. Over the years and with more experience and understanding, they both seem more sympathetic to how different a father he was to me than he was to them. I was under the impression these wounds had healed. It’s always surprising to see the way an impending death will expose buried or forgotten pain.

She wrote to say she had been having some “not great” feelings about some things that had been going on. One of which was the way I was treating dad. She went on to say he told her that every time I saw him I was giving him a “guilt trip about being a shitty dad.”

My blood ran cold, and then very very hot indeed.

I have been doing my absolute UTMOST to avoid telling him that. He is the one who keeps bringing things up and wanting to rehash these painful memories. At worst I have elected not to argue with him when he expresses that a particular decision he made was a bad one. Mostly, I have told him I know he is truly remorseful, that it is in the past, and that I forgive him.

I told my sister as much, and after brief reflection, she conceded my version bore the greater ring of truth.

I am FURIOUS that he is characterizing these exchanges as me browbeating him. I am not SURPRISED he is doing so, on a fundamental level. He is notoriously bad at accepting responsibility for his actions and very fond of sketching himself as the victim. But the way he talks to me in these conversations and the way he describes them to my sister bear absolutely no resemblance.

Both he and my sisters seem to think my difficulty with him is about things that have happened in the distant past. The truth is, he is still behaving in ways that hurt people and refusing to acknowledge his role in the unfolding consequences.

He is hurt he is not getting some particular kind of emotional tenderness from me that he HAS NOT EARNED. He is resentful that I do not seem to care about him as deeply as my sisters do, while remaining an UNSAFE person for me to be vulnerable with. I have been acting with profound effort and considerable intention to remain present and open-hearted toward him, and to find that effort is being met with the petulance and self-pity he exposed in his description to my sister makes it hard to imagine the value in persisting in the effort.

Yet, even with all of that being true, I know it is worthwhile. Not for any value he might derive from it, but from what I will know about myself. That my compassion can exceed the pain it is confronted with. That my willingness to be present and vulnerable through intense difficulty is a strength I can be completely sure of. That a mirror cracked through circumstance still shows the truth, even if only in fragments.

My dad has always been a musician. He wrote and recorded an album, played in a few bands, and when I was young would often sit at the piano and play and sing. There were lullaby’s at bedtime, silly songs in the car. It’s possible I so strongly associate him with music because he is the obvious source of my own talent; my favorite thing about me.

One of my favorite things he would play was what I would call the “glass of beer” song. When I would ask him to play it, he would almost always oblige. It was so beautiful and sad and powerful. I loved it.

It wasn’t until I was somewhere in my 30’s, listening to the Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection, that I realized he hadn’t written it. I laughed about that one for a long time. He never claimed he had, he just never said he hadn’t and for most of my childhood, if he sang something I didn’t recognize, I assumed he made it up.

He and I have a complicated relationship. In a different way than my mother and I did. In his case, I know he loves me – to the best of his ability. But, much like my mother, he seems incapable of seeing past his own wants and needs to express care or concern for others.

When he and my mother split up, it was quite amicable. They still spent time together socially and shared a group of friends. Even when my mother got involved with my step-father, things were friendly; this largely owing to the fact my stepfather was my father’s 2nd cousin. Convenient, right?

As time went on, and the relationship between my mother and stepfather became more serious, things began to change. Andrew had a terrible violent temper. He would punish us for the most minor transgressions, usually with physical abuse. In retrospect, it was almost inevitable it would unfold that way. He was only 16 when my mother, then 23 took up with him. He was living in our basement to escape the violent abuse he had suffered at the hands of his own father. He didn’t work, so my mother left him in charge of her 2.5 and 5 year old children. Children who had – up to that point – been rather overindulged and subject to almost no discipline.

He had no other tools in his arsenal than screaming and hitting. My mother seemed to think this was just how things were done and never objected or intervened on our behalf. We would go to school with bruises we were supposed to hide. My grandmother and his both knew what was happening. There was a lot of tut-tutting, but no one acted to prevent this abuse. Not even my father.

He still can’t articulate why he didn’t get involved. I’ve asked him any number of times. For my part, I am sure it is because having 2 small children around interfered with his social life to an unacceptable extent.

One Sunday, he was bringing my sister and I back from his every-other-weekend visit. We got back to our house, and no one was at home. He was instantly furious. Like his cousin, he didn’t have a short fuse, he had NO fuse.

He knew my mother and Andrew socialized with some of the neighbors up the road. He marched us next door and asked if he was there. We were let inside and an argument immediately commenced. Dad was angry no one had been home to take us off his hands. He could also tell Andrew was high and that set him off as well. Rich, coming from the person that gave him weed in the first place, but I digress.

As the shouting intensified my sister and I stood there watching them getting more and more aggressive. Finally, my dad reached out and slapped Andrew across the face. I have no idea what possessed him to do that. He wasn’t ordinarily a physically violent person. Whatever his thinking was, it unleashed a fury in Andrew like I had never seen. He turned on his heel, ran into the kitchen, and came back brandishing a huge butcher knife, screaming he was going to kill him.

At this point my dad grabs my hand and my sister’s shoulder and we run outside. We pile back into his car and go back to his house. Later, when my mom was finally home from work, she came and picked us up and took us home.

I was about 5 at the time, but even then I remember thinking, why is he sending us back to someone who threatened to kill him right in front of us?

There was never a satisfying answer for this. Indeed, I didn’t hear from him at all for over six months. Andrew held a grudge like no other and said if he ever saw my dad again he would kill him. My father’s response? To stop coming to pick us up at all.

Time went by. I turned six. I went to the phone booth and looked him up in the book and called him. I told him he couldn’t just stop being my dad because of what happened. He was chastened, and started making arrangements to meet my mom in a parking lot to pick us up so he didn’t have to come to the house.

The rest of my relationship with my dad is filled with examples of this dynamic. Me, asking why he abdicated his responsibility to keep me safe, and him having no good answer.

I learned early I would need to protect myself. One way I did this was to close my heart to him. After so many disappointments and acts of active harm, I no longer trusted him. Somehow, his treatment of me felt like more of a betrayal than my mother’s indifference. I had once felt tremendous love from and for him. To lose it was much worse than never having it.

For many years, only music acted as a tether between us. He arranged for me to have studio time to record my album. He gave me his piano. He tried, in the only way he knew, to keep some connection between us alive.

Over the last decade or so, his health has declined precipitously. He is now at a point where the repeating cycle of medical emergency > surgical intervention > return to original health-damaging behavior > medical emergency, etc has escalated to a point of no return. His surgeon advised us that to treat his current condition would require multiple additional surgeries with diminishing hope of meaningful recovery. He urged us to consider palliative care as an alternative, and after significant discussion, that is the option he chose.

We spoke at length about his fears and regrets. He begged me, in tears, to forgive him. I told him I had done so long since, and that any forgiveness he felt was withheld was for him to grant himself.

And in the dawning realization that he is already in the process of dying, my heart is softening. I know there are a number of reasons why this feels possible now, when it hasn’t before. Not least because having lost my mother without warning just nine months ago, I know how much I don’t want that to happen with him.

It is painful to re-engage with these feelings, but I am grateful to have them. I would rather be present with the true core of my love for him than deny myself – and him – the opportunity to experience it. Now at this time where I finally feel safe from any chance of him hurting me, I can once again be vulnerable enough to access the parts of my heart where my connection to him has been hidden for so long.

It’s hard to articulate all of the feelings this process is bringing up. Gratitude, sorrow, frustration and ambivalence are all taking their part. I have never been involved in end of life care for anyone before. The only way I feel sure I can connect to him, and help him feel the depth of my wish that his pain be eased, is to be present.

We talked once about how certain songs always made us cry. For me, it’s America by Simon and Garfunkel. For him, it was The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. As much as it is FIRMLY on the nose, it feels like the right offering to bring to the moment. Remembering all the times he sang the song I loved for me, I will sing the things I cannot say, and hope it speaks to his heart.

On 3/3/26 at 3:33 am there will be a full moon eclipse in Virgo. I have an alarm set to wake up and prepare to capture some of the energy it will be delivering.

Though conventional full moon energy is about culmination, eclipses disrupt this typical rhythm; they may result in a banishing, but the flow is less intentional. We have less influence over what we decide to release. Instead, the universe will wield its scythe to carve away what we need to shed to be ready for what will come to be.

Virgo places focus on matters of practicality, substance, and physical manifestation. It also rules healing, restoration, and release of outmoded energy. Moving what is inside us into future phases of evolution emphasizes our most repeated patterns so that we can determine whether they still serve us.

I won’t deny that this prospect is slightly daunting. The idea of any additional chaos descending upon my life right now feels less like a far-reaching trend impacting universal energies writ-large, and more like an admonition directed at me like a cosmic searchlight. So much of my focus over the last year has been uncovering the truths inside me that I had consigned to darkness so that I could bring them back into dialogue with the rest of the knowing I deploy in my daily life.

I have tried to make this deliberate effort with attendant courage and perseverance. With an eye on the future more fully informed by an integrated understanding of the past. The complicating influence of grief has been a force multiplier in many ways; its capricious nature injecting a series of staggering setbacks to my perceived emotional progress. It has left me feeling, at many turns, disconnected from time and divided from a grounded sense of place.

To further complicate this impression, I haven’t been sure where I would be living for the next year. There were moving parts beyond my control that were causing a considerable amount of anxiety. I was scrambling mentally to cobble together a strategy in case it didn’t go the way I hoped. Thankfully, I was able to confirm recently that I’ll be able to stay put. I’ve been delaying certain homemaking tasks because I didn’t know whether I would still be here long enough to enjoy them. Seeds to plant, curtains to hang, walls to paint have all been swirling in the back of my mind as ways to more fully inhabit my space. Now it feels safe to begin these undertakings, knowing I will be remaining in this place I have truly come to love.

So what else might this eclipse reveal to me? I’m a little scared to find out, even if it will only serve to illuminate what obstacles I need to sidestep as I keep to the path of restoration. Perhaps it will be softer than the glare of revelation I am bracing for, if the universe sees fit.

It beats the alternative, to be sure, but without a ready way to entertain myself, it still leaves me in the same conundrum.

I’m running, going to the gym, writing, and witchcrafting away. Even still, things feel unpleasantly stagnant. While I don’t blame ANYONE for my restlessness and I’m not in the habit of picking fights, I do recognize that I have to do something different if I want things to change.

That said, it’s a difficult balance to strike between choosing distraction to beat back boredom or staying present with the discomfort of ambiguity and stillness. All signs tell me to be patient: to resist the urge to push past the pause.

Recognizing that my discontent springs from restlessness rather than sorrow does help reframe my approach to embodying presence; with attention directed toward the impulse toward busyness rather than some unconfronted element of a larger grief. It softens the edges of sorrow into something less pressing. That in itself represents a change, so perhaps the process is already underway…

I was recently reflecting on the notion of time operating like a spiral. Where we can move through phases with echoing familiarity from a new and – hopefully – more fully informed perspective. Just at present it feels less like a spiral and more like Escher’s stairs; my vantage shifts elevation based on the degree to which I have integrated whatever lesson previous experience may have afforded me.

Lately, it has felt like I am in the basement trying to determine how long it’s going to take me to get up to ground level again, let alone gaining additional ground. Revisiting music I wrote 20 years ago catapults me into an eerily similar set of feelings about a completely separate set of circumstances. Heartache from wounds long healed echoes through my body and soul amplifying present pain. Having written a poignant soundtrack to my despair, it feels almost as though I am condemned to proceed through the same sequence of bewildering romantic calamities.

It would appear I have not, in fact followed Ms. Mann’s advice to “Wise Up” Part of my failure comes from a creeping complacency developed over a decade bereft of the primary substance of my emotional life. I felt nothing as intensely; neither pleasure nor pain. It was easier to deploy intellectual understanding to make “good” and “correct” choices. My heart was moved but little, and did not clamor with longing and illogic.

And now it does. As it did before.

I remember what has come before, and thus I know things, but I cannot seem to apply any of them to the moment I am in. A moment full of yearning, regret, and a typically futile desire to turn back time and make a different choice.

“I’m holding my breath. And I’m turning blue. Forget what I said; let’s decide it’s not true.”

I know that wisdom and deep feeling are not mutually exclusive. Many of the greatest sages are passionate in their expression of enlightenment, but that feels beyond the reach of this moment for me. I am still too raw with renewed feeling toward everything and occupied with a panoply of griefs. My pedantry tokens have an abysmal exchange rate for the lucre of emotional-bandwidth, so I am unable to meet the task with sufficient resources in hand.

As ever, patience – in perpetually short supply – is the likely remedy. As much as the play-through of this catalog is intermittently agonizing, I am also sure beyond doubt there are other songs in my future. Songs that confirm the magic of the precisely correct moment. Ones that contain harmony I’ve never heard before. Songs that will Save Me.

I have been spending a lot of time alone lately. Possibly a little less than usual, but it has felt like more. The emotional awakening I am experiencing has been – by and large – a good, if painful process. I feel more myself than I have in a decade, and as I remember me to myself, I am also struck by how much more immediate both the pain and joy of life feel to me now. I recall how this used to be my lived experience all the time, and I mourn a little for the years lost to inner estrangement.

The Hermit is a symbol, above all else, of solitary reflection. He stands apart from the bustle of other cards holding a light up to a looming shade. As the part of the Major Arcana that represents the approaching dark night of the soul, he has paused for a look at how far the Fool has already come on his journey.

When the Hermit appears it is an invitation to pause and reflect. To spend time alone and reconnect with the inner wisdom we all possess. It is tempting to fill time with distraction and noise, lest feelings of isolation overwhelm us, but the Hermit understands that being alone does not have to mean being lonely.

In the years of my emotional estrangement, I didn’t feel anything with particular intensity. I grew to strongly prefer my own company over spending time with others. I knew this grew out of a number of conditions; being partnered to someone who’s company I could barely tolerate, and the circumstance of singlehood which required me to learn how to enjoy my life without companionship. It was something I had actively cultivated in the past, but in that time came quite naturally.

I assumed it was due to some profound emotional growth that I could be alone – indeed even prefer it – with such aplomb. I saw it as an asset to my happiness, though I worried about the degree to which it might be difficult to find a partner who could understand and respect my desire for space.

Recently I was exposed to the idea that the kind of self-isolation I was practicing might not be about me having achieved such profound equanimity, but in fact that the opposite was true; that extended periods of alone time were a trauma response to cope with emotional disregulation.

This suggestion absolutely bowled me over. Still awakening to myself, I was able to more readily access my deeper feelings and know immediately this is what had been happening for me over the last few years. That being alone was the only way I could sufficiently control conditions to allow myself to process what I was feeling. That the sometimes desperate impulse I would have to be by myself was due almost exclusively to my inability to access my emotions in situ if any other stimuli was present.

What I had framed as a measured response to upsets and conflict was instead a powerful strategy to disassociate in moments of stress. To distance myself from feelings that felt unsafe or unmanageable until such time as I could approach them without additional distraction or obligation to consider the experience of others in the same moment.

Understanding this suddenly shifted my perception of what alone-time really meant for me. Coinciding with a renewed intensity of desire to feel connected to others, it illuminated how often I was denying a penetrating loneliness; rejecting the notion that I want and need emotional intimacy and presence to feel fully nourished meant I was not seeking or maintaining it in any meaningful way.

The appearance of the Hermit put much of this in context. The last few weeks have been particularly instructive regarding how connection and aloneness interact. How by the development of a more nuanced perspective I more clearly felt the distinction between solitude and loneliness. In tandem, it became more conspicuous the differing quality of attentive presence versus simply being in company. An intentional effort at connection or a distraction in the form of companionship.

It is more obvious than ever to me that solitude and connection are meant to be in harmony, not treated as rival claims for temporal resources. Just as the experience of being alone does not need to mean loneliness so too should time spent with someone be treated as meaningful in its own right. Without agenda or objective, being present with another person is a gesture of love for both people. By giving freely of my authentic self, I free you to do the same. By knowing I am listening with open-hearted care, you are assured of my considerate attention. This above all else, is how love is demonstrated as an act, rather than a nebulous desire or abstract intent.

Looking back with the hope of illuminating the future path is the essence of what the Hermit is urging. Understanding the value of solitude in pursuit of this aim is the lesson for this moment. Cultivating an attentive pose toward this work will be the best purpose for however long my time alone may last.

I failed the unit in high school gym which required us to run a mile.

At no point in any part of my upbringing was physical fitness or activity something to aspire to. We didn’t even enjoy the fairly common practice of revering professional athletes. Apart from WWF, there was nothing even approaching sports ever on the roster of entertainment.

My parents had a slightly different relationship to “fun” My dad was an avid golfer, a one-time skier, and general gadabout. He liked to go and do things. My mother, on the other hand was an inveterate couch potato. She liked to sit still, stay home, and smoke weed. This difference in preferences was cited as an enormous contributing cause for their breakup.

Even though my dad was active, it never occurred to him to include me in any of these hobbies. He did take me fishing once, which I hated, but never any of the things I would later grow up an embrace on my own.

My mother held all athletic endeavors in contempt. She thought it a trivial waste of time and energy to exert oneself. As an adult I developed many hobbies that required me to move my body and maintain a certain degree of endurance. She beheld this trend in bafflement.

She herself was something of a cautionary tale. One evening, while on the way home from my apartment, she tripped over a tree root and fell on her side. She injured her hip badly enough that she developed a serious limp which she sustained for the rest of her life. She refused to go to physical therapy or try any rehabilitative exercise to improve mobility or restore function.

When we would talk about my hiking, skiing, golfing, tennis, biking, triathalon, ect she would always say, “It’s like you never sit still.” To which I would reply “Well, I’m afraid if I sit still too long, I won’t be able to get up again.”

I didn’t start running in any meaningful way until I was in my mid-thirties. As an asthmatic who strongly preferred strength training to cardio, I had never seen the appeal. Plus, every time I tried, I hated it. It was uncomfortable, it was boring, and I was bad at it.

Then, after multiple false starts, I finally hit on a strategy that allowed me to learn to enjoy – nay, even love – running; I had to slow way down.

This was incredibly difficult to figure out. So too in the rest of my life, really. I like to go and go fast. I am often in a hurry for no discernible reason. It has taken concerted effort on my part to intentionally reduce the speed at which I make decisions, take action, and meaningfully here, run.

At my most physically fit, I would run a 7.5 mile route 2-3 times per week. I was also weight lifting and doing some kind of stretching routine. I felt invincible and very pleased with myself. One Sunday, on a whim. I rode my bike 11 miles from the Sellwood bridge to the St. John’s bridge and then ran back. That kinda shit.

In the intervening years I have maintained… variable degrees of fitness. I spent 4 years profoundly sick with untreated endometriosis that impaired my function so much it was all I could do to stay alive. After that improved, by means of a total hysterectomy, my energy level was simply zero. For years after my procedure, I struggled with intense fatigue. No amount of sleep seemed to leave me feeling rested or energetic.

Nevertheless, in 2021 after I had my long-awaited breast reduction, I decided to train for a half-marathon. I ran the Holiday Half in a little over 3 hours. My pace was slow as cold molasses, but I was exceedingly proud of myself for making it through. The toll that race took on my body was so intense that it halted my running altogether. The combination of poor form and the wrong shoes had left me with intense sciatic pain and no real concept of how to treat it.

By the middle of last year the pain I had been enduring became intolerable. It was beginning to impact my ability to sleep and function in normal daily activities. I had even – to my great dismay – begun to notice a limp. So, I did what my mother had not and booked sessions with a physical therapist.

It wasn’t my explicit intention to start running again when I started PT. My primary and sole focus was to help reduce my near constant pain. Happily, this also coincided with the beginning of hormone replacement therapy that began to restore my energy in a way I didn’t think possible.

I was at absolute zero. I could not run a full half mile the first time I tried. Even at a 15 min + pace, I simply could not maintain for that long. Rebuilding has been painfully slow compared to other times in my past; where I was once able to add .5 mi of distance to any run until a desired 7 mi max, this time it went far more gradually. Some weeks I wasn’t able to add any distance or improve my pace.

Even though it has been frustrating at times, I am starting to notice the skill building taking effect. I am now adding .25 mi to each run and alternating between flat and hilly terrain. I have also integrated interval training – which I detest – into the mix since I know it’s the most effective way to improve pace.

Running has become tangible proof that transformation is possible, reinforcing the belief that capability grows through sustained effort rather than innate ease. Part of it is the total mental focus it takes. Another part of it is being able to see tangible progress in my efforts from when I started. Running used to be something I hated as a kid. It was too hard and I didn’t want to try. Being a runner now makes me feel like I’ve overcome something really challenging and I’m proud of my ability to do that.

I am scheduled for a 10k at the beginning of April and plan to run the Holiday Half Marathon again this coming December. My goal is to beat my previous time, and not come away so hurt it makes me want to quit running again. Hopefully, I know better not to.

• a subtle distinction or variation
• a subtle quality
• sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value)

My 2nd husband* and I grew up in radically different circumstances. He was the child of millionaires, I once lived in a house that had been condemned and had no running water but for the hose the neighbor ran to our intake pipe.

He had been good looking and privileged, I had been awkward and unpopular. He went to arguably the best private high school in the region with the children of other wealthy and often famous families. I bounced through no less than 9 public schools before 10th grade. He was gifted a brand-new car at 16, I drove my dad’s 25 year old Plymouth without functional reverse and failing brakes.

Aside from the economic differences, there were other considerations. I lived in an urban setting with a radical left anti-capitalist mother, while he was raised on a 40 acre rural property by people so conservative they thought Rush Limbaugh was a pansy.

This is not to say his childhood was without difficulty and trauma, it is merely to say we lived very different lives prior to meeting one another.

Of course one way in which we lived different experiences was through the lens of our opposite genders. He was – like many of his class and age – utterly blind to his white male privilege. This was both passively experienced and culturally reinforced by his family of origin. Their devoted belief that their financial success was a result of their worthiness was deeply ingrained in him; it was part of the fabric of both his identity and how he interpreted the actions and circumstances of other people.

Many of the implications of these differences between us didn’t become clear until we had been together long enough to commit to building a house and life together. We wanted the same things in life, we loved each other passionately, and it just… kinda… didn’t come up. Until it did.

He was a person all but incapable of nuance. He saw the world in extremely clear-cut terms and was all but impossible to sway to a new opinion once one was fixed. I am convinced part of this was due to a degree of neurodivergence, but much of it was also born of having moved through life with a stunning lack of systemic opposition to his ambitions.

He was utterly confounded by my upbringing. He never could quite reconcile how I had emerged from such profound deprivation to become a reasonably successful professional person. He always attributed it – not to the food assistance, college financial aid, subsidized childcare for my daughter and other entitlements I received – to some exceptional quality of mine that allowed this to happen. No matter how I tried to explain that these programs had worked exactly the way they were supposed to, he was never convinced.

After a point, I realized he didn’t really care to understand. That no amount of new information presented would move the needle on his positions and thoughts. So, I gave up. When he said things that were factually or materially incorrect, I simply let him. When he explained my own experiences back to me through his own filter, I didn’t argue. I knew there was no point, and I had tired of trying to get through to him.

Until one night.

He was a heavy drinker. I often couldn’t tell when he was drunk, but very frequently when we had some kind of conflict, he would admit to being “wasted” or “trashed” I understood this as the excuse it was, but it nevertheless surprised me the number of time he was in the bag and I didn’t realize it until later.

One night, while we were being intimate, I set a boundary physically due to some discomfort I was experiencing at the time. At some point, he crossed that boundary. I was so surprised and upset, I didn’t say anything at the time.

When I brought it up in a discussion we had about it soon after, he gave me the “I was super drunk” line, though he did apologize both profusely and sincerely. I tried to explain to him how traumatizing it was. That even though I knew he loved me and hadn’t meant to hurt me, it had damaged the unequivocal trust I had had in our physical relationship up to that point.

He was genuinely confused about why that might be true. How one event in the context of years of respect and trust could be so harmful. And so, despite my better judgement, I tried to explain.

I explained to him the experience of being a woman engaging in any degree of physical intimacy with men. I told him about how many times I had given a pushy guy a blow job rather than risking the possibility of being violently sexually assaulted. I told him about the times when I had pretended to enjoy a sexual encounter in order to get it over with to escape a frightening situation. I told him how many men I had let kiss me when I didn’t want to, because I was afraid that resisting would lead to far worse. To being grabbed, touched, and hurt by people who felt they were entitled to my body, and my response pretending to be a willing participant, lest both the aggressor and I had to admit what was really going on and reckon with that.

Though I knew he believed me – in the sense that he didn’t think I was making it up – he was utterly unable to comprehend that all of this had happened to me; a strong, assertive woman who he had always considered immune to intimidation.

And then I said, “I guarantee you have had women in your past ‘give in’ to you when they didn’t want to.”

His fury and indignation were immediate. He would never force a woman. He had never NEEDED to pressure a woman into sex. This suggestion was a direct threat to both his ego and his image of himself as a “good” guy.

I told him that even if that was true (I believed he believed it was) that it might not have been clear to him at the time that he was being placated. That men his age were not trained to care about or even meaningfully consider what consent really looked like. That they were products of rape culture just like the rest of us.

“I HAVE NEVER RAPED ANYONE!”

When I tried to clarify that I wasn’t calling him a rapist, that I was simply trying to give some cultural context for why he might not see the encounter the same way the person on the other side had, he flatly refused to consider my meaning. To attempt to grasp the distinction between being a rapist and having been raised in rape culture.

He then went on to tell me how offensive he found this idea because of an event that had really haunted him in high school; about how an accusation of sexual impropriety had cemented his belief that women exaggerate or make these things up all the time.

His tone changed when he started to tell the story. It went from one of righteous indignation to a mocking amusement. He detailed how, at a party with a bunch of friends, a girl he had been hooking up with “got more than she bargained for**” once their clothes came off. He said, “I know she had a good time. It was totally obvious” But that for reasons he could never understand and completely unfairly, she had gone to school and complained about the whole encounter. Never explicitly saying he forced her, but complaining about his behavior in vague and indistinct ways.

Even conceding the possibility that he didn’t hear the exact nature of her complaints (she did go to a different school, and he only heard about it indirectly) there was no doubt in my mind that he felt like the wronged party in every sense.

I paused in the wake of this story. I was stunned to realize he had produced this story as evidence in his favor that he was innocent of any kind of sexual coercion. For me, it only underscored how his perception of events was so profoundly informed by rape culture. That to him, the lack of a forceful and explicit “No” in the moment completely absolved him of any sense of wrongdoing. That consent was granted continually by her lack of active opposition in the moment.

I looked at him and said, “I have been that girl. I am telling you, she didn’t want what she got. If she had been happy about what happened between you, she wouldn’t have gone to school and told everyone she wasn’t. Sometimes, women say yes – or, they don’t say no – even when they don’t want to because they are scared, even if you weren’t trying to scare her intentionally. You are a physically imposing person with a very forceful personality. You have no idea what her life experience is like. You don’t know if she’d ever been allowed to say no. You assume you did nothing wrong because that is what you were taught to believe. I am not saying you did something you were consciously aware was wrong, I am saying you didn’t have the full understanding of why the fact she didn’t say ‘no’ wasn’t the same as her being an enthusiastic and completely willing participant.”

I tried everything I could think to say to make him understand. It didn’t work. No matter what tactic I took, he was never able to grasp the nuance I was trying to communicate. It was – unsurprisingly – part of a broader pattern that ultimately contributed to the demise of the relationship.

Seeing this post today brought this conversation back to me in full force:

In the case of my then partner – who I knew had reasonably good intentions – I was looking for ways to help reconcile his lack of understanding with a person I was trying to share my life with. With additional experience I know that regardless of the culture they were exposed to, there is enough information available now to confront those assumptions and accept responsibility for amending their understanding and actions.

What we now understand about the multi-faceted nature of consent should become a gospel that all can commit to. No matter what may have been promoted as “true” and “real” in the past, we now understand enough to know and do better. We used to know the sun moved around the earth, after all. The differences are so enormous that a nuanced view isn’t the least bit necessary.

*We had a wedding, but for administrative reasons, never filed a marriage license.

**He couldn’t resist the chance to emphasize how big his dick was, even in this moment.

Ultimately, I think we place too much emphasis on empty courtesy over authentic kindness in this culture so niceness isn’t a quality I put a lot of value in. That said, she had a way of talking both about and to her children that strays about as far away from nice as you can get.

I was born profoundly cross-eyed. It runs in the family on both sides, but no one else has ever had such a severe case as mine. I was also a redhead, like my dad, and she would joke that had I been born a hundred years ago, it was likely they would have labeled me a devil spawn and left me on a hillside.

She said a lot of things like that. Quips she clearly found amusing or colorful and repeated so often they became part of the lexicon of my childhood. She told my sister frequently that having a baby at 17 was a mistake. But, she didn’t put it that way. Instead she would look at her and say “You ruined my life” or “If abortion had been legal that year…”

The messages for me were different. They were less vitriolic, as a rule. While she resented my sister for the fact of her existence, I was to blame for a variety of character flaws personal to me. Among the list of my sins:

• I had been “the worst” baby. I never stopped crying
• I had been “born disapproving of her”
• I was intolerably conceited and she claimed “the universe gave you that lazy eye to keep you from becoming the most vain creature on the planet”
• That while my sister had been a mistake, I was at best a social blunder

Children rarely pause to consider the things their parents say to them as to the content of the claim. It certainly didn’t occur to me until much later that everything she ever said about me was really about her.

When my daughter was born she had terrible colic. She cried a lot as a result. Once, when my mother came to visit she said, “Jesus, she’s even worse than you were!” Objectively, she didn’t cry that much. Suddenly, this vision I had of myself as having cried non-stop for my entire infancy was called into question. It dawned on me that her experience of my difficulty as a baby was likely unrelated to how I behaved and tied primarily to her disinterest in parenting.

I had never really understood what she meant when she said I was born disapproving of her; if I was looking down my nose at her, blame the strabismus? I did challenge her a lot as a child. More, I think, than most children might. I knew she wasn’t making choices that put our well-being first and I criticized her for it. But, to attribute that to a baby never made any sense to me. After becoming a parent myself, I realized it was almost certainly a response to feeling a sense of guilt over her ambivalence about motherhood.

Vanity was, far and away, the quality she derided most vehemently. In retrospect it’s impossible to interpret this as anything other than misdirected self-hatred. She was beautiful, but she never felt she gained the advantage she felt entitled to because of it. In my case, I was an awkward, poorly dressed, and malnourished child that no one would accuse of being fussy about my looks. I had no concept I might grow up to be attractive, nor the expectation of the admiration of others because of it.

What I DID have was a confidence that I deserved better than what I was getting. Both from her in particular, and from life in general. My childhood was full of chaos and danger. My mother did nothing to protect us from that, and in many cases acted in direct opposition to what would benefit us. I knew she was wrong, I knew she should be doing better, and I had no problem telling her so.

To her, wanting to be safe and cared for – believing myself worthy of those things – made me vain. Deciding I could make different choices and create a better life for myself in the future was arrogant. When I started actively taking steps to achieve that and having precisely the outcomes I imagined for myself she would hiss “You are such a fucking princess.” This was her fiercest expression of contempt.

Though she said it to shame me, I said “You’re goddamned right” and embraced it wholeheartedly.

I do not know how I came by the character that allowed me to see past her vision of the world. My sister, who suffered far worse at the hands of both my mother and others, accepted the ugliness as unavoidable. Her life mirrored our mother’s in significant ways; almost as though she could not imagine a different outcome than the one written for her, no matter how awful it was.

Whatever was present in me, I am deeply grateful for it. Though we were estranged for the last nine years of her life, I know she would have been absolutely stunned to see what has become of me. The professional success, the travel, the security I have created for myself; all of these things she saw as unattainable and too much to hope for are firmly established facts for me.

And if it be vanity to believe in my own inherent worth, step aside so I can get a clear shot of myself in the mirror.

Sometimes my cards speak to me with such clarity. Other times I fail to connect the threads into an intelligible message. This can occasionally be instructive in the sense of needing to focus my attention and study the result more carefully.

More often, it is when it is telling me something I don’t want to hear or don’t feel ready to accept.

This morning feels like one of those times.

It’s unusual enough to pull so many major arcana cards at once, but to have ALL of them be reversed is truly extraordinary. Though there are schools of thought that ignore reversals, I tend to read them as presented. Each of these particular trumps have a lessened but still significant positive meaning in their reversed position. It might be the lens of the particular moment I am in, but I find it hard to trust.

And maybe there’s reason for that. My intuition seems geared only to notice potential harm. Though I am not by nature a pessimist, the radar in my head is unquestionably tuned for picking up danger. Some subconscious pattern recognition process is running at all times. My body knows what it is sensing long before my mind catches up. I am still learning to trust it; not to shout it down when it warns me against something I want to ignore, or discount as paranoia. So far, the warnings that were right still didn’t save me from whatever hurt I was heading for, it just let me suffer in advance, knowing it was coming.

I know I am doing what I ought. I am taking care of myself as best I can. I am moving my body, being still with my soul, and learning to navigate the conversation that occurs in the space between these two efforts. I feel like I have climbed to the precipice of something necessary and dangerous without realizing I was doing so and it is only a matter of time before the fall.

There’s almost certainly nothing I can do about it, except to keep my eyes open on the way down.