I Am Breaking A Curse

It sounds dramatic but it’s true. I’m breaking a curse. I’ve broken many in my family already - not having a baby, not being financially dependant on a husband, living across the country, starting a business and taking my ventures seriously. The women in my family have all let themselves become so small and I watch as they slowly hoard things in different ways. My mothers mother kept newspapers and art supplies and things for the ideas she never had enough energy for and smoke in her lungs. My fathers mother has rubbermaids full of printed photos, an astounding collection of feather earrings and anything I ever made as a child including good grades. My mother keeps clothes, crystals, and bad habits. All of them keep to the borders of their insecurities, all of them tied in some way or another to some kind of matrimony that feels it can make the best decisions for the family.

No-one went anywhere. My mom was in her 40’s the first time she travelled - on her boyfriends credit card because he cheated on her and this was the penance she chose for both of them. She will go away and he will stay and think about what he did and fuck that woman again in her absence and she will not care because she is in Europe for a couple of weeks. Because he is paying for the car.

Myself, I have taken my legacy at my own pace. When I turned 22 I was the oldest woman in my lineage to not have a child. My pre-frontal cortex, now developed, thanks me. When I was 23, 24, 25, 26 I lived alone and wrote books and started a business and bought a car and tried 100 different ways of thinking and being and living. All that the women before me weren’t able to do I took upon myself as my duty - not because I felt I had to necessarily but because I wanted to. I wanted to be free, I wanted to fall in love as many times as it took to become myself and pick a partner from the heart instead of the home or wallet or efficiency or responsibility.

Now at 27, there are still many things I want to do and still so many fears about not being able to do them. I want to travel - not just in the country I was born in but over the sea. I want to rent out my home and spend months in a new place writing my next book or teaching something dear to me. I want to pack a large suitcase and be less concerned with seeing every sight because it might be the first and last time I will be there and instead be very concerned with having the clothes I need to feel like myself as I write poetry in a cafe and learn the words for the foods I love and how to order coffee in German. I want to buy the groceries that will nourish me not just fill me, I do not want to eat or smoke away my sorrows and I do not want to become literally blind to the ways the person I am bound to betrays me as they keep their onus of safety towards me.

At 27, I have for the first time booked a trip to somewhere totally new to me. I am tagging along on my boyfriends work trip, his birthday week, and a moment in time for me that will be deeply liberating because truthfully I have been so fucking scared for so long that I will get stuck or trapped or lost or come back to a broken life if I dare step off the continent of North America because there is no one before me who has done this. And I am not going to spend 12 hours a day in a museum or see every sight or expunge every fucking detail of history from this place. I am going because I belong in the world, I am going because I envision this places energy and my energy moving in a spiral together and I want to see if that’s true or if it’s more linear. I am going because I want to eat really good olive oil and dance with a sheer shirt and no bra in a club where no one knows me or my name and because I want to kiss passionately in a robe on a balcony and write a story about the cliche of it that is really not cliche and speaks to the tenderness of life.

It is the beginning of the journey of my Saturn Return in Pisces in the 9th house. Reality and fantasy blur, the fear of getting lost in the inspiring world of chaos. And that is the fear - that I will lose something essential and that the way the irresponsibility of those that came before me impacted me, my own will impact those I love. The curse is the fear that to live fully and freely and with trust for the evidence of the support around me is outright foolish. So I banish it.

For 27, the month of June consists of the overlay of two cards - King of Pentacles and 3 of Wands. Learning the true boundaries of what is available to me, asking for the support I want, and letting the conjunction of my mind, body, and spirit lead me towards another path. I have lit candles, I have spoken with the universe, I have pulled cards and studied my chart and said no to opportunities that I could have said yes to but felt more like a test of alignment. Not doing things for the sake of it being right in front of me - not saying yes to things like it is a plate of olives and I will always have a little more room but carefully projecting myself into the flavours of the meal and what I will genuinely enjoy the most. Not what has the most, not what I already know, not what another has said they liked, not the thing that is the most interesting. I have already learned that my no’s give way to my yes’s and here I am at the threshold - already having said yes, and please and thank you and is is truly okay? Am I actually allowed? Do you really want me here? Am I a burden? Will it all fall apart? Will you be there if it does? Will I survive if it does? Will I feel a fool if it does? Will I feel a fool if it doesn’t?

Someone will need to water my garden while I’m away and that’s okay because my friends have keys. Things will bloom while I’m gone and things will die when I’m gone and it’s okay because it happens every year. The flight will be long but we’ll bring a pack of cards. I can pack what I want because he has some gold-standard membership with two suitcase allowances and we can wake up in another country together for the first time.

I remember all the spells I did, I remember all the times I was flakey with the universe about what I really truly wanted because I was scared for my beliefs to disappoint me but more comfortable with disappointing myself with a lack of accuracy. I remember when I decided to be firm with myself, to be brave about narrowing down the interests of my life, about adding things to not just my pinterest board but the breadth of what I was allowing myself to have.

For years I had dreams that I wasn’t able to get where I wanted to go - couldn’t get to the airport; got there but couldn’t get in; got in but couldn’t get on the flight; got on the flight but it wouldn’t take off; got off the ground but had to land half-way through; got to where I was going but couldn’t come back. It was an endless array of my inner landscape looking towards the things I thought were blocking me. Friends that would unpack my suitcase as I packed it, a mother that kept making stops for snacks on the way to the airport, putting the passport in the wrong bag, losing it in another country. On and on and on the excuses went. I didn’t have a valid passport for 7 years so deep was the affliction and belief that I would not be really going anywhere, a self-fulfilling prophecy keeping me in the realm of digestible disappointment.

So anyway, it was a curse. Put onto myself, deep patterns of my lineage, and in exactly two weeks I will be on a different continent in a different country with a different belief and now my fear is how will I stay put when opportunity has blown me so widely open? How will everything I know stay what I know as I traverse new things to know? Will my colours change or the tone of my voice or the way I drink coffee? Will I realize I cannot possible ever own a dog or keep too many precious objects that cannot be packed up and stored for my return? Will I learn when I break? Will I come together again with gold at the seams?