You're not ready until you're ready
In defence of the "healing era," going slow, and being like melting chocolate.
A year and a half ago, in the back of an incense-steeped crystal shop in Vancouver, BC, a psychic told me I was like melting chocolate.
“If you try to melt chocolate in the microwave on high, you’ll ruin it,” she told me. It hardens, burns up. “You have to melt chocolate slowly.”
As she pulled Page card after Page card from across a table draped in black silk, I felt like I was taking a test and getting the answers wrong. Give me Pentacles. Give me the Emperor, the Chariot. Anything but the youth and inexperience of the Page.
“You’re not ready,” she told me. “You need to heal first.”
I had been healing. For three years. I went to therapy every Friday. I did candlelight yoga on Wednesdays. Every time I picked up a book, it was on being here now, doing the work, becoming a mountain. I was seeing a psychic.
Despite my healing regiments, I was still frozen. Affirmations bounced off me like seeds on concrete. My “inner child” was always under the bed or behind a door as part of a perpetual game of hide-and-seek. I set alarms for 6 AM only to paw at my phone in the dark and turn them off.
I pursued projects before I felt deserving of success. I sabotaged them. These false starts and wrong turns reaffirmed I wasn’t capable, that I was lazy, that nothing worked out for me. I used shame as my catalyst for change, and it blew up in my face every time.
I did not want to melt, or burn slowly; I wanted to self-immolate, rise from the pitch-black ashes in full power of myself, at my full potential, productive.
Whether at 16, or 23, or 25, I always felt like I was running out of time. In another post, I wrote:
I used to cry on my birthday because it meant I was slinking farther and farther from precocity. I believed any intelligence or talent I possessed depreciated with age, that every year garnered cancelled out the eminence of any goal or dream coming to fruition.
I left the crystal shop with a bruised wallet and hurt ego and went to the beach across the street, where I sat on a great, fat log with great, fat growth rings on both its ends and waited for an epiphany to jolt me from my stagnation. What a great story that would be — if this tarot reading, this divine intervention, this spiritual initiation finally changed me, redeemed me.
But nothing happened. The sense that I was too late only set deeper, like the sun smouldering behind the mountains.