There is a tiger’s eye ring that started all of this, and I no longer have it.

I was seventeen, maybe nineteen. My first job, the kind that pays you in coins you can almost count in your palm. I was walking home with that little bit of money when I passed a street vendor with a tray of crystal rings, and one of them caught me the way a thing catches you before you have any language for why. Tiger’s eye. Brown and gold and banded like something that had been watching a long time. I bought it.

I did not know I was buying the first stone of a whole life.

The Language of Stones

For a long time after that, crystals were the only subject I trusted myself to speak on. Before astrology. Before shadow work. Before I ever tried to teach anyone about money and failed at it, because that was never the lane the energy actually ran in. I built my first small community around crystals. I gathered four girls and carried my favourite stones and we sat together and it was good. I made groups, I posted, I taught. I grouped the crystals by element and by sign, laid them out like a language I was finally fluent in. I never sold a single one. I only ever wanted people to understand them.

I imported them from America to Kenya, spending money I did not really have, and I have since learned that most of those stones were probably pulled out of Kenyan ground in the first place, shipped away, sold back to me at a markup by the same machine that takes everything from here and returns it wearing a price tag. I paid it anyway. That is how much I wanted to hold them.

And then I went to Sedona.

This was 2017. I had crossed an ocean and I was standing in the middle of red rock that hums if you stand still long enough, and I gathered crystals the way a child gathers shells, greedy and delighted and completely unashamed of wanting them. I brought them home in my bags like treasure. For a few days I was the most myself I had been in a while.

Then I went to a Catholic retreat.

I do not fully know how to explain what happened in me there, except that fear arrived, the specific fear that has a scripture for everything and a warning for anything that glitters outside the sanctioned light. I began to feel that my crystals were dangerous. That loving them was a door I had left open to something I should be afraid of. That to belong to the room I was in, I had to prove I could let them go.

So I threw them out. The jade. The others. I put my own earth in the bin like it was contraband.

The next morning I walked the same path, looking for them. I do not think I even decided to. My body just took me back to where I had abandoned them, the way you return to the place you last had a thing you cannot bear to have lost. They were gone. Of course they were gone. And I stood there feeling a grief that was much larger than a few stones, though I could not have told you then what the real size of it was.

I had thrown away my north, and not for the first time, and not for the last.

The Drifting Pole

The magnetic north of the earth is drifting. It has left where it sat for a long time and it is moving, fast, and a compass does not stop working when the field shifts. It only has to be recalibrated. The old map stops being reliable, and for a while you do not know which way you are facing.

That is what losing the north actually is. Not a pole destroyed, but a direction you can no longer take for granted.

And it feels, in a body, like fear. Like bewilderment. Like standing on a path the morning after, not able to find the thing you threw away, not able to say why you are crying.

The Borrowed Voices

I took a red garnet to the sea as an offering and watched it disappear into the water and I cried on the shore like I had drowned something. I have lost so many stones. Given away, dropped, sacrificed, gone. Early on, before I knew what was what, I lost money to people who lied to me about which stone was which, and I lost more than money, because being lied to about the thing you love teaches you to distrust your own longing. I disbanded the first community when I got tired. I let the groups go quiet. I never built the business, and now I watch the women I taught still running theirs, and something in me asks, too late, whether I should have sold.

The wound is that I kept setting down the thing I loved because some borrowed voice told me it was not safe to hold.

The church. The fear. The quiet verdict that a woman like me should not want something so much, should not build a life on something so unserious, so bright, so unprovable.

Because here is the part I have never resolved, and I am not going to pretend I have. I do not know if they work. I have never heard a crystal speak to me the way some people describe, never had one tell me to charge it a certain way or place it in a certain hand. I have only ever felt them. The yawn that comes from nowhere. The energy that creeps up the arm. The red jasper I kept close through a season when I needed to feel held, because someone had told me it steadied you, and I cannot tell you whether it was the stone or my belief in the stone or the simple animal comfort of carrying something that felt like an anchor. I cannot separate the crystal from my faith in it.

And I have decided, finally, that I do not have to.

The Question

The question was never whether the north is scientifically where the compass says. The question is whether you let yourself be pulled by it.

I threw mine away to belong to a room. And the room did not hold the part of me that loved them. My relationship with the stones had. They were the one thing that did not forget. Some minerals preserve the direction of an ancient field long after the world around them has changed, holding it for millions of years, long after the people who scattered and doubted and changed their minds have dispersed. They keep the old direction even when the north has moved. Even when I have.

The Thread

A reading once told me that one of my grandmothers wore a green stone. I do not know which grandmother, or which stone, or whether it is even true. But something in me leaned toward it like iron leans toward the pole, because it would mean this did not start with a tiger’s eye ring at a market.

It would mean it came down to me.

That the loving of stones is not a hobby I picked up but a thread I was handed, and that when I threw my jade in the bin I was throwing away hers too.

I am not going to end this by telling you I have found my north again, because I am still learning how to stop giving it away. But I know now what it is. It is not out there, in Sedona, in a mine, in a room that will approve of me if I am only austere enough. It is the small steady pull of the thing I have loved since I was a girl with almost no money and one gold-banded ring.

It is in my own hands. It is in the ground under Kenya that they keep taking from. It is in whatever my grandmother wore.

I threw it away once, and walked back the next morning to look for it.

I am still walking back.

🤍

Going Within

1. What did you love before anyone told you what it meant about you? Where is it now?

2. Think of a room you wanted to belong to. What did you set down, quietly or dramatically, to be allowed in? Did the room hold you the way the thing you set down had?

3. Whose voice delivers the verdict when you reach for something bright and unprovable? Name the voice. It is almost never your own.

4. Is there a thread that may have come down to you, a grandmother’s stone, a parent’s craft, a family gift nobody claimed? What would it mean to pick it back up as an inheritance instead of a hobby?

Take these to a journal or a long walk, and answer honestly rather than impressively.

The Stones and The Thread

The stones and I found our way back to each other. I teach them now at Crystal Clarity Kenya, with discernment: study it, question it, relate to it, decide consciously. And the wound underneath this essay, the borrowed voices and the rooms we shrink for, lives in my books at inkandshadowtales.com.

If you want your reflections to have a home that remembers them, they live there too.

If you don’t want to walk alone, come join me. We shall walk together.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone still throwing away their north.

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Share Whispers of the Moth

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I had been looking forward to Saturday all week. My son had too, though for different reasons.

I enforce no screens on weekdays. He knows this. By Saturday he has earned his shows, the ones I approve, the ones that don’t loop and trap and demand another and another. His plan was to be occupied. My plan was to escape into that occupation. He watches, I rest. Nobody needs anything from the other for a few hours. We had an unspoken agreement, and it was going to work perfectly.

Then I found him watching YouTube.

Not just any YouTube. Mine. He had found my channels, the adult ones, and was deep in the shorts, the ones designed to keep you looping, the ones I had banned him from precisely because I know what they do to a child’s attention. So the punishment was swift. No screens for the entire Saturday.

I took away the one thing that would have occupied him. Which meant all his energy came directly at me. The punishment I designed to restore my authority, and to buy my own rest, had quietly guaranteed the opposite.

Paper Planes

Then he found paper and started making planes.

He made one, it flew, and something lit up in him the way things light up in six-year-olds when the world suddenly makes sense. He wanted another. Then another. Then he wanted me to make them, because mine flew better and he knew it.

By afternoon I had pulled up YouTube on my own phone so we could watch tutorials on how to fold different types. I banned screens in the morning, and by afternoon we were both on the exact platform I had forbidden, watching strangers demonstrate the physics of folding. We tried most of the designs. I made many others: one that boomerangs back to you, one that flies dead straight and accurate, another built for distance. I learned there are people who make paper planes competitively, who travel to see whose plane goes furthest. We took ours outside and had our own contest. One flew up onto someone’s balcony, and we stood there looking up at it, and it was funny to both of us in the same moment.

And then I was done. My monthly cycle had arrived. I had been driving for work, cleaning, doing laundry, and I had missed my meditation rhythm all week because the days had been heavy. I was sitting in the kind of tiredness that has nothing theatrical about it. I just needed to be left alone.

He kept coming back, and I kept saying later. And somewhere in the repetition, I noticed I was doing the thing I always do.

Trying to teach something when what was actually happening was that I had nothing left to give and I was calling it a lesson.

I was tired. He wanted more complicated designs. And I left him there, crying, squinting at YouTube instructions, trying to fold a plane by himself from an adult channel where the instructor holds the 2026 world record for paper airplanes.

That was the punishment I had designed.

The Bath

I ran the bath eventually. That is where the meditation happened. Not on a cushion, not in silence, but in hot water at the end of a long Saturday with the laundry done and my son temporarily quiet.

The question that day was: what are the fruits of your actions, and what void are they filling?

The teaching says the fruit is never the goal of the plant. The plant makes fruit to protect and nourish the seed. The fruit is a tool, not a destination. We chase it anyway, because we are animals and fruit fills voids: the stomach, the heart, the mind. The whole story of working hard to enjoy the fruits of your labor is built on that reaching. The higher path is to ask what seed you are actually trying to nourish.

I thought the seeds were the books. The platform. The home. The proof that the work was real. And those are real seeds. But sitting in the water with my son in my mind, trying to follow adult instructions alone in the other room, having already asked me several times while I said later, I understood something simpler.

The thing I had been refusing him all afternoon, my presence, one more plane, five more minutes, was not the point.

The seed he was trying to grow was the experience of someone entering his world without agenda.

That is what children are asking for under every specific request. Not the object. The contact.

I stayed in the water a little longer anyway, because mothers need that too, and I am learning not to apologize for it. Then I got out of the bath. I went back. I made the plane. It flew, to happy squeals, to a boy so excited you would think the plane had crossed an ocean. He showered and went to bed.

That was the whole thing. Not a breakthrough. Not a lesson delivered. Just the action done, because the meditation had shown me what it was actually for.

Changed Action

The teaching says karma is action, and the same action produces the same result. Change the action, change the result. We repeat because the brain cannot tell pleasure from pain. It only wants the familiar.

The familiar, for me, is withholding presence until I have gathered enough of it to give safely. The familiar is calling that a boundary. The familiar is making my son wait for something that was never actually scarce.

It only felt scarce because I was tired.

I wanted the fruit of compliance and quiet. I got a whole different harvest. A six-year-old who discovered paper planes. A Saturday that ended on the platform I had banned. A seed I never meant to plant, growing anyway.

I changed the action. I went back. I do not know what that plants in him. Patience, maybe.

I know what it planted in me. The no-screens rule still matters, and I will keep teaching it. But there are days when the punishment starts punishing something more important than the lesson, and on those days the wiser discipline is the one nobody taught me:

To compromise, to look the other way, and to let him be happy while the lesson waits for a better hour.

And I stopped treating my presence like a fruit he had to earn.

🤍

Going Within

1. Think of the last consequence or boundary you set from an empty tank. What was it officially teaching, and what was it actually buying you?

2. Where in your life are you chasing a fruit, the quiet, the compliance, the result, when what you are really hungry for is a seed underneath it? Name the seed.

3. Who in your life keeps asking for a specific thing, another game, another call, five more minutes, when what they may really be asking for is contact? What would entering their world without agenda look like this week?

4. What do you make people earn before they get your presence? Who taught you that presence had a price?

Take these to a journal or a long walk, and answer honestly rather than impressively.

The Books

This essay is part of a new series being written in real time, where the healing and the parenting happen in the same hour. The books that came before it are now live on Amazon, ready for the ones who are ready to walk this path deeper.

You can find them at inkandshadowtales.com.

If you don’t want to walk alone, come join me there. We shall walk together.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone learning when the lesson can wait.

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Share Whispers of the Moth

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Typical.

Here is what happens every time, like clockwork. My personality is big. I get really connected to people. We get used to each other, and once we are, human things start happening. They start using that closeness against me a little, and I, on my end, start covering up some of my own mistakes.

One of my biggest mistakes is coming late.

I am not going to lie to you. I am a latecomer. I have no sense of time. Even right now, writing this, it is already midday, and I was supposed to have done a lot today. Instead, I spent a whole hour just reflecting. And honestly, I wish I could just not have any sense of time at all, because I do not love working under pressure. I actually work really well under it, weirdly, but I do not enjoy the lead-up.

Anyway. I am regressing. Let me focus.

This was not sudden, even if yesterday looked sudden from the outside. There had been small things building for a while that I kept absorbing without saying anything. I had been late three times since the summer started. Three times, total, over the course of weeks. That was the number she decided to use: responding to my lateness by asking for something I had not agreed to. Extra hours. Tasks outside of what I was actually hired for. I experienced it as leverage.

Yesterday I got there late again. She was waiting for me. She said I had to stay longer, otherwise she would call the office.

And something in me just said, enough, the line must be drawn somewhere, let her call.

I did not agree this time. I did not negotiate. I had already been sitting with the decision to leave for a while without acting on it, and something about her saying it as a threat made the decision come to a head right then.

I gave my notice. She called the office anyway.

I think she just wanted to get there first.

This all happened during a full moon in Capricorn, which feels almost too on the nose. Capricorn is structure, discipline, showing up consistently, whether you feel like it or not. And if I am honest, the chaos of this exit is pointing directly at something I already knew. The kind of jobs I keep taking do not actually have the structure I need. Shifts that hold me hostage from getting fulfilling work.

Do I wake up excited to go to these jobs? No. Do I wake up excited to work on my own website, my own writing, the thing I am actually building? Every single time.

I have been told I am constantly bracing before I even walk in the door. That my body knows what is coming before my mind admits it.

The full moon was not punishing me. It was just shining a light on a structure that was already cracked, and a body that already knew it.

Here is the part I actually want to admit, because it is the funniest and the most honest.

I do this thing where I walk into a new situation and immediately decide it is amazing. Oh my God, this job is so easy. I do not have to do anything I do not like. The house is beautiful. And I really do love beauty, so a beautiful house genuinely disarms me. I will overlook almost anything if the environment is harmonious, and some of these places are amazing. There was one home surrounded by trees, and deer would just wander in and out. I only got to work in the mornings; the rest of the time, I could just be in the back yard working on my own things and being in nature. There was another one that faced the ocean. The view from that place lives rent-free in my mind when a guided meditation opens with clearing your head. I go there. Mmmh... maybe I should be house-sitting. Sorry, let me focus.

That is exactly how the fog forms. I fall in love with the good parts so fast and so completely that I stop noticing the small wrong things accumulating underneath. The beauty becomes the distraction.

Cancer season started this week, and the first teaching is about mist. Fog. Not the kind in the sky, the kind that rises from the ground right where you are standing, hiding exactly what is in front of you.

It goes like this for me, every time. Something feels off. I notice it early. I do not say anything, because saying something feels like complaining, and I have spent my whole life trying not to be someone whose grievances drain the people around her. So I hold it. I keep showing up. I tell myself it is manageable.

Then something tips it. Not even something huge. Sometimes it is a vacuum request. And the fog lifts all at once.

Not gently. Like fire.

Which sounds simple. Except for me, naming small irritations sounds exactly like complaining. And I really do not like to complain.

But I have been sitting with that this week, and I think I need to be more precise. I do not dislike complaining. I dislike what I believe complaining makes me become.

The belief underneath it: if I say what bothers me, I become a burden. Some people have to manage. A pattern I recognize from somewhere much older than this job, that I swore I would never repeat.

So instead, I absorb everything silently, right up until I can no longer, and then it all comes out at once, and it looks nothing like a small irritation. It looks like a woman who just quit her job and burned the bridge on the way out.

Every explosion I have ever regretted began as a sentence I never said.

There is another layer to this that I did not expect to find. When I hear other people complain about small things, even my own son, something in me wants to shut it down immediately. Redirect. See the positive side. I tell myself I am teaching resilience. But underneath that urgency is something else. Their small complaint touches the same place mine does. It feels, for half a second, like evidence that I have not done enough. So I rush to fix the feeling before I have to feel that.

And I realized something this week that stopped me: children do not only learn whether emotions are safe from how the people around them express emotion. They also learn it from how those people receive it. Every time I redirect my son, I am not just teaching him to see the positive side. I am teaching him whether his discomfort is welcome in the room.

Same fog. Both ends.

I am not going to pretend this is some deep, resolved piece. It is not. I do not have an ending where everything gets fixed.

What I do have is a mid-week correction to my own framing. I thought my issue was ~~complaining~~. It is not, really. My actual issue is what happens the moment I detect a shift in the dynamic of a relationship, which I do fast, almost always before I can explain why.

The detection is not the problem. What happens after it is.

Right now, the sequence runs something like: something feels off, which means my place is threatened, which means I either submit or burn the bridge.

That escalates from observation to identity in about half a second.

The pattern is consistent across basically every relationship I have ever had. Jobs. Friendships. I have lost friendships over this exact thing. I once lost many, all the way in Bali, Indonesia, where I essentially kicked or got kicked out of a villa, miles from home, over the same sequence.

So if anyone out there is thinking about hiring me for a job: I am wonderful, I am dedicated, I fall in love with beautiful spaces a little too easily, and I notice shifts in relationships quickly. What I am still learning is how to let the noticing stay information rather than turn into a verdict on who I am.

I have also realized I am looking for friendships where small grievances stay small. Where someone can say, “That bothered me,” without it becoming gossip, disloyalty, or a character flaw. Maybe that is what I have been trying to learn all along: not how to avoid complaining, but how to let discomfort have somewhere safe to land before it becomes resentment.

Maybe that is what this chapter is about.

Not becoming someone who never sees the shift.

Becoming someone whose worth no longer depends on what she sees.

So yes. I got fired again.

Or maybe this time, I finally stopped volunteering for jobs I had already left in my head months earlier.

The jury is still out.

When Eva is not walking out of a beautiful house because someone finally crossed the last line, she is learning the difference between what she observes and what she concludes from it. The gap is smaller than it looks. She is working on it.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it looks like to stop turning a sentence about behavior into a verdict on your value, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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I was in Nakumatt when I was twenty-two and saw a small washing machine sitting on a counter. I bought it immediately.

I had someone helping at home, but she could not wash my personal stuff (obviously), and I hated washing clothes. Not because I was/ I am lazy, well, yes, sometimes I am, especially on stuff I consider a waste of energy.

When I started earning money, one of the first things I did was bring running water from the well into my mother’s house. Nobody asked me to.

Innovation, for me, has never been about creating something flashy.

What is consuming unnecessary energy, and how do I redesign it so that energy can be used for living instead of surviving?

For the past two years, I have been building what began as AxisGPT: a shadow work companion that kept becoming more than I planned. A place where AI, astrology, ancestral work, daily reflection, and shadow work could stop living in separate boxes and finally speak to each other.

The first thing I have ever built where every part of me gets to come to work.

And for almost all of these two years, I kept treating it as something I did before my real work started.

I would pick up shifts, come home, work on the website, write another article, build another feature, and tell myself: once I finish this, then I will begin.

Today’s teaching was named something I had not been able to see clearly.

Matías De Stefano speaks about the religious inheritance many of us still carry without realizing it: the belief that work comes first, rest comes after, and paradise is the reward for sufficient suffering. Even when we no longer believe the theology, many of us still live the structure.

The shift that happened today during meditation feels both incredibly small and completely irreversible.

Axis is not something I need to finish. It is not a side project, not a bridge toward my real career.

It is the first thing I have built that contains everything I care about, and I have been calling it a detour.

That belief is convincing because bills are real. Rent is real. Children need stability. I will not romanticize uncertainty: I will still pick up shifts because, right now, they help my nervous system remember that we are safe while this ecosystem grows.

Safety allows creativity to keep building.

Yesterday, I picked up my son and suggested we go to a park. He immediately resisted.

Not that park again. I do not want to go.

I took him anyway.

The park he thought he knew had been turned into a splash park. He played in the water the entire afternoon. On the way home, I mentioned that he had been so negative, and he said something that stopped me:

How can you know something will be good before you go?

He looked at me the way children look at you when they know you are also talking to yourself.

He was right. I was.

Earlier, he had asked whether I would still be driving him around when we are old.

I laughed and told him there would be self-driving cars by then; they are here already.

Then another thought arrived: by then, he will probably be driving me.

That is innovation. Not rejection of what was. Just allowing reality to become what it is becoming.

And releasing my grip on yesterday’s version of how things work.

Axis will change. It will become things I cannot predict today: new tools, retreats, books, conversations, and ideas I have not imagined yet. Just as I have changed, it will keep changing.

For the first time, I can honestly say something I could not have said one year ago.

It is completely okay if I spend the rest of my life cultivating this.

Not because I know where it ends.

Because I finally understand it was never supposed to.

🤍

When Eva is not redesigning the energy something unnecessarily costs, she is learning to stop treating her own life’s work as the thing she does before her real life begins.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it looks like to stop calling your life’s work a detour, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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Share Whispers of the Moth

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I asked myself a strange question this week.

If a curse travels through blood, how can a blood ritual remove it? Same channel, two directions.

The thought sat with me longer than I expected.

I think of people I have known who went to see a traditionalist when something in the family would not resolve. I was young when I first witnessed this, and I judged it, the way you do when you have absorbed enough of the other system to believe the old one is shameful by comparison.

I understand it differently now.

As I grew older, I went to see a traditionalist myself, to understand my own lineage and the issues that have ailed it. The shame I had carried since childhood, the same shame I once aimed at other people for doing exactly what I was now doing, slowly started to dissipate.

A bee is real. But the word bee also carries a whole inherited map most of us never built ourselves. Honey, sting, hive, bear, flowers, yellow and black, all of it handed to us complete, long before we ever met an actual bee.

The word ancestor works the same way. The ancestors are real. But the word ancestor also arrives carrying a map we did not build. Obligation. Lineage. Blood memory. Debt. A whole architecture of fear and duty, inherited rather than tested.

Some of what I carry under that word is real. I felt it in the bath this year, in the prayer I said for my family line, in the release that came after.

That was not inherited. That was mine, tested against my own life and found true.

But some of what I carry under an ancestor is just an old map, still running, never actually checked against anything.

Any immigrant who has traveled back to the motherland does not need to be told there is a certain energy there, a feeling of home that arrives before any thought. I felt this myself on a recent trip and meditation on Mt Kenya. Something moved in me on that mountain that was not belief and was not an idea I had studied. It was physical. The mountain did not ask what religion I followed or what doctrine I held. Whatever happened there happened before thought could shape it into a story.

This is what makes me wonder whether some of what we call spirituality was originally biology. Not ideas about the sacred, but a direct relationship with land, season, body, and place, recognized by the nervous system long before the intellect arrives to explain it.

The traditional system in Kenya was, once, a way of staying connected to exactly that. Land. Season. The people who came before. It gave power and agency through ritual.

But it also calcified into something heavier. The ngomi system, the fear that ancestors require constant appeasement, the sense that you owe a debt that can never quite be paid in full.

Families held at ransom by their own dead.

Matías De Stefano describes inheritance this way:

Biology has its own version of the same image. A grandmother who survived famine can pass her body’s fear of scarcity down as a nervous system pattern, not just a story repeated at dinner, but an actual physiological setting, inherited the way eye color is inherited.

I understand why this was exhausting. I understand why, when something offered relief, people took it.

Christianity arrived offering exactly that relief. One sacrifice. Done. The blood of Jesus paid once, covering everything going forward. No more cattle. No more appeasing an ancestor who could never be fully satisfied.

For people exhausted by an endless system of debt, being born again must have felt like finally being allowed to put something down.

But the relief came at a cost nobody names clearly enough.

The connection to land went with it. The old system kept people in relationship with the soil, the seasons, and the actual ground they stood on. The new one moved the relationship with the divine away from the soil and the seasons, toward something more distant and abstract.

And the power moved too. It used to live in the family, in the clan, in the ritual you could perform yourself. Now it lived in an institution you had to travel to, kneel inside, and trust to administer what was yours to begin with.

I still love his teaching. Most people know him as Jesus, the name the Bible gave him. The more I have learned, the more I have come to understand him as Yeshua, which feels closer to who he actually was before translation and empire reshaped the name and the story around it. I have never felt the need to call anyone Lord. But I have called him Jesus, and I feel that love and protection that people talk about. I have felt it directly, at a Catholic retreat that went deeper than anything I expected.

But I have also read enough now to know that the Bible I was handed is not the whole of what Israel itself practices and believes. There are traditions that never made it into what was exported to us. I cannot unknow that. And once you know it, going back to the version that asks you not to ask further questions becomes very hard.

So I hold both. The love is real. The borrowed nature of the package is also real.

What I am working out in my own life, between the traditionalist and the church, between Yeshua and the ancestors, the country is working out at scale.

Here is where I think we actually are, as a country.

Both systems have weakened. The old one, eroded by generations of religious pressure and now also rightly questioned for what it protected that should never have been protected. The new one, having promised a transformation that has not delivered the safety or worth it claimed it would.

The crime. The greed. The scarcity.

The sense of not belonging anywhere, not being enough anywhere. I do not think these are separate problems from the ideology question. I think they are what happens when two systems collapse against each other, and nothing has yet grown in the space between them.

This is not necessarily a collapse. It might be exactly what biology looks like when an old structure has outgrown its usefulness and a new one has not yet finished forming.

I think I understand now why this state feels so uncomfortable.

If people were actually free to test, keep, and discard what no longer serves them, without losing their place in either community, it would feel like enormous relief. Pleasure, even, in the most literal sense. Energy is finally allowed to move instead of bracing against obligation.

And that is precisely why both systems use the same tool to prevent it.

Shame.

But I think the deeper fear underneath the shame is belonging.

If I stop following the old obligations, will I still be part of my family? If I question the religion I inherited, will I still belong to my community? If I say what I actually believe, will I still belong anywhere at all?

I do not think the answer is choosing a side. Not a return to the old system exactly as it was, with everything it asked people to fear and pay for. Not a tighter grip on a religion that was never built on this ground.

I think what wants to be born is something that has not been built yet. People are testing what actually produces belonging and safety now, in this generation’s real conditions, keeping only what survives that test. Some of it from Jesus’s teaching. Some of it from the ancestors. Some of it from what science and lived experience have shown to actually work.

Not as ideology. As biology. Tested, evolving, allowed to change again when the conditions change again.

This is, in a much smaller way, what I have been doing in my own life all year. Taking what serves. Releasing what does not. Refusing to let any one system own the whole of me.

Maybe the country needs the same permission I have been slowly giving myself.

To test. To keep what works. To let go of what does not.

Without shame attached to any part of it.

🤍

When Eva is not asking whether a curse can be undone by the same blood that carries it, she is still testing what survives contact with her own life. Keep what works. Let the rest go quietly.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it looks like to choose biology over ideology, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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I was five years old, taking apart a radio on the floor of our house, trying to understand where the sound came from.

Nobody had to teach me to do this. My hands just went there. Padlocks, radios, anything with an inside: I wanted to see the mechanism, not just use the thing.

I preferred primary and high school. The teachers there were able to explain core ideas from the ground up. I don’t think that’s spoon-feeding, if you’re starting at the root.

I did not feel smart, though. I felt the gap between what people said about me and what I experienced about myself, every single day.

University asked me to learn a subject from the middle. Show up, absorb the formula, apply it, move on. If I could not see where something came from, the root, the why, the whole shape of it, I switched off. Completely. Not stubbornness. The mind simply would not move forward without the foundation underneath it.

University was five years of this. I barely attended class, then crammed at the end of each semester at a pace that finally let things click, because compressed time forced the whole picture to arrive at once, instead of in scattered pieces I couldn’t connect.

I graduated with a pass. The lowest passing grade. Five years, and a pass.

I felt it in my body before I felt it in my mind.

A tightening across the chest.

Heat rising into my face.

The specific shame of seeing five years reduced to a single word.

Pass.

Not failure.

Not excellence.

Just enough.

That grade became a ring.

I could feel it years later in job interviews, in meetings, in rooms where I knew the answer and said something, but still didn’t get the seat at the table, and I blamed my pass for it.

I went back and did a second degree to push the first one down the list. I collected a master’s. I am close to another. For years, I told people about my degrees, to be respected, to be perceived a certain way, but also because some part of me was still trying to loosen the ring by force. More credentials. More proof. Surely enough proof would finally make the ring let go.

It didn’t.

The ring was at its tightest during the CNA years.

Two degrees and a master’s, and I was being directed minute by minute through tasks that left no room for the part of me that has always wanted to understand how things work.

Compassion on command.

Schedules.

Checklists.

Routines.

The mind that used to take things apart to understand them had nowhere to go.

My body felt this before I had language for it. The exhaustion was not only physical. It was the specific exhaustion of an intelligence with no outlet, running and running against a wall it could not see but could feel to the core.

In 2024, my body stopped.

That is not a metaphor.

It actually stopped being able to keep going.

What happened after that was the laptop, the writing, the slides, the etymology, and the way everything started connecting. I used to think of that as starting something new.

It wasn’t new.

It was the ring loosening.

The same mind that took apart radios at five years old took apart the I AM Path teachings and found etymology beneath emotion, beneath astrology, beneath the body. The same hands that couldn’t stop opening padlocks couldn’t stop building: a website, a business, slide decks, faster than I could finish them.

That is not a different person showing up. That is the same intelligence, with the ring loose enough to move.

And here is the sensation, in the body, of a ring loosening: it does not feel like triumph. It feels like a held breath finally going out. A held breath you had stopped noticing you were holding, because you had been holding it for so long; it felt like just breathing.

I still feel rings around other things.

The collaborative one: every group still has a flicker of bracing for a fight, even when no one is fighting. I watch people make and keep friends easily, build with them naturally, and feel the ring there too.

The emotional one: I can read exactly what is happening in a room, including inside myself, and still feel the feeling outrun the steadying.

The spiritual one: I watch people channel and wonder if not having that means something about me.

But I know what these are now.

Not absences.

Rings.

And I know what loosening one feels like, because I have felt it happen once already, in the body, as relief, as a breath going out that I didn’t know I was holding.

The world just took a long time to build a container shaped like what she actually was.

She is building it now.

One article.

One doodle.

One reflection.

One book.

One app.

One path at a time.

With her own hands. The way she always wanted to.

🤍

When Eva is not building slide decks faster than she can finish them, she is still the five-year-old who wanted to see the inside of the radio. She never stopped. The world just took a while to notice.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when the intelligence that was always there finally has room to move, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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I remember being in primary school, the girl who reported couples to the teachers instead of being in one. I was certain I knew why. I was big, dark, not the right shape for the story. I was watching everyone else live.

The popular boy noticed me. But quietly. He would find ways to touch me in spaces where no one was watching. He did not want anyone to know.

I understood that as information about my worth.

Not: “He is hiding me.”

But: “I must be someone worth hiding.”

That belief (I am worth experiencing in private, not claiming in public) found evidence everywhere after that.

The ones I liked who did not like me back. The men who wanted my energy but kept me outside their visible lives. The ten-year relationship with someone who could spend a decade beside me and still could not publicly choose the future I wanted with him.

Every time, it seemed I was the experience, not the choice.

I did not understand then what I understand now. I was not gathering evidence about my worth. I was gathering confirmation of a belief I had already decided was true.

In high school, something shifted in a way I only understand looking back. Someone liked me (I remember being genuinely shocked), and instead of loving them, I learned to extract. To take what was available before it disappeared. It was not a calculation. It was survival. If love was unreliable, you learned to gather what you could before the reliable thing happened and it left.

That pattern stayed with me longer than I want to admit.

My first serious relationship lasted ten years. He was romantic at the beginning. But something about my authentic self (the independence, the spontaneity, the intensity) always created friction. His family did not accept me. Different tribe. The dynamic was always uneven.

And when it ended, he could not give me the one visible commitment. The public claim.

Same story. Different person. Same place in me it landed.

Matías De Stefano’s soulmate teaching said something I needed to hear, but differently than I had heard it before.

Every longing, every heartbeat, every feeling of being seen and known and wanted: that was my own production. The other person was the occasion. I was the source.

Which means: what I was searching for was never in them. The capacity for authentic love, for being fully present in a relationship, for the kind of partnership where I do not have to manage myself or prove my worth. That was in me all along.

They could not give it to me because it was never theirs to give.

And they could not take it when they left, though it felt like they did.

What I understand now that I did not then: the needs I was asking one person to fulfill were never meant to come from a single source.

Genuine presence. Stability. The feeling of being chosen without having to campaign for it.

These are real needs.

Not evidence of weakness.

Not evidence of dependency.

Not too much to want.

But the belief that one person was supposed to be the complete answer: that was the trap inside the soulmate story.

Those needs can come from many places. From the community. From the work I am building. From friendships that hold. From my own capacity, which I am still learning, is larger than I thought.

The teaching does not ask you to give up on love. It asks you to release one person from the impossible task of being the whole source of it.

I no longer want to fight for my space in someone’s life.

I no longer want to be the one who has to convince them I am worth it.

I no longer want to be the quiet thing someone experiences when no one is watching.

The belief that arrived in primary school (I am worth experiencing in private, not claiming in public) got into everything. Every relationship after was partly shaped by it.

But belief is not a verdict.

The shift is not dramatic. It does not arrive with certainty. It arrives in small recognitions, like this one:

Understanding it was one thing. Living, it has been slower.

What I am discovering now is that many of the things I wanted from a relationship are things I have been slowly building within myself.

A home within me.

A sense of belonging: in community, in the work, in myself.

The excitement, that aliveness that comes from being around someone's fire. I am finding it in my own.

The feeling of being wanted and seen. I am learning to give it to myself first.

Companionship: through the people who show up, not just one person.

Space to create.

The freedom to be fully myself.

These can also exist in a relationship. Both are true.

Not because I no longer desire partnership.

I do.

The more at home I become in myself, the more I can allow a relationship to be what it is:

Not a rescue.

Not a completion.

Not a missing piece.

I was never the secret. I was the person who believed I was.

And there is a difference.

🤍

When Eva is actively not auditioning for belonging, she is probably noticing the moment she almost did. That is also progress.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when the story you told yourself about yourself turns out to have been wrong all along, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

Share

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On a Tuesday morning in June, I filled the bathtub with Epsom salt, climbed in, and tried to release four hundred years of inherited fear.

That is not an exaggeration.

I had been reading Matías De Stefano’s teachings on the void: the idea that the universe is 99.9% empty space, that all our frameworks, beliefs, and gods are just the mind’s attempt to fill what is fundamentally and terrifyingly open. There was a portal happening - there always is one this days I had decided, with the kind of decision that feels less like choice and more like surrender, that I was going to try to put some things down.

I had a list by the time I got into the water. Not a written one. But I knew what I was carrying.

There is a God I grew up with who punishes.

He is not Yahweh specifically, though that is the name the missionaries brought. He sits in the space where older things used to be. In the Gikuyu tradition I come from, there are ancestors who watch. Who hold the blessings. Who can choose, if rituals are not honored, if protocols are not observed, if the proper channels of respect are not maintained, to withhold what the living need. Or worse: to reach forward and touch the children.

Two different systems. Same architecture.

Obey or be punished. Love with conditions attached. The divine as a figure who keeps score.

I keep wondering if every system eventually asks the same question.

And if I am honest, neither of them frightens me as much as the possibility that they might be right.

Because if they are right, then freedom is dangerous. If they are right, then questioning has consequences. If they are right, then every act of disobedience becomes a risk calculation. Not just for me. For my son.

Maybe that is the real fear underneath all of this. Not punishment. Responsibility.

I left Christianity deliberately. I watched it operate too long as a colonial tool not to. The missionaries brought a God who punished disobedience with hell and cursed children to generations of consequence for their parents’ failure to comply. They installed him into a spiritual system that was already here, one that had been doing similar accounting under different names and rituals. Two gods of the same father, asking the same thing: perform correctly or pay.

I thought when I walked away from the church, I was free of this god.

But what if I did not leave him? What if I carried him with me? What if he simply changed clothes?

What if every system eventually turns into the same thing once fear enters it? A cosmic authority keeping score.

There is a Hawaiian practice called Ho’oponopono. Four phrases, offered to the divine or to any broken relationship:

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

I have used it before, deliberately, as a practice. But this morning in the water, I did not think about the practice. I just spoke. I found myself speaking to God, to whatever is present when a body is warm and still, with no performance required. I am sorry for not trusting you.

And I sat with the strange sensation of having spoken to the thing I was afraid of, and finding that what came out of me was nothing like fear.

Not: please don’t hurt me, I will do better, I will comply.

Just: I am sorry for the distance. I am sorry for mistaking the architecture of the punishing God for the thing itself.

My son is six. He is curious, loud, and full of opinions, and he loves YouTube and would watch it for 9 consecutive hours if I did not intervene.

When he misbehaves, I take away the TV.

I tell him there are consequences. He conforms.

I have told myself this is reasonable parenting. Natural consequences. Teaching him that actions have results. And maybe that is true. But I am beginning to see how it resembles my current tension.

That love is conditional.

Obey and receive. Disobey and lose.

And then I thought about the TV.

He conforms.

Not because he has understood something. Because he does not want to lose the thing. He has learned that my approval, which to a six-year-old may seem indistinguishable from love, comes and goes based on his performance.

I sat with that longer than anything else.

Because I have spent years questioning authority. Questioning religion. Questioning tradition. Questioning power.

And yet, when I needed my son to behave, what did I find in my hands? The same architecture. Different scale. Same architecture.

Compliance in exchange of a reward. Correction through loss. Obedience through consequence.

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The Gikuyu traditions, I feel, obligate me to honor some of this too. Rituals performed out of fear of consequence rather than love of connection. My son is African. He carries something in him that was here before the missionaries arrived. I want him to have access to that. I feel I owe it to him. But I do not want to hand him a spiritual tradition organized around the fear of what will happen if he does not comply.

So I am caught between the tradition that kept my family safe for generations, but carries the same architecture, and the freedom I claimed by leaving one system, a freedom I have not fully known how to use.

I also spoke to my body.

Not to the gland. Not to the biology. Just to whatever is in me that learned, somewhere along the way, to be suspicious of sweetness. To withhold nourishment from itself. To manage rather than receive.

Maybe that is the deeper question underneath all of this.

Can I receive without earning? Not money. Not success. Not recognition.

Sweetness. Love. Rest. Care. Belonging.

Can I receive them without first proving I deserve them?

I do not know.

But I think that might be the belief I was actually soaking in the water.

This is what I poured into the water.

Not solved. Not wrapped in healing language. Not arrived at a conclusion I can package cleanly.

But this: I see the thread. From the missionaries’ God to the ancestors’ accounting to my own hands reaching for the TV remote to my body’s careful management of sweetness. Love is learned as something earned, withheld, and earned again. A lesson I have been teaching my son while trying to unlearn it myself.

And inside the same water, inside the same morning, I was already doing something different. Already speaking to God without the fear architecture. Already offering repair to my own body. Already saying, not to a punishing authority but to everything that has been carrying this with me: I am sorry. Thank you. I love you.

The seeing and the different way arrived in the same water.

You cannot put something down until you know what it is. And maybe you cannot find the new thing until you are already doing it, before you know you are doing it.

I climbed out of the bath. I felt lighter. Not because the weight was gone. Because I finally knew what I was carrying.

And because something in me had already begun to put it down.

When Eva is not climbing out of bathtubs lighter than when she went in, she is at home with her son, noticing the same architecture appearing in her own hands. She is learning both at once. The water is still running.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when the thing you are trying to release turns out to be the thing you have been quietly handing down, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

Share

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For someone who naturally lives in thoughts, ideas, possibilities, emotions, dreams, and meaning, I had, somewhere along the way, almost completely forgotten about the body.

Not abandoned it. Not rejected it. Just forgotten. The way you forget a room in a house you live in. You know it is there. You just stop going.

Taurus season brought me back to that room.

I want to be honest about what this month actually looked like.

Showing up consistently was harder than I expected. Every day, publishing something (a slide deck, a doodle, a teaching, a thought) was an act that required more than I anticipated. The fears that come with making your thinking visible are real. The shadow work that happens when you decide to align parts of yourself you had abandoned is real. The resistance of old identities that no longer fit, still showing up at the door anyway: that is real.

I have had to face fears about being seen. About being misunderstood. About what it means to teach what you are still learning.

But I kept going. Slowly. Consistently.

Taurus is the bridge.

That is the teaching at the center of this month. Taurus is how the field becomes form. How the source becomes matter. How the invisible idea becomes the thing you can touch.

The sentence I kept returning to all month was this: reality is vibration. I attract what matches my vibration. Coherence creates resonance.

That sequence is not three separate things. It is one movement, described from three angles. The thought shapes the feeling. The feeling moves the body. The body acts in the world. Energy does not disappear. The more I give, the more I can receive. I am the origin of the energy I generate and direct.

Then came abundance.

Not as money.

Not as an accumulation.

But as an inner overflow.

Strength appeared not as force, but as self-knowledge, emotional integration, mental clarity, and physical responsibility.

Matter became Mother.

Matrix.

Manifestation.

Spirit made visible.

I learned that security is not something I find outside myself. It emerges when I trust myself, know my values, and can hold my center even when life becomes chaotic.

We moved into wealth.

Not wealth as possession.

But wealth as self-governance. The capacity to sustain myself, to make decisions, and to create a life from my own center. To live in alignment with my needs, values, and purpose.

Then came one of the biggest lessons of all.

Comfort is a zone. Not a destination.

Life moves in cycles.

Stability.

Movement.

Stability.

Movement.

Again, and again.

I discovered that my true comfort zone is not a place. It is something I carry within me.

I see my shadows clearly. I see my light clearly. I see why both serve me.

As the month continued, Taurus opened the doorway to the arts.

Music reminded me that I am not separate from the symphony. I am one note within an infinite composition.

Poetry reminded me that words create worlds.

Abracadabra. As I speak, I create.

My life itself is becoming a poem.

Literature showed me that we are both authors and stories. The rock and the chisel. The sculptor and the sculpture.

Movement taught me that life is rhythm. Rhythm is consciousness. Identity is movement.

Architecture revealed the dance between beauty, utility, firmness, and purpose.

Cinema reminded me that life is projected, directed, edited, acted, and continually reimagined.

We are not merely living our lives.

We are creating them.

And then we arrived at the body.

The temple.

The place where all of these ideas become reality.

The second half of the month was a slow, system-by-system teaching about what it means to be alive in a body. The endocrine system: the glands as prisms refracting white light into the colors of your attributes. The respiratory system: breath is the entry point of the cosmic. The immune: the inner fortress built to understand, not to war. The circulatory system: the heart pulses without deciding who deserves it. The digestive system: every meal is an initiatory path, breaking down who you think you are to reveal what is actually inside. The excretory: what you hide does not disappear, it seeps into the waters that feed you. The reproductive: the body below the navel was never the obstacle to the divine; it was always the doorway. The muscular: electricity, tiny mice, and the teaching that strength is not control but a contribution to the whole. The skeletal system, the most rigid part of the body, produces blood.

And today, the nervous system. The connector of all of it. The system that makes the body know it is a body.

Neurons do not divide. The ones in you right now were formed before you were born. They carry everything they have ever absorbed.

Know yourself, and you will know the universe.

That is not a metaphor. That is physics.

Thirty days. Twelve body systems. Each one carries a lesson far beyond biology.

Digestion taught me discernment.

Excretion taught me release.

Reproduction asked what wanted to grow through me.

Muscles taught me that movement creates reality.

The skeletal system showed me that structure creates freedom.

The nervous system revealed that life exists through connection.

And perhaps my greatest realization of all:

One month of learning that matter is not separate from spirit.

What a slow and consistent journey this has been.

What a beautiful affirmation of the body.

What a beautiful reminder that spirituality is not an escape from the physical world.

It is an invitation to fully inhabit it.

As Taurus closes, I leave with a deeper appreciation for the body, for reality, for embodiment, and for the simple truth that growth does not happen all at once.

It happens in one breath.

One choice.

One step.

One day at a time.

Taurus: I have. ♉

When Eva is not reciting body systems to herself in the shower, she is on the balcony checking on the radishes. Both are in the Taurus month. Both count.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when a Pisces spends thirty days learning to inhabit matter, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

Share

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Many people ask how to use a full moon to their advantage.

The question is interesting because it assumes the Moon is something separate from us that we can manipulate.

But what if it is closer to a mirror?

Not a wish-granting one. Not a magic one.

A surface that shows you what is already there - in the light you rarely allow yourself.

The Moon has been affecting life on Earth long before anyone called it spiritual.

It moves the tides. It cues reproductive cycles in dozens of species. It was used for thousands of years to track time, plant crops, navigate oceans, and mark ceremonies.

Nature runs on rhythm. Day and night. Inhale and exhale. Growth and rest.

The Moon is simply one of the most visible clocks we have.

Over time, if you pay attention, it becomes something more personal than a clock.

It becomes a timestamp for your own evolution.

What Is a Blue Moon?

A Blue Moon is the second full moon in a single calendar month.

May 2026 holds two full moons. This is the second one, which makes it rare in the most literal sense of the word.

Astrologically, it falls in Sagittarius.

The Sign: Sagittarius

Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter - the planet of expansion, truth, and philosophy.

Its themes are belief systems, higher learning, long journeys, the pursuit of meaning, and the honest question: what do I believe - and is it still true?

This Full Moon is asking you to look at what has grown in those areas of your life. What you now know that you did not know before. What truth has arrived that you can no longer ignore.

The Seed and the Harvest

In astrology, a New Moon marks the beginning of a cycle.

It is the seed.

A Full Moon in the same sign occurs roughly six months later.

It is the harvest.

Not a new planting. Not a wish. A revelation of what has already been growing beneath the surface.

This is why Full Moons often bring realizations. Not because they manufacture something new. Because they illuminate what has been unfolding since the seed was planted.

A Full Moon can reveal a truth, a pattern, a decision, a completion.

It is less like a magic wand and more like a progress report.

Why This Blue Moon Matters

This Full Moon is connected to the Sagittarius New Moon of December 19th, 2025.

That was the seed.

You may not remember a ceremony. You may not have written anything down. But something was beginning in your life on or around that date. A question was forming. A direction was changing. A belief was being tested.

You are not looking for a ritual. You are looking for a thread.

Ask yourself:

• What was beginning in December?

• What were you learning or unlearning?

• What question were you trying to answer?

• What belief was being challenged or confirmed?

• What new direction were you considering?

You are looking for a theme. A conversation that life started having with you six months ago.

Now the Full Moon shines a light on what has happened since.

The question becomes: what have I learned? How has my perspective shifted? What truth can I see now that I could not see then?

The Step Most People Skip

Most people immediately ask, “What can I manifest?”

There is a step before that.

First: what has already manifested?

What growth has already occurred? What answers have already arrived? What part of you has changed?

A farmer checks the harvest before deciding what to plant next.

The Full Moon often shows you the harvest.

A Simple Exercise: Two Pages

Grab a notebook. Two pages are all you need.

Page one: December 19th, 2025.

What was happening in your life? What were you worried about? What were you hoping for? What question were you sitting with?

Page two: today.

What do you know now that you did not know then? What has expanded? What has ended? What feels like it is on the next horizon?

Read both pages side by side.

That space between them - that is not random. That is a chapter of your life that has been unfolding, whether you were tracking it or not.

The moon gives you the timestamps. The story was always yours.

How Your Birth Chart Changes This

Sagittarius exists somewhere in your birth chart. It occupies one of the twelve houses.

The house tells you specifically where this cycle is unfolding in your life.

If Sagittarius is in your career sector, this Full Moon may be highlighting professional purpose or the meaning behind your work. If it connects to relationships, the lessons appear through partnerships. If it touches money, the focus is self-worth or resources. If it touches education, belief, or travel, those themes are front and center.

The sign tells you what is being discussed. The house tells you where.

This is why two people can experience the same Full Moon completely differently - and both be right.

How I Work With This Blue Moon

Step 1: Look back.

Trace the thread from December 19th. What was beginning, changing, or being questioned?

Step 2: Identify the lesson.

What have you learned? What belief has shifted? What perspective have you gained that you did not have before?

Step 3: Celebrate the harvest.

Before asking for something new, acknowledge what has already arrived.

Growth counts. Awareness counts. Clarity counts. Answers count.

Step 4: Release what no longer fits.

Which beliefs are you outgrowing? What truth have you been avoiding because it would require you to change?

Step 5: Prepare the next seed.

Ask: what do I want to learn next? What question is ready to be asked?

On Manifestation

Manifestation is often described as getting what we want.

I see it differently.

Manifestation begins with awareness. The Full Moon reveals something. That awareness changes our choices. Those choices change our actions. Those actions change what arrives.

In that sense, manifestation is not forcing the universe to comply.

It is participating consciously with the cycle you are already living inside.

Your life is not a random collection of events.

It is a series of unfolding stories.

The new and full moon is where you get to see the chapters.

The harvest is already here.

The question is whether you are willing to look.

If you want to understand how your birth chart interacts with this or any lunation - or if you want to begin learning astrology as a language for navigating your own life - visit www.inkandshadowtales.com

The Fires That Were Not Mine

It happened this morning. I was writing a comment in a Facebook group about menstrual cups. The kind of comment I have written a hundred times before: useful, embodied, vulnerable, real.

And as I hit post, something in me sat back and said, “That should have been on my own page.”

It was not the first time I noticed; it was the first time I gave it my full attention.

For years, I have been tending to other people’s fires. Posting helpful comments in their groups. Contributing depth to their threads. Defending my views against their skeptical audiences. Each time it felt useful. Each time I thought I was doing the work.

I was not.

I was scattering my energy across containers that were never mine, and calling it service.

Last year, I joined a juicing group.

The juicing actually helped me. That part is true. My body responded. I felt better. And the leaders saw I had something else to offer beyond juicing. They asked me to contribute on crystals, shadow work, mystical topics. So, I did. I started teaching what I knew.

The members also came from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religions. Many of them were triggered by what I shared. They pushed back. I could feel the resistance. And I started defending, not just sharing the message, but defending it. My posts began to carry a wound within them. I was no longer teaching. I was negotiating.

And then there was the day I posted about the different types of cacao. Someone asked where I got mine. I said Amazon and explained how to ship to Kenya.

It hadn’t sunk in at the time that the community’s actual business was selling herbal products. The membership fee covered a month of juicing. The knowledge was free. The products were the revenue. And here I was, in their container, pointing people toward Amazon.

I was acting out of ignorance, defaulting to my habit of freely sharing knowledge, forgetting that the container I was in had its own economy. The room was a business. I had been treating it like a teaching space.

That was the last post. The leader asked me to tone it down. Then to stop. I left the group.

What I told myself for months after was that the group rejected me. What I told myself was that the religious members could not handle it. What I told myself was that the leader had not protected my space and my truth.

What I am only seeing now, more than a year later: I was teaching in a room that was not mine.

The juicing group was someone else’s container, built around their topic, for their people, with their expectations. I was a guest who started speaking like a host. And my nervous system could feel the mismatch long before my mind admitted it. The members were not mine to teach. They had not come there to learn from me.

This is not because they were closed or wrong. They had simply gathered around a different fire.

And I see now that the invitation itself had a shape I did not read. The leader who brought me in said he wanted to learn from me. I took that at face value. What he actually wanted was for me to share what I knew inside his container, in service of his platform. As long as my contribution enriched the room, I was welcome. The moment my sharing pointed people outside it, the welcome ended.

That was not malice. It was the logic of an extractive invitation, dressed in the language of inclusion. He wanted access to what I knew. He did not want me to have access to his people in a way that benefited me independently of him.

Later, he told me, gently, “Build your own community. You are talking to people who are not yours.”

Earlier this month, I came across a teaching about home that finally landed for me. Home is the fire around which we gather. To light the home is to focus the soul’s potential.

The keeper of the fire is the home itself.

What I had been doing for years was running between other people’s fires, adding my breath to flames that already had their own keepers. It looked like generosity. It looked like teaching. It looked like community work.

It was fragmentation.

Every fire I tended that was not mine was an hour I did not spend tending my own. Every comment I wrote in someone else’s thread was a paragraph I did not write on my own Substack. Every defense of my views in a hostile room was creative energy spent making the case for myself instead of doing the work.

And because I was always reacting to other people’s containers, I never stayed still long enough to hear the shape of my own.

And the body knew. The exhaustion, the depletion, the resentment: those were the signals. The body always knows when we are pouring into channels that do not nourish us back.

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This year, someone else asked me to collaborate. The invitation’s shape was different.

He had been following my work for months. He approached me as an equal and made the terms clear from the start: he would not be there as a leader correcting me. He was the one learning. I would have full authority over what I taught: astrology, shadow work, the body teachings, whatever was actually moving through me.

The structure makes sense for both of us. His audience is bigger than mine. By bringing my work into his space, I reach people I would not otherwise reach. He gains depth he could not source himself. Neither of us is performing for the other.

When I read his message, my body responded differently. There was no urgency to prove. No need to defend. No subtle wound of being asked to perform free labor in someone else’s container. Just an invitation, between two people building their own fires, who recognized each other.

That is what collaboration looks like when both people have first tended their own homes.

What I am practicing now, in plain language:

The work I want to make goes to my own home first: my Substack, my site, my voice, my creations. It needs to be born there before it travels.

Before I speak in someone else’s container, I am learning to read its shape. Is it a teaching space? A business? A community with its own economy? Some rooms are not built for the kind of fire I bring.

I am also learning to check whether I am being invited as an equal with my own audience, or as a guest expected to perform for someone else’s.

What I am leaving behind is the scattering: showing up in rooms that did not call me, defending myself to audiences that did not gather for me, and calling that service when it was actually fragmentation.

The body knows the difference between giving from abundance and giving from depletion. The arteries give without deciding who deserves it, but they only have something to give because the heart has been doing its work, the cells have been producing, and the lungs have been breathing. The body gives because every system is also receiving. Production opens the channel.

The home has to be lit before anyone can be warmed by it.

The fire was always mine. I just spent too long warming everyone else.

🤍

When Eva is not writing comments about menstrual cups in other people’s Facebook groups, she is here, at her own fire. The gap between those two acts took her years to notice. She is noticing now.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it costs to scatter yourself across rooms that were never yours, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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It starts in the stomach.

Before I post anything — an essay, a graphic, a sentence I have been carrying for days — there is a wave.

A tightening.

A pulling back.

Then the voices come in fast.

What if they don’t like it? What if you are wrong? What if they laugh at me? I look ridiculous. They won’t respect me. I am being too much. What if they leave? We don’t belong here. Stay small. Stay edited. Stay safe.

That word always catches me.

We.

Not I.

We.

That is how I know the voice is older than the moment.

I have come to call this part of me the watcher.

She is not a stranger. She is the part of me that learned to scan before I had language for scanning. She belongs to the animal body that knows the herd can turn. She belongs to the ancestral body that remembers the village. She belongs to the child who learned not to stand out too boldly, not to expose too much of herself, not to risk being pushed outside the circle. She belongs to the adult who learned that in corporate life, sometimes you edit yourself or you don’t eat.

My Leo lives in the 12th house, the house of the hidden, the unseen. The lion in the basement. My roar learned, early, to live where it could not scare anyone.

She was shaped long before Instagram.

Long before essays.

Long before personal brands and algorithms.

She learned visibility through survival.

And survival taught her that exposure could cost belonging.

And the fear underneath all of this is not really:

people might dislike my content.

It is something deeper.

If I fully reveal what I believe, who I am becoming, and how I see the world, will I still belong to the tribe that formed me?

Because the things I write about touch territories that groups have always regulated carefully: religion, spirituality, culture, identity, womanhood, visibility, power, individuality.

The body does not always experience disagreement there as “difference of opinion.”

Sometimes it experiences it as possible separation.

Possible expulsion.

That is why the watcher says we.

And so she found her own solution.

Last year, I tried to solve this by splitting myself into pieces.

I had my real-name Facebook, where family, old friends, and old colleagues lived. I had Ink and Shadow Tales, where the writing and shadow work could go. I had a TikTok that became Whispers of the Moth, because some part of me felt safer speaking from the dark. I had a crystals page. A money shadow workbook page. Other TikTok accounts because the first audience felt too close, too familiar, too loaded with projection and misunderstanding. I had LinkedIn, where I thought my professional identity had to stay separate from the rest of me. And of course there were websites, emails, half-built identities, forgotten passwords.

I was moving between rooms all day.

This belongs here. That belongs there. This is too much for family. That is too spiritual for work. This audience can handle this version of me. That audience cannot.

It looked strategic. It was fear. Not dramatic fear. Organized fear.

The kind that fragments the self into manageable pieces so no single room ever holds the whole of you.

If one room rejected me, the others could survive.

It suited the watcher perfectly. Constant hypervigilance.

She loved that arrangement.

Visible enough to try. Hidden enough to survive.

This year, something has shifted.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But enough for me to notice.

I am posting under one name now. Mostly.

The work is beginning to gather in one place. The writing, the astrology, the shadow work, the gardening attempts, the reflections, the contradictions, the moments of clarity, the moments where I laugh at myself.

More of me is entering the same room.

And the wave still comes.

Every single time.

But now I can see something I could not see before:

The wave is not the verdict. It is the watcher arriving at the threshold.

Last year, if the wave came, I obeyed it.

I edited the sentence until it lost its pulse. I posted it somewhere smaller. I deleted it after three hours. I moved it to another account. I abandoned the whole thing.

Now, sometimes I still post while she is talking.

That is the shift.

Not fearlessness. Discernment.

The watcher fears exposure.

Not visibility in some abstract sense.

Exposure.

Being seen by the wrong eyes. Being measured before I am ready. Being misunderstood. Being reduced. Being attacked exactly where I am most unguarded. Being seen as less than.

And if I am honest, she is not completely wrong.

There were times in my life when exposure did carry consequences.

Speaking too openly could cost belonging.

Having an opinion could cost approval.

There were workplaces where speaking up delayed promotions and created friction with authority.

There were moments where visibility did affect safety. An ex once had multiple accounts watching me online. There were times I posted about crystals and immediately imagined being called a devil worshipper or something worse.

Some of these things happened.

Some of them are simply her fears.

But to the nervous system, imagined danger and remembered danger can feel almost identical.

When she was formed, I did not have the tools I have now.

I did not know how to regulate myself when conflict appeared.

I did not know how to hold my ground without collapsing or attacking.

I did not know how to let people misunderstand me without feeling erased by it.

So she learned the only strategies she could: hide, split, scan, edit, stay small, stay careful.

What is changing now is not that danger has disappeared.

It is that I am no longer powerless inside it.

Now, sometimes I listen to her.

Sometimes I do edit the post.

Sometimes I realize something belongs in my journal and not online.

Sometimes the reason is to protect myself and my family.

Sometimes I recognize that a piece is still too raw, too exposed, too unintegrated to share well.

But other times, I can feel that she is reading an old level of danger into a present moment that does not require me to disappear.

That is where discernment comes in.

Not silencing her.

Not obeying her automatically.

Listening. Assessing. Choosing.

And sometimes pressing the button anyway.

I think that is why slow work matters so much to me now.

Books.

Writing.

Gardening.

Taurus month.

The slow repetition of showing up.

Even my gardening debacles have become part of the lesson.

And I think visibility works the same way.

Not one giant leap into exposure.

Small acts.

Repeated over time.

The nervous system learning through lived evidence.

I post something real. The world does not end. Someone resonates. The body updates a little.

Then again.

Then again.

So I continue publishing my books, writing on Substack, and posting on social media.

Visible.

Not because the watcher disappeared.

Because I am learning when she is protecting me and when she is protecting an older version of me that no longer fully exists.

The watcher still comes.

She will probably come tomorrow.

The wave will start in the stomach.

The voices will come in fast.

What if you are wrong? What if they leave? What if we don’t belong here?

And I will listen.

I will assess.

I will decide.

And sometimes, I will press the button anyway.

🤍

When Eva is not pressing the button anyway, she is probably staring at the publish button from a safe distance, or editing a sentence until it loses its pulse, or moving the whole thing to a smaller account. The watcher is aware of this essay.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what it takes to stay visible when every old part of you learned that exposure was dangerous, one honest essay at a time.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

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Day 20 of Taurus Month

Taurus is the seeding season, and I am walking the I AM Path with Matías De Stefano, author of Conversations Between I and AM. At the start of the month he gave us an exercise: plant seeds in a glass or a pot, water them daily with the theme of each day, and at the end of thirty days, eat what grew. The seed is the source, he said. Become a seed.

So I got a glass.

I googled. The internet said lima beans. I bought lima beans. Day one, I soaked them in water as the instructions said. I put them in the glass. I told my son, we’re going to say nice things to this plant. Thank you. Good morning. We love you.

And then I waited for the seeds to grow.

Nothing. Nothing happened.

So I thought, maybe I’m overwatering. I moved it to the sun. Still nothing. By day three, I had decided the seeds themselves were the problem, so I went to the grocery store for more.

I did not come back with more lima beans.

I came back with sunflower seeds, turnips, mung beans, broccoli sprouts, and a couple of packets I no longer recognize the names of. I HAVE was the month’s mantra. If I was going to manifest abundance, I figured I might as well manifest all of it. The affirmations were working, on my shopping, at least.

It was somewhere around day eight that Matías posted a video showing how his plants were doing, and the shock on my face when I saw soil in his glass. Plus, his plants were already thriving. Casually. Nobody had said anything about soil. I had been watering lima beans floating in a glass of water and cotton wool for five days while telling them they were loved.

I ran outside. I dug up dirt. I jammed the lima beans into it. Still nothing. No roots. No sprouts. Plus, now there was a distinct rotten smell.

This is where it escalated.

I realized maybe I needed to give them the best chance of survival, that the outside dirt just didn’t have the right nutrients. So my son and I went to get some potting soil, and I didn’t spare a penny. I bought the most expensive soil that promised all sorts of amazing new technology for potted plants, including holding water, yielding twice as much produce, and feeding plants for up to 6 months. Wow. Because I had bought way too much soil and not enough pots, I started looking at my existing houseplants and thinking they must also have bad soil. They had been minding their own business for a year. I re-potted all of them. I stood on my balcony, hands covered in dirt, repotting plants I had never previously had a problem with, because clearly the soil was the issue, and now I have better soil.

I overwatered some days. I underwatered others. I gave up on the affirmations partway through because, honestly, I got pissed off at the glass and because the plants were now outside.

Here’s the part I haven’t told anyone.

The lima beans haven’t sprouted. Most of the new seeds haven’t either. And I can’t throw them away. Because I have poured too much love into them. They have had my son’s voice. They have had twenty days of Matías and I HAVE and affirmations and the I AM Path poured into them.

How do you compost seeds you’ve prayed over?

So I keep watering them. Still hoping. Still talking to them. And then this is what makes me laugh: the potatoes and garlic and onions in my pantry, the ones I forget about for three weeks while I’m not cooking, always sprout roots all on their own. The ones I ignore. The ones I never bless, never affirm, never sing to.

The forgotten produce in the pantry is doing better than the worshipped seeds in the glass.

Taurus is laughing at me. I am going to let her.

There is one thing in my whole windowsill experiment that is actually growing, and it grew because I left it alone enough. Radishes. I didn’t even know they were radishes until I took a picture and looked them up. I had labeled them as broccoli sprouts, mung beans, and a few packets I forgot the names of. They have been the only consistent green thing in this whole month. I am going to eat them as microgreens this week.

Today is day 20.

Here is what I have actually learned in the past twenty days of trying to grow things during Taurus month:

Affirmations do not replace soil. Manifesting abundance and overwatering look identical from the outside. You cannot speed up a root by talking to it. The plants I already had were not the problem: the impatience was. And mung beans do not care about my affirmations. They just grow. So do radishes, apparently, when you don’t realize what they are.

The deeper one, the one I didn’t want to write down: matter doesn’t respond to how much I pour in. It responds to whether the conditions are right. The intentions are real. The affirmations are sincere. And the lima beans needed soil from day one, not affirmations.

I am a Pisces sun in the 6th house. I live in my mind. My mind is strong. It is all mentalism anyway. Taurus is the weapon fashioned against me, the slow, the daily, the embodied, the small, consistent discipline that has always been the hardest thing for me to practice.

Pisces believes devotion can bend reality.

Pisces sings to the seed. Dreams for it. Sees the future flower before the root exists. It lives through imagination, symbolism, projection, and meaning.

Taurus does not care about the vision first.

Taurus asks: Did you water it correctly? Is there soil? Is there sunlight? Are the conditions stable enough to sustain life every day?

Pisces is the dream. Taurus is the root system.

And I think this month exposed how often I have tried to grow things through emotional intensity instead of structure. I wanted manifestation without repetition. Transformation without routine. Growth without waiting.

But matter has its own laws.

Matter responds to consistency. To conditions. To embodiment. To physical reality.

Not just belief.

The mung beans had all three from the beginning. So did the radishes I didn’t even know I was growing. So does the garlic in the pantry, which I never thought to look at. That is why they are alive.

The lima beans became a perfect symbol for how I have tried to build parts of my life: enormous devotion, enormous imagination, enormous emotional energy, but weak foundations. Beautiful vision. Unstable structure. Pisces without enough Taurus.

But it is day 20, and I have not given up. I have ten more days of Taurus. Ten more days of affirmations and meditations and watering things that may or may not grow. The radishes are real. The garlic is real. The mung beans are real. The lima beans are still soaking in soil that I will not throw away.

Eternal optimist. Delulu Pisces. Whatever you want to call her. She is still gardening.

Today is day 20. 🤍

When Eva is not caring for others, she is on her balcony talking to lima beans that have not yet decided to cooperate. Her son has been rooting for them since day one. She is still hopeful. It is day 20.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and what happens when Pisces tries to grow things in Taurus season, one honest essay at a time.

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The names in this essay have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. The story is true.

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Two years ago, I went to plant medicine with one intention:

I want to be abundant. I want to feel my own self-worth.

At the time, I was in survival.

I had come to the U.S. after years in tech in Kenya, leading, building, managing, and found myself starting over. The fastest way to make money was caregiving. So I worked. Long shifts. Double shifts. Nights. Always chasing the next dollar.

I could not stop telling myself that one more shift, one more certification, one more month of grinding would finally produce the security I was working for.

It did not. It was not enough.

My body finally refused. I do not remember the exact moment. I just remember being in bed and not wanting to go anywhere. I remember a stretch of days where I could not pick up a shift if I had wanted to. My body said no in a way my mind could not override.

That was the beginning.

In that forced stillness, I started asking different questions.

Why am I not receiving enough, even though I have put in so much work?

Why does effort not equal arrival?

Why am I still not enough?

I did what I always do when I am faced with questions I cannot answer. I went looking. I looked at my chart and saw all my planets in my second house, the house of values and self-worth. And in other circles, the words of the day were quantum jumping, manifestation, and abundance. The teaching seemed to be: you have to feel abundant in order to become abundant.

I thought: if I am given a chance to talk to God, to a higher power, to whatever is bigger than me, what am I going to ask for? I am going to ask for the thing underneath the money. The one that has been blocking everything. So I can finally manifest, finally arrive, finally have what I have been working for.

When I heard about plant medicine, I went with a clear ask: show me what is blocking me so I can finally be enough. I want abundance. I want to be worthy.

I thought the answer was something I could find.

The mind that brought me to medicine was still a mind trying to control how the answer would arrive.

The medicine knew that, of course. And it answered me sideways.

The Huachuma showed me the masks I was wearing. When I persisted in wanting to know more, I found myself in a forest with a black hole.

I asked: what caused this? Who caused it? Show me the original wound. I was waiting for a memory. A face. A scene from childhood I could finally process and release.

Huachuma kept showing me the black hole. I did not dare enter it. I later realized it was the void.

I asked again. I asked harder. I thought I needed more medicine. I thought the void was a place I had to push through to get to the answer underneath.

The blank space was the answer. And that is how my trip ended.

It took me weeks to understand what the medicine had given me. The wound is not personal. The wound is the void all humans carry. The fear of abandonment, rejection, scarcity, separation — these are not unique to me, not caused by one specific event, not the fault of one specific person.

They are the inheritance of being human.

There is no one to blame.

There is no single cause to fix.

Only something to face.

The Bufo experience was different.

Bufo is short. Twenty minutes, maybe less. There is no time to think. The medicine bypasses everything: the ego, the warrior, the protector, the scanning, the analyzing, and you are simply delivered into a state.

I do not remember the entry. I remember being there.

I was in a place full of flowers. A woman I somehow knew. And a state I had never experienced before. I felt her joy. I became joyful. There was no separation between the joy and me. The joy was my body. The joy was my body’s home state. Everything else I had been carrying, survival, certification anxiety, the weight of the shifts, the shame and lostness of being a regional technology officer turned house girl, none of it existed. It had never existed. The flowers were enough. The light was enough. I was enough simply by being in the field.

When I came back, the people holding the ceremony placed their hands on my body.

What happened next is the part I will never forget.

I felt the universe. I felt held from every direction. I felt nourished. I felt supported. I felt the matrix of the world, the entire field, around me, doing the holding for me. The hands of the people in the ceremony were the bridge. They were what brought the cosmic feeling into my body.

I cried. I laughed. I thanked them. I told them I loved them. I meant every word.

That night, I wrote in my journal: I was the woman in the flower field. I am joy at my core.

I left believing that.

And for two years, I misunderstood it.

Whenever life got heavy, I tried to go back there. I would close my eyes and reach for the memory. The flowers. The feeling. The state.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

But something was off.

Meanwhile, I was still in the same loop. Still chasing, but this time it was my own creations. Still proving. Still trying to build something that would finally make me feel enough.

I had turned the experience into something to extract from.

Not something to be.

After the retreat, in that first wave of urgency, I built a lot of things.

I bought a laptop. I built AxisGPT, my AI shadow work tool. I wrote a book and published it. I tried to market it. I tried to make it all happen immediately, because the survival self was still in charge and was now wearing a spiritual costume. I had a vision. I had medicine. Now I have to manifest it. Now. Quickly.

The book did not sell as well as I wanted. The marketing did not work the way I wanted.

What survived, after the marketing push fell apart, was Substack.

I liked writing the articles. The articles were the slowest, gentlest, least-survival-coded thing I had been doing. I told myself: I will keep writing. I cannot manage the rest, but I can write one essay at a time when something moves me.

So I started writing once a month, sometimes less. I went back to caregiving, but this time I chose differently. I left nursing homes completely. I picked the caregiving jobs that did not make me feel less than. The hours were fewer. The income was less. And the income was enough.

That was the first time I had ever experienced enough without it being a deprivation.

Enough to pay the bills. Enough to write. Enough to do my shadow work. Enough to attend to the slow integration, the medicine had been waiting to be delivered.

There was a person whose social media platform I respected, who had originally rejected my book months earlier. I had been crushed by the rejection at the time. I had pursued the connection in a way that, looking back, was the survival self trying to manufacture proof of worth.

Eventually, I stopped pursuing. Not because I gave up on them. Because I gave up on the manufacturing. I just kept writing the articles. I kept showing up as myself, even in his comment section.

They started reading. Quietly. Without me knowing. They began responding to my essays. Then they invited me onto their social media live to discuss the perfectionism essay I had written.

I went on. I was nervous. And then something happened during the live.

I was not performing knowledge. I was not citing books I had read. I was not trying to prove I belonged in the conversation.

I was talking about my experiences. My medicine journeys. My shadow work. The slow integration after the collapse. The way the body teaches you what the mind cannot understand. I was just being a Pisces who had been through some things and had a few words to offer about it.

The conversation landed. The host’s audience leaned in. The host themselves, the one who had originally rejected the book, said: “ This is the work. This is what your writing has been doing. I see it now.

I came off that live, and I sat in my car, and something quiet happened in my chest.

This is the moment I had envisioned during the medicine journey. Not the bliss state. Not the joy state. This. Being received as myself. Being met without having to prove anything.

The next day, I went to Tulip Town.

I went because I wanted to recreate the image Bufo had shown me. The woman in the flower field. I had been carrying the image for two years, and I wanted to step into it physically. A photograph of myself in a field of flowers, so I could tap into the moment the way I had been doing internally.

I see now what I was doing. Still in extraction mode. Let me put my body in the location, and the joy will return.

I went anyway. I took my son. I wore a turquoise tunic and white capris. I stood between rows of red tulips with the mountain in the distance, Mount Baker on its clear day, and I let someone take a picture.

But standing there, nothing dramatic happened.

No bliss. No peak state.

What I felt instead was quiet. The mountain in the distance. The rows of tulips. My son is near me. My body in the spring sun. Here. Just here. Not extracting. Not performing the joy memory. Not trying to summon a state.

Just standing in a field of flowers as a woman who has been doing the work, with a body that is tired and well, with a child whose hand was reaching for hers.

When I looked at the photograph later, I noticed something I had not expected.

The woman in the photograph looked like the woman in the Bufo field.

She was not wearing a flowing white dress. She was wearing turquoise and white from a clearance rack. She was not in soft golden light. She was in the bright Pacific Northwest spring sun. She was not surrounded by sunflowers. She was surrounded by rows of cultivated red and yellow tulips planted in straight lines, with a snow-capped mountain behind her.

She was the same woman.

The medicine had not shown me a fantasy version of myself. It had shown me a state. A state that was now, two years later, available to me — not by extraction, not by summoning, not by performing, but by the slow patient work of letting the conditioning loosen until who I am underneath could simply walk into a tulip field with her son and be there.

It was not until last night, in conversation, that the deeper teaching finally landed.

I said: I always thought the medicine showed me that I am joy at my core. And then I paused. I said, slowly: but I think it was showing me something else now. I think it was showing me my intention. I had asked to have abundance and to feel worthy. Maybe the medicine showed me what those things actually feel like in the body.

The person I was talking with said, “Yes.” The medicine did not give you abundance. The medicine gave you the answer to what abundance actually is.

Full body chills. Up the spine, across the scalp, down the arms.

I started laughing. I laughed because, of course, it took two years. The body holds the knowing patiently until the mind is ready.

And then I yawned. The yawn is my body’s signature signal of release. We were holding this. We no longer need to hold it.

Nothing big had changed.

But everything was different.

I could feel when I was receiving. A conversation. A moment of being seen. Work that did not drain me. Money that came without force. My son cuddled up to me as I put him to bed. A reader writing to say your essay shifted something for me. A stranger signing up and trusting me to take them on a retreat to Mount Kenya. A person who rejected my book earlier, inviting me to their platform.

It had always been there.

I just could not perceive it before.

The medicine did not give me abundance.

It showed me what it feels like to receive.

Everything since has been learning how to stay open to that.

Slowly. In ordinary life.

But I do not interpret those moments the same way anymore.

They are not proof that I am failing.

They are signals. And the response is no longer:

do more, fix it, find the answer.

It is:

pause.

The shame I used to carry about my work, my path, my life has been slowly fading. Not because I have achieved more. Because I have stopped pretending.

The woman in the flower field was never somewhere else.

She was a state I could not hold yet.

Now, sometimes, I can.

Not always.

But enough.

That is enough.

🤍

When Eva is not caring for others, she is visiting flower gardens and tulip fields — when her son can allow it. Otherwise, it is Monster truck car shows for them.

She writes about the worth wound, shadow work, and the slow work of becoming, one essay at a time, when something moves her.

If this essay moved you, share it with someone who needs it.

Share

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I have always loved expressing myself.

For twelve years, I trained election officials in Kenya on new technology. Biometric voter identification. Results transmission systems. Things people had never used before. And mostly they were boomers, because they’re the ones managing the polling stations. You try teaching technology to the analog generation, the one that doesn’t like technology, doesn’t even trust technology, in a pressure-filled environment like elections. And you want them not only to absorb it, but also to relay it to others with the same mentality, and then to actually use it to authenticate voters. Let me know how that goes.

But I loved it.

And I was good at it.

Not because I memorized the manual.

Because I made it mine. I added my own stories. I made jokes. I knew where to slow down and where people would get stuck. I remembered being on stage in high school, the rhythm of standing in front of a room and making something land. So when I was training, I was in theatre. I acted out what could go wrong with humor, not to shame people, but to give them both sides.

And I can tell you, during election day — which is a one-day exam in Kenya — the few calls I got from the roughly 10,000 officials scattered across my region weren’t about the different scenarios. They were about things I could resolve, like gadget failures.

When I am able to pass information from me to others that is train, I exhale.

That’s how I know it’s where I belong.

But something happens when the subject is me.

When I’m not relaying someone else’s curriculum. When I’m the material.

I see it most clearly on social media.

I have something I want to share. A thought. An image from a walk. A piece of writing I’ve been sitting with.

And before I can post it, the voices start.

I can hear how loud it is. I’m sitting there laughing at myself, because the original thing I wanted to share has already disappeared under five layers of logistics.

By the time I finish negotiating with all those voices, a week has passed. And now it’s midnight, and I’m learning how to create better carousels using Canva AI.

Sometimes a month.

And the thing I wanted to share is still sitting in my drafts, having been overtaken by new events, which will go through the same process of negotiations.

For a long time, I thought this was a problem of perfectionism.

It’s not.

Perfectionism is just where it hides.

Underneath the perfectionism is an older voice that says:

And perfectionism is the strategy to cover that.

If I can make it look perfect — the image, the caption, the format, the timing — then maybe other things will happen with my message.

Maybe they will see me in a different light. Maybe my message will stand out, be unique, and therefore be chosen. Maybe they won’t misunderstand it, because I have been very clear and given them all the information, so they can’t judge me. They will see this, and I will finally get the validation.

Lately, that wound has been finding new places to hide.

Now it sounds like:

Same wound. New costume.

And even right now — writing this — the wound has found an even newer costume.

The em dashes.

I’m laughing as I type this, because — of course. Of course, the voice found one more place to live. It is never enough.

Yesterday I had a small test.

I had written a Substack essay. I had it edited the way I wanted on my computer. Clean. Formatted. Ready.

Someone wanted to read it. I wanted to send it through Substack, not just as a Google Doc.

But my Substack was logged out on my computer. I couldn’t pull it up there. I could only post from my phone — where I couldn’t format it the way I’d planned.

So I had a choice.

Wait until I was home and could post the perfect version.

Or post it now, imperfect, without the formatting I had in mind.

I posted it.

Not because I’d done any big healing work in that moment. Just because the need was more pressing than the perfection.

Later that day, I was back at my computer. I posted the “real” version — the one I’d polished.

And here’s what happened.

The imperfect one has more comments. More reactions. More people are actually reading it.

The perfect one is sitting there, beautifully formatted, with barely a pulse.

I can’t edit the imperfect one anymore. Once people start commenting on Substack, you can’t change it.

So it’s just there.

Imperfect. Read. Responded to.

And the not-enough wound is looking at it, going — huh.

Here’s what I’m learning.

The antidote is more specific than that.

If perfectionism has a real standard in it — something that actually serves the work — give it a container. Decide: I post weekly. It looks like this. Then perfectionism has somewhere to live that isn’t in my throat every time I have something to say.

And if what’s actually running is the being-seen wound — the part that wants the post to make people think I’m smart, powerful, put-together, doing well — that’s a different move. That one has to be handled before posting. Not after the reactions come in.

Because if I need the post to make people see me a certain way, I’m not expressing.

I’m auditioning.

So the question I’m learning to ask myself, right before I post, is this:

Those are two very different orientations.

One is performance. The other is release.

One needs the outcome to look a certain way. The other just needs to come out.

One is me trying to arrive somewhere with the post. The other is the post being the arriving.

And then — before it goes up — I practice saying:

And I post.

Even when it’s not the format I planned. Even when the image isn’t right. Even when the caption feels clumsy. Even — when — it — has — em dashes.

Not perfectly.

Honestly.

Before you close this tab — sit with me for a second.

When you feel something real… what happens in the moment before you share it?

Is there a part of you that needs what you share to be “good enough” before it can be seen?

Where do you hold that pressure in your body?

What are you currently holding in… that wants to be expressed?

Can you tell the difference between expressing… and controlling how you’re seen?

You don’t need to answer them out loud. Just notice.

When I train, I exhale.

There’s nothing to prove. Nothing to become. Just something moving through me that needs to land.

I’m learning that expression is the same.

Not something to perfect. Something to release.

I’m learning to exhale here, too.

If this moved something in you, consider sharing it with someone who battles perfectionism and the fear of being seen.

Share

You might be handing them the exhale they didn't know they needed.

Another social media conversation. Another spiritual absolute. The message was clear:

Astrology is a limitation. Birth charts are illusions. You are the sole creator of your reality and anything external is a crutch. The moment you realize you are the operant power, you release everything else.

I've heard this before.

And instead of reacting, I paused.

Not to defend astrology. Not to reject the view.

But to ask myself an honest question:

*Why does this bother me?*

---

The answer I expected was intellectual.

Something about the body and cycles. Something about tools and discernment. Something about the difference between using a map and being ruled by one.

But the first honest answer that came up was not intellectual at all.

It was this:

*I wanted bragging rights.*

---

Not enlightenment. Not alignment. Not my highest self.

Bragging rights.

The part of me that wants to get life right doesn't just want to be right. It wants to be visibly, undeniably, impressively right. Right enough that someone looks at the path I chose and cannot argue with it.

That is not a spiritual goal.

That is a wound wearing spiritual clothing.

And once I saw it I couldn't unsee it.

---

So I stayed with it. The way I always do when something uncomfortable surfaces.

I let my shadow work tool ask me the questions I didn't want to answer.

*What are you really trying to prove?*

That I am doing life correctly.

*And what happens if you don't prove it?*

Then I might be behind. Then I might have chosen the wrong path. Then I might have missed something I was supposed to figure out.

*And what does that mean about you?*

That I am not clever enough. That I didn't get it right. That I should have known better.

---

Pause here.

Because this is where it gets interesting.

Not clever enough. Didn't get it right. Should have known better.

These are not thoughts about astrology.

These are thoughts about worth.

---

I have spent a significant part of my adult life managing the possibility of getting it wrong.

I have kept every door open, including religion, not out of wisdom but out of protection. If I never fully commit to one path, I can never be blamed for choosing the wrong one. If I keep the map, follow the process, do the shadow work, understand the transits, track the patterns, then maybe I will arrive somewhere undeniable.

Somewhere that proves I was worthy of the life I wanted all along.

*Worthy.*

That word stopped me.

Because the question underneath all the maps and frameworks and one-more-thing-to-heal was never really about readiness.

It was about this:

*Do I deserve to receive the full life before I have fixed everything that is broken in me?*

---

Let me show you how the excavation actually moves.

Because this is shadow work. Not the performance of it, but the real thing. The part where you follow the thread all the way down even when you don't like where it leads.

The surface layer sounds like this:

*I am not ready yet. I need to resolve my money patterns first. Then my relationship patterns. Then maybe the rest.*

That feels responsible. Measured. Even wise.

But underneath it:

*I am not enough yet.*

Which sounds like:

*There are still things wrong with me that need to be corrected before I qualify.*

And at the very bottom, if you are willing to go there:

*I am not worthy of receiving what I want until I have earned it.*

---

That is the root.

Not astrology. Not process. Not the commenter's transcript.

The belief that receiving must be earned. That the full life, the relationship, the wealth, the recognition, the arrival, has conditions attached. That somewhere there is a version of me that will have resolved enough, healed enough, understood enough to finally deserve it.

And I have been working toward her ever since.

---

Now here is where the shadow work asks the question that changes everything.

*If there was no right way to live... and no one measuring your progress... and no final version of you to reach... what would you stop trying so hard to prove?*

I sat with that for a long time.

And then:

*I would stop trying to prove I am not behind.*

*I would stop trying to prove I am doing life correctly.*

*I would stop trying to become someone who has finally arrived.*

And then the question that went all the way to the bottom:

*If you stopped all of that... what would be left?*

One word came.

*Worthiness.*

Not the performance of it. Not the proof of it.

Just the quiet, terrifying possibility that I was already worthy before I started working to become it.

---

Now let me tell you what astrology actually did for me.

Because this is where I have to be honest in both directions.

Did I need astrology to tell me I had patterns around money and relationships? No. I was already living those patterns. Overgiving everything in some relationships. Extracting everything back in others. Nothing in between. No balance. No ease.

The pattern was already there, written in my body and my choices long before I ever looked at a chart.

But did astrology help? Yes.

When I found the language for what I was living, something shifted. Not the pattern itself, not immediately. But my relationship to it. Suddenly it had a name. A map. A context that said: this is not a character flaw. This is a pattern with a root. And patterns with roots can be worked with.

My Sun and Mercury in the 6th house told me something I have come to deeply trust. My path runs through the daily work. The ordinary. The unglamorous showing up that nobody photographs. My gold is not at the summit. It is in the climb itself, in the integration, in the way the body learns through repetition what the mind cannot learn through theory alone.

If I quantum jump over that, I don't just skip the difficulty.

I skip the evolution.

And right now my planets are transiting my 7th and 8th houses. The houses of relationship and shared resources. Interdependence. The slow dissolution of the self that insists on doing everything alone.

Before I became a mother navigating life in a country not my own, independence felt like power. If someone failed me, I left. My ego loved the exit.

But here, in a country where community is not automatic, where you have to build it deliberately, where you have to ask, that version of strength quietly collapsed.

I watched a Kenyan woman travel all the way back home just to give birth. Not for medical reasons. For community. For the bone-deep need of not doing it alone. I understood her completely. Because I have felt the specific weight of a life where the safety net is not woven into the culture around you. Where you have to ask for what you need instead of simply being held by it.

And asking, for someone who built her entire identity around not needing to, is its own kind of mountain.

The 8th house does not ask politely. It simply removes the conditions that made independence feel manageable. And then it waits.

I am learning to stay. To receive. To let support come in without immediately calculating how to return it so I don't feel like I owe anyone anything.

I am learning that interdependence is not a failure of strength.

It is the graduation from it.

---

So was the commenter wrong?

Not entirely.

There is a version of me that uses the map to delay. That finds one more thing to heal before she allows herself to receive. That uses the process as a waiting room.

I see her. I am not pretending she doesn't exist.

But here is what I know now that I didn't know when I started today.

The wound was never about readiness.

Readiness was just the story the wound told itself to sound reasonable.

The wound is worthiness.

The belief that I must earn the right to receive what I want. That there are conditions. That fixing myself is the price of admission to the full life.

---

And here is the question I want to leave with you.

Not the commenter's question. Not the astrology debate.

This one:

*If you stopped working on yourself for one moment, not forever, just for one moment, and simply received... what would that feel like in your body?*

Relief?

Fear?

Both?

Because the answer tells you everything about where your wound actually lives.

---

I am not done with the map.

But I am beginning to understand what I was really using it for.

Not navigation.

Permission.

Permission to receive a life I was already worthy of.

Before the healing. Before the process. Before I fixed the money patterns and the relationship patterns and everything else on the list.

The worthiness was never at the end of the work.

It was the condition I was born with.

I am just learning, slowly, to stop arguing with it.

---

And maybe that is the real alchemy.

Not turning lead into gold.

But finally believing you deserved the gold before the transformation began.

I wanted to ground myself. Connect to my roots. Touch something old in the land and let it touch me back. I had been carrying a question I couldn't quite name, something about scarcity, about belonging, about whether I was allowed to take up the space I actually occupy.

The land answered in a way I wasn't expecting.

During a ceremony on the mountain, I found myself on the ground. Not sitting. Not meditating quietly the way I had imagined. My body was moving, spreading, pressing itself into the earth. I was making sounds I didn't plan to make. I kept hugging the grass. I felt the ground moving beneath me, or maybe I was moving into it. I couldn't tell the difference.

At some point I became something large. Something that wanted to stretch and spread and take up more room than I normally allow myself. A dragon. A grasshopper. Something ancient that doesn't ask permission.

And my mind kept resisting.

*Sit still. Be composed. Let the messages come through properly.*

But my body wouldn't listen. It had its own intentions.

At some point a voice came, not mine, older than mine, something that could see me more clearly than I could see myself.

When will you release her.

Not a question. A recognition.

Then our guide sang a Kikuyu song.

*Whose home is this, whose home is this, so that I may spread myself like a buffalo?*

The response came back, simple and unhesitating:

*This is our home. If you want to spread yourself, spread.*

I heard those words while I was already on the ground, already sprawling, already becoming something that refused to be small.

And I thought: I would never do this anywhere else.

Not in the West. Not in a borrowed landscape. Not somewhere that doesn't know my name or my people or the particular way my body holds grief and history and hunger all at once.

Only here. Only on land that recognized me before I recognized myself.

The buffalo doesn't ask permission because it is powerful. It asks because it understands the land is shared. And the land says: *yes, there is room. spread.*

I had come to the mountain asking if I was allowed to take up space.

The mountain answered before I finished the question.

A few days later I found myself reading a conversation online.

A traveler visiting Kenya wrote about something that made her uncomfortable. She had been welcomed warmly everywhere she went. People were kind, protective, generous. But she noticed she was waved through security while locals had their bags checked. She was served first. People stepped aside. She was called madam.

She felt she was being given space that wasn't hers to take.

The comments that followed cracked open something older.

Some Kenyans said: that's just our hospitality.

Others said: no, sometimes we do treat white visitors differently.

Others pointed to tourism economics. Others to colonial memory. Others to how Africans are treated when we travel abroad.

Everyone was speaking from a different wound.

And reading it, I realized the debate wasn't really about hospitality.

It was about space.

Who steps aside. Who gets priority. Who occupies the center. Who shrinks so someone else can move freely.

Kenya carries a complicated history with this question.

Colonial systems once placed Europeans above Africans socially and politically. Some of those gestures still echo, so quietly that people perform them without knowing why.

Tourism adds another layer. Visitors often represent income and opportunity. Sometimes hospitality and economic survival become difficult to separate.

So what a traveler experiences may be several things at once: genuine warmth, historical pattern, economic calculation. All of it real. All of it tangled.

Hospitality welcomes someone into a space. Hierarchy rearranges the space around them. They can look identical from the outside. But one leaves everyone standing. The other asks someone to step aside.

But underneath the debate is the same question the buffalo song asks.

*Whose home is this?*

And the answer matters, not just culturally, but personally.

Because I have spent most of my life doing the opposite of spreading.

I have moved through rooms carefully. Monitored how much space I occupy. Checked whether my presence was too much before allowing myself to fully arrive. Given deference I didn't consciously choose to give, to keep the peace, to make room, to avoid being seen as someone who takes too much.

I told my guide during the ceremony: I don't like surveillance. I don't like being seen.

And he heard it as what it was, not humility, but confinement.

The same confinement the traveler's story revealed in a different form. She was given space she didn't ask for. I give away space I was never asked to surrender.

Two different positions. The same imbalance around who is allowed to take space, and who has quietly agreed to need less of it.

The voice on the mountain asked: *when will you release her.*

I don't have the full answer yet.

My body knows. It was already on the ground, already spreading, already making animal sounds in its native land without apology.

But my mind held back. It kept wanting to compose itself. To receive the journey properly. To be seen doing it right.

The medicine kept saying: *listen.*

Maybe that is the truest answer to the question this essay started with.

How do we take our place in the world without pushing others out of it?

We stop performing smallness as a courtesy.

We stop mistaking confinement for consideration.

We ask whose home this is, and when the land answers *ours*, we let ourselves believe it.

Sometimes I wonder how many of us are quietly negotiating the same question in different ways.

Where did we learn to step aside before anyone asked us to?

Where did we learn that taking our place might mean pushing someone else out of theirs?

And what would change if we believed the answer the land gave that day on Mount Kenya:

*There is room. Spread.*

The buffalo doesn't dominate the land.

It doesn't disappear from it either.

It simply spreads, fully, without apology, in the place it belongs.

I am still learning to do that.

P.S.

I know I wrote a lot about buffalo because of the song. But the truth is the mountain and the Mara were full of reminders — elephants, waterbuck, buffalo — all large, calm creatures simply existing in their space.

The land seemed determined to make its point.

I've hiked twice in my life. The first time was 25 years ago at Mt. Longonot. The second time was this week at Mt. Kenya. Same country. Same body. Completely different person.

The first hike started with a flyer.

I saw it at university. Hike and picnic at Mt. Longonot. I told my boyfriend and I was very excited. I thought it would be a nice thing we could do together. A walk. Maybe a picnic. Something light.

Unfortunately, he went and told everyone. And suddenly the whole class was in on it.

The next few days I noticed people going out in the mornings to run. I genuinely wondered what the hullabaloo was about. We were just going for a walk. But they were training like it was a marathon. I was deeply disillusioned by what the word "hike" apparently meant.

The day of the hike, I showed up looking cute in piggy tails for my hair , jeans, sneakers ,and a small orange bag full of potato chips , popcorn,cookies and Dextrosal — a glucose packet for kids

Everyone else had backpacks. Real food. Gear. They showed up ready. It was, looking back, quite funny.

We were divided into groups and each group was assigned a leader. Unfortunately for me, our leader was a Maasai who had spent his whole life trekking mountains. He chose the most challenging route. While other groups followed the path around the base and then began their climb, we started tackling hill after hill straight toward the mountain.

what followed was the longest day of my life. It rained. It was sunny. It was windy. The mountain had sections that were almost perpendicular to the ground and people were physically pushing me up. My boyfriend left me early on and I could see him with my orange bag ahead at hill twenty when we hadn't even started the mountain properly. He just kept getting smaller.

At some point I fainted. I had visions of being airlifted by helicopter. Then I woke up and I was still in exactly the same spot. The bus had already moved to the other side of the mountain. There was no going back.

I remember thinking: I would die a virgin. How could I have paid for this.

I ended up with the last guide, the one assigned to people with muscle pulls and breathing problems. And me. If we were not stopping for the muscle pull person, it was for me. It was so ridiculous it became funny.

My boyfriend was long gone. Meanwhile i was borrowing food and water ,but I made myself a quiet promise: if I made it out of this alive, I was breaking up with him. (I did.)

And somehow, I still reached the top. Looking like a homeless person. At 8pm. The first person had arrived at 4pm.

It was the best moment.

Going down, I was much faster. I always notice this about myself. Once I am over the hill, I pick up speed. The pressure lifts and something in me loosens.

We got to the bus to find people angry at us for how long we had taken. I felt humiliated. Like I had failed, even though I had finished.

I carried that experience in my body for 23 years as: I don't keep up. I underestimate things. I suffer through things I wasn't prepared for.

Then I found myself organizing a retreat at Mt. Kenya.

In my mind, my connection to the mountain was always going to be felt in the deeper, quieter parts of the retreat. Not the hike. The hike felt like a footnote. A small walk in nature. A bit of fresh air before the real work began.

Apparently everyone else had come specifically to hike. Not a small walk. A real hike. I hadn't considered that as the main event.

It started dawning on me in the car. Participants kept talking about the altitude. The gear. The difficulty. And I, the person who had organized this entire retreat, didn't even have the shoes.

Lord.

That night, Longonot came back. Same feeling in my chest. Same voice:

I'm not ready. I don't have the right things. I might embarrass myself again.

I told the team I would do very little. That I wasn't prepared. I was already managing their expectations and shrinking before the day had even begun.

But something moved differently in me that night.

There were internal voices telling me to just quit. To let them go. *Why are you keeping them waiting? Just go. You organized this, that's enough.*

But another part of me said: *Let me give myself the best shot. After all, I organized this. I am paying for this. I deserve to actually be here.*

I can be very resourceful when I commit. At 5am I was calling local shops. The first sent me offline. I went to the supermarket at 7am and they didn't have what I needed. I could feel the pressure of my team waiting, of time running out, of the old story repeating.

And then I found a shop that rushed to open. A woman who had everything: shoes, poles, rain jacket, gloves, trousers, all in my size. And she was leasing them. She was so kind about it. No fuss. Just: here is what you need.

It felt like the universe meeting me halfway. Like the mountain saying: *you asked. here.*

I didn't wait to feel ready. I just stopped waiting.

And then I started exactly the way I always do.

Fast. Trying to perform, trying to set the pace, trying to keep up. Already panting within the first few minutes, the same body doing the same thing it did on Longonot 25 years ago, as if nothing had changed at all.

*Climbing mountains doesn't require hurrying.*

My guide. And my team. All of them saying the same thing.

That stopped me.

Not just the guide, but my own team. Experienced hikers who had climbed different mountains, some even the Himalayas. Guides who had walked Mt. Kenya before and could see exactly what I was doing to myself. They weren't being kind. They weren't being competitive. They were being accurate.

I slowed down. Not as a strategy. As permission.

Permission to just be me. To be slow without it meaning something. To not be the fastest, or keep up, or prove anything, and for that to simply be okay.

I stopped looking ahead to see who was further. I started walking with my breath.

Step. Breath. Step. Breath.

And suddenly, my body caught up to me.

At some point I told the others to go ahead.

Not from defeat. From clarity. We each had a guide. Everyone was supported. I didn't need to prove anything by keeping up with people who had come prepared for something I hadn't.

My guide and I found our pace. We would stop to eat. Continue. Stop to look. Stop to hug trees. Continue. I noticed where I was instead of how far I had left. I looked at the steps I was taking and the greenery surrounding me rather than the peak.

I just kept moving.

I didn't reach the peak.

Almost to Makinda camp, near one of the viewpoints. Turned back at 2pm. Not because I failed, but because I was choosing my limit, not collapsing into it.

I felt very proud of myself. Not because I had kept up. But because I had stayed. I had enjoyed the journey. I had removed the urgency to perform and just been present on the mountain, which in the end was the deeper connection I had come for anyway.

Looking back, it wasn't just the hike that went differently. It was how I moved inside difficulty.

Before, I had willpower. And willpower collapsed when the mountain didn't care about my effort. This time I had something else: the right tools, people who knew the terrain, and permission, finally, to move at my own pace.

That was the real shift. Not that I became stronger. But that I stopped abandoning myself and started supporting myself. With others, not against them.

Before: pushing through, keeping up, not stopping.

Now: pacing, adjusting, staying.

Looking at both versions of me, what I love is this: I have always been the curious,adventurous and sometimes naive person who shows up.

Even when I was the slowest. Even when I was muddy. Even when people were annoyed. Even when the journey took longer than anyone expected. I still finished.

Mt. Kenya didn't create a new person. It revealed that the younger version of me simply needed guidance, tools, and permission to move at her pace.

The mountain didn't change my nature. It corrected the interpretation of it.

I didn't conquer the mountain.

I just stopped trying to keep up with it.

I turned 42 last week. This hike was my birthday treat to myself.

They say life begins at 40. I think I finally understand why. Not because you become more. But because you stop fighting yourself so hard. You surrender — not to the mountain, not to other people's pace — but to who you actually are.

Turns out she was worth the wait.

This is nothing new here in Kenya; just a few weeks ago, Marion Naipei, a Kenyan girl, met James Opande on Tinder. After months of chatting, they finally decided to meet at a local pub. "He is someone I knew and really trusted," she said.

That night, she was too drunk to notice he was recording her.

When the video went viral on Telegram, Marion found out on a Thursday morning from a friend's call. She was trending. When she confronted Opande, he denied it. Then he played victim: "It has also caused him problems, especially with his wife.

This is a pattern that has repeated time and again. The issue is that Women have become the target of the fallout from the story.

Their choices, their morality, their bodies examined. The men who recorded? They faded into the background while Kenyans took to social media to express outrage. Not at the crime, but at the women themselves.

But here's what's worth examining: why do we care more about defending our honor than defending our women?

The Distraction

When women are exploited in Kenya, our online spaces are split predictably.

Men respond to the crime with ridicule and silence. Women rush to defend the exploited, often having to defend themselves simultaneously. What rarely happens is sustained focus on consent, power, and accountability.

Instead, we get a gender war.

And that war is doing important work. Just not the kind we think. It's keeping us from seeing the actual thief.

Because while Kenyans argue about whether our women are "cheap" or our men are "protecting" them, a Russian man is harvesting our vulnerabilities and selling them to the world. He isn't dating. He's extracting.

He identifies women in places where economic desperation is real. And he turns their private moments into content. He profits from our humiliation while we're too busy fighting each other to notice.

That's the trap. Divide and conquer. Classic colonization.

The Wound Beneath the Rage

But I want to go deeper into why men are angrier at women than at the extractor.

Because the rage isn't really about morality. It's about something older.

Many Kenyan men are experiencing a specific wound: the historical humiliation of being seen as inferior. Economic pressure that makes masculinity feel fragile. The unspoken terror of being bypassed. Socially, sexually, financially. By outsiders.

When a woman "chooses" a foreigner, when she accepts money from him, when she's willing to cross a line that a Kenyan man couldn't afford to cross. It triggers something ancient.

The unspoken narrative is: If our women desire outsiders, then we have failed as protectors.

That belief is rarely spoken. But it drives everything.

This isn't about defending values. It's about defending wounded pride.

The Masculine Worth Wound

Here's the deeper belief system being triggered:

A man's value depends on being chosen.

Not on who he is. But on whether women select him over other men. On whether he can provide what she needs. On whether she requires him to survive.

When a foreigner arrives with money and attention, he represents something a local man cannot compete with. And in that moment, the local man feels the truth he's been trained to fear: I am not necessary. Therefore, I do not matter. Therefore, I am not enough.

This is unbearable.

Because he was never taught that his worth exists independent of being chosen. He was taught that masculine value comes from provision, from protection, from being needed. Love, in this framework, isn't partnership. It's ownership. Power isn't mutual respect. It's control.

So when control is stripped away, when she chooses someone else, when she refuses to need him, the only power left is domination. The only way to feel valuable again is to punish her for rejecting him.

He cannot compete with the foreigner economically. Kenyan law will hold the foreigner accountable. But he can do something else: he can humiliate her. He can shame her publicly. He can control the narrative about her body, her choices, her character. Because that's the only arena where he still has power.

This is the shadow work no one wants to name: Kenyan men have been taught to measure their worth through women. And when that measurement fails, they destroy the scale.

And when you can't fight the system that made you feel less-than. When you can't compete with global capital, when you can't offer what a foreigner can. You fight the closest target.

You fight the women.

You call them names. You question their morality. You insist they're betraying "us." Because at least that feels like you're doing something. At least that feels like control.

The Economics We Don't Name

But here's the part we all know and refuse to say: many women don't have a choice.

Society demands they be "pure". Sunday church service, virgin until marriage, respectable. But it offers them almost no path to financial security that doesn't involve a man's blessing. No stable employment. No inheritance. No safety net.

So when a foreigner arrives with dollars and attention, it's not just romance. It's survival.

But there's another layer we're even more afraid to name.

This foreigner is white. And whiteness has been coded through colonialism, through religion, through media, through generations of messaging,as safe. As good. As powerful. As loving.

We were taught through missionaries that Jesus was white. Through education that civilization came from the West. Through economics that prosperity required looking abroad. Through media that portrayed white men as romantic heroes and Black men as threats.

So when a woman chooses a white foreigner over a Black African man, she's not just choosing dollars. She's choosing what she's been taught to believe is safer, better, more valuable.

The "muzungu fetish" everyone mocks? It's not simple desire. It's economic despair mixed with internalized colonialism. It's a woman looking at a foreigner and seeing: this is my way out. This is safety. This is what I was told to want.

African men feel this acutely. They're not just competing economically. They're competing against centuries of messaging that says their skin, their culture, their way of loving isn't good enough.

But here's what we won't say: Women are also victims of this hierarchy. We internalized it. We learned to see our own men through the colonizer's eyes. We were taught to desire what was taught to be desirable.

This doesn't make the choice less real. It makes it more tragic.

Women defending her aren't defending promiscuity. They're defending the right to survive in a system that failed her. They're defending a woman who was taught to believe that her own people couldn't save her.

But we don't want to see that. Because seeing it would mean confronting that we, as a society, created the conditions for her vulnerability. And that colonialism didn't just take our land. It colonized our desires.

The Real Work

The gender war keeps us from asking the real questions:

Who protects women when systems fail?

Why does humiliation feel easier than justice?

Why are we angrier at our women than at the man profiting from their exploitation?

And here's what we're avoiding: this isn't a cultural debate or a moral opinion.

Recording people without consent for profit is a crime under Kenyan law. Exposing others to HIV knowingly is a crime. These are criminal offenses, not relationship problems or cultural misunderstandings.

Yet we treat them like opinion pieces. We defend the perpetrators by attacking the women. And that's how abuse gets normalized.

In many countries, when men violate women, there is zero tolerance. Communities understand that accountability isn't about shame. It's about protection. It's about making clear: there are consequences.

Yaytseslav should be an example. Not for the women whose bodies he commodified, but for every man considering similar exploitation: Kenya sees you. Kenya will hold you accountable.

Instead, we're holding the women accountable. We're debating their choices, their morality, their "purity." And while we do that, the predator profits.

But accountability alone won't heal us.

What's being felt across the country is grief. Not anger.

Grief that we've failed to protect our own. Grief that we've turned survival into spectacle. Grief that we'd rather fight each other than face the systems that exploit us all.

If Kenyan men could name the wound beneath the rage. The feeling of being less-than, of being unable to protect, of being bypassed. Maybe we could stop blaming women and start fighting the actual extraction happening.

If Kenyan women could be honest about survival without apology. And if we could hear that without shame. Maybe we could build systems that don't force survival into the shadows.

That's the work. Not defending our honor.

But reclaiming our power.

Not by fighting each other.

But by finally seeing who's really at the door.