The Fires That Were Not Mine
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.
Negotiation changes the frequency of the message. The work stops transmitting and starts defending itself.
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.
Not every gathering is a village fire. Some are marketplaces.
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.”
It took me a year to build the capacity that aligned with that message.
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.
Exhaustion is often not overwork. It is misdirected circulation.
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.
And I want to be clear: this is not about isolation. I want to go to others and be warmed by their fires. I want others to come and be warmed by mine. We need each other. The whole point of tending your own fire is so that you have something to bring when you visit, and something to offer when others arrive. That is interdependence. That is how it works between sovereign homes.
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.
A starving heart cannot circulate abundance.
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.
🤍
And if anyone wants to know where to find me, my home is here.
🔥Website — www.inkandshadowtales.com
🔥Substack - Whispers of the moth
🔥TikTok — Whispers of the Moth
This is where I tend my fire.
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.
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