This morning Pamela Madsen shared a beautiful live feed lecture about contraction in expansion – that is, the fear on the way to embracing your power that you are becoming too big.

I share this fear in a slightly different nuance – rather than bigness vs smallness, I carry the fear of complexity vs simplicity. Which is maybe nearly the same thing but the subtle difference to me is key.

I used to combat this by fitting myself into roles that were easily digested, particularly by the patriarchy – gogo dancer, lingerie model, submissive. I was so afraid of my brilliance that I genuinely wanted to be a prop, a beautiful piece of decor. Even my band I treated as a vanity project, something I did just for myself. My kinks meanwhile existed as a means of escaping my own brain. I started to forget that I was smart. I needed love so badly that I feared challenging anyone.

My last relationship – if you could call it that – ended because my ex couldn’t hide himself from me. He left me (twice!) for a woman he could be his false self around rather than do the work of self-acceptance, and I wrote this blogpromising myself I’d stop playing small and apologizing for my intuition. All I had to do was set the intention and cast a few spells on myself, and my whole world shifted, seemingly without my effort.

I’m not at all easily digestible. I can barely digest myself. Things happen to me and from me on a regular occurrence that I can’t even explain let alone expect others to believe. My relationship to spirit, my relationship to language, my relationship to manifestation and creatorship are all shifting in ways I can’t explain. My voice is becoming clearer, both in the auditory and linguistic senses. My perception is becoming stronger. The things I talk about are becoming more and more complex. And all of this is shifting me away from my safe harbor of simplicity.

I know a cool and beautiful girl who takes photos and rescues cats. I don’t know her very well but she seems very kind and talented in her field. And sometimes I envy her. Sometimes I think my life would be easier if I just took photos and rescued cats; I think I wouldn’t feel as threatening to people’s belief systems because everyone likes beautiful photos and cats. When I imagine her I don’t see her triggering people’s core wounds with her work, I don’t see her making people feel uncertain about what they thought they knew about God. She seems like the ideal girl you’d want to date – talented, beautiful, kind, and constantly surrounded by kittens.

I never found a home in simplicity. The easier the job, the more I sucked at it. Turns out the things I’m good at are actually the things that are difficult for most – dissecting feelings and motivations, solving human behavior, pondering the mysteries of the universe, literally practicing magick.

And yeah, I fear being too much.

I know this is coming up for me now because we’re in eclipse season (along with the Lionsgate portal and complicated retrogrades in Neptune and Mercury) and it’s time to shed all the past stuff that’s no longer serving us, and clearly my failed attempts at simplicity and convenience fall into that category. So I suspect I’ll be fine, and that these are normal feelings, but I’m going through them anyway.

And if I lose everyone I love and it’s just me and God at the edge of the world, then I guess it’s me and God at the edge of the world. I no longer have it in me to pretend to be something I’m not.