People always suggest you pick up a new hobby in those moments. Mine was Canva.
Sometimes you end up in situations – relationships, jobs, places in your life, where you end up creating a self that fits in with that situation. So what happens to you when that situation ends ?
When I left a four year relationship in the late spring of 2021, I found myself on autopilot. I had another three months of my job to get through until I could gracefully back out and take the time to pause and feel. I left our shared living space, and found myself in a friends spare room. The old cliches about finding out who’s still there for you when you are no longer part of a socially agreeable duo are true. I was working at a primary school and refused to leave the kids before the end of the summer term. I was okay, just dealing with the minor inconveniences of living out of a suitcase and now having a commute that was three times longer than my previous one. I was exhausted. I had no idea where I was going next. I knew I wanted out of Bordeaux, out of a life so closely intertwined with a music and nightlife scene I had become repulsed by. Out of a life that felt so hollow and false once I was no longer so and so’s girlfriend. But I had no idea of where to go.
I told myself that the answers would come to me, that I was going to trust myself and the Universe, given that we had got us this far. As I created more and more distance with the previous version of myself that had always had someone around to tell her what was what, I found the space to have to make up my own answers. I needed that.
I turned to my Instagram, and started working on some astrological content, instead of just posting the usual everyday stuff. I enjoyed it. I started experimenting with Canva to create educational text posts about which ever new moon was happening. I really enjoyed that. As I unbuilt the low-level emotionnal abuse from my relationship that had affected my self-esteem, I started to fall in love with myself, properly. I’d been preaching self-love for a few years, since I’d started therapy, but choosing to stay in a relationship that constantly devalued me was giving myself mixed signals. I started playing around with photo shoots of myself. Editing. Backgrounds in cute pastel colors. Fonts. Graphic elements. I was having fun, all by myself, recreating myself. Redefining myself. I grew bolder, and more able to express myself honestly in my captions. I allowed myself to play around with creating memes – one of my all time favorite art forms. I’d tried making a meme page the first year I was in that particular relationship – when I’d shown him, he’d told me that they were not relevant or funny. I gave up. This time round, the people I showed my memes to were supportive and encouraging, because they had no agenda in diminishing my self-belief. I kept at it. I gained followers. I joined an online Coven of witches, based around a magical marketing program. The community uplifted me like I’d never experienced before, and as the school term ended, I found myself longing for my grandparents holiday house in the village of Genêts, Normandy.
I’m going to write a whole post about this place, because it deserves it. In the meantime, lets just say that it’s always been a magical place to me (and lots of others, year round inhabitants or seasonal ones like my family). I planned to come for the summer, to take some time to think about what I wanted to do next. I’d left my old apartment and relationship on the 27th of April 2021 – the day that Pluto went retrograde. As I write this, in the early hours of the 5th of October 2021, Pluto is about to go direct again. Pluto deals with transformation, elimination, transmutation. It’s linked to the sign of Scorpio and the Tower in Tarot. Things dying, making room for new life. Pluto sits in Scorpio, like the rest of my astrological generation, in my chart, and lands in my 11th house. The house of social groups and communities. That was the part of my life I felt the need to transform the most.
I’m still very much in the middle of this journey, so the conclusions have yet to fully emerge, but I’m excited to see them unfold. In this spirit, I’ve been working on creating a Patreon so as to literally build the community I want to see in the world for myself.
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