Practical Omens, Pt. 1
Conditions.
The past year has been a shift away from creating as much online content for a wide audience and toward connecting with people directly, working with individuals or very small groups.
Making TikToks had started to feel like I was talking at a crowd when I wanted to be with people. I missed watching someone’s face change when an idea landed. I missed getting to know people beyond the comment section. I reminded myself why I even began my social media journey. What I wanted was to make friends, not to achieve a worldwide reach.
I can’t say that this thought landed on fertile ground, it was rather a desert of fear. Because having confidence in myself, the same way I do in other things, has been a terrifying experience. Like falling out of a helicopter type thing. You eventually arrive at a feeling of boundless freedom, but first it starts with an all-encompassing fear that doesn’t let you move a muscle.
I had to let go of the fear that people might not find what I do worthy enough of their time and love. When my well-being is directly tied to how many people interact with my work, it is a very real fear with real consequences. But what if I saw myself as someone who is worthy of trust and confidence? I’ve always found my way before, the data I’ve gathered shows that I can do it again.
When I tuned into what was beyond the fear, I understood that I am the love I need and want. Right away, I sort of hate how that sounds—almost crystal-ascension-new-age-hocus-pocus? But as someone who grew up thinking she needed to save people to deserve their love (i.e., my mother), believing that I'm worthy of love simply because I exist still feels like a very unnatural thought.
I remember seeing my daughter make a funny face and strike a pose while we were hanging out with friends. I just looked at her and thought about how much I adored her, to the point that I didn’t know it was possible. She was so charismatic, so funny, and so incredibly herself that I couldn’t stop admiring her. And then my friend pointed out that I make that exact same face, the exact same pose where I lean against the wall with one hand and cross my legs. What I saw reflected in her was me when I forget my “self”. I realized that this boundless love I have for her is also the love I feel for me—for my awkward, goofy self that is so sincere and vulnerable. Not because I sat down one day and decided to love myself, but because I got to see myself through someone I already loved without conditions.
Now that you have that image fresh in your mind, I should say that I don’t know what this experience would have been like if I hadn’t made my own choice to become a mother, under my own conditions, when and how I wanted to. I praise my ancestors for the incredible luck of my circumstances, which I’m sure is the result of their love and protection. Many women still have to move mountains just to have a say in their own lives. I am very present with that knowledge, and I acknowledge the privilege that every woman in my bloodline sacrificed for.
One of those women is always fresh in my mind. I’ve always felt my babushka Tanya (it’s Tatyana Ivanovna for everyone else) next to me, ever since the dream on the 40th day after her death.
We were together on a train. She walked into my compartment, rushed as if she were getting off at the next station. She gave me a hug. A little scared. She also looked younger than I remembered her. She died in her sixties, but in the dream she looked maybe thirty-five or forty—her strongest, most confident self. It’s been almost two decades since her death, but the feeling that the dream left in my chest is still there. It took me years to understand what it had meant. She said goodbye to her life through seeing her young self reflected in me. She got to go on in this life through me, knowing that helped her to let go enough to rest.
Coming back to my present self, I’ve realized that I make the biggest difference for people when I use my ability to speak intuition into existence. In order to speak it, I almost have to dissapear a little, it’s the actual act of talking that does all the work for me. When I find the flow during a class, where everyone’s presence is palpable, when we are all flowing in the same river (some getting off sooner than others), I am able to speak what’s on everyone’s mind. I don’t know it, I don’t think it. It just comes out.
Truth comes to me when I speak. It gets muddled when I think too much about it, overpowered by voices of trauma, fear, or trying to anticipate how other people might perceive me.
I’ve come to a place where I’ve released almost all control over how I’m perceived on the outside. Honestly, any control I thought I had was imaginary. Trying to manage it only created more noise in my own mind.
The quieter my own mind became, the easier it was to hear something else.
Next, the omens started to come.
