i’ve been trying to figure out how i wanted to write about this eclipse season because, if i’m being real, there has been so much going on internally that every time i tried to turn it into one clean article, it felt too neat.

we had the leo south node eclipse, then the pisces north node eclipse, all while i’m coming out of my nodal reversal and moving through my saturn return in aries. and somewhere in the middle of all of that, i started questioning almost every structure i’ve built my adult life around.

not in a dramatic “burn everything down and start over” way (well…kinda). but it has actually felt much quieter than that. more like realizing that a lot of the things i worked really hard to create did exactly what they were supposed to do for me, but i’m not sure they’re supposed to carry me into the next version of my life.

that has been the biggest thread running through everything lately. career, creativity, home, love, money, independence, spirituality. at first i was treating all of these as separate questions, but the more i sit with them, the more i realize they’re connected. i think i’ve reached a point where i don’t necessarily need a completely different life. i need a different structure around the life i already know i want.

career, visibility, and being tired of always being the one who has to produce

the career piece is probably where i noticed the shift first.

i’ve been a creator for such a huge portion of my adult life that being the talent has almost become synonymous with work for me. i’m the one creating the idea, filming the idea, being in the idea, talking about the idea, posting it, selling it and then figuring out what i’m going to make next. and there are still so many parts of that that i love. i love storytelling. i love beauty. i love communications. i love having a platform. i love sharing things i’m genuinely excited about.

but i also feel like i’m outgrowing being the one who constantly has to produce.

i’ve found myself becoming much more interested in the strategy behind people than always needing to be the person at the center. i love looking at someone and seeing what they could build. i love communications, positioning, guidance, helping people make sense of what they already have. i can feel myself wanting to move into more of an overseeing role professionally, and that has been interesting to admit because it doesn’t mean i’m no longer creative. it actually feels like another expression of the same part of me.

i think what i’m really outgrowing is having my entire livelihood depend on how consistently i can turn myself outward.

which obviously felt almost comically aligned with a leo south node eclipse.

i don’t want to make the astrology too literal, but the leo themes around visibility, identity, creativity and being seen have absolutely been present. i’ve had to think about how much of my identity has been connected to being recognized as a certain version of myself, and what happens when that version isn’t necessarily wrong, but just isn’t big enough anymore.

i don’t want to disappear. i don’t even think i want to stop being a creator completely. i just don’t want being seen to be the entire structure holding my life together.

and honestly, writing has been helping me understand that. writing lets me have a thought before i have to perform it. i can sit with something, change my mind, follow it somewhere unexpected and let it actually change me before i turn around and explain it to somebody else. i think after years of being a content machine, i’m trying to figure out how to be a person who creates again.

social media, becoming, and not having something to teach every five minutes

i’ve also been thinking about how social media has kind of ruined the beautiful journey of becoming.

everything online rewards the finished thought. the transformation photo. the lesson. the “here are five things i learned.” you’re expected to come knowing enough to keep talking, and if your work involves sharing your life, there can be this weird pressure to turn every internal shift into something useful before you’ve even had enough time to understand what happened.

i’ve definitely felt that lately.

there are things i could post about right now. i know how to make content. that isn’t the problem. i’ve been doing it long enough that i could probably manufacture something to say on almost any given day.

i just don’t want to anymore.

i don’t want to make things simply because i know how to make them. i want my actual curiosity to lead again.

i want there to be room for seasons where i’m unraveling something and don’t know where it leads yet. i want to have revelations that belong to me for a little while before they become something i teach. i want to be able to change my mind without feeling like i need to explain why the old version of me said something different six months ago.

i think this is also why the eden paper has started making more sense to me as i’ve been building it. i don’t really want to position myself as someone who has life figured out. “muse, not guru” keeps feeling more accurate. i’m much more interested in documenting how i make meaning out of my own life and letting that open a question for somebody else than i am in giving everybody the answer.

this whole article is probably an example of that. i’m not writing from the other side of anything. these are just the things i can see from where i’m standing right now.

stability, home, and realizing i don’t need to keep proving i can do everything alone

the other thing i haven’t been able to stop thinking about is stability.

i think my definition of freedom is changing.

for most of my twenties, freedom meant independence. it meant being able to leave, build a life somewhere else, figure things out on my own and know that i could create something from nothing. i left my hometown of baltimore when i was young and built an entire adult life away from home, and i genuinely think i needed to do that. i needed to know who i was outside of what was familiar. i needed the experiences i had. i needed to prove to myself that i could create my own life.

but i’m almost thirty now, and i already know i can survive.

i already know i can figure it out when things fall apart. i know i can rebuild. i know i can make something work even when the circumstances aren’t ideal.

i’m not sure i need to keep making that the test.

and that is part of why i’ve been seriously thinking about moving back home to baltimore.

a younger version of me probably would have seen moving home as going backwards. now i think about family. i think about support. i think about saving money. traveling more. having space to figure out what i want to build next without everything immediately needing to pay for itself. i think about what it would feel like to have more stability underneath me instead of constantly trying to create stability from scratch.

and none of that makes the version of me who needed to leave wrong.

that’s been important for me to understand.

i can have needed distance then and need closeness now. i can have needed to prove my independence then and be ready to receive more support now. those things don’t cancel each other out.

sometimes you come back to the same place as a completely different person.

i’ve even had to sit with the fact that if something looks like i’m taking a few steps backwards but gives me the foundation to take twenty steps forward after i root down, i’m actually okay with that.

that is new for me.

i’ve spent a lot of years growing outward. i think i’m finally interested in building something underneath myself.

my saturn return in aries (retrograde) is making all of this extremely literal

of course, all of this is happening during my saturn return in aries (in my 4th house of home and emotional stability) and saturn currently being retrograde has made it feel even more like i’m reviewing the structures and definitions i’ve been living by rather than rushing ahead and building something new just for the sake of saying i did.

i’ve been thinking a lot about responsibility, but not in the “work harder, be more disciplined, get your life together” way i probably would have interpreted saturn when i was younger. it feels more like responsibility for what i already know about myself.

i know constantly being on drains me. i know financial instability makes it harder for me to be creative. i know i function differently when i feel supported. i know i don’t want my entire livelihood to depend on my ability to keep producing myself. i know there are environments where i feel more like myself and environments where i feel like all of my energy goes toward maintaining the environment.

at some point i have to actually do something with that information.

that’s probably the most saturn-return-coded realization i’ve had.

i have spent years doing the inner work. i’ve analyzed myself from every possible angle. i’ve learned about my patterns, my nervous system, my human design, my astrology, my relationships, my fears, all of it. and there comes a point where self-awareness has to become a life choice.

i can know that something does not support me, but if i keep choosing it because it is familiar or because it looks like success, then what am i actually doing with the knowing?

i think that is the phase i’m entering now. less studying myself. more creating actual structures around what i’ve learned.

divine love, inner union, and realizing what i was waiting to receive

this has probably been the most surprising connection for me.

a lot of what i’ve been thinking about with career and stability has started changing the way i understand my divine love journey too. i realized that there were things i was waiting to receive through partnership that were really about structure.

stability. protection. security. feeling like i didn’t have to be the one holding everything all the time. feeling like there was another person who knew where we were going and could create enough safety around the connection for me to soften.

and i still think those are beautiful things to want through love. i don’t think the lesson is that we should become so self-sufficient that partnership no longer adds anything meaningful to our lives. but i do think i was learning the difference between wanting someone to support the life i’m building and unconsciously waiting for somebody to become the structure of my life. that is what made inner union start feeling practical to me instead of just spiritual language.

for years i’ve done so much of the emotional and spiritual work. feeling. surrendering. trying to trust. learning to listen to myself. understanding what relationships mirror back to me. but there is another part of that work that is much less glamorous, which is actually building around what you know.

it is one thing to say i know what i need. it is another thing to make decisions that protect it.

that brought me back to one of the biggest resentments i had around this connection. i spent a lot of time wishing he had protected it differently from outside interference, other people, fear, whatever was influencing the way things unfolded. and then i had this realization that… i also have to protect my own knowing from interference.

not external interference in the exact same way, but my fear, other people’s opinions, appearances, logic, needing somebody else to validate what i already feel before i trust myself.

that doesn’t remove anybody else’s responsibility. i’m not interested in using spirituality to make everything somebody else did somehow my fault.

it just gave me my own responsibility back.

i can’t control whether another person stands firmly in what they know. i can decide whether i stand firmly in what i know. and i think that is the actual inner union i’m interested in now. not becoming so independent that i don’t need love. becoming someone who can stay connected to herself while loving somebody else. having an “us” without losing the “me.”

letting go without convincing myself it meant nothing

my definition of letting go has also changed through all of this.

i used to think moving forward meant that eventually i would have to care less. or that i would need to decide i had misunderstood something in order to release it.

i don’t feel that way anymore. i can know what i know and still choose life.

i can believe that a connection was significant without organizing my future around what happens with it next. i can love somebody and not stay attached to the version of them that hurt me. i can believe somebody is capable of being more than their wounds without waiting for them to become that person on my timeline.

i think that was another huge shift.

at some point, if i truly believe somebody is more than the most wounded version of themselves, there is something strange about continuing to emotionally hold onto that version because i’m hurt by what they did.

i can release it.

that doesn’t mean chasing the healed version either. it means letting somebody have their own journey without me needing to carry it.

that became symbolic of something much bigger in me.

there was a wounded version of masculine energy in me too. the part that believed control was safety. the part that believed strength meant carrying everything alone. the part that wanted certainty because certainty meant i couldn’t be blindsided.

i’m letting that go, too.

a pisces lesson in not needing the ending to prove i understood the story

that is where the pisces eclipse came in and tied so much of this together for me.

if the leo eclipse has been asking me to release some of my attachment to an old identity, the pisces eclipse has felt like releasing my attachment to knowing what happens after it.

and i really do not love that part.

i love meaning. i love patterns. i love when something happens and then six months later i can look back and understand exactly why it happened. i love a full-circle moment probably more than the average person. but i also know there have been times where i’ve wanted the ending of something to validate what i believed about the experience itself.

if the relationship ends a particular way, then i was right about what it meant. if the career shift works out a certain way, then i know i made the right decision. if i move somewhere and everything magically falls into place, then i know the pull was correct.

and unfortunately…. i don’t think trust actually works like that.

i’m realizing i can trust what an experience awakened in me without demanding that life produce a specific ending as proof. i can know that something changed me. i can know that i’m being pulled toward a different structure. i can know that the version of my life i’ve been living no longer fits in the same way.

i do not necessarily have to know the final form yet.

that feels like the place where leo and pisces have been meeting for me. leo is loosening my attachment to who i thought i had to keep being, and pisces is loosening my attachment to immediately knowing who i become instead.

i think my old life did its job

that is probably the clearest way i can explain where i am right now.

i don’t hate my old life, i’m actually deeply grateful for it.

it gave me independence. it gave me a career. it gave me experiences i could never have planned. it gave me people i love. it gave me a version of myself i needed to become. it also stripped away a lot of things i thought i needed and forced me to learn parts of myself that i probably would have avoided if everything had stayed comfortable.

i think it did its job.

and maybe the reason i’ve felt so much tension lately is that i’ve been trying to keep extracting something from a version of my life that has already given me what it came to give me. i’ve been asking myself how to push it farther when i might actually need to build from a different place now.

i saw a quote from devi brown here on substack recently that said, “you cannot arrive at what you are meant to create without first being shaped by the search for it,” and i think that is why it hit me so hard.

i’ve spent a lot of this season searching for the answer. what am i doing with my career? what does being a creator look like now? what does home mean to me? what happens with my divine love? what am i actually building? what does my life look like if i stop measuring freedom the same way i did at twenty-two?

but i’m starting to realize that maybe i couldn’t have been handed the answers at the beginning because the searching itself needed to change me. i don’t think the next version of my life can be built entirely from ambition, independence, visibility and proving that i can make something happen.

those things got me here.

now i’m thinking about support. structure. creativity that has room to breathe. being able to receive love without asking it to rescue me. making decisions from what i know about myself instead of what looks most impressive. having roots without seeing them as a cage.

i’m still figuring out what all of that looks like practically. some of it might look different six months from now. i’m trying to leave enough room for that.

but i do know i don’t feel like i’m starting over.

it actually feels more like i’m finally building with everything the old life taught me.

keep up—

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