my dishwasher broke this week, so i’ve been hand washing my dishes.

and it brought up something funny.

as a kid, my black parents always said hand washing was the only way to clean dishes. cleaner. more thorough. i didn’t even know we had a dishwasher in my childhood home for years.

so when i moved out on my own, using the dishwasher felt like i was doing something. like i was breaking a generational curse or something dramatic. like, “look at me, i don’t have to stand at the sink, i don’t have to do unnecessary labor and i don’t dry out my beautiful hands.”

and then my dishwasher broke.

so i’ve been standing at the sink. with raisin fingers.

but here’s the part that really got me.

there was also a time in my life — not childhood, but adulthood — where even having a dishwasher didn’t help. where the dishes would still pile up. or i’d throw everything in there just to say it was handled because i felt overwhelmed with life. cleaning felt heavy. it felt like one more thing i couldn’t manage. my space mirrored my nervous system. cluttered, chaotic, emotionally maxed out.

i wasn’t lazy. i was in transition. ending things. moving. starting over. trying to hold it together while everything inside me was shifting. even the plates felt like too much.

so i would avoid them. or rush them. or treat the task like something to conquer instead of something to move through. and now, standing at the sink this week, i noticed the difference.

same sink. same task. same warm water.

but i wasn’t rushing. i wasn’t trying to escape it. i wasn’t cleaning to override what i was feeling. i was just… there. washing the plates. letting my mind settle. letting my body catch up to itself.

and i realized how far i’ve actually come.

because what used to feel like punishment felt meditative. what used to feel like evidence that i was “behind” felt grounding. it wasn’t about proving i don’t have to do hard things anymore. it wasn’t about rejecting what my parents taught me. it wasn’t about rebellion.

it was about intention.

for my ancestors, and even for my parents, tasks were survival. you worked. you cleaned. you kept moving. sometimes the task was how you overrode your feelings because there wasn’t space to sit in them. there wasn’t room to spiral. there wasn’t time.

but for me, washing the dishes wasn’t about overriding anything. it was about being present with what i’m feeling.

same task. different nervous system.

and that feels very aligned with the astrology right now.

i’ve been thinking about how much i don’t love the way astrology gets used during eclipse seasons. everything becomes dramatic. urgent. “this is going to change your life forever.” and maybe sometimes it does. but a lot of the time, it just stimulates people for likes, clicks and engagement. in reality it dysregulates them. it makes it feel like something massive is happening to you instead of something subtle integrating through you.

we’re in mercury retrograde in pisces — memory, lineage, emotional residue resurfacing. saturn and neptune are at zero degrees aries — identity threshold energy. and now a virgo eclipse opposing all of that. it’s layered. it’s reflective. it’s exposing.

but i don’t think it’s doom and gloom. i think it’s about maintenance.

pisces holds the feeling. virgo processes it. pisces lets you float in the ocean of it for a second. virgo wrings out your clothes and says, okay — now what are we actually doing with this?

two things can be true at once. you can feel grief and clarity. longing and acceptance. you can understand why something unfolded the way it did and still wish it had been different.

but you don’t have to let the dishes pile up in your psyche.

you don’t have to override your feelings either.

you can feel it — and keep tending.

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that’s what i’m noticing. the growth isn’t in abandoning the task. it isn’t in rejecting the past. it isn’t even in dramatically “breaking cycles.”

sometimes the evolution is quieter than that.

same sink.

different nervous system.

and honestly, that feels way more powerful than rebellion ever did.

keep up—

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