“I hate myself right now!” Not words anyone relishes saying, but words I imagine everyone has felt at some point. Even if, when you’re saying them, you feel uniquely tragic, impossible to reach.
I said this about myself in the car earlier this week, in a fit of pique and insecurity and dread. August and I were setting out for a mutually long day. Later on, I was going to speak publicly about a self-published project of mine, a zine in which I write on, among other things, loss, power, violence, place, time, and identity, including those aspects of my own that lend me shame, confusion, contradiction. To write this was one thing. To stand by these words and attempt to sum them up in front of people was another. In past attempts to distribute the zine, I’d felt the same angst fermenting to self-directed antipathy. Any confidence was being swallowed by ambivalence—about myself, my project, my belonging, the latter being one of the hearts of the zine itself. Still, why couldn’t I just be excited? Why couldn’t I be happy to have this zine, little book, really, in my hands? Why couldn’t I let my enthusiasm spark likewise in others? Why do I have to overthink and -feel everything?
“Why is it whenever I try to do something with this project, I have some kind of episode!” I yell-cry-cry-cried to August, whose gentle touch on my shoulder prompted my raw admission which, in turn, broke my surliness into tears (“the water’s runnin’ free…”). I was craving some resource, some strength—from within or without myself, it wasn’t clear.
“Maybe today you can just embrace the ambivalence, and let the rest of it go,” she said.
Letting go seemed impossible, yet what I hated was how impossible I was feeling. Poisonous pen posed, dying of need inside. But still, there was a bigger transformation I was resisting: to let die my armed “dreams” of perfection, my dueling fears of and cravings for soul-exposure like illuminated scorpions skittering to the dark. I met my first ever in scorpion Arizona this summer on a trip with my friends, in the bathroom of our VRBO. It was smaller than I expected. Plucky, but softer looking, more crushable. I let it drink my shower water off the tiles in the dark.
Scorpio has a reputation of ferocity, and that is not misplaced. But scorpions love the darkness because it protects them, and water because it’s what sustains.
Were my ill-timed tears also about survival? Could relinquishing truly be the way?
This season, because of where and how Scorpio resides in my natal chart, I’d expected a creative harvest. I expected strides on my memoir project, shattering emotional insights. I expected renewed fortitude to drill down into the old story of my mother, Amy, my primordial Scorpio, a major subject of my memoir and emblem of my wounds.
These are now the final hours of this year’s Scorpio season. Turned out, I didn’t want to do that. What I wanted was to rest. What I wanted was a dark, warm, quiet room. What I wanted was to bathe. I stewarded necessarily, unclogged my shower drain of shedded hair and honeycomb wax. We had the kitchen sink looked at by twin brother plumbers born under the sign of Scorpio, and one of them tattoo-proud of that.
Then there’s the newer stewardship of getting myself to the gym—an Amyan activity, to be sure. I shadow her ghost while lying there on the bench of the reverse leg curl machine, feeling slightly sickened by those last four reps, but then: the triumph of fatigue. When I stand, I feel sturdier than I’ve felt in years.
The movements I choose are measures of self-healing. My knee that’s ached with every step of the last decade is slowly gaining the support it needs, and my right foot slowly relaxes, re-levels itself in turn. My slackened hamstrings remember their edges. Then there’s stretching later, when the fatigue of the workout gets reconfigured as a delicious pleasure.
At the panel I attend before the one I’m on, Marian Moore reads her poem about her mother, “My Mother in the Mirror”:
There you are
again,
reflected before me
in the gym mirrors.And I have just enough
Zen and physics,
Biology and Shinto,
To not
greet your image
with amazement.What is time anyway?
My answer: time is a probe, an oracle. It is a morass of feeling, recollection, and instinct. It is grief. Anger like caves. “Slippery beginnings.” Transformation, the nymph shuttering off its first skin. Sullen hurt, grizzled rue. Desires, raucous. Boundaries, staunch. Sacrifices, willing and otherwise. Revenge fever dreams. The sublime mystery of the turn. Thirst like there’s nothing but this night is what you’ll find contained below. And, in some cellar of you.
Chelsey K. Shannon 