Your Cynicism Won’t Save You
Independence, self-sufficiency, and other myths.
Inside this edition: A love letter, tarot card of the week, a new book, and scholarships!
Rewatching The X Files as an adult, I see what was so compelling as a kid. There’s mystery, double-crossing, complex stratagems, and an overarching shibboleth only too relevant to my early lived experience; Trust No One.
Distrust was not only seen as prudent advice, offered to me by two traumatised generations of family, but when my mother betrayed her own advice (romantic relationships were her exception), the consequences were catastrophic. It was normal to me, as it is for a great many of us, to fear my parental figures. To long to trust them, but have enough survival instincts to realise I couldn’t. This is a sophisticated instinct that deserves respect. The problem is when it's used in ill-fitting situations. And with time and new language, most situations are.
We love to interpret survival strategy as personality. For me, this looked like thoughts and behaviours that valued the qualities of hard work, self-sufficiency, being unconventional, persevering, and being unattached. In a word: independent. For a long time, I believed with my whole being that independence was a necessary—in fact the only—path to safety.
I disappointed myself before anyone else had the chance to disappoint me. I isolated myself before others could isolate me. And I told myself I wasn’t a trustworthy person, so I continued to only feel comfortable around the untrustworthy. If someone broke tradition and demonstrated elements of trust, no they didn’t. And the cycle continued.
Distrust takes effort. You can’t just glide through life a cynic. Like I did, you have to keep up appearances to others and to yourself. You have to push people away. You have to suffer your pain and disability alone (or else distrust the people who assist you with them). You have to deny the fact of our interconnectedness again and again.
If you were raised in a family of colour/culture, you’ll know that independence is often seen, and felt, as going against the grain. That often cited Western therapy concepts like “boundaries” might be laughed at sooner than be understood and respected. So for people that find safety in hyper-independence, there is a push-pull of immense proportions that requires an even more staunch commitment to distrust. And yet, we know why our families like this. We know that “sticking together” and helping each other was and is their survival.
And it works. Just like it does for every group, community, species. Ahh there’s the rub! The most terrifying truth for the nervous systems of any independent diva: we need each other. There’s no getting away. There’s nowhere to hide where relational complexities, where conflict, where love and support even, won’t find you. Because (another rub) it’s already here. Emotional avoidance is necessarily hard work because you have to deny the truth of your experience; the relationships you already have, the systems you’re enmeshed within, the Country/land—and the entities within and beyond it—that you’re already in confluence with in every moment, whether you like it or not.
I used to be someone who saw any claim to ‘need each other’ as naive hippiedom at best and a dog whistle for anti-feminist agendas at worst. I remember skipping past the scene in Sex & The City when Samantha has the flu, drinks homemade lean, and admits in a moment of weakness that she needs a man to fix her fallen curtain rods. Unacceptable. “A person or group will always betray your trust. That’s just not how the world works” was what my downloaded internal software would repeat. But I never stopped to notice that I was ignoring all evidence against, and going to lengths to construct evidence for.
Hill (2017) says we are “continuously re/constituted through material entanglements.” This isn’t something we notice easily, trained as we are to rush, to name, to hurry towards meaning. But have you ever gone for a walk, sat down outside, and got quiet? Really, quiet? There is a concert of sound, texture, smell—agencies big and small, seen and unseen—and we are in concert with. Breathing in, stepping on, being enchanted by. Hyper-independence is a modern, industrial fiction that gaslights us about the moment-to-moment experiences our five senses (and our internal spirituality or sense of aliveness) cannot deny.
Letting go of cynicism and distrust isn’t a quick or easy venture. It takes practicing self-compassion and the reflexive acknowledgement of “both/and”. The acknowledgement that there is One inside you (as my Jungian psychoanalyst would say) who is kept safe by independence and there is a—perhaps more values-aligned—One who acknowledges the inescapable, vulnerable web of entanglement that is being alive. Holding this kind of both/and is opening yourself up to “a way of being with versus a system of doing for, to, or about” says Anderson (2012). Or as Gumb (2022) says, to a more “nuanced field of receptive language.” Or as Lett (2016) says, engaging in an “opening our stoniness to possibility.”
I recently engaged in a session of therapeutic art making, made of up myself and two other arts therapists. We had already been supporting each other’s art making for a few days before this, and I had noticed certain motifs arising across our work; the echoes of both colours, materials, and this theme of both/and in a relational context.
We decide to use thread. With no plan, just a willingness to be with each other and this shared material. There was a comfortable flow between us. In largely letting go of words, we were proving, and furthering, the possibility of a co-created sense of trust and safe-enoughness. This growing mutuality and camaraderie threaded between us, and showed up in my material expression; a hanky with bears on it, each connected to the others by a wheel of interlocked stitches that formed a web. A meeting place. Pears-Scown (2023) says that we gain our “‘thingness’ in the context of a relationship through entanglement, rupture, and congealment.”
In the rhythmic, quiet place of weaving together our potential knowings, I found myself looking up at the outside world through my window. As I observed the swaying trees I noticed how much I had let my field of attention breathe and widen; letting in not only what was happening among us as a “we”, but alongside and around us. I noticed aloud as we sewed. I can hear the wind rushing through the trees. I’m feeling cozy. They did the same, describing elements of Country and how they were responding to it. Akomolafe (2023) says the “inside and the outside are not easily divided.”
What are the borders of the three of us? What are the borders of all my relationships—of all your relationships—when threads, visible or otherwise, connect us not just to each other but to a proliferation of others? When your becoming takes shape through interaction with a host of forces, too numerous to count?
Just like the threads we stitched, invisible tethers connect us to the “ragged and messy happenings that occur in the interstices of, or relationality between, self and world” as Springay & Truman (2017) say. It’s impossible to be independent when numerous hands have touched the food I eat, when a support worker weeds my garden, when a train driver drives my train, when just by virtue of being alive, I have affected the lives of so many others.
Aloneness. That’s another myth. And I have found that its opposite, connectedness, can be brought back to consciousness simply by attuning and attending to the unfolding, fluid relationships already all around you. They are yours to create trust within, together.
Distrust, cynicism, and aloneness cannot survive a life, and a world, where we notice and appreciate—through presence and practice—what’s actually happening around us. Where we let ourselves feel what’s terrifying, vulnerable, and sometimes harmful about the infinitely complex ecological intra-action we call being in relationship.
As well as what feels meaningful, generative, and true to our most animalistic experience of life. There is awe to be found there. It’s not a safe place. It’s not supposed to be. It’s a place where we make space for all ways of being and knowing. Let’s get there together.
Because if everything is connected, then everything belongs.
Tarot card of the week: 4 of Pentacles Rx
I know how hard it can be to swallow the “money can’t buy you happiness” line, especially when you have little. At the same time, that kind of advice can hit a tender spot precisely because we’re coming into awareness of a glimmer of dissatisfaction with materialism in general. Both these reactions are valid. And both can emerge when we’re faced with losing more than feels fair. And it’s not fair! But this card invites you to get off the carousel if you don’t like the direction it’s going in.
As with the emotional independence and avoidant attachment styles mentioned above, financial independence (necessary as it may be) comes with a price. Namely, one’s energy and time. The Four of Pentacles speaks to releasing your iron grip on the way things should look for you, materially speaking, in favour of filling your cup. What is the cost benefit analysis life is asking you to make, when it comes to “safety” and “security” versus inner contentment? Where can you relax in your approach? You’re not being reckless just by resting a little. Trust yourself.
Love Oracle: Divine Guidance for Relationships is coming!
Here’s your first look at my new book :o 🌹🦢🗝️💌
Love Oracle is a bibliomancy tool that takes Pleasure Oracle’s focus on sex and intimacy and extends it to also encompass the love of our friends, families, communities, and strangers.
From love that’s romantic and radically hopeful, to love that’s defiant and determined, to love that’s like a hot crush; this book celebrates it and offers regular guidance from Goddess around it that you can meditate on, journal about, do with your friends over a tea, and transform into truthful, loving action in your life.
I’ve been using Love Oracle every morning, as a ritual emotional check in, so I can speak from experience when I say it’s potent. I hope you love it!! ❤️🔥🪞🕊️
Love Oracle: Divine Guidance For Relationships is available for preorder NOW and comes out in February 2025.
Scholarship applications are open!
This email marks the beginning of a two-week period in which I’m accepting applications for creative coaching scholarships for the first part of 2025 <3 The 90% off scholarships are for my signature three-month private coaching series, Come Alive. This is an intimate 1:1 mentorship opportunity for perfectionists, the creatively curious, and anyone who wants to live their most creatively fulfilling, magical life.
Scholarships are an opportunity for me to support clients dealing with long-term financial hardship and social barriers, who aren’t able to afford the “supported rate” (for those who are under-paid) which is the lowest tier in my sliding scale pricing. Successful applicants will be notified in early January for a January start. Learn more about Come Alive here.
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by December 29th 2024. And pass it on!
If you don’t meet the criteria to apply for a scholarship, keep in mind my sliding scale pricing is in effect all year long. You can book a free clarity call on my website to chat with me about it.
Xo Jerico
How to work with me
☆THE DREAMER☆ is a free newsletter and online space for those dreaming at the intersection of creativity, magic, therapeutic practice, ecology, and neurodiversity. If you enjoy The Dreamer, pass it on! And support my work in the following ways:
꩜ Book yourself (or a friend) a “year ahead” tarot reading with me!
꩜ Preorder my latest book, Love Oracle, due in Feb 2025.
꩜ Purchase one of my four books/decks incl. the award-winning Neo Tarot.
꩜ Learn about 1:1 creative coaching/facilitation on a complimentary call with me.
Loved this, Jerico.
“I disappointed myself before anyone else had the chance to disappoint me. I isolated myself before others could isolate me. And I told myself I wasn’t a trustworthy person, so I continued to only feel comfortable around the untrustworthy.”
Offffftt. Sad, real, beautiful. All of it.