Dear Soul,
Have you given Taylor Swift’s latest album a listen yet?
There’s a song on it called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” that has been taking up space in my mind since I first heard it. I’ve been letting it marinade - observing myself turning it around in the hand of my mind like a set of those metal balls that the slightly sinister guys in a suit seem to have in the movies.
And it landed this weekend - the witchy symbolism of the lyrics and the “how the hell did I get to this place?” and “no more!” feel of the song seem to speak directly to the struggle of being aware and awake in the world right now.
It seems to me that Taylor Swift is enumerating the pitfalls of coming of age in the music industry and navigating the shadow side of fame - that the crowd will turn on you and then act all aghast at how you’re “over-reacting”; that the rules of the game will demand that you play nice and be complicit in your own taming; that you will repeatedly find yourself in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t position that makes your belly churn and your blood boil as you smile pretty and endure … always endure … until you simply no longer can.
Does any of this sound familiar? I can confidently say that there is a variation of this journey that I’ve seen play out for myself and for many of the people in my world - family, friends and clients alike - over and over again.
Many of us cross the threshold and embark upon the more intentionally spiritual side of our life journey around the time that we hit the F*ck it! point with trying to keep the peace, our efforts to maintain the status quo, and the urge to smile and play nice. It’s often the result of some “Tower” moment - the collapse of some house of cards we kept trying to convince ourselves was solid and reliable and utterly unable to be challenged - but not always.
Sometimes we simply get fed up; we see the bars of the cage for what they are and we are willing to risk the consequences of stepping around them, of baring our teeth, of letting out the growl of frustration that our confinement and our complicity has been feeding for a very long time - maybe our whole life.
And once we let it out, we feel the growl of our lineage come with it, the tears of our confined and marginalized and scared into submission ancestors flow behind it and the anger of every witch and healer and herbalist who was silenced by death or threat of death ooze like molten lava slowly pushing it all forward - an unstoppable march to the surface propelled by generations of longing and hurt and despair.
Have you seen this image of her performance of this song from the Eras Tour this weekend?
It was all over my social media feeds - often with a comment referencing “female rage” or the energy the OP would be carrying into the rest of the year or something similar.
I think it touched something hidden deep within the collective - an untapped sense of the power we’ve pushed down because we’ve seen it misappropriated to such an extent in our outer world that we’ve come to fear it in ourselves.
With it comes the dawning realization that the person who is most deeply afraid of “little old me” is me ...
And we’re served up an image of Taylor Swift screaming into her microphone in front of 10’s of thousands of spectators (most of whom are singing along) -
“So tell me everything is not about me
But what if it is?
Then say they didn't do it to hurt me
But what if they did?
I want to snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me…”
And maybe something is freed up within us; maybe the voices of our ancestors and the echoes of our lineage swell to such a crescendo within us that the initial gut-punch of that realization - “I am afraid of little old me” - makes space for a shift, for the drop of a pebble in the pond of our inner landscape that ripples out in every direction opening us up to the possibility that none of it is as inescapable as it seems.
And we are not as alone as we have believed.
So, yes - the person who is most deeply afraid of “little old me” is me …
… until it’s not.
Sending you Love,
Tawnia
PS: I have a few openings to support amazing souls like you in paving a way forward through the questions and the confusions and the rubble of all that is falling away in our lives right now. If you’d like to talk about working 1:1 together this season, please send me a message or schedule a free 30-minute Connection Call so we can talk about it.