Confessions of a libra

Pain belongs to me | Credit: Here

04.06.25

When pain knocks at my door, I hear destiny calling. The fae wings on my back are a testament to this reality. Like the great shamans of the world, I have used pain as initiation, but I’ve never had the clarity until now to dissect the process. There I am, getting my 3rd tattoo. The same girl who said she would never stain her skin because she didn’t understand why people would do that. The same one who parroted her parent’s ideas like they were her own. The very same one who believed herself to be weak and unable to withstand pain. My crying on a regular basis made people think I was soft, and I began to believe it. Despite the fact that I knew I survived things that many would balk at, with grace. I lied to myself by allowing people to rewrite my reality in their words. Yet I have always been brave, I just needed to see it for myself.

The needle begins that sturdy buzz and it filters through my ears and into my nervous system. I watch myself in the mirror, half nude and chewing on some sour gummies. I can do this, if I could survive him, I can do anything. She starts my tattoo and I brace for the pain to knock the wind out of me. The sensation feels like a scraping of the top layers of my skin. It feels less like stabbing. My tension eases a bit, the pain is localised, I can handle this. I think about all the periods I survived. I think about how many times I had had to start over. Life has humbled me by dangling carrots and ripping them savagely from my heart. Here I am again, healing a heart that feels well worn.

The pain felt good. It felt deserved, a chaperone on my transition. I felt as though, surviving the tattoo would bring out of me a phoenix energy. The knowing was undeniable. I ate those gummies, I joked and sometimes, I just let myself feel the ache. This tattoo symbolised everything I said I wasn’t because I was denying myself joy. I was denying myself multidimensionality to soothe the egos of the insecure. I envisioned as I sat there, feeling flayed by needles – past people watching me, perturbed. Someone out there somewhere saying, this isn’t like her and that spurred me on. Good, I thought, sometimes you need a reckoning. A man my senior moaned and groaned as he received his forearm tattoo and suddenly the session felt like a rite for feminine power. I felt stronger, womanly and divinely protected.

A few months back I was battling with the Gemini who inspired the very first blog post. A relationship in my mid-twenties that I hoped would bring everything that shared values could bring. But only if you actually share those values instead of being lied to by someone incapable of accountability. I was deathly sick. In retrospect, it was a sign. My body responds violently to misalignment.

I used to think it was a specific thing, like I only get sick in the wrong job. No, in my late twenties I see now that my body responds physically to incompatibility. That was when I had my first panic attacks ever in my life. Struggling to work a full week, or even a full day while living with someone who got himself fired and refused to apply for more than 2 jobs a day. It felt like my very own living hell. Worse still, being in therapy and having the therapist give up on you. So much so as to ask you to create a daily schedule for the man who was already weaponising his incompetence.

When I say I tried to fix things, I mean that literally and viscerally. I learnt that you cannot love someone out of extreme self abandonment. You cannot help someone who refuses to even face their own issues. I was dating someone who used his childhood wounds as badges while I actively worked to shirk any narratives that no longer served me from childhood. A man who was perfectly happy to be dependent on other people quite possibly for the rest of his life. I was making myself small for his lack of self worth. It’s not worth being with someone out of niceness. Unfortunately as women, many of us have been taught to treat men like this. With kid gloves.

I went to my best friends house to unpack. My best friend is no ordinary woman. A fellow Priestess like myself. We are soul family and we have always amplified each other’s energies. We dissected this man to the nth. We replayed conversations with knew eyes and mapped out timelines like detectives on a case. We start stacking it up his claims.

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He said he was doing Astrophysics but he was only doing a bridging course only to abandon it. He said he needed tutorials to learn how to clean and still struggled to do it. He used humour and argumentativeness to posture an intelligence he has but overinflates. He said he wants a family but he gets himself fired like a teenager from something very silly. He lied about his high school graduation results…we went deep diving. By the end of this hangout, the path was illuminated before me. Like a woman coming out of a fog, I felt disgusted at my predicament and rage that my kindness had been met with incompetence.

As per my first blog post, I warned his mother and promptly left him. Like many women, I had been grieving the relationship while I was still in it. I was less present, less affectionate (I actually detested his touch by the end), sick as a dog and feeling cornered. I knew I did the right thing because as soon as I broke up with him, the clouds parted and a heavy weight lifted from my chest. Like a heavyweight had been carefully lifted. Once I was free, I hit the ground running. What looked like chaos then, was divinely orchestrated magic. I was about to speed-run through healing several years wounds over the next following months. It was busy. I was going to work, then I had leave to do placement for my Dermal Therapy course. Yes, I am a qualified Dermal Therapist if you are wondering.

Prior to this relationship I hadn’t had anything particularly stable. The occasional man I was seeing. But I had spent years battling limerence for my first love. So I contacted him. I thought fuck it, I’ve spent so long imagining a world where we would reconcile, let me stop torturing myself if it’s that deep. He responded, and soon we were on a date. He came to pick me up near the city. I could tell he put effort in, he knows what I’m like about dressing up. We walked into the city, respectfully close but not overly familiar. It was tentative, it was flirty and it was surreal. We went to this little dumpling place and caught up on our lives. He spun tales of his new mature mindset and all that. Another story for another time. We then went to Lui Bar, a high end place in one of the taller buildings in Melbourne. We drank expensive cocktails and grew heady on the fumes of attraction.

What I had done was opened a portal to close a cycle, but then I was unaware of it. What I realised from re-engaging with him, is that I had grown a lot more than I thought. That my mind or my heart had held onto very old ideas about what he meant to me. Those ideas were not always rooted in truth, but rather in wounds. I had outgrown our dynamic, and I realised how much he played safe where I didn’t. While I’ve never needed someone to be like me to love them, he also couldn’t hold space for my luminosity. Having recently finished with Mr Gemini, I was now realising who I was through them. Both air signs incidentally.

September was roughly two months post breakup and everything ramped up. I was working and studying more. My body was only starting to feel more like my friend but to deepen that relationship, I found myself doing a yoga challenge. I wanted to see how many days consecutively I could do yoga and to see what it would do for me in every aspect of life. If anyone’s wondering my favourite Youtube yoga girlies are; Boho Beautiful (my O.G. From my early 20’s), Sarah Wes, Arianna Elizabeth, Yoga with Adrienne and YogBela (South Asian). I had 60 days and I needed variety. At that same time I was learning more about kemetic astrology and somehow found myself doing a spiritual fast for the first time. Much like during Ramadan, I was eating before sunrise and after sunset. During the day, I would have fruit, some nuts and water at most. The level of self focus I had at this time was next to godly.

A typical day for me looked like waking up early to do yoga, anywhere between 10-30 minutes depending on mood and needs. I would then make tea or something to eat then do a daily card pull and journal. I was doing placement, so trying to learn all about the different wavelengths of IPL machines vs lasers. Eating after dusk and listening to educational material in my interests in the evening. I took myself out that September to a classy solo date, an upgrade from my usual solo picnics. I went to The Paris Cat Jazz Club in Melbourne CBD. They were doing a Stevie Wonder appreciation night so I went and boogied. I recall a few looks from people who seemed perplexed by my ability to sing and dance alone without a care in the world. I guess presence and responding to rhythm in music is considered a unique quality by some.

We’re back at the tattoo parlour. It is 9 days before my 26th birthday and I am facing a kind of pain I never thought I could handle. She’s doing the shading and the tattoo is almost done, so my skin is raw. I have been well and truly used and abused for aesthetic purposes. There is no resistance anymore, only acceptance. My back is a live wire of tenderness and pain. But my heart is beating with newfound freedom. I have shed the shackles of past versions of myself. I am stronger, more self assured and more disciplined. I am experiencing psychic clarity and ascension from the way I have treated my vessel. I feel kissed by life, kissed in the bruised parts of me and held safely in my becoming.

Every breakup I have had has been a painful initiation. People have made comments that they thought past situations would make me crumble but I always came out on top. This is not by accident. This is the result of my bravery. A refusal to take any situation and fold to accommodate the circumstances. I have always known I deserve the best, even when it seemed I was struggling to figure it out. I’ve taken every interaction with a friend, family member or lover as a lesson. I choose to use psychology and esoteric studies to help me befriend my shadow, so I can come out bigger and better than ever. When you make friends with pain, you work with it to facilitate your growth.

You do not have to use pain as self flagellation. You can alchemise your pain to bring out the best in you. For everyone in transition, experiencing a breakup or simply wanting more for life – know that you are worthy. You are worthy before the fall. You are worthy in the quiet of your mind where you map our your escape routes. May your pain be the salve you never knew you needed.