#bloodmemory

The Saturnian Freeze: Why Your "Laziness" Is Actually Unprocessed Grief

I once sat across from a client who apologized for being lazy. She had not left her bed in four days. But when I read her body like an ancient text — not the DSM, the soma — I saw no lethargy. I saw a funeral in progress.

We call it executive dysfunction. The alchemists called it nigredo: the blackening that precedes all transformation. Your "laziness" is not a character flaw. It is Saturn's freeze, the cosmic insistence that you stop producing so your grief can finally speak. In somatic terms, the body has entered a sacred stillness; the nervous system is not shut down, it is processing what the mind refused to bury properly.

Capitalism taught you that stillness is sin. But the old texts knew better: the witch who cannot rise from her bed is not cursed. She is uninitiated in her own mourning. The freeze is a psychic opening, not a closing. The energy you think you have lost is not gone — it is underground, feeding roots you cannot yet see. I mapped this exact pattern — the freeze, the grief beneath the guilt, and the ritual to thaw it — in Garden of the Mind. Forty pages of citations, somatic protocols, and the clearing ritual your spirit is waiting for. Link in bio.

https://shortlink.uk/1v84p

🩸He used to be beautiful.🩸

I hate how much this hurts. Not because of what he became… But because someone once loved that face on the left. Someone kissed it. Someone whispered to it in the dark. Someone promised he’d make it out alive. That someone was me. A girl — just one year younger, not yet hollowed by this place. I watched him walk in: the sharp-eyed boy from some noble Romanian house. There were many who dropped to their knees for me, hoping for courtship. But he… he was the only one I ever said yes to. I believed in him. I believed he would never pay the price this place demands. I thought he was strong enough to refuse it. But the Scholomance does not help. It hungers. And he fed it — willingly. Somewhere in the archives, our freshman photos still exist. And now I stand over my own rotting body, trapped in the shape of a girl who loved the first boy she ever trusted— and who has to relive it. Forever.

🩸 Reblog if you’ve ever trusted someone who fed the darkness and left you to rot. 💔 Comment if your memory is a mausoleum. 🦷 Follow if you’re not afraid to love something monstrous.

The sea was the first to see us and so the sea will be the last to leave us. A visual poem from Kenya that explores blood memory, creation myths and ancestry.

A Visual Poem by Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann Editing by Angela Wamai Underwater Camera by Jahawi Bertolli

The Alchemy of Decay: Why Gen Z's Dark Academia Obsession Is Actually Soul Nigredo

I once treated a student who had not left her dorm in six weeks. She had read The Secret History seventeen times. Her room smelled of old paper and extinguished candles. When I asked what she found in those pages, she said: "Decay has rules. And I need rules."

We pathologize this as maladaptive daydreaming or obsessive escapism. But the old maps knew this terrain. Prometheus did not steal fire because he was greedy. He stole it because the gods had monopolized transformation itself. Dark academia is not an aesthetic. It is nigredo — the necessary blackening that precedes all alchemical change. Gen Z is not obsessed with crumbling libraries because they are romantic. They are obsessed because decay is the only honest language their nervous system recognizes in a world that demands infinite, frictionless growth.

The "forbidden knowledge" trope is not about elitism. It is about uninitiated psychic opening. When you consume a text so completely that your morality frays, you are not studying. You are performing soul flight without a map. The isolated campus, the toxic intimacy, the intellectual hubris — these are not plot devices. They are clinical symptoms of a psyche that has outgrown its container and is now feeding on itself.

Your obsession with decay is not dysfunction. It is your spirit recognizing that transformation requires putrefaction. The library is not your escape. It is your crucible.

Micro-ritual: Find one object in your room that represents "growth" — a plant, a planner, a self-help book. Place it beside something that represents "decay" — a dried leaf, a cracked mug, an old letter. Sit between them for eleven minutes. Do not choose. Simply witness that both are alchemical stages of the same fire. Write one sentence about what you are actually rotting away from. That sentence is your prima materia.

When your ancestors sang through you, what song waited inside? Share one line here.

My thoughts of being displaced repeatedly as a child came up this week as I watched the documentary film “Blood Memory” at the Kansas International Film Festival. The film follows Sandy White Hawk, an American Indian woman taken from her home at 18 months of age and placed in a white family’s home 400 miles away. The federal government ran the Indian Adoption Project from 1958 to 1967 in collaboration with the Child Welfare League of America in an effort to assimilate Indian children into the white culture. An estimated one-third of Indian children were taken from their families between 1941 and 1967, according to the Association American Indian Affairs.

Sandy struggled all her life to overcome the trauma of being removed from her community. She says that as a child, she was rejected for her skin color and cultural heritage. She missed knowing her parents, siblings, and extended family. Sixty years later, Sandy helps others who were adopted heal through song and ceremony. She organized a welcome-home ceremony for adopted relatives of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. “Blood Memory” follows Sandy’s journey and celebrates her work. The other side of the story follows Mark Fidler, a private adoption attorney and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. He struggles with defending a law passed in 1978 to end Indian adoption. He represents adoptive parents and he think he is doing what is right for children.

Doing what is right for children is critical. It’s also sometimes hard to determine. My own story has led me to question when it’s alright to remove a child from a community. I was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, near my father’s hometown. My mom was from Warren, Ohio, not far from Pittsburgh. In my first six years of life we participated in life in a big Irish Catholic family, playing with cousins and going to grandma’s for Sunday Dinner. On the other side of my family, I had an Italian grandmother and Hungarian grandfather, both second-generation Americans. I was learning their heritage, as well.

All that changed when we moved to Marina, California when I was in second grade. We lived there two years, then it was off to the next destination. My dad was a retail manager and his company moved him a lot. Following California, we moved to Colorado, then Texas, Missouri, and Michigan. He left the company while we lived in Michigan and decided to move back to Missouri. I was in 10th grade at the time. High school was never the same for me after that. I had lost my friends, my swim team, and my status in high school society. I attended ten schools in all before graduating from high school.

I regret being rootless. I don’t have lifelong friends, a church home I’ve been part of forever, and I definitely do not attend class reunions. (No loss there, from what I hear!) Moving around as an adult hasn’t helped. Given that I don’t have roots, and I know how to adapt to a new home, I have accepted positions that required me to move. That meant I had to uproot my four children, including moving my daughter while she was in high school. I did what I said I wouldn’t do to my kids. Haven’t we all?