I want to skip to the good part.

But I might miss out on something beautiful.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

A few days ago, I opened up my cedar chest and took a big whiff of the pleasant, woody smell that I associate closely with my childhood. I rooted through the cavernous box that my father made by hand until I extracted a thick composition notebook with a silvery cover. Its sides ballooned open like a spent accordion due to its age and the mementos taped to its pages, things like letters my grandmother wrote me and, strangely, my old library card.

Though I tended to keep several journals at once when I was a kid (a habit that stuck with me—I love a good notebook), this particular one was my main squeeze throughout my middle school years. It was special—I pasted my favorite stickers on its cover and, believing my thoughts to be more interesting than they were, wrote mildly threatening phrases like ‘Keep Out’ across the center. I had nearly filled the pages instead of my usual pattern of starting off strong and eventually losing steam around page 30.

The OG is in the bottom right corner. And I don’t know where I got that Winnie the Pooh journal, but I wrote in it like three times.

Within the safety of the narrow blue lines bisecting each page, I tried on identities like they were graphic Ts from Limited Too. This was best illustrated by my handwriting, which shifted back and forth from a neat, precise cursive complete with flourishes to a messy, sloping print done in hard-to-read pastel gel pens. I even wrote in a lime green gel pen for one entry—the teacher in me shrieked when I laid eyes on it in present day and I suddenly understood why gel pens were banned for a time at my middle school.

Despite my best attempts, my journal is decidedly unliterary and, truthfully, isn’t all that interesting—I led a very small and simple life where I thought a visit to the mall warranted a two-page entry that detailed every single item I purchased. I wrote regularly about trite things that probably felt pretty significant to a young Midwestern girl who grew up surrounded by trees: the plot to a Star Wars movie I enjoyed, a list of which boys were dating which girls at school, and, inexplicably, a love letter to Taco Bell where I credit it for helping me get my appetite back after a stomach bug (oh, how times have changed).

But once I saw past the silliness of being a teenager, bigger themes started to emerge as I read entry after entry. I often wrote about an eventual someday where I would start over and reinvent myself into some new, cooler girl who was surrounded by friends. Who was going to make the cheerleading squad one day. Who would, once elected to the student council board, finally, finally arrive at the good stuff in life—the unknowable zenith that I wanted to experience so badly.

As I sat cross legged on the hardwood floor of my apartment and held my journal in my hands, I could still feel that longing as acutely as the day I wrote it.

The feeling itself hadn’t changed. The thesis of my teenage journal simply turned into a dissertation that I am writing as an adult. It is an insidious little voice that whispers, “but wait…there’s more.” It is a jiggling knee and a tapping foot, impatiently counting down the moments to what’s next. It is a hand grasped around a pair of scissors, ready to cut out the blank spaces so that the brightly colored parts of life can be pasted together, back to back, into one vibrant collage of fulfillment.

This longing is an impossible question that rings through my head, over and over again.

“Can we skip to the good part?”

Even if you’re not of the Tik Tok generation, when you read the previous line, you may have automatically thought of the annoying “aaaaah, aah, aah, ahh” of the viral song by indie band AJR that accompanies the many videos on the Internet of people skipping to the good parts in life: the part where they have a six pack. The part where they’re walking down the aisle with their soulmate. The part where they’re waking up to ocean views and endless sunshine.

Lately, I’ve been watching this type of video a lot. Most evenings, I lie on my bed and scroll through Tik Toks and Instagram reels that have been posted to Facebook (the Elder Millennial approach). From my tiny apartment, I’ve watched bedraggled, abandoned dogs transform into sleek, healthy pets after being rescued. I’ve seen a hunched-over, skinny teen achieve the ultimate glow-up and simultaneously flex his muscles and his smile as the chorus swells. I’ve seen the down-and-out mother turn into the successful business owner within the span of three seconds.

And, along with millions of other viewers, I smile each time the good part shows up. This is the modern-day way of bottling hope and peddling it to the masses, one swipe up at a time. For a moment, it doesn’t matter whether I am experiencing my own zenith or not. When we watch this sort of immaculately edited version of life, all that matters is that there is a good part.

These days, though the amount of notebooks I own would beg to differ, I don’t journal as much as I used to. I still write, but when it comes to documenting my days, I prefer the ease and connection of social media. I snap pictures of grid-worthy moments and line them up, one by one, like brightly-colored squares on a game board.

Some nights, after I’ve abandoned Facebook’s endless offering of videos, I wind up on my Instagram page and look at the timeline of my life, as told by social media. With the same approach I took as I flipped through my middle school journal, I audit the content that I have chosen to commit to the page, so to speak, and look for patterns.

I scroll past a photo of me and my partner on a boat with our arms around each other. Another of me with my arms stretched overhead as I look out into an ocean so blue that it looks manufactured. Below that, I smile happily with my nieces in one post and sit astride a scooter in front of a brilliant fall backdrop in another. My Instagram page is good part after good part.

I stare at the thin black lines that separate one photo from the next and think of what they represent—the gaps in between. The long months spent doing the mundane shit: waking up, washing my face, feeding my cats, and doing my job. I don’t document my morning cup of coffee or the unfolded pile of laundry in the basket because, well, I don’t see it as the good part. I think of my life as one of those timelines that paraded across my social studies textbooks in middle school: the important parts are marked by tic marks that bisect the main line. The long stretches in between? Unimportant. What matters is documented.

I focus in on one of the most recent photos I posted on Instagram: in it, I am kissing Hilly on the cheek. He is wearing a colorful dashiki in shades of turquoise, moss green and orange. Behind us is a gorgeous Crucian sunset over the ocean.

As I look at this picture, the same longing for what comes next that I wrote about in my childhood journal returns in full force as I think of how I wish that I could take my thumb and index finger, grasp the timeline of my life in my hands, and bend it so that I could skip the next four months. Months that will not include kisses or ocean sunsets or the feeling of my partner’s hand in mine. Months that will include stripping myself, bit by bit, of my belongings and scratching my head as I figure out the logistics of getting myself from St. Louis to St. Croix.

I wish I could skip forward just a bit more, to the part where all the boxes are unpacked. The part where my cats are settled in and have found their favorite spots in our new apartment. The part where I have a new job, or I at least have figured out what the hell I want to do next professionally.

While I’m at it, I add more to my version of the good part: artistic license takes over, and I insert meaningful friendships, spiritual growth, and stable mental health. I erase worries, tension and difficulty. In my mind, the good part is everything I long for. It is a sunset over the ocean. Because the good part hasn’t happened yet, it’s a shapeshifting vision that becomes whatever I need it to be in the moment: the part where I’m loved. The part where I have become a newer, better version of me. The part where I feel fulfilled.

When I let myself dream of skipping to the good part, what I envision quickly balloons out of control and grows impossibly, monstrously huge. The tiny squares on Instagram become teeth in a gaping mouth that threatens to swallow me whole—I want what I believe to be the good part, which I now understand to be a state of perfection, so badly that I am willing to cut out chunks of my life in order to access it. I chase after it with each post I make, hoping to prove that I am getting a little closer to “it,” or the moment where I have it all.

I stare at this impossible future so hard that the past and present blur together into a sickening, unimportant patina. Everything that surrounds me becomes muddled as I seek the light at the end of a tunnel of my own creation. A light that seems to get farther away with each step I take forward.

Like a child chasing a lightning bug, just as I lose hope that the good part exists, it flickers once more, and the chase begins again. I charge forward with my arms outstretched, waiting to finally feel the satisfaction of holding the good part in my hands.

It’s Monday. I have four more weeks of summer school and four more months before I move away. Humidity blankets St. Louis, draping every inch of the city with the last word to a mantra that every Midwesterner knows: “it’s not the heat, it’s the…”

The temperature rises into triple digits. Tomato plants droop dramatically. People are irritable, honking their horns and rolling their eyes. I sit, astride my scooter, one hand held up to my face to block the searing sun and the other gripped tightly around the handlebar.

I look at the hazy sky above me and think about heat lightning.

Despite its name, heat lightning actually has nothing to do with the temperature—it’s a term given to the flashes of light that come from storms that are too far away for us to hear. Heat lightning is a silent Morse code that lights up the highest clouds, tapping out a pattern that I watched reverently as a child from a porch swing attached to the back of my house.

On heat lightning nights, I waited and waited for the eventual storm to roll in, like all of the other ones that came careening across the Missouri sky, their impressive claps of thunder and forked tongues of lightning that leapt from the clouds to kiss the earth. But the good part never came.

Heat lightning would never make the morning news because it didn’t split trees dramatically in half. It wouldn’t even make the pages of my journal—I only wrote about the times when lightning struck so close to our house that I could swear I could taste it. Its brand of light a series of faint flickers of brilliance that lined the path that spooled out in front of me with no clear ending. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for when I watched the flashes, but at the same time, I could not tear my eyes away from the skyward game of Simon that was silently lighting up cloud after cloud.

As I sat on my scooter in the middle of St. Louis at a stop light that had been red for far too long, I wondered if I was in the heat lightning phase of life. Beautiful in its own right. Perhaps not memorable in the traditional sense. But still worth watching.

The light changed, and I moved forward once again, hurtling towards what’s next. And I decided that I do not want to skip to the good part…because, maybe, life is a series of good parts, strung together, one after the next, like exquisite beads on a thin, black line that keeps unraveling, bit by bit. Like soft flashes of lightning that appear, one after the next.

Maybe the good part is what you look back on and appreciate, not what you look forward to. Maybe the good is found in the mundane, the in between, and the moments where we are becoming the next version of ourselves, whatever that may be. Maybe the good part happens over and over again…we just have to look for the flashes of light all around us, not the one pinpoint of light far off in the distance.

Tonight, I will watch the sun slip from the sky and marvel at the simple beauty of a tree’s leaves silhouetted against a watercolor sunset. Instead of longing to dig my toes in the sand as I watch the flaming sun get swallowed by a sparkling ocean, I will press the pause button and drink deeply of this good part in life. I will create, in my mind, a grid of moments that are both beautiful and mundane.

I will create a mosaic that is built of both the extraordinary and the ordinary. And that will be the good part.

Tell me about the good part you’re living right now. Let’s chat.

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Nine of Wands✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

Typically, the Nine of Wands is read as a card that says, “hey, you’re almost there!” It’s the final burst of adrenaline to push you over the finish line and into what’s next for you. It’s a sign that the good times are right around the corner…if you keep pushing for just a bit longer.

I don’t dislike this interpretation at all. But when I look at this card, I see boredom and resentment. The figure is mean muggin’ all of the wands that stand behind him like they don’t mean much of anything. In fact, he refuses to look directly at them at all, preferring to face away and turn his back on all of the things he did to arrive at this final stage. The wand he clutches in his hand is what he believes to be his ticket to the “good part” in life, or the moment where life becomes easy and carefree: he plans to use it to beat his way forward without so much as a glance back at his past.

Interestingly, what I find to be the most important attribute of this card is the eight wands that he is ignoring. They stand upright, almost like markers on a timeline, as evidence of the moments, big and small, that had to occur to lead up to this point—their varying sizes show that not all of these moments held the same weight. The figure’s refusal to acknowledge them means that he is missing out on the message that the universe is trying to teach him: if you only look forward, you will always be fighting for contentment. You’ll miss out on the joy that is being offered to you now in favor of some hazy future moment where all is right. The bandage that bisects the figure’s head represents the suffering that occurs when we chase some idealized future instead of choosing to see the bigger picture.

When the Nine of Wands shows up in a reading, it’s often a sign to evaluate your mindset around time and your pace of development. Setting your sights on newer, bigger goals is not a bad thing…but a lack of appreciation of your past and present guarantees that you will never be satisfied and will never get to the good part…because you’ll always be chasing a state of perfection that doesn’t exist.

Moving forward is a part of life. But as the timeline unfolds in front of us, it’s important to acknowledge all of the wands that lined the way…and the spaces in between as well.

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✨Prompts | The Nine of Wands✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ What past “good parts” have you experienced in life?

☀️ What is the in between teaching you right now?

☀️ What would it feel like to be content with where you are now?

☀️ What would it look like to hold space for who you are now and who you want to become?

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.

I don’t need to skip to the good part. I’m already living it.

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It’s 101 degrees in St. Louis, and the heat makes me grumpy. But what DOESN’T make me grumpy is writing this newsletter and a good sale (I am a Midwesterner, after all…I will tell you how much I saved on the shirt I’m wearing).

So, in an effort to ward off heat-induced grumpiness, I’m running a Big Summer Blowout Sale. Click below to receive 15% off of a paid subscription FOREVER (geez, talk about pressure—will I be writing on Substack when I’m 90?!). Clickity click below to sign up—you’ll get an additional newsletter on Fridays and my undying gratitude.

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