i've seen this film before.

my brain needs a different ending.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place where I explore my spirituality and my humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

It was springtime, those first murky months of the pandemic where we couldn’t really get our arms around the whole thing (I’m not sure we ever did).

I was newly divorced and dating a man with blue eyes and tattoos on his calves. I could never tell if he liked me (I’m not sure if he ever did).

He suggested the movie because it had won a lot of awards. Would I like to go?

Of course I said yes. I didn’t know what else to say in those days except for yes, yes, yes to everything. Anything to get me out of my own head and out of my apartment, which was filled with half-unpacked moving boxes and too many blank walls.

We saw Parasite. And if you, too, have seen it, you are probably shaking your head right now. It is not a good movie to see on a date.

Odd details resurface about that night.

I remember that we sat on the left hand side of the theaters. I remember how strange it felt to take my mask down once we were in our seats. I remember that he didn’t want popcorn and that I thought, what kind of person doesn’t get popcorn at the movies?

And I remember one scene from that movie. Just one.

Ki-jung, a young woman, sits on top of a toilet that is spewing sewage water in a futile effort to control just one thing as her world falls apart around her. Her basement level apartment, which she shares with her family, has flooded.

The detritus of her life floats in the steadily-rising water around her: broken picture frames, half-submerged vases, waterlogged blankets. Her head is nearly pressed against the ceiling as she crouches on the toilet and curls her feet in towards her chest.

With trembling hands, she lights a cigarette.

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette | Van Gogh, 1886.

She begins to smoke it, patently ignoring all of the shit around her. She ignores the belching toilet, the desperate cries of her hopeless neighbors, the frantic sound of the rain continuing to beat down outside.

I sat, pinned to the seat, as I watched this painful portrait of resignment. Though I didn’t know it in the moment, I, too, was trying to sit on a geyser of shit and stop it from exploding around me. The fact that I was there, barely divorced, watching this movie with a man who only held the barest shred of interest in me, was evidence enough.

I was smoking a cigarette, trying to ignore the fact that, with every second that passed, the water was rising higher. Soon, it would be at my neck.

And then, what would I do?

He broke up with me three months later. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the ending hurt any less.

My brain is very good at remembering the things that I would rather that it forgot. And it is especially good at remembering endings.

Entire plotlines are lost inside the recesses of my mind, but the ending will always be branded into my memory, a red-hot poker to the skull that sears with pain when something in the present reminds me of the painful past.

I have forgotten most of that anxious, short relationship with the man who didn’t order popcorn. But a present-day argument can trigger an avalanche of a montage: the texture of his couch against my palms as he broke up with me. The soggy lump of tissues that sat in my lap. The weak hug goodbye. What’s the point, I wondered. You don’t even like me.

My chest tightens when I look at the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner of my basement, the ones that I piled there carelessly after I moved in two years ago—another monument to an ending. Instantly, I am transported back to a hollow, sad moment from the day that I moved out of the soulless suburban house I shared with my ex-husband.

In this scene, I am sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. My mother is next to me. She is telling me how sad it all is, how sad she is—how sad, how sad, how sad. I am staring at the peg board that hangs on the wall in front of where I am parked and counting the holes.

I hear her, but she sounds like she is underwater. I wonder if I am the one who is submerged.

The only story my sweet, dumb brain knows when it comes to packing up everything into cardboard boxes is one of sadness. In these last few months, I have walked a path that I have been down before, one of sorting socks, of offloading non-essentials and dismantling my home.

With each bag of clothing that I give away and every shriek of the packing tape, my brain screams out in pain.

I’ve seen this film before, it tells me. The ending sucked.

It begins to erupt. I desperately try to put a lid on it, to sit on it before it does any more damage. But the sewage leaks out anyway.

So I ignore it. I light the cigarette of avoidance and hope that I can somehow manage to swim my way out of it before that shit water comes any higher.

It works sometimes. Other times, I drown, crushed by the flotsam of the endings that I have already lived.

Told you, my brain says. We’ve seen how this one ends.

My trauma tends to show up like a drunk uncle to a family dinner: uninvited, loud as hell, and very, very hard to get rid of. I can’t reason with it—it knows best—but it is strangely comforting, in a devil-you-know sort of way.

When my trauma arrives, I sigh and open the door. I let it come in and get belligerent. I let it spin its yarns, ones so old that their edges are frayed and the fibers are nearly translucent. Though I know that the story is outdated, I listen anyway.

The only story my brain likes to tell about moving is that you do it for a sad reason.

You can probably see why this is a problem. I move in 25 days. For a happy reason.

I’m moving for love. I’m moving because I know that this is the final phase of my healing post-divorce. I’m moving because I want to, not because I have to.

Which is why it is so frustrating that my brain refuses to get the memo. It has plopped down and kicked its feet up, bottle in hand. It rants without pause as I slowly pack up my apartment, schedule vet appointments for my cats and say goodbye to my friends.

Give me a break, I tell it. There’s an alternate ending. Look, I’m writing it right now! I gesture to the chorus of support that I receive almost daily—strangers telling me how inspired they are by this choice, friends who tell me that I seem so much happier, and little signs from the universe that, yes, this is right.

My brain crosses its arms and refuses to acknowledge all of the good. It turns its eyes to the past and continues rewatching a film that should have been archived long ago.

I wonder what to do with its stubbornness. Should I berate it, shake my finger and scream at it until a vein pops out in my forehead? Should I continue to ignore it and hope that it finally turns off the TV and acknowledges the present?

I look at it for a long time.

I walk up to it. I drape a blanket around its shoulders. I pour a glass of water and set it on the table.

My brain eyes me warily. What’s this? it asks me. It is used to my anger, moments where I clutch the sides of my head and curse the fragility of my mind.

I’m not sure what you need right now, I tell it. But I know you need time. Let me take care of you.

I watch as my brain lifts the glass and upends it. Water pours over me, washing away old, tired stories. It shakes loose some of the pain that clings to the edges of this move. Not all of it. But some of it.

I have been told to stop imagining myself as in the process of healing, to instead choose to see myself as healed. I love the idea that I can just ignore my spewing trauma and sit on it long enough until it just…disappears.

But I know that is not true for me. One cup of water is not enough. I know that I must keep filling up pitcher after pitcher of water. I have to keep pouring. So I do.

Ripples appear in the stagnant water that has sat there for so long. The painful past blurs just enough for me to imagine something else.

And finally, I begin to see a new ending.

What tired stories does your brain still tell you? And how have you been gentle with yourself when your brain just doesn’t seem to get it?

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Star ✨

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

When I was a kid, I had this fantastic wooden box that my parents let me buy at a local street fair. It was made of cedar and lined with velvet. I stored all of my best treasures inside. And on the outside was a mystical, magical painting of a waterfall at night, done up in dusky purples and deep blues. The moonlit water seemed to shimmer, despite the static nature of the picture. The pool beneath it rippled with life and movement.

If you had asked me to imagine the most peaceful, tranquil place on Earth, I couldn’t imagine a better one than the one painted on that box. It was a place where, once you arrived and stepped into the rush of the water, you finally felt whole.

The imagery on the 18th card in the tarot, the Star, has always reminded me of that box. It exists outside of the confines of our mundane reality, a portal to a place of utter contentment and solace. A place where you can be as naked as the day you were born and dip your pitcher into the healing water as many times as you’d like. The water will never run out.

This is a card of healing, the sort that must be done alone. The nude figure kneels at the edge of the water source in a prayerlike posture, two pitchers in their hands. Water pours from each of the clay jars—one stream lands in the pool it came from, while the other trickles across the ground next to the figure. There isn’t an urgency about this image. One doesn’t get the sense that this process is quick at all—whatever magic is emerging from this ritual is slow and almost sensual in nature.

The Star revisits the concept of duality that is portrayed many times throughout the major arcana—this universal quest to hold space for multiple, sometimes opposing truths at the same time. We can both be in the process of healing and whole as we are. We are asked to pour back into ourselves and also out into the world around us. We are asked to be vulnerable, to bare our new skin, and to be protective of ourselves as we continue to heal.

An ibis perches in a tree, just barely in the frame of the card, reminding us of the need for unity. We are not in a battle against ourselves—we delay our healing when we declare war against our own minds. The stars that fill the top part of the card illuminate the gentle ripples on the surface of the pool, a signal that growth is happening. Each pour of the pitcher sends out seismic waves of change.

When the Star appears in a reading, it is time to practice grace and gratitude with one’s own healing process. It is time to dip into the waters of your intuition and your emotions.

And it is time to release that water from its containers and let your healing take a new shape, both inside and outside of yourself.

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✨Prompts | The Star ✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ When it comes to my healing, what needs to be poured out of me? Over me? Into me?

☀️ What ripples are you observing on your healing journey?

☀️ What environment will best support and hold you as you heal?

☀️ How can you be gentle with yourself as you navigate the complex waters of your healing?

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

I believe in my healing.

Like I said above, I move in less than a month. Now, more than ever, I need to write, and I cannot tell you how much it means to me when someone says, “hey, I read what you wrote” and tells me how it impacted them. So if you’ve ever hesitated on replying to my emails or leaving me a comment, let me make it abundantly clear that I love hearing from folks who’ve navigated something similar.

Thanks for reading.