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…
My grandmother was born on the Fourth of July. She died in the small town of Independence, Louisiana. And she is buried a five-minute walk from my childhood home in a small, quiet place called Liberty Cemetery.
My aunt Cindy told me these three things in a Facebook Messenger conversation last week. I had asked her simply to tell me about her mother, my Meemaw.
I was only ten when my paternal grandmother passed, and my memories of her are scarce. I remember her dark, curly hair, so similar to my younger sister’s. Her cigarettes. And her card playing skills—she taught me how to play poker. We had a yellow margarine tub full of wheat pennies, and Meemaw taught me the art of betting.
“You’ve got a good hand,” she’d tell me. And then, she’d lay her cards down and scoop all of the pennies up.
Over the next few days, my aunt shared snippets from her mother’s life. Each time my phone buzzed with a new message from her, I felt a little thrill, the sort you get when you see a butterfly alight on a branch right in front of you or when you remember that you’ll soon be seeing an old friend for the first time in a while.
I lined each detail up on the shelf of my mind reverently. Her given first name was Juliet, not Dolores, which she went by. She never graduated high school. She dreamed of owning a houseboat one day. Her last words were that she loved her kids.
As the days passed, my aunt shared some of the sadder parts of my Meemaw’s life. Her final years were riddled with one cancer diagnosis after another. She was an alcoholic. She was poor.
One detail stood out to me because it was a sort of sadness that I immediately recognized. After Dolores married my grandfather in 1955, he moved her from Louisiana to Nebraska, where his parents lived.
As a woman who had lost both her mother and her father before she turned 16, she was so excited to meet her in-laws. I can almost see her nervously smoothing down her skirt as her new husband opens the door to his childhood home. My grandmother smiles, tentatively, hopefully—she has left behind her seven siblings and the only home she knew for love. Perhaps this is the moment everything changes. Perhaps this will fill the void she feels.
Instead, according to my aunt, her mother-in-law inexplicably hated my grandmother from the moment she saw her. It didn’t matter what she said or what she did. There was nothing Dolores could do to make her husband’s mother like her.
Throughout my life, I, too, have run into people who immediately do not like me. And I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.
There was the girl with red hair who went to high school with me who refused to speak to me, even when we were seated next to each other in calculus. Jessica with curly blonde hair who worked with me at Wendy’s and stood silently as I scrambled to fill the brown paper bags with food, refusing to help.
Jocelyn at the bookstore in college, who berated me and rolled her eyes when I didn’t ring up a sale correctly. The owner of a fitness studio where I taught classes who fired me two days before the studio shut its doors for good simply because she knew it would hurt me.
In each situation, I wondered why. I wondered what I had done, believing there to be One Weird Trick No One Wants You to Know About to becoming universally likeable. I spent hours replaying interactions, looking for a lift of an eyebrow or a string of words that would finally let me crack the code as to why I was so reviled by these people. I never found an answer.
In other moments, I dug my heels in, preferring to believe that the other person was just stupid or heartless or a terrible combination of both. I pretended that I didn’t care that they didn’t like me, that it didn’t matter what their problem was.
This was a lie. I cared very, very much.
Life moved on. The people who hated me faded from view, eventually being replaced at random times with another person who was not a fan of me. But even as I grew older, I could not stop looking in the rearview mirror.
I wanted, more than anything, to understand why these people did not like me.
My grandmother’s story made me wonder if this lack of likeability was inherited, as much of a part of my DNA as my green eyes, strangely long second toe and hips that crackle and pop when I stand up.
If it is, it must favor the women in my family. My mother, too, has butted heads with people who took one look at her and decided that she was worth hating: a secretary she worked with who had the same pinched look on her face each time she saw my mother, a man at our church who saw her innovative suggestions as a threat to his foothold on the music program. I saw her pain, my grandmother’s pain, repeated in my own life.
As an adult, I tried to stop wondering why the scenario of The One Person Who Doesn’t Like Me For No Apparent Reason kept happening. But I spent hours lying awake in my bed, imagining all the horrible things these people must be saying about me.
“Remember Katie?” the girl from Wendy’s says to her husband over a glass of wine. “God, she was a bitch.”
“Remember Katie?” the fitness studio owner tells her friend. “She sucked.”
They all gather together for a cocktail hour in my mind, toasting to their shared hatred of me. “To Katie,” they say in tandem. “We don’t like her.”
I know that this is ridiculous, bordering on self-centered—these people probably don’t think about me at all anymore. Perhaps they don’t even remember my name. So why do I still think about them?
Why does a not-so-small part of me still wish that I could change their minds?
Likeability and palatability are a package deal when you are a woman. Both are trump cards to be laid down on the table of life. I am not sure I hold these cards in my hand.
I am a questioner. When I was a kid, I raised my hand more than the rest of my classmates, over and over again, because I couldn’t help it. I am not quiet—the constant stream of chattering in my mind spills out of my mouth more often than I care to admit.
I simply don’t know how to be palatable. I don’t know how to be anyone other than a woman who reads a lot of poetry, who wonders aloud if there would be a better way to do things, who writes about the most personal parts of herself and posts them on the Internet.
I hold these pieces of myself and fan them out like cards. I do not have the perfect hand. There are cards I wish I could swap out or tuck up my sleeve. I understand that I cannot, that I must play the hand I was dealt. I understand, too, that I get to decide how to play it.
But I wish, more than anything, to control how other people respond to the cards I lay on the table.
I want to choreograph their reactions to every move I make, forcing them to smile and nod at my every word. I want people to clap admirably and raise their glasses in a toast to how damn likeable I am. I want you to read these words and think, “wow, that Katie. I like her.”
When I sit with this want, I feel gross and weak. I know that, like a game of cards, the outcome is always unpredictable. I cannot control you and how you feel about me any more than I can guarantee the order of cards in a recently-shuffled deck.
Seeking the universal approval of others is exhausting. It is a game I know I cannot win. I wonder why, over the past 34 years of my life, I have chosen to play it again and again.
If I tried to write my Meemaw’s story from the point of view of her mother-in-law, it would be rife with slights and salacious details. It would draw her as an uneducated, uncouth woman who smoked like a chimney and who didn’t have manners that matched the staid Midwestern mentality.
But truthfully, I don’t give two shits what her mother-in-law thought or why she hated Dolores so much. Why would I? She was a minor character in my grandmother’s story, a mere splinter in the fingerprint of her life.
Who my grandmother was is so much more than the narrative others wrote about her. She was funny. She was generous. She loved the color green and said that, after she died, she would return as a swallowtail butterfly. According to my aunt, she shows up all the time.
She wasn’t palatable, but I don’t think she cared much about being that way—never a stranger to an odd job, she drove a big truck towards the end of her life. I like to imagine her navigating the heavenly corridors created by the stars, one elbow sticking out of the window of the cab.
I wonder, if my Meemaw was still alive, what she would tell me about being liked.
She appears in front of me now, sitting on the moon, a cigarette dangling from her lips and a deck of cards in her hands. She winks at me and shuffles the deck, her hands moving expertly and her brow furrowed in concentration.
She deals me in.
We turn over card after card. We bet against the house, believing in ourselves enough to know that, even if we lose, we will still have played our hands beautifully. They’re good ones, after all.
She tells me to not worry so much about what cards others will lay down. What people will say about the cards I play. I ask her to tell me how. How to not worry so much.
“You can only control your hand,” she says sagely, flicking the ash off the end of her cigarette and letting it scatter amongst the stars. I sit silently, absorbing this.
It’s time for her to go.
She slips off of the moon and hoists herself into that big truck. As she waves to me, one hand dangling out of the window, she is already fading into the night. The last thing I see is the bright red of her cigarette’s cherry.
A north star guiding me forward. Reminding me to play the hell out of my hand.
The next morning, I get up early. I put on my shoes and step outside. I walk up the hill and past my neighbor’s garden. He has planted thistle and milkweed and coneflowers. Beauty spills out into the street. Out of the corner of my eye, a bit of movement catches my attention.
A yellow swallowtail butterfly beats its wings, a firecracker of light against the pale blue sky. I watch it for a moment, flitting from flower to flower. Unconcerned with whether it is liked. Writing a story all its own.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
“I’m working on it, Meemaw,” I whisper.
I’d like to talk about likeability. Is it important? How do you stay receptive to feedback yet accept that, sometimes, there isn’t an easily-discernible reason behind someone’s dislike?
✨Cards for Humanity: The Seven of Wands✨
Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.
I am an absolute sucker for a detail. Case in point: at brunch last weekend, I audibly squealed when the bill came because it was clipped to an adorable postcard with avocados on it. If you give me a gift while charging me an exorbitant amount for oat milk, I will pay it with a smile.
The same holds true in my tarot practice, and thankfully, Pamela Colman Smith was also a woman who loved a detail. If you look closely enough at any of her drawings in the Smith Rider Waite tarot deck, you’re likely to find a tiny detail or two that you can’t stop looking at.
The Seven of Wands is no exception. Check out the figure’s shoes. As one of my Instagram followers put it, he must have gotten dressed in the dark because those, my friend, are not a matched pair.
Some scholars (who unsurprisingly are often male) say that Pamela Colman Smith was simply an untrained artist who was not detail oriented. To that I say a big ole “fuck the patriarchy” because I believe that Pixie meant every last eccentricity.
So the question becomes why. Why the mismatched footwear? Why the raggedy, uneven line of wands at the feet of the figure? Why is he so angry? Why is he standing on the edge of a cliff?
The Seven of Wands is a card that I struggled to connect with for a long time, preferring to simply read it as a moment where you’re being challenged in your convictions or boundaries. And that is, of course, a way to interpret this card, which links with the element of fire and our passions, energy and how we show up in the world.
But the mismatched shoes make me think of the choices we make that are unconventional and…well…not universally liked. Our choices won’t always garner us the approval of every person we encounter. In fact, some may be so bothered by them that they try to knock you off balance.
But the figure in the Seven of Wands has the high ground. Whatever is challenging him is below him, waving their own wands fruitlessly in the air, trying to sweep his legs. All he really has to do is walk away with his head held high…in his mismatched shoes, of course.
When the Seven of Wands appears in a reading, it’s time to ask yourself what you’re really fighting for. If you’re trying to defend yourself and your choices with every breath you take, perhaps the message is that you simply will not please everyone. Perhaps you’re exactly where you need to be. And perhaps, you can use that wand in your hands as a walking stick to guide you forward to the Eight of Wands, where everything seems to align and fall into place.
It takes a lot of trust. And apparently, a fashion statement or two. But knowing when to fight and when to walk away is a lesson your guides want you to understand.
✨Prompts | The Seven of Wands✨
Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.
☀️ When my boundaries are being questioned, how can I hold the line?
☀️ What eccentricities do you love about yourself, even if others aren’t always a fan?
☀️ What does it mean to take the higher ground in times of conflict?
☀️ What space will open up in your life when you release the need to please everyone?
✨Weekly Mantra✨
Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.
I like who I am, and I don’t need to prove my worth to anyone else.
so 1st 'wheat pennies' have not heard that spoken in decades ! made me smile. 2nd, this article reminded me of something I used to say to my daughter, a Winston Churchill quote, "you have enemies, GOOD it means you stood for something. It is hard, especially as a female member of this human community to not be likable. It is some strange unwritten expectation for women, 'a successful women is polite, pleasing and likable'. The reality is the most successful ppl at least in the arena of business and profits are those who rank higher on the DISAGREEABLE scale, a scale dominated usually by men. Seems it is acceptable if not expected for men to be disagreeable. I do find it interesting when someone just , for no real cause , just doest like someone else. I allow it from my dogs, if they don't like ya, well that's all. I mean dogs just have a sense about these sorta things, right? ; ) So I say... , in the words of RuPaul, ' what other people think about you is none of your business" I try to remind myself of this daily and in doing so just be as true to myself as I can be.
Great article
Is likeability important? I think it is in certain life areas like work and networking. But what I think is much more important is loveability. Being someone who can be loved (by a parent, a partner, a friend, etc.) is I think so much more integral to living a good life than being someone who can be liked. You can be disliked by many people, but as long as you are loved by at least one or two, you can still be happy. While if you're liked by many but not loved by anyone, I don't think that can ever make you happy.