Please Don't Make Me Do It With A Broken Heart
Life is hard enough as it is
I am participating in a twelve week women’s recovery circle focused on our individual Word of the Year (or WOTY). I struggled with choosing a WOTY for weeks. My higher self was like “we’re good, we don’t need a WOTY”, but my junior self was insecure and couldn’t bear coming up empty-handed. So, I chose a word, but then I wondered why it seems to be only women who choose a WOTY. I Googled “men and word of the year”. Zip. Hmm.
It seems to me that women in particular are plagued with the idea that there are standards for success that we must meet in just about everything. To be fair, we have been fed this idea by many patriarchal systems in order to make us feel like we are constantly missing the mark so we settle for less than we are worth, do more (or do what others don’t wish to do), and buy a bunch of crap we don’t need.
I had bought into the belief that success exists as an absolute. Otherwise, why all the hustling? The striving to do more and be more? The having to select a WOTY to keep me on track year after year?
My brief solo retreat the other week showed me that although I had made a huge leap away from the myth of a universal definition of success when I quit my corporate career, I was still wrestling with the part about having to get everything right.
I venture to say that the pressure men feel is focused in a single area, e.g. career or making money. Women on the other hand? Please just watch this speech from The Barbie Movie, which recounts all of the ways women are expected to get things right. And the cherry on top:
"And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.” - Gloria in The Barbie Movie
One example of this absurd pressure came up in my women’s recovery circle on Saturday. One woman explained the pressure she felt to strike exactly the right amount of distress/outrage/fear over the authoritarian turn of the US government. Several other women expressed also feeling the pressure to get this right. Basically, if we try to keep our sanity intact by perhaps limiting how much we talk about or consume the news, we fear we look uncaring or selfish.
Yet, we cannot feel all of the feelings 24/7, walking around with a massively broken heart while taking care of business. But then Taylor Swift sings about doing just this and more in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”. I hope Swift is making a point rather than setting a standard. The conditioning that we don’t have sovereignty - even over the amount of emotion we show - is so deep and messed up, right?
With the wind on my back in the form of Venus in Aries (and a bit of retrograde through Pisces) for the next four months, I’ll be working on alchemizing self-doubt as a shadow of a monolithic idea of success into my WOTY: Freedom.
I wish you health, joy, peace, and love this week.
Maria Luz
Weekly Message and Oracle Card Pull
I often receive symbolic images from Spirit through my third eye, much like I understand the Sabian symbols were received by the psychic Elsie Wheeler in 1925. Please use your own intuition and take what resonates and leave the rest.
The themes of this week seem to be about being physically in your body and in your physical space, and about doing your well-being reps and being patient.
If you gave last week’s message or Oracle spread some space in your life, I would be interested to hear how it went in the comments. A preview of this week’s spread is in this Note.
I received the below in meditation on 2.9.25.
A person swimming laps with steady even strokes.
I take a couple of meanings: