Gone Into the Bliss
A reflection of 2024 on the Cold Moon
December 15, 2024
The final full moon of each calendar year has come to be my favorite time for reflection. I’ve written my thoughts on the entire year at this time since 2022. It seems to be a tradition that is sticking, and I’m glad. This Cold Moon is in Gemini, so no wonder I’ve been thinking a lot.
2024 has been long and perspective-altering. Like looking through a broken crystal and seeing only bits and pieces in many directions. A drawn-out series of freezing and thawing, entering and exiting a fog. I never stood in one feeling long enough to understand it at its core. I don’t think that this year was ever asking me to go in depth towards one thing; rather, it was asking me to try everything on and let go of what doesn’t fit.
In January, I was afraid of losing what I have come to realize that I never even had. February lifted a spell that made me feel so inadequate the entirety of the previous year. I loved so much in February, but I’m not sure what it all meant if I could never express things from a place of stillness. During March, I was polarized, both giving and demanding, receiving and withdrawn. In April, I was overcome with shame because I felt so stuck in infinite painful pasts, and my inability to move through it dictated all that I was in the present. May was the beginning of the end, and it was a truly beautiful one. June was heart-opening but mind-altering. It laid the groundwork for a specific paranoia about all things that seeped into my core and would temporarily remove me from myself in the months to come. July was like a tug of war with no winners. I fought hard for some things and gave up on others, but I never won—nobody did. August reminded me of how small of an infinity time feels like when you value something and how much love weaves together our most memorable moments. September broke my heart. And when I thought it couldn’t be broken any further, October made sure to prove to me otherwise. But November was kind, which is uncharacteristic of my Novembers. I was reacquainted with the elements and flow of all things. Even death did not destroy my understanding of connection. December so far has been warm. I feel like my form is dissolving and will reassemble without the weight of particular disturbances upon my spirit.
Last year, I said that 2024 felt welcoming, and it has been. No amount of confusion, pain, paranoia, or whatever else has taken away from that. If anything, I’ve found those more difficult moments have been the most expansive for me. They added details to the bigger picture, broadening my perspective. A constant goal of mine has been to see things as accurately as possible; it seems that pain and disappointment are ways to shed illusions.
In order to make genuine changes, we must see things, specifically unfavorable things, for what they are. Neutral acceptance has been a recurring theme for me in 2024. For much of my life, I used to (and often still do, or at least feel the urge to) want things and people to change in order to meet my needs. I constantly felt like I did something wrong that made people and situations be so out of alignment with me. If I wanted a specific outcome and another person didn’t, I would wonder why I wasn’t “good enough” for our desires to match up; then I would try to shift my desires in order to be content with what I knew in my spirit did not feel right for me. Rather than shifting my circumstances so my needs could be met, I would try my hardest to shift my needs and “need less”. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with what I need out of spaces and relationships, what I can compromise on and what is non-negotiable, and what I want to feel in my relationships with others. I wrote a list of new rules for myself in November; rule three and all of its subsequent parts goes, “3. My needs are my compass, not my hopes a. It is my responsibility to ensure that my needs are met i. I cannot expect (or hope) for people to change to meet my needs”. This rule stands out to me as the summary of my lessons this year. What felt like a lot of learning to let go and stand on my own was ultimately learning not to shy away from my own needs or try to bend them in order to fit into places that were never meant for me.
Last night during my post-yoga meditation, what came to me was the phrase, “You do not feel any safer when you run from yourself.”. It was out of an anxious search for safety and stability that I would stick around in situations that felt incomplete or without the proper space to express myself fully. I was running from a version of myself that could be fully present; I think because I didn’t feel safe to be her in certain situations. But I thought that if I just stayed long enough, things would work themselves out and one day I would feel right, and I wouldn’t fragment myself or make my needs smaller.
Patterns of pain were the cycles that I needed to open my eyes and my heart. This year, instead of running, I started to stand still with myself and seek her out when I needed to. Instead of shaping myself into something that can work for a while but isn’t really me at my core, I’ve started to become more flexible within myself and let go of the part of me that was so willing to self-abandon. And when I felt lost from myself, like I was trapped in a fog, I called out for her and gave myself the tools to find her again in the future.
In the last few years, with specific thanks to my writing on Leila from 5 to 7, I have been able to deeply cultivate myself. Self-expression has always been of great importance to me, and writing and creating online has been a low-stakes manifestation of that. However, I have had a lot of difficulty with feeling fully true to myself in certain relationships, and I would always wonder why I felt so cool on my own but so stupid with certain people. I felt stupid because I wasn’t really myself, or when I was myself, I felt dismissed. Still, I gave things a try and just observed how I felt. I had to accept the difficult truth that some things just are not right for me, and that doesn’t make them wrong in their entirety, just wrong for me.
The hardest thing for me has been having to accept that sometimes wants and needs will not align, even when you feel so present and true with someone. Despite how difficult this has been, it has made me value connection in a new light. This situation showed me that it is okay for me to be myself and that there isn’t anything wrong with me. People can and do appreciate me for all that I am. People can love me and still not want what I want or have the means to be what I need, and that is not a punishment. I’m grateful for all of the time that it took me to see this because it gave me time to spend with them.
This Gemini full moon is offering me a lot of room for gratitude. It feels like a beautiful funeral. The ones where everyone is crying but filled with so much joy and connection. I have a deep sense of reverence for who I was in all of my confusion, errors, self-abandonment, creativity, love, and different levels of expression. She got me here. And now she’s gone, or is just another layer of the me that is constantly emerging.
Last month, when my sweet little angel baby kitty passed very unexpectedly, she came to us first. She was always so calm, with a soft half meow that you could only hear if you were really listening to her. I loved her so much; I was the first to see her on the day that she and her siblings were born. When she had a minor eye infection as a kitten, I prayed Psalms 91 and 108 over her and her water bowl every day until she was healed. On the night that she passed, she meowed so loud, my sister and I ran downstairs to see what was going on. We just pet her and calmed her down, and then my sister wrapped her in a towel and held her until she fell asleep. She passed a few hours later; my mom and sister saw as she left. We all cried a great deal; there were no previous signs that anything was wrong. Later that night, I wrote, “Death typically doesn’t feel like a punishment to the one that is dying. She doesn’t feel like it [her life] was cut short because that was all of the time that she knew. It was scary, then it was bliss, then she was gone. Gone into the bliss. It hurt so much for me, but she is beyond hurt. She’s entered full connection to it all.”
My love for my kitty still stands; it exists in more dimensions now. As does the love for the former versions of myself. I was able to see death as more of a neutral process, one that doesn’t have the means to pick and choose. Transformations and endings exist in a similar but smaller-scale way. I don’t feel as though I really chose the moments for these changes to commence; they just came, and I made the most of what I was given. We have the means to intentionally change and end things, but that wasn’t my process this year. The flow of things led me here; that was all of the time that I was given with that specific version of myself, and now she is gone—gone into the bliss.
So in 2025, when my dissolved particles emerge into something new and refined, I think I might build a focus towards more intentional changes. I’m curious about what that would offer me. I am really enjoying where I am now; it's like I’m everything and nothing. Everywhere and nowhere. Fluid and solid. Visible and invisible. I feel so truly myself because I am not trying to be anything. I am not in any situations where I feel like I have to be more or less of myself. I’m not so afraid of any moments in time; I think because I know how much potential every moment holds. I have been developing a sensibility that allows me to embody all parts of myself. There is nothing to run from, and there is no safety found in running. I have hope and trust in myself to ensure that my needs are met, and I am excited to see where this takes me.