My Nope Era

Resistance is your body's wisdom

Last night my astro-nerd group had a New Moon in Aries ritual — it was simple: write down everything that was “dead weight” to your Quest, and then we’ll burn it.

But I didn’t want to.

I did it anyway, because I have enough comfort with anything personal growth-y that I was willing to just try it—but it made me realize that I am resistant to any kind of inner work right now. Which means I’m also resistant to writing, because the process of writing is inner work for me.

I got a lot from the exercise, and I woke up this morning with all kinds of realizations—but I still feel resistance to really pushing in that direction.

My resistance is just emotional exhaustion, and it’s OK.

The relationship I had with my-person-who-died-in-October was so overwhelming, draining, confusing, chaotic, intractable, and painful that it burned me out on feeling things. I have delegated my grieving process to my dreams and the few minutes before and after bed when there is nothing else to focus on. I’m not suppressing it, I’m just not engaging with it except in the margins.

And actually that has been fine. I am doing it in a way that works for me because it’s my emotional circuits that need to heal. And that has meant spending my time doing things that do not make me feel anything deeply.

I could easily turn that into something I’m doing wrong.

But I don’t, because I’ve trained myself out of doing that.

It’s OK to rest. It’s OK to listen to your resistance. My resistance is just telling me, “everything deep is too much right now”. And I know if I give myself time to rest, I will eventually feel like it’s not too much anymore. I will eventually be ready for the next thing. Nothing is gained by forcing anything. My mind and nervous system will recover with time.

Not only do I trust my resistance as my body’s wisdom, I also trust the Universe to nudge me when it’s time to move. I trust that everything will unfold when it’s meant to, and there’s nothing I need to “do” to make destiny happen—it’s already written. It’s already unfolding.

My life is not a project that needs to be constructed. It’s an experience that I’m having. And that is always true, regardless of what it looks like.

Witnessing is processing

In the ritual, I drew a map of my feelings. But they are not really “dead weight”. I resisted burning the paper. I just wanted to witness them.

I decided to digitize my drawing because I like having a record of it. This is how I honor my feelings and let them be what they are.

So, welcome to my inner world:

It is objectively bereft of sunshine, I’ll admit. 😂 But it’s not that bad, really.

I’ve reached the point in my journey where I don’t judge my inner reality for simply being what it is. I’m in a transition phase where I’m processing a very heavy reality that I was subject to for a long time, battling someone else’s demons who eventually won, in the midst of a very heavy world that we are all being subjected to.

I am lucky to have all the time I need to lazily stroll through my uncertainty, confusion, questions, and doubts without needing to get anywhere with them. Being happy to be where I am is a gift I give to all the parts of me that need that time and space.

I have befriended my monsters

Nihilism is just the shape my exhaustion takes…I don’t take it too seriously at this point because I’m quite familiar with it. I know what it means and I know what it is there for. It exists to keep me from leaping because I need time to heal. It protects me from what I’m not yet ready to take on.

Sagittarius (my rising) is the sign of hope in the darkness, and nihilism is part of the archetype. Sag season is late November to December—the darkest point in the year, right before the light returns. Sag has faith, but faith is never an easy position to take in this world. Sagittarian faith requires believing that all of the pain and horror and despair we witness and experience on Earth has a point to it.

But sometimes we do the Epic Quest, we fight the Boss Monster, we are valiant and true…and it only leads to death and despair. That experience undermines a core need for life to be meaningful, and for darkness to be transmutable into light.

When events don’t give us that, we have to give it to ourselves.

We have to take all the broken pieces and paste them back together into a story that makes it all make sense. We have to face the darkness and the nothingness, the emptiness where our dreams were supposed to appear, and find meaning in it anyway.

That is work and it happens in its own time. You can’t make it happen because it is a magical, organic, intrinsic process the Universe does with you. And that is what I am allowing to happen by not pushing myself forward right now.

The awesome things out there will still exist when I’m ready for them.

I’m still studying astrology, researching historical echoes, and writing about things I find. But that is all the “work in the world” my nervous system is willing to take on right now.

Beyond that, I am just finding low-intensity-but-still-interesting-enough things to do, which for me right now is refactoring a very old codebase with Claude. It’s a Virgo stellium’s dream: fussing with details all day that nobody will ever see but I know it’s better.

I’m not trying to vibe code some epic new thing yet. I have ideas—there are things I want to build— but I am not emotionally ready to commit to something new. I’m on a sabbatical from growth and progress.

And there are parts of me that struggle with not having a Grand Quest. But they are being patient with the parts of me that just need to do anything but that. Anything but believing in something again. Anything but devoting myself to something again, in that intense all-consuming way I tend to jump into things.

That part of me is still there, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s just not in the driver’s seat right now.

What I’m devoted to right now is honoring my exhaustion by doing what feels good and nourishing to the most tired parts of me. That takes the shape of things that are mentally engaging but not emotionally demanding.

Aries (my Moon sign) is the archetype of jumping off cliffs in pursuit of the object of desire. I am still recovering from the last time I did that—when Uranus-the-Disrupter was in Aries, conjunct my IC.¹

The ghosts of that experience and everything that followed are slowly fading. But I’m not in a hurry.

Grief in itself is exhausting—your body, brain and nervous system has to adjust to change it didn’t ask for. I’m doing that without a lot of deliberate emotional processing because that is the level of intensity that feels right.

And it is strange and unusual for me, because I’m a bit of an intensity junkie. But I’m getting that need met by consuming the news. 😆 I follow current events and chart how they are playing out the astrological cycles we are in, and that doesn’t require any personal excavation.

“Monitoring the situation” is soothing to me in a way that is hard to explain because of course the subject matter itself is awful, ridiculous, baffling, and maddening. But having studied the cycles of time and being personally safe and relatively insulated from it lets me absorb it with detachment—and then it is just fascinating.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m in my Nope Era. And it’s lowkey great. 💚

1. The IC is the bottom or base of the natal chart, and represents our physical and emotional foundations. Saturn is conjunct mine right now, which explains this whole post to be honest. Saturn is the cold hard truth, the limitations of reality, and the necessity of facing them. But it’s also the hermit, the wanderer, the sage. Saturn governs isolation, melancholy, and the awareness of impermanence. Before Neptune and Pluto were discovered, Saturn held all the significations of mysticism and death, transitions and liminal spaces. It is the borderland between knowing and unknowing, between darkness and light. 🪐

P.S. If you want to know what long-term transits are going on for you right now, I have a free report here which is pretty awesome!