K A I R O S
I WAS BORN IN BEIJING and transplanted to the States at age one. I was raised in a secular, academic household (my father is an atheist with a PhD) where I did not have the language to describe the invisible things I knew. I was validated for mathematical and scientific intelligence but not emotional or psychic intelligence, and never saw examples of the latter valued around me.
I subsequently studied Economics before mustering the audacity to major in Literature at Duke University (where fate led me after waitlisting me from Harvard, a tragedy from which my Chinese tiger mother has yet to recover). During the early days of the climb, I had this constant refrain in me singing, “We don’t have to do it this way,” but I couldn’t quite see the alternative yet. I figured I’d stick with the conventional game for now.
After graduating, I made the even less sensible decision to spend ten years working and writing in a vortex called Hollywood, where I gradually forgot what I already knew: this whole thing is made up! But it was during this time that I learned a core truth: that the solution cannot be seen from inside the system — it must come from the natural world.
But let me go back further in time: I had been carrying an electric storm from ancestors past. My maternal grandfather, a renowned and Scorpionic writer, had been sent to the labor camps during the Cultural Revolution when they were persecuting artists and higher thought. His father, a university dean in Beijing, had previously died under dark circumstances that my grandfather only learned of three years after, as he had been stationed with the army in North Korea at the time. By then, his mother (a teacher and one of the first women to be educated in China) had also died and his younger brother as well. This was just one sliver of the fragmented past I began to uncover after his wife, my Piscean grandmother, passed in 2018.
In excavating my ghosts, I began to explore the dark cloud which had enveloped me since birth. The adults around me would not speak of the past, but I remembered sensing even as a child: if someone could just put words to this shapeless black mass, I would at least have a chance of working through it myself!
What I needed were healing stories, perhaps even with humor, but in absence of this, I coped by putting the past out of mind. And yet, during all those silenced years, a part of me always knew: the treasure slept in these shadows where no one would go.
I know now that this burden was too heavy for any child to carry, that my parents were working with the only tools they had. They were doing to me what had been done to them, and those before them and those before them, but I came to disrupt this pattern and transmute the line, for their sacrifices are not my sentence to bear. I know now I am not “wrong” for choosing to live another way; I came here to rebirth myself again and again.
I am grateful for my trials for they gave me a gift: a preternatural ability to see in the dark. They bestowed upon me the deepest empathy and capacity to hold the shadows of this world. I realized I had been searching for a feeling in every person I met — a sense of belonging, understanding, safety and care. My new life began when I surrendered to this:
I am not meant to find this feeling in everyone else.
I am to be the one who gives it to them.
Alchemize your wound.
Abyssus abyssum invocat:
The depths of me calls to the depths of you.
We get trained out of our intuition by this world. It is relentless; it is an initiation. I watched this happen to myself and those around me over years and years — wondering why we had inherited this reality, how one might navigate it without succumbing to it, why we were made to act as though we weren’t feeling this way — until it almost took me under. But it was during the descent that I finally stopped fighting, and then silently, willingly, sank to the bottom of the sea.
And sitting there on the floor, quiet again, I chose to come back to myself.
A N I M A
by Jennifer Vesta
anima: the unconscious feminine; the true inner self; soul
My father’s anima is barely alive.
It was beaten down in him by the world and he turned gradually into stone.
It was once a burning ember that is now so faint, the fire is almost out.
I felt this so strongly as a child.
I absorbed my father’s pain. It hurt me, it terrified me, it was my deepest wound.
It made me feel there was something wrong with me.
I felt I was starting from a disadvantage. I internalized the pain as unspeakable inferiority.
The broken thing within me.
I buried it as I grew.
I tried to run from it. Escape the father wound pain.
Everything I did was to get away from the pain.
Avoid the thing, do not talk about the thing.
It scared me because if my father is broken, he cannot protect us, he cannot support me.
I was not taught how to make room for my father’s vulnerability.
It was not allowed.
I knew how to heal others but not how to give this to him.
It seemed so easy to me, why did he insist on staying broken?
He could just switch into joy like me, he could have made our lives so much more fun, so filled with light, but he never did.
My father’s pain became my pain and I carry it with me still.
The men I went to over the years, they carried the promise of curing this pain. But each was healing the very same wound, some not at all, some running like me.
Once I go deep enough, I invariably find it within him, pulsating red underneath.
He is broken like me.
The child in me always knew I’d have to do it myself.
But I want to be taken care of!
Why must I do it alone when other girls get to be little princesses?
Is it because I have a broken father who cannot protect me?
I don’t want to be broken, I want to be a princess like every girl on screen.
What’s wrong with me?
Don’t tell anyone there’s something wrong with me, I’m going to hide it.
I’m going to find someone who won’t call me on it and then I’ll be safe and then I can hide it for the rest of my life.
Sovereignty: I was born with the gift and I thought it was bad.
I thought: to be sovereign means no one wants to take care of you.
You’re forced to do it yourself because life dealt you a losing hand.
Strength was in me but did it mean I was wrong?
It didn’t match up with the ideal girl sold to me all my life.
I decided: I’ll be sovereign in secret, but play this weak thing in order to win.
I’ll hobble myself so they can embrace me, so he’ll fall in love.
I took the princess role when that deal was offered to me by a test.
The deal to be unreal and sign away my voice.
And betray myself so fully I almost couldn’t come back.
My mind had been telling my heart for so long that this was how I should be,
I needed to taste it before I could pass it,
I needed to live it to know in my bones it was false,
I needed to get burned so badly, I could never again swallow the lie.
When I was young, I walked in on my father alone, naked in his bathroom with his back to me, leaning over the counter, staring at himself in the mirror. I had been calling his name before and he did not hear me, so absorbed was he in that moment of meditation, confrontation, of seeing himself for what he had become.
I remembered feeling something strange come over me as I walked deeper down the hallway into my parents’ bedroom towards the sliding bathroom door which was slightly ajar. The growing silence that seemed not right.
The naked vulnerability of him in that moment terrified me.
I wasn’t meant to see him like that.
I backed away from the door. I had never seen my father naked, so powerless, so exposed. What was he thinking as he stared at himself like that?
I never spoke of it to anyone.
I didn’t understand what I saw, what exactly it was that frightened me so much.
But I remember the feeling as though it were yesterday.
My father cried on the phone to me when his mother died.
I was in college. I didn’t know how to respond.
It scared me, I shut down to not feel it. I didn’t want to feel it, I was graduating into a void, I was already petrified, this was the last thing I needed to hear.
I was unable to comfort him then.
All the ways in which my father failed me led me to fail him in his moment of need.
I knew how to give to my friends but not to my family.
It was never practiced in mine.
We had no rituals, no ceremonies, no command of emotion, no magic in mine.
My father did not know how to show affection because it was not shown to him.
My father did not know that he does not have to be like those who once hurt him.
My father does not know that his anima is his power.