Heavy & Grey

What if the weight you feel isn’t meant for you alone…

Hey neighbor! I like to listen to music while I write. If you want to listen along while you read, here is this playlist I used while writing this week. Have a listen, have a drink, and welcome to the neighborhood. I hope this post gives you a chance to breathe

Things feel heavy in the neighborhood this week.

Between the fires in LA, the chaos of social media and the TikTok ban (if you can even call it that), the Presidential Inauguration, and just trying to survive in our day to day lives, it just feels heavy.

If you’ve read one of the neighborhood posts before, you’re not stranger to how we mostly wing it each week with our posts. We like a sense of comfort and decompression here, and our content is written under the vibe of living in the moment.

Today was no different.

I knew I wanted to write a post for the Every Witch Way section of our Substack and I knew I have PLENTY of things I can talk about, but when it came time to come home from work and actually write anything…

If you’ve come here expecting eloquent wording, grammatical structure, and thoughtful take aways… we may not be the publication for you.

Substack works more as a blog for us anyway. Sharing tidbits and updates like a newsletter, sprinkling in some tutorials and educational content, but mostly a creative outlet to just get thoughts into words. Structure would be lovely, but sometimes space to just explore yields better results. We like to think of this as a chat among friends, a creative outlet that hopefully inspires you as well.

Austin has been sick, so he stayed home today. I worked my normal shift, but it was a weird Sunday that honestly felt like an entire week in one day. By the time I was home and wanted to sit down to actually write, I had zero interest. I had to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, meal prep for tomorrow, all things that required me to keep moving and getting things done instead of sitting and feeding the creative part of me.

So now, with less than an hour before I want to be in bed (so I can do it all over again tomorrow) I am sitting at the tablet with a cup of mandarin ginger tea and a prayer that I can focus long enough to get this out of me. (Spoiler alert, I did not get to bed on time)

Sitting here, listening to this week’s playlist choice, I want to spend this week offering a reprieve from the heavy in the world around us. A little blessing from the bullshit of the mundane if you will. This week dear neighbors, I hope this post gives you the space and permission to put that weight down.

I feel, especially in a world with social media, that everything feels so perfect and put together in a way that makes us carry more than we need to for fear of not living up to the expectation the rest of the world considers the norm. While we may know these expectations are not important, it doesn’t make them any less stressful for us to encounter. Sometimes what we really need is another person to validate our feelings and tell us it’s ok to feel the weight of everything, that it is ok to grieve or feel grey.

I think the reason everything feels so heavy, is because it isn’t a weight we should be carrying by ourselves. It is EXHAUSTING to constantly have your guards up, to be emotional invested in what’s going on around us, to be up to date on the latest political or social situation, to be working as much as we do in order to pay rent and bills. I don’t think we are meant to do that alone, it is just too much weight for one person.

Sure we are a society and everyone is carrying their own weight and doing things on their own, but that sense of community is lacking. It is really hard to find a good community to engage and interact with when all of our time is spent working and surviving. I mean I am working two jobs, my day consists of working a full time day job, and then going straight to the second job in an effort to make ends meet.

Where are we supposed to find time to decompress, take care of ourselves, nurture ourselves (in a both a literal food sense and a creative sense), sleep for eight hours, work, and be social with community?

We have to intentionally carve space for those things, and often seek validation and permission to put things down so we can breathe.

So while I sit here, drinking my tea, I hope this week gives you that permission.

We call this the neighborhood for a reason.

You can feel things here.

You can be safe here.

You can put the heavy things down here.

Take a break, have a drink, decompress. Feel creative or just rest, there are no expectations here.

I hope this week that you feel validated in your emotions, your sense of grey.

I hope that you are able to acknowledge what feels heavy in your life, and determine what is yours to carry versus what weight should be shared.

I hope you can find comfort and support in this community, this neighborhood.

I hope you pour your own cup of tea, or coffee, or a cocktail. Whatever drink you need in your cup right now, in this moment, while you read this post and talk about the heavy and the grey in your own life.

And maybe,

Hopefully,

When your cup is empty and you’ve said what you’ve needed to say,

Things aren’t so heavy,

And they aren’t so grey.

See you ‘round the neighborhood

💜 🦋 Ry