“Become wounded or wise.” —Sadhguru
Dearest Squad,
I started following Sadhguru on Instagram in 2020. I am always on the lookout for guidance from my gurus. The things he had to say really resonated with me…and not just because I was in the middle of realizing just how Buddhist and Hindu I’ve been my entire life without having the words for it.
My mother taught me how to meditate when I was four years old. In my teens, Elfquest introduced me to the idea of “the now of wolf thought.” It reminds us that the only reality that truly exists is this present moment. Right here. Right now. There’s no tomorrow, sung Sammy Hagar. We all know this to be true.
Sadhguru took this idea a step farther for me. He is constantly reminding us that the past doesn’t exist at all, and tomorrow is a lie. TOMORROW IS A LIE. I loved that. The more you think about it, the more brilliant it becomes.
The past isn’t a lie, because we have personal experience there, but it also does not exist. We hold it in our memories. We treasure it. We torture ourselves with it. In the throes of PTSD, one can mentally relive it. But it does not exist.
Just as we can choose where to go in our future, we can choose what to do with our past. The good things and the bad things. We can decide how to let it affect us. We can become wounded, or we can become wise.
I have a friend who just started journaling. She writes everything down, good and bad. Especially the bad things. She not only wants to get them out of her head, but she also wants to remember them so she can learn from them. I get that.
I recommend journaling to everyone I meet, regardless of age.
Personally, I’ve journaled my whole life. I have journals going back to Kindergarten. There’s a kind of scary entry I wrote as a preteen that says something like “I want to get all these terrible thoughts on paper so they don’t have to live in my head anymore.” It was smart of me to write them down and purge them. Writing can be therapeutic in that way. That kind of writing probably saved my life as a kid.
But it also made my words—my history—immortal.
I am aware that my books that get published will live on long after I’m gone. (Heck, we all fear the whole “being famous after we’re dead” thing, and if that happens, please know that I have been annoyed by this idea since I was in high school.) The phrases and plots and characters I create have the potential to become essentially immortal.
For this reason, I do not fictionalize people I hate. I don’t giggle as I kill them off. (Do you know how many of my friends would LOVE to be killed off in one of my books?) I don’t write them down because I don’t want them to become part of my written history. I do not want them in my narrative. Literally.
I started journaling again faithfully in 2020. It’s more sporadic these days, but I still do it, especially when storm chasing or traveling overseas. I miss it when I don’t. But unlike those teenage years, I don’t chronicle arguments I had with my mom or things someone said to me that got under my skin. I chronicle big events, sure, good or bad, but I mostly write down epiphanies. Lovely moments. Quotes from a movie or television show that resonated with me at the time. Things that made me laugh. Heck, I’ve even journaled my tarot card readings, and what I think they meant based on my current circumstances.
When I go back and read those words—because I sometimes do—I want to remember the good things. Casey always told me to write down all the good things. What if we get old and forget them? What if we get depressed and forget them? The stars shine brighter in the darkness.
I want to remember those stars.
“Write what you know” is an annoying phrase that has also haunted me my entire life. When I was writing my first novel at 11 years old, I was acutely aware that I didn’t know much. Writers are encouraged to live their lives so that they have something other to write about than writers who write all the time. (looks at Stephen King )
But when we writers choose to live like this, every book, every essay, every poem becomes my history. A history that doesn’t exist at all. A history that is now, officially, fiction. Re-reading Thieftess as I write these chapters…I’m realizing that it’s not much different from revisiting my old journal entries.
Welcome to my life, Squad.
I’m so happy—and honored—that you are all part of my story.
Love you all so very much—
xox
Princess Alethea
✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨🖤✨
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