Once upon a time there was a divine, interdimensional being who chose to experience a human life and was then designated, “Ashley,” in her human form. The being’s essence was strong, and for a long time it sparkled through her human form brighter than many of those around her.
There were many rules, laws, and customs in her timeline designed to suppress the divine sparkle within everyone using horrible, shared hallucinations like strip malls and credit scores, but something about her brain allowed her to resist the conditioning more than others. They could not suppress her curiosity, her joy, her sense of adventure, or the enormity of her feelings. This made her weird, and the other beings in their human disguises who had fallen prey to the brainwashing labeled her things like, “quirky,” “oddball,” “know-it-all,” and “sensitive,” which often made her feel sad and alone.
Despite the sadness, she spent much of her life working hard to stave off being buried by the horrors of the system around her like report cards and dress codes, to varying degrees of success. Her joy, curiosity, and connectedness ebbed and flowed as she moved through the various phases and challenges of her human life – grief and celebration, love and heartbreak, adventure and despair. Through it all, she managed to strike a balance between satisfying the requirements of the systems she’d been born into while also keeping the spark of her true divine self lit. The more she achieved the goals imposed on her by the system, the easier it was to let her light shine.
Until one day, 5 and a half years ago, the tide of her joy and fulfillment started to recede for the first time in a while. She watched it pull away, confident that it would all flow back to her soon, but days turned into weeks turned into months, and the blows kept coming. Intense storms of panic gave way to quiet, dragging sadness, until eventually she needed SSRIs to turn off her tears. She went from being playful, curious, charming, and effervescent to being burnt out, bored, isolated, and apathetic. She learned that one word for her brain’s resistance to human nonsense is, “neurodivergent,” and this finally helped her understand that the world was built to stamp people like her out. And then, for a while, she finally let it.
What was the point of fighting for herself when the world kept throwing punches? And in the face of the world’s wrecking ball, she got tricked into trading her spark for stability. She clawed her way to financial success but was left numb and empty. She stopped creating, moving, learning – she just consumed endlessly to fill the void left by her departed sparkle. She replaced meaningful social engagement, creativity, and nourishment with doomscrolling and DoorDash. She stopped dreaming, stopped wishing, stopped feeling grateful, and spiraled into some of the most all-consuming despair of her life. And somehow still, the blows kept coming.
In that despair, she did find love. She found stability, however unfulfilling. She found community, even if she hasn’t yet fostered it as thoroughly as she wishes. And most importantly, she decided that the spark in her that she thought had gone out is called “god,” and it never fully goes away, it just gets lost in the fray sometimes. She’s recently found it again, and it’s been very hard to hold onto. Any time she’s managed to hold it for a while, she’s been so kind and gentle with it, tending to it with rest and gratitude. Through trial and error, she’s finally realized that the best way to tend to the spark is by treating her body like what it is – an altar to the divine and an interdimensional, time travelling spaceship – both of which deserve to be clean, well kept, appropriately fueled, and beautifully decorated. And when those things are well taken care of, the spirit of the altar and the captain of the spaceship will be able to fulfill their destinies.
She’s finally starting to see the world for what it is. She’s awake and ready to finally free herself. She has found glimpses of divinity in the margins of her doomscrolls, and she’s tuning into the frequencies around her. She finally understands the horrors and the hallucinations and will play the humans’ silly games (file taxes and pay for access to fresh water) while embodying the ultimate truth: she is everything. We are everything. The connection, the curiosity, the creation – everything the system tries to stamp out is the point of it all. And now that she’s turned that shaky spark into an eternal ember, she’s ready to light it all up and burn it all down, one post, one meditation session, one dance class, one homegrown tomato, one belly laugh, one swim in the ocean at a time.
Excavating Ashley 