Not Everything Real Deserves Residency (Track Two of Siren, Not Savior) #30

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. Sometimes the question isn’t whether there’s room at the table. It’s what and who we choose to make room for. In permanent residency at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Lately, I’ve realized that the person I protect my peace from most often isn’t someone on the internet.

It isn’t politics.

It isn’t work.

It isn’t difficult people.

It’s my own mind.

Not because my mind is my enemy.

Because my mind is a magnificent storyteller.

Give it one photograph, and it writes an entire novel.

Give it one headline, and it predicts the future.

Give it one unanswered text, and it invents a motive.

For years, I thought peace meant controlling what happened around me.

Now I think peace is learning to interrupt the stories I don’t have to keep telling.

I confused feeling with feeding.

They’re not the same thing.

I can feel disappointment without feeding resentment.

I can feel grief without feeding despair.

I can feel anger without feeding outrage.

Some emotions are visitors.

Others become tenants because we keep setting the table for them.

Lately, I’ve been asking a different question:

Does this deserve a room in my queendom?

Not because it isn’t real.

Because not everything real deserves residency.

The world is exceptionally good at offering us things to feed.

Political outrage.

Comparison.

The endless temptation to make someone else’s choices mean something about our own lives.

Every day there is another invitation to abandon ourselves in service of a story.

Recently, I saw someone from my past spending time with a person who had long admired them. Years ago, I might have felt a pang of comparison, loss, or curiosity.

Instead, my first thought was, I’m glad someone is looking out for them.

The thought arrived so naturally that it startled me.

It wasn’t because I’d forgotten the past.

It was because compassion arrived before the story.

That was the moment I realized something had changed.

Not the circumstances.

Me.

Growing up, if someone unexpectedly showed up at our house, my parents had a simple response:

“Get a plate.”

There was always room for one more.

Lately, I’ve wondered if I’ve been doing the same thing inside my own mind.

Every fear?

Get a plate.

Every criticism?

Get a plate.

Every imagined conversation?

Get a plate.

No wonder my inner table has felt so crowded.

These days, I’m becoming more intentional.

Not every thought gets a seat.

Not every fear gets fed.

Not every story gets to stay.

Protecting the Queendom isn’t about building higher walls.

It’s about becoming a wiser host.

Maybe healing isn’t reaching a day when nothing bothers us.

Maybe healing is reaching a day when fewer things get invited to dinner.

Because what we feed grows.

Maybe that’s what peace has been all along: not a place we find, but a table we learn to set.

Protect the Queendom.

The Sample

“Regroup” and the idea of protecting my peace, even from my own mind, were inspired by the Regroup card from the Fertility and Creativity section of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom Oracle Cards by Christiane Northrup, M.D., one of the five oracle decks, plus my Dalí tarot deck, I regularly pull from.

I don’t use the cards to tell me what’s going to happen. I use them as prompts. An image, a word, an idea that sometimes catches something my brain has already been trying to tell me.

This one caught something:

I confused feeling with feeding.

They’re not the same thing.

Track Notes

This piece is about learning the difference between feeling something and feeding it.

Protecting your peace isn’t pretending anger, grief, jealousy, fear, disappointment, or outrage aren’t real. It’s recognizing that experiencing an emotion doesn’t require giving it permanent residency.

For those of us accustomed to paying attention to everything, the work, the world, the people we love, the people we’re worried about, the people who irritate the shit out of us, discernment can be its own form of liberation.

Not everything that knocks deserves a key.

Not everything real deserves residency.

Liner Notes

The thinkers, stories, spiritual texts, art, and cultural cues that live underneath this track.

• Circe | Madeline Miller
  I’m reading this now, and its questions about exile, transformation, voice, power, and female sovereignty are very much wandering around my brain.

• Meggan Watterson | Mary Magdalene and the divine feminine
  I’m immersed in Watterson’s books as I prepare for a retreat at the end of the month. Her explorations of Mary Magdalene, inner authority, love, and the sacred feminine are influencing how I’m thinking about sovereignty from the inside out.

• Protect Your Light | George Lizos
  I picked this up at the Namaste Bookstore on 14th Street and I read this cover to cover on the plane back from New York City this week. Its exploration of protecting your energy and becoming conscious about what you allow into your emotional and energetic space has stayed with me.

• The Dinner Party | Judy Chicago
  A monumental table built around presence, memory, and women claiming space. Its imagery of place settings and who gets remembered at the table has been sitting alongside my own questions about what and whom we make room for.

• The Siren
  The mythology underneath this entire series continues to interest me. The Siren has a voice. She doesn’t run from ship to ship trying to save everyone aboard. She stays rooted in her own power and sings. What is the truth between desire and self-control?

The Next Track

Many women learn early to be “easy to work with.”

I used to hear that entirely as a compliment.

Now I’m wondering what it costs us.

Next up: Easy Is Expensive. When being easy to work with becomes self-erasure, and how to reclaim your voice without burning everything down.