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I suspect that this message is for people who are coming to grips with their voice. I barely know where to start this.
I’ve been trying to come to grips with my voice for I don’t know how long, but it’s been in my conscious awareness since about 2018, when I became aware that I was an Enneagram 3. I found out for the first time in my life that all these things that I thought were me were actually just the things that I was doing so that I could pay the rent, maybe even buy a house one day, buy cat food for the kitties, you know, just be in material existence. There’s no way to opt out of our lessons with money, so I’m gonna forgive myself that I didn’t know. I still don’t know how to be in right relationship with money. I am still trying to square my fear of being rejected with my deep desire to bring my voice into the world—all the ways that I’ve censored myself on behalf of employers and clients that I knew wouldn’t like what I really have to say. I knew because I know I’m not wrong about this. I’m not wrong.
I had the experience of people cutting me off during COVID. I’m sure many people had fights one way or another and lost people because we wanted to say something that felt really important and core to our sense of safety in the world. I don’t even want to get into who’s on what side. It just doesn’t even fucking matter. What matters is that we didn’t know how to talk to each other. It breaks my heart, still breaking my heart, because there’s a bunch of people who see the world changing in really big, worried ways right now. We still don’t know how to talk to each other about some of the most important stuff because it could get us fired or thrown out from our social group or our best friend who we really just don’t have any other friends. If that best friend wasn’t available, I just don’t know how we’d be on the planet right now. But maybe that best friend doesn’t like what you really have to say.
I’m coming to terms with my mother’s karma. Back in September, my guides said to me when I was really mad at a friend who wasn’t looking at her mom’s karma—I was like, honey bunny, this is staring right in the face—my guides were like, if you really want to scream this at her, probably you need to say it to yourself. Don’t treat your mother’s karma like a foreign country is exactly what they said to me. Those words are still piercing me through.
If you followed along with last week’s missive, I had just touched for the very first time a place—thanks to bufo—for maybe five minutes. Let’s call it five minutes. I felt the plane on which all of us are already awake. Then I poured back into this existence. It’s been a really interesting week since. I’m grappling because I need to unmask. I have to unmask. I have to find my voice.
Wouldn’t you know it, I showed up at the airport in one of these horrific capitalist systems, Volaris, which is basically the United Airlines of Mexico. They just don’t have empowered people. They don’t have good processes. You know the deal. You’ve been in these situations. I don’t need to explain to you, probably the world over, these sort of situations where nobody’s real. The employees are not really doing anything. They’re not really going above and beyond. You get blamed for shit that’s 100% not your fault. The check-in system was down. A bunch of people couldn’t get checked in. I was one of those people. Normally, they’re like—Volaris has got horrible technical infrastructure many times. I fly with Volaris almost every month to LA because it’s a monopoly. They are the only ones that have a non-stop, so I really don’t have an actual choice if I want to fly non-stop.
Many times I’ve had check-in glitches, so I went to the airport as normal. This time I didn’t realize there was a system failure. A whole bunch of people had check-in glitches. There was a massive line. I wasn’t gonna make my flight. I looked at that line. I know this line. I’m not gonna make my flight. Long story short, I was trying to get as many people as possible on this flight. There was a woman who called me a Karen because what she saw was a white woman who was trying to get bumped up to the front of the line. I’m like, oh my god, we’re not all gonna get on this plane if we, the passengers, don’t do something to expedite this process because the employees are not—you can see what they’re going to do. They’re gonna blame us and say, well, you should have gotten to the airport three hours in advance. Oh, did they admit that there was a check-in glitch? Did I get an email saying, “hey, we’re so sorry, here’s a refund of your flight, here’s at least a voucher?” No.
This is late-stage capitalism. These companies don’t apologize. They don’t train their employees to be able to apologize and to admit what’s going on. They re-traumatize us by gaslighting us, being like, “oh, you should have gotten to the airport at five o’clock in the morning.” No. Your system’s been broken for 24 hours. It wouldn’t matter if I got here yesterday. Your system isn’t checking people in, period, the end.
I got called a Karen by another frustrated passenger. I didn’t like it. It really stung to be insulted. Man, is it a complex one. Holy shit, is it complex, because I want a lot more white women to talk to the manager—not because we want to ignore the dog leash policy. Honestly, the dog thing such a minor thing, but yes, I get it–there are absolutely white women who are not connected to their hearts who are using their white privilege to do stupid shit, you know, like calling the police on a man for being black in their neighborhood. There’s absolutely legit crazy nonsense that white women are doing. Yet also, if you happen to be born in a white body or a body of any color, this is the year to be coming into our voice.
Whoever you are, there is an insult to shut you up.
“Karen” cut me to my core.
I imagine whatever color you are, whatever country you were born into, there is an equivalent word that you can be called by someone. Maybe you will be. Maybe I don’t know. Maybe we just have to live through our nightmares. It seems like we just have to live through our nightmare and be called the thing that we don’t want to be called because it’s inevitable. I mean, who do you know who’s ever had a voice that ever said to you—ever, not one—there’s not one person who came into their voice who had the experience of everybody liking it. If there’s one thing we can guarantee, it’s that someone, probably lots of ones, won’t like what you have to say.
I have tried for years to develop the strength to say things that piss people off. I’ve been removed from communities when I said things that others didn’t like—communities run by white men, I just want to note in particular. That still hurts. The friends who cut me off during COVID because I had a viewpoint they didn’t like, because I dared—literally the thing that cut me to the quick with that was they said they were upset that I spoke about it. It was like, oh, if you had had that viewpoint and just kept it to yourself, maybe we would still be your friends. But because you said it on Facebook, in public, where it could harm other people, that was our last straw.
I think we all understand—surely you understand. If you don’t, when are you gonna go talk to the trees? Maybe that would help a little bit. I love some trees. I love trees, don’t get me wrong. But the point of a voice is not just to talk to the trees for most of us. I know it’s not for me. I mostly want to go listen to the trees. I don’t need to talk to them so much. When I see a really good tree, like a real old one, I always say the same thing to the tree. I just go up to the tree, pat it, tell it what a good job it’s doing. I have no idea. There’s some other part of me that takes over that’s like the tree cheerleader. I always go tell the trees what a good job they’re doing. I don’t know why. It’s been like this for years. I just feel like my message to the trees is: I see you. You’re amazing. Thanks for holding down this corner. I see what you’re doing here. You’re an energetic anchor. You’re doing a great job. I don’t know that they needed that talk, but maybe they do. I need to give it to them is all I know.
That’s me and the trees. We have a very simple conversation. Here I am, clearing my throat. Oh my goodness. Working with these micro doses of bufo is helping me come into my voice. I just have to publish. There’s so much that I don’t understand. There is so much that I want to talk about. There is a community that I want to form to start to unravel the rift between men and women because we’ve been programmed to mistrust each other, to not tell the truth to each other, to omit things, to pretend that we like things we don’t like. I’m literally clearing my throat as this is all happening. Sip of tea.
There’s things that I don’t know how to talk about, even to my bestie, best male friend. I want to talk about it with some ladies. I need some coven space. I need us not to hate men. There’s a lot—still there’s a lot of women, and I respect where they are in their journey. I really genuinely do. They say a lot of things that I do agree with, but when there’s this flavor of “fuck all men” or literally like “stop having sex with all men,” I’m like, no, I’m not gonna go there. That’s just me personally. If that’s where you’re at, I honor where you are in your journey, but that’s not where I am. I don’t want to center hating men. That’s not the center of the conversation, right? That’s not the—I just really don’t want to tolerate rage. Anger, absolutely. There’s anger in me. I want to talk about the anger, but if you’re not willing to come into what’s presently true, if you want to hold on to the rage as a safety blanket and be like, I am not willing to look at the man who’s presently standing in front of me, I need this like a chain mail to keep me safe—that’s absolutely fine. I really genuinely know that’s in a lot of people’s body. That’s where they are. That’s fine. That’s not where I’m at. That’s not the center of the conversation that I want to have.
I’m coming to terms with being autistic. When I was talking earlier about not treating my mother’s karma like a foreign country, I’m here to heal my matrilineal mind line, meaning I’m here to heal the patterns that my mother faced, that my mother’s mother faced. Maybe I don’t even know how many generations it went back—this pattern of not being supported by a man, I mean really supported. This man considers you family. You’re in his inner circle. The way men often describe it is, I’ll bury the bodies with you.
My mom didn’t have that support from any man. She didn’t have it with my dad. My grandmother didn’t have it. She didn’t have it with my grandfather or the first—that was the second man. My granny. Oh my gosh, you think I was spitfire? My granny got divorced twice in a time when it was barely legal, even. It was barely possible. She did in in a time when women couldn’t have a credit card in their own name. My granny got divorced twice. I don’t know what the story was with her mother and her grandfather, but at least those two—there just wasn’t a man who had my mom’s back. There wasn’t a man who had my granny’s back.
Even though I was married and I thought that man had my back, he didn’t. When I found my voice, and I left the holy roller church that is a cult—maybe not as pernicious as some, no snakes, no Strychnine, no Kool-Aid, no suicide pacts, no doomsday prophecies, well maybe some doomsday prophecies but not real, real hardcore. Just, you know, cover-up-sexual-assault-by-pastors kind of hardcore. They’ll tell you where you can and can’t live. Tell you who you should and shouldn’t marry. Control your sexuality. You have to wear certain clothes. You have to be modest. You can’t paint your nails. Well, you can, but you’ll get shamed for it. Can’t wear jewelry. But you can, but not too much. You have to know what the line is. Somebody might shame you for it even if you’re wearing the same amount of jewelry as somebody else who sits on the platform. Oh my gosh, there are so many stories from that church I can’t even explain it all.
I thought that man had my back. He did not. When I saw through the trappings of the cult, and I left the cult, I died. Our marriage was over. It was the till death do us part. I died. We both chose to go our separate ways, but I discovered that he didn’t have my back. If I use my voice, I would be disconnected from that. I would no longer be in his inner circle. I might sleep in the same bed as him. We might have the same checking account, but that was really just out of a sense of duty, not actually me being his person, you know? I was kicked out. I was kicked out of that circle. I found out how shallow appearances could be.
My mother was autistic, too.
Back to my mother. My mother was diagnosed as ADHD, ADD. She wasn’t diagnosed with autism. She was diagnosed with schizoid, which is not schizophrenia but it is in the odd cluster, literally called the odd cluster, which I still kind of marvel at. My mom—you have to understand, if you’re an Enneagram 3, meaning you’re the overachiever and you need to be exemplary, to be the best—I was. I probably would have been valedictorian had I not dropped out of high school a year early to go to college. Grades perfect, blah blah blah. I didn’t really have any friends, but I was doing the academic thing. That was the thing I knew how to be perfect in. I was doing my best to appear perfect, which is why I joined the church and was little miss perfect within the context of that small little fishing pond called the church. They didn’t consider me so weird. I was their kind of weird. But when I left that, I was just weird again. I was just the—now as an atheist—weird girl.
I found another pond called geeks, the technology community in Portland. Probably a lot of autistic people are in the technology community. I felt comfortable. I felt at home there. It had its season in my life. Then I burned out, really badly burned out doing the thing that the technology community tells you to do, which is to start a startup. I did because It had so many markers of success, blah blah blah. But ultimately, we ran out of money, and didn’t get the next round of funding. I burned out, burned out, burned out. Then I burned out again when my mom passed in 2022.
I burned out in 2016. Then again in ‘22 to ‘23. Then I was trying to treat whatever this disorder was, thinking that it was a parasite issue. Long story, blah blah, end up in the hospital. Burned out again at the end of ‘24 into ‘25. I was like, “why can’t I get back on my feet? Why can’t I find my energy again?” I had no idea that autism was connected with chronic fatigue. I had no idea that chronic fatigue was due to masking and not having your voice, not being aligned to your sacred work, your holy work that fills you.
When you do this sacred work, it’s like plugging into an electrical outlet, to be of service. This is all in the constellation of the work that we do to be of service to others, which does fill us in one way, and then the work that we do in our hobbies to fill both our masculine need to be of service and our feminine need to connect with the deep essential voice within us. Both can pay you.
There’s so many things to talk about, so many things to talk about and disentangle. A lot of it has to do with gender, but we’ll have to put a pin in that for later.
I don’t think there’s ever a convenient time to come into your voice.
I’m coming to terms with what it is to have autism and ADHD and to be unmasking in 2026. In some way, I feel like this is the most convenient time because a lot of us are coming into our voice. A lot of us are going, yeah, I don’t like that. I don’t like it when you talk to me that way. I don’t attack myself anymore. I don’t need to pretend that I like it when someone else talks to me that way anymore.
I don’t even know how to tie this up in a bow. I don’t know what my call to action is. I don’t know what my monetization strategy is. It all seems so inconvenient. But guess what? This is the year of finding our voice. We are going to do it.
I will say this: if this message resonates with you, my struggle is that I often put out really vulnerable stuff, and I just don’t get much response. I don’t know if I’m talking about the right things. I don’t know if I’m talking about it in the right way. I don’t know who I’m talking to. So if this resonates, please hit reply, leave a comment on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. I will do my best to read them. If you are on the Substack, you can comment on the post if you feel like you want everybody to see it. You can hit reply to any of these emails. I will read it.
This is my tender request. I so often feel like I’m screaming into the void. I don’t know why I’m doing it because it just seems like it gets me in trouble, but I have to. I have to find this voice. I have to find this voice. It has to go out into the public. It has to find the people that it’s here to connect with because I just can’t help thinking we should be talking to each other. We should be figuring this out together because it’s really hard to do this on our own.
I will end as I always do with the tagline, which hopefully will make sense as we are untangling all this good girl conditioning of what I am supposed to say, what I’m supposed to keep to myself, and what I’m not supposed to think at all:
Be good, but not too good.
Love y’all. Bye.
cris
