What Happens After Becoming

I have spent most of my adult life becoming.

Becoming educated. Becoming financially secure. Becoming a lawyer. Becoming an entrepreneur. Becoming an author. Becoming a wife. Becoming someone who could survive things my younger self couldn’t have imagined. There was always another mountain, and invariably, I would climb it.

Then - sometime around crossing the threshold into the crone phase of my life - another question started creeping in:

What if becoming isn’t the point anymore? What if it’s time to just be?

What if fixing, perfecting, refining, and climbing toward some alternate version of myself is a phase I’m allowed to complete? What if becoming has now become a distraction?

I don’t mean to say that the journey to here was useless or a waste of time. It wasn’t. I did a lot of the proverbial growing and expanding that we talk about incarnating for. I learned, became more capable, more resilient.

Then my gaze began to settle inward rather than looking wildly all around me, and I came to an epiphany.

In my youth, I strove toward outward achievement. Not because I was actually going anywhere, but because I relished the external validation that followed. The applause for overcoming. The accolades of certificates and diplomas and gold stars. The “good on you for working so hard.” Achievement provided assurance that I was doing life correctly: moving in linear fashion through defined milestones of “success” that earned me a seat at the table.

Guiding me along the way was an increasing interest in spirituality and personal development. I became quite good at manifestation. I learned how to focus my intention, direct my energy, and participate consciously in creating my life. The irony of this type of manifestation is that continually “next-leveling” my life wasn’t deepening my understanding of myself or the Universe; I had simply found a way to bury my feelings of unworthiness in pixie dust.

Because even in the personal-development community, we subtly vilify stillness. If you are still, you are lazy. Lazy carries heavy connotations in an industry that thrives off instilling into you that you’re not there yet. You have healing to do. You need to do the work. You have not arrived. You will never arrive.

This is why we admonish one another for “wasting time” scrolling or watching Netflix. Bubble baths are discarded as “not real self-care.” We’re only caring for ourselves, apparently, when we have a dedicated three-hour morning routine that includes meditation, exercise, journaling, lighting a candle, pulling a card, and checking a horoscope, topped off with a cold plunge and ceremonial-grade cacao.

We took achievement culture, draped it in linen, lit some incense, and called it enlightenment. Rather than freeing ourselves from the endless project of becoming, we spiritualized our perfectionism.

I’m tired. And I’m over it.

I’m ready for ease and flow.

Real ease and flow - not performative, social-media-curated ease and flow. Not ease as another stop on the road to some greater achievement. Finding magic in the mere fact that I am divinity embodied in a physical expression of a small sliver of god in sweatpants and a t-shirt kind of ease and flow.

I have been largely absent from public view for about a year now. While nestled inside that sacred cocoon, I gave myself permission to stop looking elsewhere for a better version of me. And I found myself thinking a lot about my childhood and adolescence, and about all the parts of myself I left there, untouched, while I was busy becoming someone else.

I had literally forgotten how much I loved to write.

To pontificate.

To compose a photograph.

To walk in my mother’s garden.

To wonder about strange things without an agenda.

To be present with myself without needing to turn the experience into something productive.

And slowly, the desire to return began rising within me.

So, here I am.

But this time, I want to be honest.

I’m not here to perform spirituality or sand down my beliefs until they are sufficiently palatable for an algorithm, an audience, or a marketplace. I don’t need every thought to become a lesson or every spiritual experience to become a five-step framework.

Sometimes I just want to wonder aloud.

That is what I intend for Written in the Stars to be - an open exploration of whatever stirs within me, from the esoteric to the mundane. How my practice of spiritual manifestation is evolving. Why I think the planets are gods and their myths are the stories of humanity. How my garden is failing this summer, and how I’m finding the capacity to let it.

For those familiar with my previous work, some of what I write here may feel provocative. My first book introduced a manifestation framework that was intentionally mainstream-friendly. That doesn’t make it inauthentic, but rather, a gateway. Beyond that gateway is a fuller expression – a deeper witchcraft. I believe this is what the crone phase is asking of me.

Much of what I encounter in contemporary witchcraft seems written for younger generations of witches. There are fewer spaces that celebrate the crone - not as a warning of what happens to a woman when youth abandons her, but as a passage into something else entirely.

Wisdom. Sovereignty. Discernment. A quiet yet profound power that no longer requires an audience. Or an award.

Without her, magical practice can begin to feel like something novel and trendy for the curious rather than something pragmatic, ancient, and sacred for the wise.

I want to make space for her here.

I want to explore spirituality without needing to make it pretty. Philosophy without pretending I have reached the answer. Metaphysics without apologizing for taking extraordinary ideas seriously. And ordinary human life without insisting that every moment become an opportunity for transformation.

Because the next initiation in my life isn’t about becoming someone different; it’s about finally having the courage to be who I have already become.