Rightly Divided
Field notes (and musings) on agency, attunement, and authorship
Vibe+Read:
I want to ask you something directly, before you read this essay and please take all the time you need to allow your answers to be true-for you:
What is the nature of the world, the power, the body, the mind, the calling — as you understand it right now, from this season of your life?
What do you actually believe?
I am writing a novel in Connecticut.
Outside my window, something keeps asking me to pay attention to the pattern underneath this book; everything I’m watching, reading, researching, living.
The pattern is this:
We have been negotiating things that were never up for negotiation.
I am thirty-two episodes into a Brazilian telenovela set in 19th century Brazil. The woman at the center — Dona Beja — should not have existed the way she did. The world had already written her terms before she arrived. Class. Gender. Propriety. The architecture of acceptable wanting.
yet, and still….
She built a gentleman’s club. She chose her lovers. She gave birth. She married — and when she did, she looked her suitor in the eye and said:
I will have a husband. And a lover.
Not a question or a request, but a condition.
My friend & writing mentor told me a story once of how a production company wanted her book to be a movie. They came with an offer and she gave them the price. She didn’t negotiate. They came back with a little more, she gave them the price. They came back 2 more times, she told them the standard. She told them the cost. She said: this is what it is.
Two women. Two centuries apart. Same posture.
Imagine we own the house. And somehow keep asking permission to come inside.
I don’t think it’s because we’re weak, either. I do feel there’s room for more discernment and knowing when things are up for discussion versus when we should make the declaration. Somewhere in our formation- familial, cultural, spiritual, we learned to soften what we know into a question. To make our clarity palatable. To perform openness to terms we have no business accepting.
We learned to audition for things that were already ours.
Turn on any dating show and you will see this in high definition. The performing, shrinking and careful self-presentation. We watch and judge the choices. But the judgment is always tender underneath. Because we recognize it. The question a contestant is trying to answer is: will you choose me? Beja had already answered a different question: I choose myself. Here are my conditions.
Sometimes it really is what you believe is being decided (about you) in the room. Sabotage, much?
Something cracked open in the cultural conversation about Gemini this year. The sign dragged for decades as flaky, two-faced, too much and never enough. suddenly being reconsidered.
I don’t think it’s a reputation repair campaign. I think it’s an invitation to rightly divide.
And rightly dividing, truly, is not just about a zodiac sign’s reputation. It is a ceremony. A rite of reckoning ourselves back to attunement rather than achievement.
The world is mostly filled with people reenacting inherited agreements.
Until we aren’t.
What did you receive, and from whom? What have you been transmitting- about yourself, about what you deserve, about what you are allowed to want — that you accepted without ever testing?
We are living inside a Uranus-in-Gemini moment. You’re anticipating chaos when an upgrade is in progress. I invite you to top transmitting frequencies you never consciously chose.
Because here is what I know to be true:
Power is the ability to remain unchanged by pressures that ask you to betray yourself.
It is deciding the terms of exchange.
It is access to your own signal.
And the body, the body always reveals where we have negotiated against ourselves.
The invitation is not self-improvement. It is not optimization. It is to lose allegiance to the mind that keeps producing the same evidence, and return to the authority you never actually surrendered.
You just forgot it was yours. Author.
Then there’s the thing about proximity.
About the people who are around you versus the people who are with you.
Knowing who is actually in the room with you, or whose room you are eager to be in, is not cynicism. It is the same discernment that tells Beja who gets to come inside, and on what terms.
I have been offering free monthly Rest Portals — communal write and rest space for mothers and caretakers — long enough to understand something I couldn’t have earlier:
Non-transactional giving does not deplete you.
Transactional giving keeps a ledger, even when it tries not to. There is an invisible accounting of effort, recognition, return.
You cannot fully give and fully audit at the same time. The split exhausts you.
What I have found in the Rest Portal is more like a well. People come. They drink. They leave more themselves than when they arrived. The well replenishes — not from my personal reserves, but from the genuine belief that rest is sacred. That caretakers deserve to be held. That when you stop performing a value, you become it.
Dona Beja held her standard in a century that had no framework for her. My mentor held hers in a room full of people with money and leverage. The Rest Portal holds its value without a transaction attached.
The thread is the same.
A ceremony back to yourself exists on the other side of every inherited agreement you are willing to examine. The reckoning is a return to your core desires.
May we stop negotiating what was never up for negotiation. May we rightly divide what we inherited from what we actually know. May we lose allegiance to the mind that keeps producing the same evidence. And may we always give from the well.
“May anyone who seeks to control me or destroy me be met by the consequences of their own intentions.”
— field notes, Norfolk, June 2026