Session Nine

A Thursday in June. Thoughts on yapping, making friends, and connecting to our indicators.

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello, I'm Cassie and welcome back to Cedar Sessions. This episode is a reading from an essay from a Thursday in June. I hope you enjoy. For a while I was posting videos of myself talking on social media. I was usually on a walk, in a flow with my thoughts, and I would record them to post. I thought that's what you were supposed to do for social media growth. Be authentic. Be you. Let people connect with you. I'd heard it in more sales pitches than I care to recall, the Instagram sales pitches that, quote, aren't sales pitches, but invitations to discover your true self. Something in me would rage every time I heard this, my mind protesting that I had tried that and it had gotten me nowhere. Just exhausted by the number of videos the algorithm wants you to post a week. This morning, however, I was drawn in and was sucked into watching a few stories. Stories about yapping and how to do it. I had to Google what the obsession was with it, and with a single click, recognized my rage and its root. Raw, unedited, talking to a camera. Sitting outside on my patio, I laughed. Laughing is often my indicator that something has clicked in me. Usually it is laughter directed at all of the times I let something ravage my mind, not quite understanding the beginning of the loop. Something in me gets stirred up. It creates a disharmony in my body, which for me looks like anger and rage. I acquiesce that something has me angry. And for the time being, of course, until something of the same root stirs me again, I'm calm. Sometimes it takes a while to realize the root. This one. This one took three or thirty-seven years. What clicked? I don't want to have raw, authentic conversations with a camera. I try them, and no sooner do I hit post does the void start swelling around me. I want to have those conversations with a person. I've considered taking an ad out for a small handful of friends. Wanted two to three women, late 30s to mid 40s, running some shit and looking to have deep conversations. I don't really care about summer camp. I don't really care about false sports or school activities. When I was little dreaming of my blue suburban, it clearly came with a posse of mom friends who would sit around with a glass of rose while the kids played in the backyard. What the eight-year-old and me didn't see in that picture was the masking that was happening. We're so taken by the separation caused by social media, AI, performance, what have you, that we're trying to unwind it with the same things causing the disconnection. Now I'd rather sit on a park bench or in the dim lighting of my studio looking at the ceiling, talking about my deepest guilt, griefs, joys, dreams, loves. The relief that washes over me when something clicks is immediate and typically all-encompassing. A small epiphany that at least creates an understanding in my body. On this morning, church bells ring in the distance, which feels like an ode to my clarity, because why are church bells ringing on a Thursday? It was a sign. I used to believe in signs when I was younger. One day when I was in middle school, my mom drove me to school. Ordinarily, I took a bus for the 45-minute ride home from Ocean City, rather, ride to school, but this morning we were in the car. I was flipping through the radio stations, 98 Rock, Q105, when I couldn't believe my 12-year-old ears. They were about to give away a pair of front row concert tickets to see Otown. Ashley Parker Angel was a true angel sent from making the band Heaven. I had never won anything in my life, but I knew that I was in that car for a reason that morning. And this was it. Back in the day, when you wanted to win something on the radio, they usually talked about it for the week and then the entire hour before. Tune in Thursday at nine for a chance to win. I anxiously waited the entire car ride. Normally switching the station at a commercial, I suffered through each one waiting for the call and the call-in moment to arrive. We pulled up to the light to the light just before my school, my heart pounding that I would miss the moment when just then, all right out there, we're giving away two front row tickets. We'll take caller number three. Perfect. My lucky number. Another sign. Hello, Q105, your caller number three. Who do we have? I was dead. At 12, I was having an out-of-body experience. Cassie, I shouted. I could hardly contain myself at school, shaking with the excitement of what I had just accomplished. And the best part, a ticket to offer someone at school, to secure my best friend. Turns out everyone is willing to be your best friend for a front-road ticket to O Town at the Civic Center. I have a habit of disassociating with someone if I smell disloyalty. It's a protective pattern that served the younger version of myself when anyone came close to saying I or my ideas were too much. Upon meeting my now husband, my older cousin stated, You better not hurt her. You don't fuck with the family. So it ran deep. The insinuation of action that would follow had been so prevalent in my life, and it was pretty much the entire sentiment. At 12, I had a ticket that would secure my friendship. I ran up to my best friend and told her. We squealed and started planning how to meet our future famous boyfriends. I heard her talking about me in gym class three days later and called off our date. Even then, I knew what I craved in people, and I was ready to annihilate any relationship that didn't meet the expectation. That too was a sign I had missed for the first three decades of my life, the anger that would rise in my body with a swift decision to end any situation that might give people a real glimpse of Cassie. At 37, signs have taken on a new layer in my life. I stopped believing in them somewhere around 16, likely when I hardened my soul to my father, both literal and metaphorical. I grew up in the Catholic Church, Sunday school, altar girl, lector, serving roles at the weekly soup and salad during Lent. It was a weekly part of my childhood, though rarely discussed Monday through Saturday. The godliness of religion on Sunday did not translate into an associated spirituality in daily life. Maybe it was all of the reports of abuse, porn, and deception that started quietly leaking, or maybe it was deeper than that. I have more recently realized that spirituality is not, in fact, a religious endeavor. That the belief in connection to a higher power isn't inextricably linked to a formal religion. What's more is I've realized spirituality is also not what it is portrayed by the Yappers. It's not your favorite spiritual guide telling you to let go and let God. Many would have you believe if you open your arms to the sky and said, deliver me from evil, you would be struck by lightning and your world would become magic. For me, it was a re-emergence of signs that came from a deep connection to myself, deciding to be my own friend, deciding to, at the very least, like myself. If you've dabbled in anything with spiritual signs, you certainly know that birds are a topic of spiritual connection. One prominent among them being the crow. If you Google crows and spiritual meanings, you get things like bridge between the spiritual and physical world, transformation, the shadow self, death. About a year ago, I started noticing three crows regularly circling our backyard, making a home in one of our trees. Of course, the dark version of me went straight to death. What does this mean? Am I dying? Is someone else dying? They came back day after day, mostly in the morning when I would spend my time in breath work or meditation. The fact that it was three of them was also not lost on me, the number that just keeps perpetuating itself in my life. After a few weeks, I started to realize that it wasn't quite physical death their presence was sparking. It was a shedding of many layers that had built up over the past two decades. I let them go, eventually acknowledging them as part of the mini wildlife sanctuary we have in the city, until that is a few months ago. I had just taken the kids to school, my three girls. It was a perfect early spring day, beautiful sun hitting the back patio, the scent of honeysuckles starting to bloom. I had this unusual urge to write. I had not really been writing at all outside of the occasional journaling, but this felt different, a distinct urge to get my laptop, go outside, sit in the sun, and write. Writing started to pour out of me. I couldn't move my fingers fast enough. Writing the essay that you may have listened to earlier about my father. I was about to write the piece about jail and my 16-year-old rejection when I stopped. I couldn't do it. I couldn't share it, write it, be that vulnerable. All of a sudden, a crow swooped down and landed on the back of a chair no more than three feet from where I was sitting. It stood there staring at me for a few minutes before it started squawking at me. Yes? What? What is it? I asked. It flew away only to return a moment later and sit on the roof overhang just above my head, before moving again to the chair in front of me. If you Google again, crows, and add the calling piece, you get an urgent message to use your voice, your inner wisdom. I took a breath and the writing started pouring again. The whole story. One that even the closest of friends didn't know in full. Later, after reading the essay on my podcast, a friend texted, Did that really happen with your dad? That day, five people reached out to me about the episode. Signs come into our lives in many ways. Sometimes it's a loud crow. Other times it's the perfect song at just the right moment. Or a caller number three. It took me a while to come back to them to open up again, to start seeing spirituality as something separate than the religion that imposed rule imposed rules of engagement, to allow spirituality to be something that connected me to something deeper and allowed the most important spark parts of me to surface. For now, I'm letting them guide me past the yapping into an upgraded version of the backyard. For now, I'm choosing my conversations, I'm choosing my interactions to go deeper, to go into what I imagine, which I know my body, my spirit, my soul, what it craves and what it can create. So back to the ad I'm taking applications now. All right. Thanks for listening. I hope you have a great day. And I will see you next time on Cedar Session.