apokálypsis + revelation: my favorite kind of tea party

wallowing in the stink

Happy weekend, fam! Welcome back to my OGs, and welcome to new subscribers! For those of you who just joined our li’l community, allow me to introduce myself.

I’m Summer, a mom and word weaver, Spanish teacher, cultural anthropologist, and performing “artivist” in Lingit Aani, Juneau, Alaska. I have two kids: a fey artist and a trickster tween, and I’m married to an old-school Alaskan fisherman and water worker. We just acquired a mini-Bernedoodle puppy named Rumi.

I was raised by Californian feminists and disturbed Gen-X puppets in 80s “Out-the-Road” Alaska. This is what I look like:

Living in Latin American and Caribbean cultures for several years and receiving my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, I learned a lot about other cultures—but most of all, I learned about my own. So, I created this newsletter, the Feral Stack, to examine Anglo-American culture deeply, beyond the vapid, connecting behaviors and values that no longer serve us and offering new ones that do. 

Also, I write about gender. Some of my more popular pieces include “When God Was a Woman” and “Patriarchy is Bad for Men, Too.” Thank you to those of you who have suffered through my rants. I love you the most.

Today, a pivot. Not because life has pivoted. But because I let myself stare at a wall and sit in my feelings for hours.

On this day in particular, I was not winning any Mother of the Year awards. This morning was a Fail. And by fail, I mean apocalyptic. As my son would say, “selling.”

My husband was trying to trap a shrew at his mom’s while I was becoming a shrew at home. My son wanted to go biking and fishing, but my daughter and I had awoken exhausted and sick. (Mentally or physically, not sure which. Maybe it’s long Covid? Maybe it’s perimenopause. Maybe it’s capitalism patriarchy. Maybe it’s Maybelline.)

I said, “Sorry, but I’m too tired for all that fun, Son.” And he said some rude shit that involved the word shit. 

And I turned into this:

Baba Yaga, my alter ego during the pandemic lockdown, which I also wrote about here and here. Image by Miki Mueller Studio

I will die on the anti-spanking hill. I couldn’t throw a punch in my nightmares. But I may have just considered eating my child this morning.

So, I lost my shit. Low tide, stinky decaying, smelly fish, buttcrack hangin’ out, did not pass GO and collect $100. Like I said, zero awards.

I guess I was tired of winning mother awards. Fuck those awards. I was tired of Doing It All—tired because, once again, I had insomnia, up all night trying to single-handedly solve my children’s unsolvable problems with my dead-ass-tired broken brain.

The ironic thing is I was listening to a parenting podcast when all this happened. In the name of Alanis Morisette, can you buh-lieve the irony?!

You would think that with school starting, it would get easier, right? Sharing the load, getting our village back. But in Juneau, Alaska, school is kinda traumatic. Due to staffing, my daughter doesn’t even have a para, even though it’s written into her IEP. And Sunday night, rumors circulated nationwide that someone was going to pull the fire alarm and shoot everyone up when kids came outside, and my son’s middle school was one of the schools mentioned.

Amidst all the storm, moms become default feelings-holder. Emotional exhaustion is real.

Recently, on some podcast (forgive me, I can’t remember which), I learned that the actual root of the word apocalypse stems from the Greek word apokálypsis, which means "revelation" or "unveiling."

I’m a water sign. I steep in shit. Like tea. A shit tea, if you will. And this morning, I just steeped in the apocalyptic shit tea that had created me and this bed in which I must lie, which literally has a big ass hole in the sheets that my daughter tore with her teeth.

I sat in my emotions, didn’t push them away, numb or work or “productive” them away, but sat in the same chair for two hours until I could peel back the veil and get to the revelation part. It was a sunny day, too. I could’ve gone on an adventure. I could have sat in the sun. I could have... I could have... I could have… not sat in this fucking chair for two fucking hours.

And now here I was. Empty, cried out, cleaned out, and unveiled. And, dare I say it, a little closer to truth? Sitting in my truth, in my bare nekkid apocalypticness, peeled back. Like the low tide denudes the inner organs of the sea. Or a wound strips the flesh, revealing what’s inside.

Maybe you’re like, cringe! But to know thyself… that is the beginning of wisdom, right, Socrates?

Bayo Akomolafe writes about greeting our monsters, “the agents of shape-shifting.” Melissa Febos writes: “Perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”

Perhaps greeting our monsters is the only way toward revelation and transformation.

This is why I hesitate to self-medicate, worried that running away from my monsters could lead to deeper, endemic problems. I’ve seen it happen in our culture, which treats symptoms and not the root of the problem.

Maybe there’s a reason for insomnia, worry, depression, and, yes, even apocalyptic mornings. There is a purpose for the screams and tears. They hold a purpose. We have to move that shit out.

With easy access to screens, we’ve lost our ability to sit with our feelings and move them through to get to the transformation part. Anytime we feel uncomfortable, we just turn to a screen for a dopamine hit. If we are bored, uneasy with the unknown, or irritable, we can just reach for a device. We don’t even let ourselves be curious for more than a second. 

I remember when my son was little and having a hard time. He started reaching for his device, a response I often saw in him and myself when I/he felt terrible and needed a quick dopamine hit.

So I said, “No. Sit with this for a second. It doesn’t feel good—I get it—it feels terrible. But it’s important for you to feel this so you can move through it. If you don't sit with this, it will burrow like shrapnel and fester under your skin, and maybe even grow you crooked.”

I sat with him and his feelings as he cried but understood. After several minutes, he stopped and looked at me with a smile as if to say I let them move through me. He got to the reveal part, the apokálypsis.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could sit with their feelings until they arrived at some revelation or epiphany, rather than all constipated? In all our brilliance, we’ve put supercomputers into our pockets that solve all our problems while creating bigger, insidious ones we don’t even see.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a system that has diverged from the truth. In centering capital and productivity, we’ve de-centered our humanity, our relationships with ourselves, others, and our environment. We don’t let ourselves struggle, cutting off sources of wisdom, seeking short-term, instant solutions, and resolving symptoms without looking at causes. We dissect and separate without looking at the big picture. We rank and compare, and everything is a competition. We are violent. We distrust the most marginalized of us and seek to control. We cast out that which is not useful for feeding the machine. We worship at the feet of machines. Even now, AI is telling me what to think and do.

If we don’t let ourselves steep in our shit tea and sit in our pain caves without numbing and distracting, we continue walking the same worn path carved down the hillside. We continue looking for external messages and covering up our innate truths.

Maybe this is why I prefer the darkness of fall and winter. My energy feels depleted during spring and summer because I don’t have the chance to sit with my feelings. I don’t get to the darkness where I can look inward to see my truth. Yes, spring and summer are fun, external-facing, surface-level, playful. However, facing out takes me to other people's stories, projections, and experiences, away from my truth. 

Fall darkness welcomes the return to dialogue with self. To the unveiling and the revealing. Tell me, do you let yourself steep in shit tea? Does it bring you to revelation?

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Xo,

Summer

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