I Didn't Ask for It and I'm Giving It Back

Hey bestie,

I have been thinking about the strange economy of being the person who can handle things. In some cultures, there is an ancient, mystical phrase for this: “being the eldest daughter”. 

But it's not just eldest daughters. If someone doesn't plan, somebody else compensates. If someone won't have the difficult conversation, somebody else lives inside the tension. If someone refuses to learn how to do something, somebody else becomes permanently responsible for knowing how. If a family, workplace or relationship is held together by one person's willingness to anticipate every problem before it happens, everyone gets to enjoy the illusion that the system works.

Guess who pays for that illusion?

Women are frequently taught that being loving means being absorbent. We absorb discomfort, logistics, emotional consequences, awkwardness, other people's bad moods and the fallout from decisions we did not make. Eventually your nervous system becomes a municipal waste-management facility for other people's choices.

Then, if you finally become unwilling to do it, someone may tell you that you've changed.

Correct. Here's an award for noticing.

Compassion is a beautiful thing. Understanding another person's wounds can be a beautiful thing. Neither requires volunteering to become the landfill where the consequences of everybody else's choices are deposited.

Sometimes the sacred act is not forgiveness, accommodation or finding a more generous interpretation.

Sometimes the sacred act is giving the fucking invoice back.

A Spell for Returning What Isn't Yours

You will need a small stone that fits comfortably in your hand, a glass or bowl of water, plenty of salt and a candle. White candles are good; use what you have.

Add the salt to the water. Hold the stone and think about something you are carrying because somebody else would not carry it. Now, to be clear this is not a spell for retaliation or punishment or what I would affectionately term getting ya lick back. We are not throwing somebody else's shit back through their spiritual front window. This is about responsibility and jurisdiction.

Ask yourself:

What actually belongs to me here?

When you know, speak:

I keep what is mine:
my choices,
my words,
my integrity,
my repair.

I release what is not mine:
your choices,
your consequences,
your silence,
your work.

I return responsibility to its rightful owner.
I will not purchase peace with pieces of myself.
I will not confuse love with endless absorption.
What is mine remains with me.
What is not mine may leave.

Put the stone on your altar. Keep the salt water beneath your bed for one to three nights.

In my own practice, I use salt water this way as an energetic cleanser, letting it sit beneath me while I sleep as a way of clearing what I no longer want to carry and grounding myself back into my own energy.

When you are ready to complete the spell, take the stone to a safe crossroads, a place where paths meet, or a tree near the crossing where leaving a stone will not create a hazard or disturb the land.

Put it down and say:

I leave here what I will no longer carry.

Turn around. Do not look back! 

That part is IMPORTANT. Do. Not. Look. Back.

If the salt water remains, pour it down the drain rather than onto plants or soil, then wash the vessel. The spell is finished.

Temple Soundtrack: Listen to the Temple Soundtrack on Spotify

For this ritual, play Earth My Body on the Temple Soundtrack playlist when you return home. Feel your feet. Feel your body. Come back to what is yours.

The spell is what you do. The blessing is what you receive. Read this aloud to close your ritual, or save it for the next time you catch yourself quietly picking up an invoice that was never addressed to you.

A Blessing for the Woman Who Is Tired of Absorbing the Cost of Everybody Else's Bullshit

Beloved,

May you know the difference between kindness and self-abandonment. May other people's discomfort cease to function as an emergency in your body. May you stop mistaking your capacity to carry something for evidence that you should.

May every responsibility find its rightful owner. May your no require fewer footnotes. May your boundaries survive another person's disappointment.

May you remember that being loving does not require being endlessly absorbent. May you keep your tenderness without becoming a container for what other people refuse to hold.

And may every invoice that was never yours be marked, with great spiritual authority:

RETURN TO SENDER.

With love and fewer unpaid spiritual invoices,

Sierra

From The Book of Blessings by Sierra Jamerson · Temple of Sound
Free spells, blessings, rituals and letters: templeofsound.co/the-temple-letters

P.S. Know a woman who needs this? Share this post and text it to her. Put it in the group chat. Drop it in her DMs. The little address above is there on purpose, so if this blessing wanders away from my email list and ends up on somebody else's phone, she can find her way back to the Temple.

I hereby grant full liturgical permission to distribute this particular piece of feminist propaganda.