Relationships are sacred, queer landscapes

Whether you’re in a heterosexual partnership or a queer (monogamous) relationship, it doesn’t matter. The old paradigm of relational homogeneity is no longer compatible with our collective awakenings. Leaning on one person to fulfil all your communal needs will not work anymore. Whether you were able to surrender to this knowledge comfortably or it was brutally brought to your attention, this is just what we’re working with at the collective consciousness level.

You can’t escape something that’s here to reshape not just our individual perception of life but our overall world order. You can’t run from our collective purpose. You can try, you can stay detached and remain disillusioned by finding comfort in systems that never served us to begin with; hold onto the privilege that keeps us from facing our personal and collective shadows, but you’re only going to miss out on what seems to be the greatest evolutionary processes that humanity has had to go through in the modern age.

Why this feels so personal to me is because astrally speaking, I was born with major Aquarian placements at some of the most prominent degrees. I have a 29° Jupiter in Aquarius and 0° Neptune in Aquarius (both anaretic degrees on the opposite ends of the spectrum create a full karmic loop) along with my Aquarius Sun and Uranus, creating a stellium in the 11th house (the house of the collective, the future and revolution). As I currently navigate my Saturn Return, the old world for me has already crumbled down and i’m actively rebuilding the future on my now strong Saturnian foundation with discipline, endurance, learned wisdom and perseverance.

It’s my soul’s mission to share my divine vision of revolutionary love and communal togetherness with the world. I cannot run away from this sacred responsibility even if I tried. I don’t assume authority when I admit this. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s been a deeply humbling experience to storm through my Aquarian shadow of wanting to shrink away instead of stepping into fated leadership and being the voice of my community; a learning curve of shedding ego and visions that were previously centered around shame, individuality and resource accumulation out of intergenerational survival instincts.

Aquarius is the sign of dismantling the status quo.

Gone are the days of seeking proximity to people for resource extraction and climbing the social ladder. People will see right through you! This is a timeline of building genuine heart-centerd connections that require intellectual resonance, vulnerability and trust-building over time. It cannot be faked or rushed. Superficial connections formed out of a desperate need to establish power and authority simply won’t last. The ego is at its detriment in visionary Aquarius. Do not try to mess with Saturn, you will be humbled.

Aquarius is rebellious and will challenge the social norms. The interesting thing about being someone who refuses to give into hierarchy is that people get resentful very quickly but secretly admire your audacity to be able to connect with others from the heart. This often ends up attracting folks who also live in integrity with their values. Who do not waste time preaching. Instead, they act it out, they practice being it. They refuse to center dominance as it instantly flattens the experience. These are people who are living embodiments of a free world.

I didn’t realise how good I was at “networking”—which, in the professional art world is often treated as a way to profit off of one another and treat people as resources rather than as whole individuals, until I started attracting souls everyone else desperately wanted proximity to but couldn’t get because they were playing by outdated social scripts whereas, I was seeking genuine connection.

I don’t filter people out by how successful they seem to appear on paper or how much social clout they have. I do not seek superficial proximity for the sake of gaining capital. I filter people out by how they choose to relate to others. How open they are to being relationally challenged. How good they are at handling conflict. How deeply they can meet themselves and by extension, the rest of the world. How other people feel in their presence.

Be discerning. Ask yourself: are they simply repurposing hierarchical dynamics while publicly claiming to be against them?

In the Age of AI, we must get skilled at telling the difference between superficiality and true sustenance.

My disabled love language is a slowburn communal romance

As a chronically ill person who’s been homebound for over 2 years, i’ve had to lean heavily on my online community to survive the fall of empire. This is the reality of many disabled folks who cannot afford to risk their health for much needed social interaction. I’ve been building with people from across the world for years. The sanitized version of community that is often served to us online is not the true reality of what tangible cross-continental/cultural community-building looks like. It’s much more messier than that. It’s deeply challenging.

Avoidance is easier, cutting people off when we’re confronted by our wounds and don’t always see eye to eye is easier than staying, engaging in conflict, being accountable and building with them despite difference. Stretching our communal capacity for discomfort is arguably the most important skill we can develop in our fight against empire.

When I first started co-building with strangers on the internet, I never imagined it would have such a huge impact on all of our lives but I can now confidently say that it has transformed us for the better. It’s been so lonely to be back in my childhood home while also being ill. There were days when I was able to make it only because someone across the ocean was rooting for me, tending to my broken heart. It is so important to have a political community that sees you fully, holds all your complexities with care and reverence, and is willing to accommodate change and celebrate difference.

Two days ago, I received distant reiki from a fellow community member who is now a beloved friend, looking to hold space for me as life has been really shaky lately with many unexpected health struggles. Last year, a community member sent me just-in-case emergency funds when a war broke out in my country without me having to ask. The same year, we raised mutual aid funds for our dear friends who’d lost their home due to flooding. Two weeks ago, I was partaking in a music collaboration. The same week, I bridged the gap between community and friendship with someone else. We’ve been texting more frequently over iMessage ever since, sharing snippets of our days as we were both mutually longing for more intimacy.

It breaks my heart when I see people refusing to do the necessary work of relational repair. Instead choosing to ghost, be aggressive or publicize a condescending image of self that cannot really co-exist with harm.

It breaks my heart when we don’t ache for each other. When we don’t treat each other as extensions of our own selves, choosing love over neglect.

Shared vision is not the same as solipsism

No two people have ever had the exact same insight or perspective and yet we manage to connect through our shared humanity. The goal is not to get everyone to achieve fluency in institutionalized political language without creating tangible impact, and punish them when they don’t comply immediately. The goal is to build capacity for complexity, nuance, accessibility and more compassion.

In my particular online community, we all come from different cultures from all over the world. What care looks like for one person doesn’t quite translate in the same way for another. The language is different even though the intention is not. Everyone has distinct styles, personalities and ways of moving through life and navigating relationships, and yet we are constantly trying to embody what it means to witness, learn from and grow with each other. Sharing cross-cultural medicine, we are anchored in our shared values.

Giving people the freedom to learn and express themselves in ways that feel true to them, to move at their own pace while honoring our own timeline and creative signature is part of love praxis. When we build capacity for difference, we co-facilitate relational elasticity.

What makes a space like this feel safe for me personally has less to do with gaining access to people who have social clout, and more to do with the fact that there is no pressure for me to have it together all the time. To grasp a heavy concept instantly. I can show up as I am without the need to perform polished intellectualism. I can ask stupid questions. Be silly, be real and trust that I will be received with love. I’ve never once been belittled or villainized for being a flawed person or not saying the “right thing” in the “right way” at the “right time.” My nervous system can relax. And God knows what we all long for the most is to be loved at the most basic human level. With zero pretence or performance.

The irony is that when your body learns to relax and you feel safe to show up whole, it gets easier to handle loving critique. You are more receptive to change than when it’s forced upon you. Trust-building is its own intentional, consensual, slow-cooking recipe. You cannot rush it. And you most definitely cannot assume intimacy from proximity. Because let’s be real—in online spaces we are all in constant energetic proximity to one another, but this does not mean that we are automatically in community.

Creative collaboration that was born out of shared vision, curiosity and play

I bring to you this offering (@mengwencao) and I created out of pure longing to be free in our queer expression.

I have admired Meng’s work from afar for more than a year. It brings me so much joy to call them my “internet friend” and co-collaborator, knowing our visions are aligned and in sync. My dream has always been to bridge the distance and separation imposed by arbitrary borders with the power of creative joy, defying hegemonic systems which require us to resist together. This is my truest, most sacred queer expression—to love across borders.

At a time when queer lives are endangered and queer expression is being silenced globally, Meng and I believe desire to be a radical force for connection. We invite you into this transnational space to indulge in play and rejoice in the pleasures of cross-border queer community.

Please use this link to read more about this space and our individual creative practices as socio-cultural asian queer artists.

We have a few special 2 for 1 tickets available for you to bring your loved ones with you! Happy pride, my loves.

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in solidarity & with revolutionary love,
mei
buy me a ko-fi to support my writing <3

Previously, when I was more able and living in Portland, Oregon, I have taught illustration at university level, facilitated workshops through community organisations and have been invited as a guest artist for lectures. I have also been a part of multiple group gallery exhibitions, some of which have been cross-continental projects, including being published and featured in different publications in the UK and US. The most recent ones being ‘Suboart Magazine’ a Lisbon based international magazine for emerging artists and ‘Artists in Crisis’ an academic publication which explores the mental health struggles of 34 different creative and performing artists across cultures, ethnicities and creative disciplines.

This May I have two offerings for you:

1. An interdisciplinary, ritualistic, somatic writing workshop

The heart is ancient technology. Come experience it’s ever-expansive, endless capacity to connect, grieve, relate, channel and world-build into future timelines. Writing that’s less about skill and more about reconnecting with parts of yourself you thought you’ve lost access to. Writing that feels like a full body exhale. It’s time we let our hearts lead us into expansion and gave language to everything we’ve been too afraid to name out loud. Nothing is ever “too much,” there is always room for it to exist, be witnessed and held. So, come hold it with me.

I am hosting this creative space for anyone who finds themselves in between two different worlds — the past and the present, and longs to step into a future that is reflective of their true embodiment of self.

If change feels invigorating and non-negotiable at this time, if old scripts, people and energies are holding you back — that is, if you are letting them. If you wish to break out of the status quo and move in queer, non-linear, non-hierarchical ways. If you want to reclaim your sovereignty and be celebrated in this journey of becoming — in your ever-expansive changing nature, I have created this space for you. This is my third time facilitating this particular workshop and it’s been quite eye-opening to see just how many of us desire to build a different life for ourselves centered on heart-led connection and interdependence. This dismantling of old narratives and writing a new story that offers you relational justice starts from within before physical reality can mirror that change back to you.

Sliding scale is available! Please fill this form and/or reach out to me via email: cosmeicart@gmail.com if needed!

2. My artist Patreon

I want to give a big shoutout to my Patrons because of who I can sustainably continue creating and contributing to the new worlds in ways that feel true to me.

If you enjoy my writing or visual art or simply find resonance in my voice, please consider signing up to my Patreon — which is a direct way of supporting me as a working artist. This is what I do for a living and have been since the past 3 years (from my sickbed might I add), and part of embodying a liberated future is also making sure that I grow out of the “starving artist” trope myself which devalues creative vision (one of the biggest inspirations for societal change) and romanticises the emotional and cultural labor of marginalised creatives with zero consideration for their physical or mental health and financial stability.

Here are a few of the mails i’ve sent out worldwide within the last few months. <3

Love’s Arrival

If you’re here reading all this, thank you so much! I appreciate you. Share this with loved ones you feel might be interested.

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with revolutionary love and care,
until we're all free,
mei

These are my full moon revelations as a Scorpio in the 8H

One of my dearest friends from high school got married yesterday in Mysore. I was invited to the wedding but wasn’t able to make it last minute due to my illness so I watched the live stream on YouTube. I love that we live at a time when this is possible.

For the longest time, I thought that by naming the harm that I experienced in my relationships and making conscious effort to break generational cycles of lovelessness by choosing to show up with care and responsibility in the matters of the heart, that I was being a conduit for the ideal love to attract itself into my life. But yesterday, during the full moon in Scorpio, I realised how untrue this is.

Taking responsibility for your actions or a lack thereof when a connection demands it and choosing the experience of love with absolute open-heartedness are two very separate things. My aggravation towards marriage as this idolised act of union that everybody is expected to give into and move towards eventually in our cis-heteropatriarchal society goes far beyond just naming the systemic harm caused by the institution itself. On my part, it seems now like it wasn’t just a rebellion against patriarchal, nuclear family structures that cause state-authorised exclusion of queer and trans folks, and complies with misogynistic violence against women. It was much more than that.

And I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday when I noticed my friend’s illuminating, contagious smile and softened gaze land upon her partner-to-be during the Varmala ceremony, an Indian wedding ritual where both the bride and groom exchange garlands of flowers as a symbol of their eternal union, and couldn’t help but swell at the pure, life-altering magic of Love energy. Watching her adorned in a silk Kanjivaram saree, mehendi on her hands and feet, surrounded by floral arrangements and people gathered around to celebrate them — I could no longer find it within myself to be remorseful about this sacred ceremony that i’d spent my whole life detesting; that’s historically been exclusionary towards queer love and queer people wanting the same chance at building a life together. I have both been repulsed by marriage and have longed for the union it resembles.

Even through my laptop screen, Love’s power became undeniable — penetrable — and I was left confronting my agony as a child of separation, grieving what I’ve missed out on but also really grateful at the same time to have finally landed at the truth underneath my split, overtly confusing heart-brain-longing-repugnance.

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Contrary to my online and irl persona and the lifelong work that I’m devoted to, I have discovered just how terrified I actually am of being seen in my entirety, in my wanting — for everything that I am, flaws and all, longing for unconditional love to find me while being horrified by the idea of being tied down to another person legally. How the thing I want the most is also the thing I fear equally — which can only mean that I am scared of being committed to another person out of the fear that i’d end up just like my parents who never knew how to love and modelled warped versions of it for me growing up.

Being in this perpetual state of internal conflict of both desiring and also fearing love so intensely has so far attracted lovers who perfectly mirrored these sentiments right back to me: a longing for divine love but only until it required tangible change, effort and deep surrender on their part — leading to a fundamental confrontation with their fear of commitment.

I have spent decades holding onto people, waiting for them out of a false sense of romantic loyalty to choose me, without ever choosing myself.

It’s a cycle that I subconsciously subscribed to, thinking it’ll keep me safe in the long run from getting my heart broken in a myriad of ways for as long as I wasn’t fully committed — always one foot out of the door. But clearly, that hasn’t been the case. If anything, it’s made me ache even more and has broken my heart beyond comprehension, because I kept choosing people who were incapable of choosing me, bailing out at the first sight of conflict which further confirmed my lack of self-trust and misalignment with my own desires. I kept missing out on the very thing I desired the most because of subconscious belief systems that kept me from it.

In order to experience what only exists in our dream reality, we’d have to let go of beliefs we inherited as children and young adults that no longer serve us, and squeeze out the deeply flawed relational dynamics our primary caregivers set up as examples for us. It would require a total shedding of old identity into a new version of self that’s more aligned with our true desires. It’s okay to want love and commitment. To desire union despite recognising the absolute fucked up-ness of a state-sanctioned merit that comes along with it. Being bound to another person doesn’t have to feel like punishment or a limitation that automatically puts you at mercy of violence and a loss of autonomy.

It’s convenient to claim the identity of an anxiously attached person (as I have done so myself) than to recognise that being anxious can also be another way of avoiding the deeper work of building stability within. I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion if it weren’t for the times when running away from love and conflict felt safer than choosing connection above all just to end up feeling like i’d lost everything that actually mattered.

Sometimes, the things that we want the most are also the things we fear will change us into versions of ourselves that we have spent lifetimes escaping out of survival.

Yesterday, I learned that in order to want love, I would have to fear it less. I would have to change my relationship to the fundamental belief that tells me that being committed to another person leads to a loss of personal autonomy and a lack of freedom to grow into who I wish to become.

I am unlearning lovelessness so that I’m prepared to love on my future (gender-neutral) wife. So that my heart is open and ready when communion knocks at my door this time.

for my dearest friend, , congratulations on your wedding ~

In light of Rabindranath Tagore’s birthday, one of the most celebrated Bengali visionary poets and educators worldwide, I am hosting this creative space for anyone who finds themselves in between two different worlds — the past and the present, and longs to step into a future that is reflective of their true embodiment of self, but is veiled by shame, insecurity and the fear of disrupting other people’s beliefs about them by choosing to change visibly.

If change feels invigorating and non-negotiable at this time, if old scripts, people and energies are holding you back — that is, if you are letting them. If you wish to break out of the status quo and move in queer, non-linear, non-hierarchical ways. If you want to reclaim your sovereignty and be celebrated in this journey of becoming — in your ever-expansive changing nature, I have created this space for you. This is my third time facilitating this particular workshop and it’s been quite eye-opening to see just how many of us desire to build a different life for ourselves centered on heart-led connection and interdependence. This dismantling of old narratives and writing a new story that offers you relational justice starts from within (7 planets were recently in Aries. Aries = Self) before physical reality can mirror that change back to you.

How to register? Fill in this form!

When and where will it take place? on the 9th of May on Google meet.

Is sliding scale available? Yes! As a chronically ill person, I offer sliding scale to my beloved BIPOC disabled, queer kin. However, if you require extra assistance, you can always email me: cosmeicart@gmail.com.

Extra notes: The heart is ancient technology. Come experience it’s ever-expansive, endless capacity to connect, grieve, relate, channel and world-build into future timelines. Writing that’s less about skill and more about reconnecting with parts of yourself you thought you’d lost access to. Writing that feels like a full body exhale. It’s time we let our hearts lead us into expansion and gave language to everything we’ve been too afraid to name out loud. Nothing is ever “too much,” there is always room for it to exist, be witnessed and held. So, come hold it with me.

with revolutionary love and care,
mei
tip here & send love

Every time abuse knocks at my door, I open it reluctantly, acknowledging its presence in my life as it confronts me silently to let it back in—-into the meadow of my inner landscape where flowers have just begun to blossom. We live in the same house—-abuse and me, but occupy different rooms.

I hold its authoritative, penetrating gaze, refusing to falter under the pressure of its sheer dominance. I do not let it intimidate me into submission. At first, it tries to mask itself as protection and I laugh at the ridiculousness of what that reveals. I question its relentless pursuit of trying to chase away my dignity—-my sovereignty, each time it interacts with me. How it craves to bruise the same wounds that have been bruised a million times over, without mercy.

How it doesn’t speak the language of care.

Abuse knows that this act of destruction, of performed hospitality is self-imposed and so tries its best to make me believe that I want it. That I asked for it. That I need it in order to be more deserving of love. It is well acquainted with my shame. Though it knows that it cannot touch me for as long as I deny it access.

It tries to convince me that I cannot resist the harm it made me get accustomed to. So, it attempts manipulation tactics to persuade me and I immediately slam the door shut. Never again.

Abuse is the snake that eats itself alive. The shadow of ouroboros, which is far away from creation.

It feeds off your dreams and the life you see for yourself.

They say, abuse shapes you into the person you turn out to be but I believe it’s actually your inner child’s grit, their grief that molds you into who you’re meant to become.

Time is non-linear. Reality is cyclical in nature, which means that we return to the past in the present moment and can rewrite it by choosing to live differently. Your present choices can alter the past that will inevitably affect your future.

Your life mirrors everything you choose to believe in. Reality bends as per your beliefs. The possibilities stretch out as far as you stretch them, and contract as much as you hold yourself back.

This is how the universe works. What you pay attention to creates your reality. What you cannot see, you cannot change. To see, you must expand your capacity to hold—-beyond the limitations of your mind, which only perceives reality in fractions. It is important that we become aware of this. So we can co-create an experience we actually want to have rather than subconsciously birthing something that doesn’t serve us.

Your life can be more than just the shame that was once forced upon you and the lack constantly being projected onto you. You must never forget this. Reject the reality where submission is the cost you pay for love. Because that is a lie. Love doesn’t cost you yourself, it invites more of you in.

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My faith reminds me that I come from Love. That’s right. Not from trauma, but Love. Divine love that doesn’t require me to fix myself to be seen but to transform into who I really am—-unmasked and liberated. A source primitive to the abuse I so instinctively got used to associating my story with. As if there was no other purpose to my life than to escape harm. I had to actively decide to reject this systemic loop of oppression that made it impossible for me to ever break free or detach from the narrative that held me captive all these years. In fear-based belief systems, in versions of myself that didn’t reflect who I wanted to be and was becoming, who i’d long outgrown.

It takes audacity to Love and reclaim your season of homecoming; to choose to write your own story of origin away from the one that’s been keeping everyone else comfortable at the expense of your own self-abandonment. To never lose sight of what is true, and share it with conviction.

Truth-telling is an act of devotion towards your inner child who is the very essence of you but without the tools you harbor now. At some point, you have to stop waiting for things to change and become change itself. When repair is not an option, you must embody the relational justice you so desperately desire. You must play it out for your own sake.

Trauma didn’t birth me, Love did.

It’s harder to remember what was once lost than to forget what one already knows, same way that it’s harder to heal than to survive abuse. Because survival is the body’s natural response to an unreliable environment, whereas, healing requires creative imagination.

Every experience that shall enter my life from here on will be filtered through the lens of a child who is now free. Unbound from fear-based belief systems and a perception of self that doesn’t serve anymore. They are no longer scared of being perceived instead make themselves known and heard through unapologetic expressions of visibility because Love doesn’t shy away from its true nature. And people, whether they’re aware of it or not, perceive you exactly how you perceive yourself to be.

Love is the mirror that reflects you back to yourself.

Dear reader,

I hope that will be courageous enough to give yourself another chance at designing a life that truly reflects everything you've ever dreamt of.

with revolutionary love and hope,
mei

you can join my artist patreon and receive monthly mail from me! i’ll be sending out incantations for you to directly apply them into practice. I’ll be writing you love poems from across oceans. and i’ll be dreaming of transnational solidarity at a time when they don’t want us to have access to ancestral wisdom. 💌

what would happen if we just let love linger without attaching it to a narrative or person? if we sank deeper into the feeling itself without needing the ache of longing to justify it? would it open up new worlds of self-discovery, of attunement to the core of connection: to commune with ourselves through the mirrored reflection of another?

I say all this not because I am seeking answers, no, quite the opposite, actually. I am revelling in the hunt. in the gathering of enough evidence that will prove its own disillusion.

treating complex experiences that ask us to feel into them without restraint as an act of indulgent self-pleasure, as mere problems demanding definite answers from something so queerly effervescent steals away their dormant potential to reveal to us deeper truths about ourselves.

about Love, which is a mystery by itself. we think we possess all the answers yet we have only just scratched the surface.

I don’t know what Love is but I do know how it feels to caress the warmth of your cheek under the light of the full moon. to gaze, unflinching, into the oceanic depths of your eyes. I remember what my skin felt like the moment it met your electrifying, sorbent touch. I remember the taste of your lips on my tongue. I know what wanting feels like.

I am aware of the ache of reaching—-desiring—-but never fully arriving; in the endless nature of eros, it is not possible. to want is to be aware of the lack that sustains it. the distance will outlive your desire whether you like it or not. it is what makes the longing known.

I know that Love lives in the shadows of a life that once belonged to me (or I belonged to it), that continues to converse with me in the now. this doesn’t scare me anymore. I am not afraid to confront what i’m capable of. I am not afraid of the depths I inhabit that drown most others.

I want to sink deeper into this feeling of reckoning with what my Spirit is made of without claiming a story that’ll help me define it. I don’t need permission to be one with my aliveness. I don’t need to prove any of it happened. my body remembers. my skin answers.

our breaths dissolve into the foggy mist of night and I awaken to my own true nature. my hands know sensation because they’ve learned the language of your nape. your alluring natural scent, your sweat in the summer heat—-intoxicating to a system like mine that has only ever made love to loss.

what it felt like to jump knowing i’ll never return; to reclaim my life. to know pleasure so intimately. to taste it so closely—-wholly, and live in the cyclical memory of it.

there is no clear distinction of time in moments of great pleasure except before it happens and the life after. there is no dying and returning to the same body without consequence, no coming back from Love unaltered.

I am changed by the nature of Spirit who resides in separate bodies, yours and mine, seeking to experience itself through us. one consciousness, two consciousnesses—-it takes two to make One. it takes three to make us. the transcendence of meeting you, merging into temporal matter, surrendering to the sorority of a lack that was always meant to be full—-this is a prayer never-ending. a dream vision that is the closest to what “reality” pursues as true.

all illusions dissolve into my awakening to you—-which is my awakening to the otherness I was born into. through Love, the otherness that resides within me awakens. through affection, I rise above all conditions that could hold one back. your mirrored soul is my portal to a timeline where everything is one. and one is all there is.

with love,
mei 

here is where you can sign up for my writing workshop, Emergence of the new Self, taking place this Sunday!

Love is the core frequency of our planet. And Desire never lies. Everything we want is possible and i’m tired of these systems convincing us otherwise. I’m sick of us being coerced into the same palatable molds in order to be worthy of being seen and celebrated. Our energetic blueprint as individuals who are all on their own paths to discovery is unique for a reason. No soul’s journey was meant to be duplicated. There are no accidents. All of this is purposeful and significant, further clarifying this underlying truth: all of us have something to offer Creation.

However, do we have what it takes? When the system benefits from us staying confused, heartbroken and depleted, it becomes hard to foster trust from within. We refuse to tend to our grief, and so change becomes something we all fear. Both of which hold the potential of becoming our greatest strengths, if only we choose to surrender to what is asking to move through us now. If we are willing to let the generational shifts of our time transform us. They are meant to change us.

There is a popular misconception circulating in the collective consciousness these days, which is that we are moving through dark times. Darkness has always existed, my love. And so has light. The only difference is its unmasked visibility which makes it undeniably confronting and hard to look away from. The ones who aren’t equipped to hold both light and dark in equal parts are being urged to do the work because collectively, we are in need of tools that help us balance the scales so we can truly sustain our lifeforce.

Remember, the only thing that can make darkness known is light. So if a swelling tide of darkness is sweeping over us right now, it is because there is more light around than we can imagine.

In order to live a life that’s truly joyful, fulfilling and in pure alignment with our dormant desires, we must become the version of ourselves we find most compelling and controversial—that version we shy away from because it challenges the status quo and shatters the illusory script that keeps us attached to a reality that no longer serves but has proven to be comfortable enough to keep us spiralling in a loop of energetic stagnancy.

I’m hosting an interdisciplinary, ritualistic, somatic writing workshop next weekend which is a permission slip for the Self to shed old identities. You can watch my 3 minute video on friendship as world-building to further understand the tidal shifts taking place in my own life that i’ve been moving through and actively integrating.

Come experience the heart’s ever-expansive, endless capacity to connect, grieve, relate, channel and world-build into future timelines. Engage in writing that’s less about skill and more about reconnecting with parts of yourself you thought you’ve lost access to. Writing that feels like a full body exhale. It’s time we let our hearts lead us into expansion and gave language to everything we’ve been too afraid to name out loud. Nothing is ever “too much,” there is always room for it to exist, be witnessed and held. So, come hold it with me.

My communal offerings are very dear to me and I take them and care work in general, very seriously. As a chronically ill person, I’m always grateful when folks show up to them (because it takes a lot for me to show up, too) and are willing to trust me with their grief. Thank you to anyone who has ever attended any of my workshops. It is the privilege of a lifetime to do this work and means the world to me that I can share it with you.

This will be my last offering until May so I hope to see some of you there! <3

with love and in solidarity,
your future ancestor in practice,
mei

Today I was rereading a poem i wrote for a publication (we call it a zine) that got published in New York. Even when I returned to that poem a year ago during our official online launch, which was a year after i had written it — i didn’t feel quite the way i am feeling now, which is… as it seems, paying remarkable attention to the aliveness in my own writing.

I’ve always sort of been the poetry kid. The one who brought poetry into the room and in people’s lives. I’ve always been known as that person. An ex lover once confessed to our mutual friend after we broke up that they had started appreciating poetry more since knowing me. It was such a tender confession.

Love poetry has always been both a form of escape from a life that I didn’t want to live and spell-casting into the future of my choice. Whether I was “professionally” invested in poetry or not, didn’t take away from the fact that it was and still is, one of my most dear passions. The easiest way to my heart. I always held this yearning inside me to someday write as well as the poets I admired back then. I’m not sure if i’m there but then again, i’m not really trying to get sucked into a comparison loop right now. What i am sitting with is the truth, the factual one, which is that my words have impact. And I am feeling that impact today. They are causing tectonic shifts inside me.

I feel naturally drawn to poems which are capable of bringing out feelings of aliveness and intensity to the forefront, those that don’t waste your time with the politeness of asking but push you whether you like it or not, into transformation. It is the most erotic dance ever, in comparison to poems that simply read as words on paper. I like poems that dig into the somatics of lived experience without holding back, where every breath is documented as proof of one’s own existence. And i think because of this earnest creative taste, my desire to get to a place where i can do similar things with language reveals itself as aspirational. What I seek is who I wish to be is who I secretly already am.

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The poem that got published in the zine a year ago is finally sinking into my psyche as that documented fraction of time, a written timelapse of the past, a textual film recorded through language. I’ve been afraid to write because i’ve been feeling as though i don’t have anything valuable to add to the current discourse around anything and everything. There is always noise that i don’t wish to add to even though there’s always also so much moving through me. Always so much i’m trying to discover and make sense of, find meaning in that i know others are also seeking answers to.

It’s invigorating to finally understand that i’m not just an imposter trying to perform being an artist or being a writer and poet. But that i actually am one. I am a writer and a poet. Not as flashy labels but as something that’s become a fundamental part of me, without which I am not entirely me. And this is a profoundly beautiful, extraordinary realization to come to. It feels like stepping out of the void space that kept me entrapped for years.

I don’t want to deliver perfection, i want to make people feel the embarrassing bits of living a life that is true to itself; one that explores, almost desperately — the flawed nakedness, the absolute (inevitable) devastation of love. The cringe of outgrowing former selves you once believed to be final without the awareness of knowing that there might be more. How all of it comes back to you, the you that is whole, bringing color to your blank canvas of a life.

I intend to use my voice less scarcely from now on, as a writer, as a poet. What a privilege it is to give myself permission to let loose and play around with the colors in my close possession. My very own color palette gathered over time through the process of active living, so I can finally start designing the life i would actually like to live with it.

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I am hosting a writing workshop next week! I don’t do these very often and I haven’t facilitated since the Grief Circles from last year, which were all such great successes, thanks to everyone who showed up for them.

See you at your most vulnerable and honest. That is often what the work requires of us. Don’t fret, let’s meet each other there. <3

You can fill this form to join and/or email me at cosmeicart@gmail.com for further assistance. I’m so grateful that so many kind souls receive my words here. It is always such a privilege to share space with you.

with love,
mei

If you’re also not one to be impressed by theoretical knowledge alone and are seeking to integrate theory into practice, into action so the laws of cause and effect can create tangible shifts in your life, this space is for you.

If you’re a dreamer in the body of a warrior, a creative visionary, shapeshifter, explorer, i invite you to join me for my March offering where we will be harnessing ancestral wisdom from the past, present and future.

Old scripts aren’t serving anyone anymore. Your external reality will always reflect your internal, not the other way around. This is a permission slip to lean into the Self that feels too controversial to step into. Erotically charged, calling out to you with a timeless fervour, aching to take residence within.

I wanted to create a space that i would want to partake in myself. One that is a collaboration of my varied special interests and areas of research. But beyond just a solo search for meaning and individual processing, i’d like to also engage in creative dialogue with fellow artists, space-holders, world-builders, doulas, somatic practitioners, astrologers, keepers of the land, healers, visionaries, poets and lovers.

There is a place that exists beyond ‘dreaming’ that requires your active engagement. Where consistent effort, surrender and humility are greatly rewarded. This is the Saturnian way of legacy building.

Without acting on your passions, you cannot initiate something worth sustaining. The irony is that we fear what we desire most.

Sliding scale is available for my POC disabled, queer kin. please reach out via email (cosmeicart@gmail.com) if you need additional accessibility. Especially if you’re from the Global South, I will do my best to make this space accessible.

Fill the form to join!

Excited to share space with you all again. <3

with love,
mei

I've been working on some pencil drawings lately. The artwork at the top is the first iteration of what was supposed to be "queer art." All about distance, separation and eternal longing that never runs out. A celebration of everlasting queer love. Reflective of an old timeline that no longer seemed exciting to hold onto—completely hollowed out of meaning now, mainly because it was brimming with attachment wounds that i’d long outgrown and yet the refusal to let go became my heart’s only mission. I even wrote a description for it before the piece itself took its first breath into this world—talk about creative disillusionment.

There is romance in the slow drag of denial. But Eros exists in the tenacity to look directly in the mirror.

Sometimes, your art wants to breathe life into you rather than the other way around. You are not always the creator parenting your creation. Sometimes, it's the Creator seeking direct contact. My art was screaming at me—nothing was working, no matter how hard I tried the drawing refused to take form. The paper wasn't scratchy enough, the pencil gave up on me, the composition was off, I didn't have the right tools (pft - it's a PENCIL DRAWING).

There was no other explanation except the obvious one. The one that's so clear, you overlook it for being "too easy." That's right, the future wanted to move through me. As soon as I stopped forcing the art out, as soon as I tapped into what wanted to be created—what needed to be created, the piece came together effortlessly. All of a sudden, I found the perfect paper lying around the house, the composition came through just right and my mechanical pencil was the only tool I needed. The expensive pencil order I'd placed earlier seemed absolutely unnecessary.

Through this process I learned:

✶ I was refusing to let go because letting go to me meant admitting defeat. And I didn’t want to be defeated in the matters of the heart.

✶ Sometimes, letting go can be a chance at victory that you offer yourself (thank you Nichiren Buddhist community for this glorious wisdom).

✶ We have to move through the deepest, darkest depths of the old world in order to arrive anew. This is the work of liberation.

✶ The future is relational. How you love yourself is how you treat your loved ones. When you forgive yourself, you become the mirror that allows them to embrace their own flawed humanity.

✶ Love is never unrequited, even when it feels “one-sided” or lacks closure. It always serves a higher purpose. That purpose lives inside you and not within the gap you expect the other to fill.

✶ Queerness also exists in the grey areas, in the in-between, transitory periods of your life when you refuse to give up on yourself despite the uncertainty and the profound grief of change.

✶ I am a queer artist whether or not I choose to center queer identity and queer romance. My vision is intrinsically queer and always will be.

✶ The future needs me. My people need me. My ancestors need me. Past, present and future versions of myself need me. This isn’t a weight to carry but a lineage to answer to.

You can find many such mystical experiences explored through my creative process on my Patreon. Please consider supporting, if able! <3

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Our world is built upon the principles of unconditional love. And even though we occupy the same physical space, not everyone is living in that same world.

If this year is really calling us into isolated gestation then may we dance through it gracefully. Celebrate every moment of silence with the same intensity that our hearts yearn for connection and queer kinship.

If the lessons lie in the void space, if this is a preparation for transmutation, then so be it. The void is the emptiness of performed identity. The lack that sustains resistance. Distorts interference. Contains conscious action. The question is no longer what can I do? But instead, what can I remove so truth becomes absolute? When the outcome feels inevitable because we stop waiting passively for life to happen to us, instead we move towards it by releasing all that is and embracing all that can be. Let us free ourselves off the shackles of relational expectations that keep us small and contained. Let us lean into the freedom our spirits were born with — their most authentic self-expression.

By moving from “wanting” to “allowing” to “participating,” we can co-create with reality. Deep contact with the void initiates kenosis, an emptying out of all that no longer serves us. The void dissolves, kenosis integrates.

Every time I let go of a belief that proved itself to be true in the past but no longer applies in the present moment, my heart expands to vessel more feeling. My mind automatically opens up to higher intelligence, which only appears when you’re determined to hold it all — even the parts that don’t serve you anymore — with a kind of neutral recognition without denying all that has been and all that will be.

There is no shame there — external or internal. There is only the knowing that it exists all at once — the past, present and future. My consciousness extends to experience more of life and the infinite depths of reality.

There is so much discovery in the spirals of awareness. Surrender all that you know and the rest will reveal itself to you soon after. To be proven wrong is the highest pleasure of connection. To discover that more is always possible. That it all lies within you. You are the creator and the creation. You are also the act of creating.

You are the Lover, the Beloved and the distance that contains the loving. You are everything in the way that the world mirrors itself back to you, and you are the reflection that makes it all possible.

Without you there would be no beauty to admire, no limit to surpass, no bounds to break out of. Without you there would be no love to experience, no love to go after or loving to indulge in.

Remember: every time you let your grief take up the space it demands, every time you loosen your grip around it (which is what we fear the most collectively), your heart stretches, expanding its capacity to hold more. There is no limit to the heart’s elasticity. Faith is its most honest confession. No feeling is too much. It is all there for a reason. Transmutation.

I know my love is true when i’m busy actively unlearning my attachment wounds and my heart still chooses to linger — so I let it. I don’t avoid the love that wants to be felt beyond attachment to a person or any specific outcome. Love is risky like that, but there is no alternative to intimacy. So I feel it for what it is without holding myself back or diminishing its intensity to fit into the confines of heteronormative relational bounds.

Your love for another is how the Divine experiences herself. Do not question it. Lean into it completely.

If you’re anything like me, trust that you’re disciplined enough to not repeat old patterns of neglect. That love can outlive healing, that it can grow with you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

My relationship to Source is intertwined with my relationship to Self. I am the vessel as well as all that is vesseled. The void is my ultimate teacher. I trust it. The silence makes everything clearer. Notice the voices that speak to you when no one else does. Recognize how this isn’t emptiness, but spaciousness that invites more of you.

There is no urgency to seek who you already are. And you are everything there is.

with love and reverence,
mei

if you’d like to financially support my creative practice, which is the most effective way of being in solidarity, you can do so here.

Why does every form of connection feel so out of place these days, so awkward, so conflicting? Except, of course, the ones who mirror my efforts and can be trusted with mutuality.

It’s starting to feel like people don’t want me in their lives anymore, though I know that it’s not as simple as my heart makes it to be. It is, however, still personal though. I ask for deconstruction and decolonisation as baseline in all my relations. I suggest we look beyond, we dream bigger. We ask more of one another. We make time for both rage and surrender, for laughter. We commit to each other like life partners do, as kin. We leap across timelines and birth new futures that hold us all. Cause no abandon.

We could have so much more than what a cis-heterosexual nuclear coupledom pursues as its ultimate reality of ownership without recognising that each of us need an entire village to survive. Without seeking one another as mere resource but as partners of co-creation.

Is it so wrong to want kinship? Because let me tell you, this is the loneliest i’ve ever been in my entire life and the most openly expressive and true i’ve ever felt.

Does that mean that being me automatically leads to rejection? I don’t think so. Then why so much pain? So much abandon? As more time goes by, I’ve almost come to expect it although I no longer choose to compromise in fear of it. So I try not to force sustainable lovership (any relationship that centers decolonial love as baseline) although it’s the thing I desire the most. It feels safer to be away from people’s limited projections and live in my ever-expansive absolute truth even if that leads to isolation. Without apology or curating myself to be more palatable. To not begin with expectation but with the change I desire. To embody it within myself first. It feels unfair sometimes because I deserve so much more and I know it.

But I’d rather be on my own than settle for anything less than a love that frees us all, and maybe this is exactly why I am in the situation i’m in right now. Needing to navigate what it means to be the only one to show up to it—my purpose. Because who else will? Maybe it is my burden to carry after all. When you come from abandonment, rejection hits like a knife to your heart every single time despite all the spiritual growth and healing work you indulge in. This is a test of my principles as much as it is of my ancestral devotion towards commitment as world-building.

Truth is, the ones who do not want to see the potential will never do, and the ones who do see it, never stopped dreaming. So where does that place me? Because I know i’m not the only one feeling this way.

I ask myself, am I okay being the object of consistent neglect? Meaning, how can I stop taking it so personally? The personal gives access to the collective but I don’t want to waste my time convincing people to do better, hoping they’ll consider the damage they’re so carelessly causing when instead, I could pour that energy into the practice itself.

At the end of the day, connection is what we’re all built for and i’m no different. I am not above love or friendship. But maybe this process of unmasking and unflinching self-acceptance starts at the very bottom—at the core of abandon—where I look at my own reflection without pity but with a determination to build.

Will I lose myself in this isolation? Or will I persist in the discovery? Stand tall through the winter storms, heart racing, beating anew? A brand new timeline peeking through the horizon, asking me to embrace it. This is who I was always meant to be. This is who I am now. In the midst of adversity, at the center of sorrow, at the precipice of awakening to my true nature.

I don’t know what gifts the future bears but this is my present. This moment in time. I know I want it all and i’m not shy to admit it. I want the world to rise above fascism. I want to be unapologetically queer. Have intimacy with my friends, romance loved ones beyond just a partner. Make love to my lesbian lover and write about gay sex and queer love. I want to breathe revolution. I want to stop denying myself my freedom and my voice, my own heart, my capacity to love and forgive, my creativity and my expansive, futuristic vision.

I want to love wholly and never stop loving. I want to grow into myself with an elegance that transcends time. You only get one life as this Self and I want to live mine fully. Hold myself with the highest integrity—not out of ego or pride but with the deepest self-awareness that I am more than worthy of everything i’ve ever wanted.

Let love find me as reflection. Let health and wellness seek me with presence and sacred reverence. Let material abundance enjoy my company and thrive in my energy. Let my people find me.

There is no other way we’re meant to be but hold each other in the highest regard, leaning into spaciousness and dissolution of form. Alchemizing suffering into joy. Restoring faith within when it arrives and sinking deeper into it with a clarity that overrules time. Tend to hearts across oceans, in the in-betweens of awakenings and miracles. With every departure and re-arrival, may we return to what’s proven itself as true cyclically, eternally. There is no edge to what the heart is capable of. May our reflections be mirrored. May love arrive with ancient wisdom and choose to stay this time. Without hesitance or performance, may it see us clearly. May we remain open to receive it.

if you would like to financially support my creative practice, which is the most effective way to be in solidarity with everything I create, you can do so here.

with love and reverence,
mei

It is not love that causes abandon,
it is the sweet nectar of inherited shame.

Being in love, being with love
and acts of loving will never leave
you astray, or take away from your selfhood.
Anyone choosing to steal your power--
power meaning, your choice to bring about
collective shifts by being exactly who you are
unmoored by the denial of this world,
anyone who misreads your courage as naivety
is essentially at war with themselves.

This is not your battle to fight. Choose wisely.
Your energy belongs elsewhere.

Let the new world take root within you.
Let it shape you into the leader
you've always been. You want to know love,
you want to lead with love.
When the doors to heaven open this time
and love visits your home once again,
when your heart is witnessed in full blossom,
awakened--let it be known.
Let it bleed through the pages
of your one life's story. This will be your legacy.

Let your heart do its thing.

To love is to surrender.
Do not worry.
Whatever happens from here onwards
will be written as love.

The land calls us to return to oneness
just as much as we yearn
to return to the innate nature
of who we are to each other.
Who we've always been in relation.

May this be the season you decide
to reconcile with your own heart and
remember--we are much closer
than you think we are.

Let this be our rebellion.
Let us tap into Source energy and reclaim
what we once lost across borders.
Carry forward the legacy left behind by our
ancestors. The wisdom to nurture
the new generation woven with freedom,
liberation and heart expansion.

I was leading Tozo today, which is essentially a group daimoku session and meditating on how uninspired i’ve been feeling in my creative pursuits when I received the guidance to start writing love poems again. It’s when I realised I hadn’t written one in so long. Hadn’t tapped into the innate nature of me. So here it is. A new love poem for the new world. <3

I have so much love for mankind but despise the way we have normalised causing each other pain. You have to become the bridge that carries the future within you for it to arrive in the now.

with love and solidarity,
mei

if you would like to support my creative practice financially (which will be greatly appreciated) you can do so by joining my Patreon!

What surprises me is how little I’ve felt compelled to say anything here. Not because I have nothing to offer, but because the urge to teach, to declare, to perform my values has softened. The beliefs carved from lived experience still matter and are important to pass along in community, but they don’t need my constant translation. There are writers here doing that work with a clarity and grace far beyond my reach and whenever I need a reality check, I let their words hold the mirror.

Stepping away from Instagram and to some extent, even Substack; from the familiar modes of creation people have come to expect of me, has shifted something fundamental in the way I meet art. The way I stitch together silences in order to be able to clearly listen for it, to make what comes naturally. To take my time with it. The way I meet myself when creation is happening and is in action. Maybe the trajectory of my creative life en masse is shifting, even if only by a few degrees. But sometimes, that’s all it takes to leap into the unknown. I am the Fool embarking on a new journey of self-discovery. I crave expansion. I yearn for invention.

You might notice the change if your attention happens to rest there or you might not. Either way feels justified. Some things, for now, I’m choosing to keep for myself.

Here are a few recent writings shared in a new format that feels more embodied than text:

1. message for the visionaries, world-builders, cultural workers and grievers

2. love is yours, believe it

3. everyone I loved and got to be loved by in return (9 year completion cycle)

Something that feels deeply fulfilling in this season is using my voice, in the most literal sense, to send out messages into the world. There is a kind of intimacy to hearing the vibrations of someone’s voice reaching you — penetrating you — moving you into slowness and presence.

I long for this sort of slow living, and arriving to each moment as if it were a brand new experience bearing wisdom that can only be reached by surrendering to the now. To what is present here right in this moment. And learning to let go of the rest.

I believe with consistency, my voice will eventually strengthen and become unwavering. It’s something to look forward to. When it naturally learns how to hold its ground. For now, I’m embracing play and what it truly means to be in practice.

Sending you love across the ethos,
mei

in addition to the video format, i’ve been putting out personal journal entries on my artist Patreon as well. you might guess the flavor of my writings if you watch any of the videos I linked here. <3

everything that could possibly keep me attached to my past identity has conveniently made an exit — effortless and flamboyant. I say “thank you” when nothing else makes sense. I do not rush to make meaning out of this empty space. there is no need to fill this gap, no need for performance. there is no one to impress. nothing to prove. nothing that keeps me bound to self-assertiveness as a form of defence. I would be lying if I said that it didn’t feel lonely sometimes. but when an old identity dies, everything attached to it has to go as well. old beliefs, patterns, circumstances, people, self-perception, attachment to outcomes.

I would be lying if I played aloof at a time like this — the only thing that was keeping me stationed to this timeline was also what was bringing me the most joy. the promise of a safe landing. but predictability can also lead to stagnancy, and we forget that. I’m so used to giving that I never even considered asking myself what would it mean, once and for all — to choose myself. I got so cozy in predictable comfort that I didn’t allow myself the infiniteness of dreaming. which would mean that I’d have to be okay being the one who triggers people with my capacity to hold it all.

it’s much easier to self-blame. “it has to be me because this person could never do this to anyone else. so i must’ve been the problem.” but people are not made of absolutes, they contain multitudes.

I didn’t want to rise alone, you see. I love my friends too much. I wanted to bring them along with me.

quoting my previous newsletter, building endurance for relational sovereignty:

You don’t have to retrace your steps and move backwards into old versions of yourself just to reach someone who is not yet ready to rise with you. You are allowed to stay rooted where you’ve grown.

so here I am, trying to take my own advice and do just that: stay rooted. however far I grow from here on will be out of the labor that I pour into myself, first and foremost. towards building a life that feels true and futures i’m able to access in the now. I can’t claim these dreams as being wholly mine. they’re whispers from my ancestors urging me to stop resisting change and karmic retribution.

it’s extremely uncomfortable here and that is enough proof to entice me into actually doing it.

my bestfriend, who I loved queerly more than all of my past lovers combined, who I trusted with my whole heart more than i could ever trust my own parents, ghosted me in the most devastatingly arrogant way possible this past week. i’m trying to understand, through this process of maintaining relational flexibility, what it means to build endurance for broken trust of this magnitude.

allowing yourself to grieve the profound loss of companionship whilst remaining steady in your integrity so no amount of external harm, avoidance or neglect can stray you away from your path — reckoning with how powerful it is to be the one activating people by mirroring their shadows back to themselves. willing to hold all the dimensions without looking away, knowing well that most people aren’t equipped to hold such density.

he’d often remind me, “mei, this isn’t on you. people run away when they can no longer face themselves and you’re the mirror they refuse to look at. looking at you would mean they’d have to look at themselves clearly and fear makes people do terrible things. none of this is on you.” when i’d tell him about all the times my loved ones left me without a word, a conversation or a proper goodbye.

a past version of me would’ve probably crumbled down by now, knowing someone who shares my fears and longing for care, who knows me so intimately has acted out exactly the way they swore they could never. past me might’ve seen this as the end of the world but surprisingly, I feel… free.

maybe because I understand now that a partial truth being activated in somebody else doesn’t automatically illustrate it as the entire picture.

embodying the fullness of an experience and holding all the nuances of being in relation is how we break cycles of harm.

this ending is also an opening — an entering. I believe that communally, we need to stop normalising abandonment.

maybe this is also Saturn’s way forward in how this mirroring works through me. how it demands more of people. when your foundation is built on false narratives, it eventually falls through. at some point, escapism runs dry. this was the final signature of a year that has already demanded so much of me, the most challenging year of my adult life so far.

I feel so ready to emerge now. I have let go of all attachments.

here is where I release every past version of myself that has led me to this day. sculpting me into a mosaic of earthly groundedness and heart-centred courage — the sign of a leader who isn’t fuelled by followers but by their own internal fire of wanting to jump first.

I am willing to take the risk because there is nothing to lose anymore (literally!). everything that needed to fade away, has already turned into ash.

now is when I jump — into the depths of the ocean — into the vastness of the void which calls out my name — into endless love.

remembering that.. every hater is a lover first.

with all my love,
mei

• I am holding my last communal offering of the year, a Visionary Grief Circle on Saturday, the 23rd of November. fill this form if you feel ready for grief work and would like to be a part!

• this is where I share exclusive writing and monthly art mail! <3

A similar reclamation unfolded as I tried making sense of a connection that felt startlingly real and untethered from anything i’d ever known before; it turned my life upside down from every conceivable angle, yet, somehow, never really took flight. There was no true beginning to anchor me or a definitive ending to release me, only the denial of this connection’s validity from the very person who I recklessly gave my heart to. While everything in my world was being uprooted, their refusal to acknowledge what lived so vividly within me carved a kind of emotional turmoil I couldn’t believe was possible.

What do you do when you have no tangible proof but only the aches of your own heart to declare the aftermath of something so devastating yet sacred?

This newly discovered perspective around reclaiming my own reality despite another’s refusal to witness it uncovered new pathways of personal liberation within me — where I realised that the parts of ourselves we most readily tend to cast away are often the ones the world has already rejected, the ones dismissed by others and the systems of power that shape our lives. We learn to internalise that external dismissal as a relentless rejection of Self. This loop keeps repeating itself until we decide to break it. I want you to know that it’s possible to break this cycle.

This wound can easily be traced back to patterns of connection we adopted as children to keep ourselves safe and avoid being abandoned. Over time, we learn to give some else’s version of reality more weightage over our own to the point of complete dissolution.

Now, as adults who want to build relationships centred around care and compassion, repeating this pattern of self-neglect only keeps us small. I’ve been doing the work of building endurance with my therapist recently and something that came through during our discussions in-session and in my reflections in between sessions is that endurance does not necessarily mean enduring more pain or being okay with the damage that’s being continually caused to us. Endurance means, from a communal, world-building perspective, the ability to expand our emotional capacity so that we are able to hold and honor difference in others without abandoning ourselves.

We live in times of overlapping crisis. Our needs are constantly changing. With climate crisis, inflation, job insecurity, long COVID and more and more people becoming disabled everyday, we require care that we can rely on.

Instead of building resentment towards one another when we find our capacities changing, what would it mean to embody those “accountability agreements” you practice in your interpersonal relationships, in your relationship with yourself as well?

Do you take accountability for your own self-care? Or do you forget that you need to show up for yourself with the same conviction and commitment you practice with others?

What if disappointment was an invitation to turn inward?

Endurance for difference means making peace with the timeline that someone else is moving through, their pacing which might look different and be way slower than yours. Despite mutual desirability for change, despite locating the harm that was once caused, knowing you deserve accountability but no longer waiting for that apology, instead, choosing to hold compassion for the flawed humanity in another without remorse.

This releases us from the attachment loop of external expectations which can sometimes be the thing holding us back from embracing internal change.

Understanding that the lack of changed behaviour or repair as you want it, when you want it is not always possible. Not because you’re unworthy or uncared for, but because healing is non-linear. Healing looks different for everyone and in order for us to truly heal in community, we need to release the expectation of change as per our own conditions. Not only do our timelines not match each other’s, we inhabit entirely different realities altogether. There are moments when our energies collide with enough softness to aid our meeting place — when that happens, it’s a beautiful occurrence but moving through relationships without fluidity and a rigid expectation that they must match us at all times only creates more distance.

Endurance does not mean complicity or a lack of relational accountability but the ability to reclaim our sovereignty.

You deserve to be free whether or not someone chooses to do the laborious work of repairing with you. You deserve not just to love yourself but to love yourself back — through consistent care and action. It’s possible that you might never receive that one apology you’ve been waiting for, that moment of clarity that finally brings you closure. It’s possible that the one who caused you harm forever lives in denial.

Endurance helps you build self-trust. Endurance helps you rewrite the narrative that tells you the only way to have connection is through self-abandonment. To live only in your partial truth in order to avoid triggering someone else with your wholeness. Endurance helps you release such outdated beliefs about yourself and your life that no longer serve you.

Wanting is not wrong. Desiring change and repair is not wrong but recognising difference in ability and building endurance for it assists relational sovereignty and freedom. You no longer rely on someone else to give you permission to be exactly who you are. You learn to let go and give into the desires that already feel alive within yourself. It’s okay to be disappointed. Other people disappoint us just as much as we disappoint them — it’s okay. This does not always reflect an absence of love. It does not necessarily mean the absence of care. It does, however, mean a misalignment in timing — the gap that creates separation, which is not your responsibility to cover.

People can only love us to the extent of the love they perceive as possible.

Endurance means letting the other person move at their own pace, encouraging growth but not forcing it. Inviting them to uncover parts of themselves they didn’t feel safe to face sooner without the expectation of immediate change. Endurance also means recognising that you don’t always need to be the “fixer” to save a connection that can only be sustained through mutuality. You don’t have to retrace your steps and move backwards into old versions of yourself just to reach someone who is not yet ready to rise with you. You are allowed to stay rooted where you’ve grown.

Sometimes, the most impactful thing we can do for others and ourselves by extension, is to love them as they are.

Let them be their fully flawed selves and witness the sacredness of it. It’s okay to continue loving people who’ve hurt us and to forgive ourselves for the harm we allowed into our lives. It’s okay to learn how to break these cycles of harm for good and intentionally create distance, if that’s what it takes — to continue loving with our whole hearts. You do not need to hold back. It’s possible to build relational endurance and not feel threatened by difference.

You’re allowed to tell the story exactly as you’ve lived it — untrimmed, unsoftened, spoken without revision.

There is no need to be fixated on what’s right or wrong, but recognise the difference in nature, in perspective — in capacity and understanding. There is always the possibility for collision to take place — for that liminal meeting place to be created where union can unfold harmoniously, but it’s also just as okay when it isn’t.

This is not a failure, this lays the groundwork for relational wisdom. People don’t have to be who you want them to be in order for you to love them. Learn to love them in their flawed humanity. Keep loving them for as long as your heart desires.

Through endurance we build more capacity for love, and dare I say, love is what we need the most right now.

with all my heart,
mei

Please take this newsletter with a grain of salt and apply only what resonates. I write this after almost being estranged from the only family i’d left—recognising very well that harm happened but chose to stay anyway. It’s okay to choose not to stay. I write this after almost 3 years of back and forth with someone I can hardly call my lover but have given myself the permission to do so now (because in my heart, that’s what they were). It has taken me decades of relational harm to reach here.

Other ways of supporting me:

★ join my Patreon

★ follow me on Instagram and engage with my work! i’ve been facing systemic silencing and meta shadowbans since the past 3-4 years for showing public solidarity towards oppressed people across the world & doing much needed communal, spiritual, relational and cultural work at this time, which has been greatly affecting my income.

For the first time in my life, i find myself in a state of heart celibacy, wanting to only pour into the ones who practice devotional loving with me.

This piece came out of a self directed meditation right after a beautiful catch-up conversation with my dear friend, Michaela, on companionship that feels aligned with the soul, where i gave myself permission to dream after a really long time of being separated from my core. I’d never considered “companionship” to be a conscious part of my practice before, though it’s always been a constant energetic force driving me towards creation. Well, I have also never been this version of myself before so it makes sense that this is when I’m intuitively asked to embody my most intimate, sacred desire.

I am hosting my last communal offering of the year, Visionary Grief Circle on the 23rd of November where we will partake in embodied practices of grieving, dreaming and visualising future realities. We will engage in ritualistic space holding, ceremony, guided meditation and writing prompts.

Fill this form to join!

This is a sliding scale offering, including free spots for those who are low income, queer, disabled and chronically ill BIPOCs. Please reach out to me directly via my email cosmeicart@gmail.com if this is you!

with all my love,
mei

Other ways of supporting me:

• join my Patreon + get physical mail rewards each month! I also share exclusive stream of consciousness writing and peeks of my art-making process there.

• follow me on Instagram, engage with and share my work to help me get more exposure. I’ve been facing systemic silencing and meta shadowbans since the past 3-4 years for showing public solidarity towards oppressed people across the world & doing much needed communal spiritual, relational and cultural work at this time, which has been greatly affecting my income.

Thank you for being here. <3

a space to both grieve and invent.

Over the last two months of holding communal grief space, one thing has become very clear to me, over and over it pulses beneath our grievances — a longing for collective re-invention. For a tenderness that remakes us.

As much as we ache for grief-tending, to transmute and metamorphose, to touch the wound until it becomes a doorway, to learn the slow alchemy of turning sorrow into soil, we also ache to grow into the future that seems impossible to awaken into form.

However, our hearts remember how to dream. Even when the world tries to steal our dreaming capacity, coaxing every breath toward survival, something in us resists when we return to our imagination — which is also a form of rebellion.

Here is the form to join. Please fill this out at the latest!

Slightly different from the previous iterations, this space is specially designed for dreaming, visualising and embodying future realities in community.

We will engage in ritualistic space holding, ceremony, guided meditation and writing prompts.

This is my last communal offering for this year, so if you’ve been wanting to share space with me, this is your chance.

Please email me directly at cosmeicart@gmail.com if you wish to be a part of this space but do not have the funds. <3 If you are white and/or able-bodied, I ask you to be mindful and will appreciate your compensation for my spiritual and emotional labor.

always with love,
mei

In some cultures, “shamanic illness” is considered to be a calling, a process of initiation through which a person experiences groundbreaking suffering and grief which assists them in their journey of becoming a healer. The “illness” is seen as a spiritual crisis that torments individuals into surrendering the patterns of their old selves for the destined role of a healer. This is what being chronically ill has done for me. It has cracked me wide open into accessing more collective empathy and a much larger sense of what it means to feel and belong in this world.

Illness has completely shifted the foundation of who I once was to who I am today. It has asked me to soften into the very parts of me I couldn’t believe could exist. Everything that shows up in your body is energy waiting to be reckoned with. It is not just a physical symptom, but also a spiritual opening. You are no longer able to perform “putting out effort” for external approval. Everything is now focused to how you’re feeling within. This energy has demanded me to sink into who I really am instead of who I think I should be, critiquing performance of any kind in the name of inclusion. It has revealed my purpose to me with great clarity.

Everything in my life so far has been purposeful. It isn’t a surprise to me that my path to healing ancestral wounds has offered me the privilege of experiencing illness. It has taken me over a year to see this initiation as a “privilege” instead of an experience that suddenly pulls the rug from underneath your feet and turns your life upside down. To not feel resentment over life itself and the injustice of simply being alive in this body.

When you experience a tower moment in your life, a dark night of the soul—some form of illness, injury, the ending of a significant relationship or any other pivotal change, the experience itself becomes the point of access to other dimensions of consciousness otherwise inaccessible to those who aren’t acquainted with the full spectrum of vitality in these transient, aging bodies of earth. Suffering becomes a portal towards deeper levels of connection and intimacy. Where truth-telling defies hegemonic systems of power seeking to silence us, perpetuating cycles of separation which keep us stuck in psychological states of survival, hyperindividualism and the normalisation of cis-heteropatriarchal nuclear family structures stealing our dreaming capacity for queer futures of chosen family and communal solidarity.

I had never even considered the emotional and spiritual weight I’d been carrying internally until my body broke into illness—which was its own way of healing itself.

If there is some illness in your system, think of it this way: Illness is the means by which an organism frees itself from invasion. Then the organism must only be helped to be sick, to break through into the full sickness, for that is the way forward.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

When i’m connected to the collective consciousness, i’m not just attuned to the beauty of our inherent oneness, but also to the weight of grief, collective shifts and old timelines crumbling to birth new ones. Of people going through massive shifts and personal transformations, the metamorphosis of grieving their old lives while I am simultaneously also grieving my own.

Illness brings forth extreme amounts of discomfort, dysphoria, physical and mental distress, and a loss of what was once considered to be the norm for Self. In that moment you have a choice about how you want to perceive it—you can either perceive it as a hindrance, a challenge or a great tragedy that has occurred to you and is here to take away from you or you can see it as an opportunity to better align with a new version of yourself you didn’t even think was possible. This intensive process of dismantling inadvertently puts you in a state of heart-expansion to hold more, to ask for more and eventually, dares you to re-imagine and re-invent new realities. Where you once thought you had control, you’re forced to surrender and adapt. To be flexible and be able to pivot. Since there is no room for denial, you are able to stretch your awareness around suffering and confront what emerges out of having to experience gruelling amounts of it without avoidance, and through this expansion, it prepares you for more interconnected joy.

Anyone who has capacity to commune with ground-breaking grief without avoidance, denial or fear has the same capacity for joy, pleasure and celebration. Whether we know it or not, that is the gift of being touched by life’s harshest sting. The level of intimacy you share with your pain gets reflected by how much love you can allow in and vice versa.

We cling onto things because we’re afraid of what the unknown might hold, the void space that feels endlessly all-consuming. When we’re too attached to a reality, we forget to search beyond it. Something that feels self limiting at first can reveal an alternate way of being that’s much more aligned with our higher purpose.

Yes, you’re giving up one way of being but simultaneously, you’re also opening yourself up to the infinite possibilities of a brand new experience. If you can hold space for both contrasting energies, you get to experience the world with a new vision that doesn’t adhere to societal expectations of people’s projections of you. You can grieve the life you’ve had to let go of, you can feel the anger and the frustration that comes up while also embracing the gratitude of unlocking a new version of yourself that you get to dive deep into for the very first time. It propels you into embodying what it truly means to be radically vulnerable. Not just externally but also internally—to show up for what your body needs instead of what you think you should be doing.

The ending is also the beginning. You might not be able to access the same reality as before but you get to fall in love with the journey of creating a new one. Instead of questioning what you might be losing, you get to ask yourself everything that you get to create from here onwards without comparing where you once were. By basking in the infiniteness of intentional flow in your life; a dance with reality and its endless possibilities.

Whether we like it or not, being chronically ill forces us back into our bodies. Every day, every second goes into repairing our once exploited relationship with our own bodies, its relationship with the world around it and the space it fundamentally occupies. It allows us to confront all the times our autonomy was stolen and care, denied. When our bodies learned how to become altars of relational extraction and inherited generational harm.

Being ill since the past two years has led me to lose all control over who I thought I was, who I had hoped myself to be, the identity I was building towards, the life that I thought I would get to live, the relationships I would have. Surely, being ill has meant living in a constant state of surrender and grief. But it has also made me alive to new possibilities and futures not just for myself but also for my kin. It has re-awakened my connection to my body in such a way that it’s become non-negotiable to ignore its needs and its connection to the land. It has become impossible to deny it rest and relief, shattering all other illusions and societal expectations of my worthiness in a world where your productivity is considered to be equidistant to how valuable you are.

My ripening into “disposability” has revealed all the wounds of the world which is ultimately, the object of illness. Not this body, but the world we cohabit.

Disposability culture teaches us that we become unworthy of life when we can no longer produce capital. Denying people care when they need it the most is systemic violence. Denying people proper access to healthcare, food and life-saving resources is neglect. Denying people love and community causes psychological damage which gets stored in the soma, making our bodies ache for us. Our bodies scream against systemic violence because they do not know how to lie. They want to protect us. Chronic illness is both the wound—a cry for grief-tending—and the medicine that sees reality clearly without the refusal to acknowledge injustice, supremacy, desirability, authoritarianism, abuse, neglect. It is both a loss of what we once knew to be true and a preparation into entering a higher reality that protects us all.

Let the voices of those facing crisis penetrate your soul. Listen to the disabled, the chronically ill, the incarcerated, the criminalised and the most vulnerable. Let the wounded teach you how to heal the world.

with love,
mei

★ artist patreon / art mail / physical newsletters your support means everything to me at this time. <3

★ my two queer, disabled friends who are also t4t life partners are seeking rental assistance to avoid evacuation. please send love over to ’s cashapp: birdboiblu or venmo: lowpolybones.

When your greatest fear is a lack of belonging, you learn early on that hiding is the safest option. Self-denial becomes the access point for social acceptance. To occupy a body that is actively changing everyday due to illness, is to be confronted by your greatest fears of disappearance and dysphoria, when no one notices your slow decay. They say that what you fear the most has already happened to you in the past, and if that’s true, then i’m wondering if it’s the post traumatic cyclical repetition of systemic neglect that has been holding me back from speaking the truth. Being ill in itself is a physical manifestation of the harm that was once caused without any outlet of release. Being chronically ill, then, becomes proof of a merciless existence.

Maja, in her latest newsletter writes, “If we assume love must fade, we start living accordingly, stopping the small gestures, ceasing the renewal, becoming passive observers of our own emotional entropy. But if we believe love can endure, we tend to it differently. Our faith in its possibility changes the way we show up. Love, like consciousness, loops back on itself: what we attend to strengthens.”

Perhaps it’s the lifelong ache for something that I never got to experience, at least not in its true nature. Perhaps it’s the flawed nature of humanity itself. Or it’s me already having put myself out there, tirelessly refusing to be torn apart by that which wanted to break my spirit despite being a recipient of constant relational harm that makes me want to admit that having faith has not been enough. What i’ve experienced every single time I held onto my faith and persevered against oppositional energies, is denial. It is a lack of reciprocity and compassion for the reverence I carried.

A dear friend recently reached out to me for some relational advice for navigating rupture with their partner, and I feel nothing less than shame to confess that for the first time in my life, my instant response to the situation (which I knew better than to voice out loud in the moment) was thinking that they were both doomed. That the relationship was doomed and maybe all the years of rupture and interpersonal conflict meant that it wasn’t actually supposed to work. That maybe we were all avoiding the obvious—rupture as the proof of something that isn’t meant to last. It broke my heart to come to that conclusion as fast as I did.

I recognise where this viewpoint stems from. I have never known anything that has sustainably lasted beyond rupture.

But what changed upon their crossing over to the other side of conflict, not just in their connection but also in my own perception around it was being curious about what lies beyond—the slight possibility of endurance. Watching someone surrender to what it takes to endure. To being so devoted to one’s love that they were willing to do the work needed to meet their partner on the other side, shifted something fundamental inside of me. It broke me at the same time. It cracked me wide open because i’ve never known a love like that. Where rupture is not seen as a hindrance but as an opportunity to love harder.

I understand that repair is nuanced and navigating it as two traumatised individuals just adds to the depth of what it means to invent new ways of loving. The expectation is never to completely deny yourself compassion in order to offer love to another. It’s always a mutual effort in identifying the harm, taking accountability without avoidance, recognising our mental and emotional capacities as separate individuals and making effort in the absence of ego to meet in the middle.

For some, conflict becomes the proof of encouragement to leave, an excuse they were hoping to rely on the whole time. For others, it’s an opening for deeper intimacy. My greatest grief is that we were never taught how to love. Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families where we would be expected to do asymmetrical labor, where our first examples of something so sacred was shaped by our abusers, have lost to some capacity, the power of our imagination. We don’t know what it would mean for us to dream. Where that would lead us.

We don’t know what sort of sacrifice it would ask of us—what is beneficial for self and communal growth, and what is extractive. We didn’t learn how to discern or tell the difference between the two. So risk-taking, for us, feels dangerous. It almost feels threatening. Like we’d be losing parts of ourselves in this process. And that is not a complete delusion either. We have to grieve parts of ourselves we need to let go of in order to let love in.

To lose a father for a daughter is like losing a limb. He is the only man i’ve ever loved so deeply. It becomes apparent then, why the betrayal I experienced in that relation has completely distorted my perception of love, why I have such a hard time trusting men and why being a lesbian was a deliberate choice I made. Why I do not trust the institution of marriage, why I do not feel safe in my own vulnerability. It explains how I am clearly able to locate the harm caused by cisheteropatriarchy, to this day why I revolt against it.

I grew up watching my parents harm each other in the most traumatising of ways (my mother almost lost her life right in front of my eyes when I was only thirteen) for almost three decades before they finally got separated last year. I didn’t realise that once the abuser would be gone, i’d have to confront what i’d been missing out on all these years i spent silently grieving a loss that hadn’t fully occurred yet. How anticipatory grief eventually becomes an active, alive thing tainting all your prayers and desperation to lead a normal life. When fear engulfs itself, the word “abuser” acts as the shield that creates distance between an innocent child who never got to know paternal love from the body of a person they came from, who caused them irreversible harm. History can never be changed or erased, only acknowledged. All you have is now. I can’t change my origin story or the karma that birthed me but I can change the trajectory of my future with honest, aligned action and my devotion towards curating for myself the life i’ve always dreamt of.

My therapist recently sent me a bunch of questions to reflect on after I disclosed that i’m a writer. The last one, also the most powerful one was: “What is one dream I will not let go of and want to see come true?”

The answer has always been love. Sacred, reciprocal, rapturous, heart-centred, benevolent, sensuous, tender, divine love.

To the child who never got to experience the love of a father who felt safe to be around or what being protected should feel like in this male dominant world where your only salvation is that one man who’s designed to keep you safe. To the child whose safety was compromised by their own mother in the name of abusive love based on attachment and lack—this is for you. You can stop now. You can release the burden of inherited self-sacrifice veiled as love. Your heart is sacred and deserves to be mirrored back with the same intensity. You are worthy of a love that protects you at all costs.

True love doesn’t deny your lived reality to stay true to itself, but willingly makes sacrifices to meet you where you are, because meeting you is the purpose. And if having access to you requires effort and the unlearning of harm, then true love is more than willing to surrender to this ethos.

It is possible to be loved without needing to conform to smallness. If anything, true love encourages your self-actualisation. For love to be true, two wholes need to come apart before they can come together. That wholeness can only be accessed by honoring the other’s otherness, by repairing what was once damaged—which then becomes a gift. A prerequisite to being in relation with one another.

It’s not physical absence alone that leaves scars of abandonment, but also the great disappointment of realising that presence without repair does not close the distance but creates more of it. Presence becomes violent while absence equates to lack, both become equally damaging to the soul.

If homeland is our place of birth, then your father is a home and your mother, the land you come from. The place where the home and the land commune sets the stage for love for the rest of your life. To the child who was denied access to both a safe home and the land of their belonging, I forgive your self-abandoning tendencies in service of self-preservation.

You have to survive winter to experience the renewal of spring. And if so, i ask my higher self once again, when will my spring arrive? I want to grow around the wounds that have shaped every departure of my life. Loss after loss, painted with hues of red that both signify the bloodshed it took to be here and the love that I’ve been trying to mold myself back into as if it were always here. As if it never left. As if I wasn’t born without it. This is what red signifies to me—the longings of a child who only knew how to dream in silence. Who didn’t have permission to cry out loud. Who was denied their safe landing.

When dead parts of us are carcassed everywhere our gaze lands, it becomes harder to locate the source of the wound underneath. Similarly, when you’re conditioned to villainize your own power, you grow to fear and despise it. You refuse to own it because you remember how it has always kept people away from you. It has made you unworthy of love. I have spent my whole life trying to love someone who couldn’t love themselves. I have repeated the same cycle over and over again in all my interpersonal relationships. I have self-abandoned to prove that it was possible to love someone else unconditionally into loving me. It is time to stop now.

It is time to give myself permission to sculpt into the version of self i’ve always known myself to be deep down. It’s time to take back control over my life and write my own story instead of fitting into someone else’s. You think your power is the cause of your rejection and systemic oppression. You think you’re the problem that needs fixing when it’s always been your power that’s been the most magnetic thing about you. Other people recognised it before you ever could.

They were focused on performing something you naturally embodied, and for that they punished you, feeding their own egos and serving their self-righteousness. Your radical vulnerability exposed their need for performance over authenticity. Your truth-telling was never the problem, it was always their lack of care, compassion and solidarity.

Triggering people is the most humbling because eventually, it forces you to recognise your own power—the internal kind, the one you’ve spent your whole life running away from. The one you can no longer afford to deny.

with all my love, for baby mei
mei

✩ Sign up for Saturday’s Grief Circle 2.0 here or email me at cosmeicart@gmail.com for a free spot.

After a very unexpectedly successful turnout at the last grief space I facilitated in September, I have decided to offer another one (and will continue to do so periodically as long as the calling feels true).

$10 - $25 sliding scale for my spiritual and emotional labor but please don’t let the lack of funds hold you back from reaching out. Everyone is welcome as always.

Fill this form to be a part of this space and look out for my email!

Email me directly at cosmeicart@gmail.com if you wish to attend the circle but aren’t able to offer monetary compensation.

See you there. <3

with love,
mei