Three is the magic number

2025 was surreal and it’s not over yet. The shedding of the Snake continues until 17th February when the Year of the Fire Horse begins. Have you felt the old structures and narratives collapsing? We have the power to discern what’s coming with us before we start taking aligned action. Galloping on the new path that’s opened, wearing the new skin we’re growing…

Moment of stillness with an unintended blurry view.

**

Unlike previous years, I don’t have a good sense of where the months began and ended. There were about two months where I was totally uninterested in the outside world, spending many hours journaling and drawing quietly and ferociously. My journal is a vessel for my lived experience. One of the loving fences I’ve set up to nurture my creativity and this period of dissolving, incubating, and being.

I’m always amused by how inaccurate my memory is when I go back and read about something that happened. I think about how many contorted narratives I must have carried and let influence, and I can’t help but feel a bittersweet grief — at all the opportunities missed, choices unmade, love never watered to grow in favour of love that drained. Maybe this is the reason I love to document all my internal questioning. It’s a way to honour the stories with no middle or end. At least there’s a place they live, uninterrupted, as mysteries forever unlived.

Three years of writing

One of my favourite writers on Substack, Henrik, posted a note that said no one will pay attention to your writing in the first three years at least. I can’t find the note anymore, but I can confirm from experience that three is an accurate benchmark.

My first year of writing I spent on getting comfortable with just writing and posting them on a fairly consistent basis. I didn’t want to post once, then nothing for three months before guilt pushed me to overcompensate with a series of posts one after another. Only to go quiet for months again.

What I’ve been essentially doing in the past year is trying to write more like myself. Searching and developing my voice. I feel the progress in the grimace on my face when I read something I wrote a year ago. I also feel it in the uninterrupted flow when I’m journaling. I’ve become significantly better at not censoring as I write. I suppose this is “writing from abundance”.

I’m entering the third year of writing and nearly there with finding my voice, though I’m always a bit uncertain. In fact, uncertainty — tension — might be an essential part of my voice. If I am to ever be absolutely certain about something that must mean I’ve chosen to simplify the narrative or that I have become rigid in my thinking.

Midnight Pond is a space for being unapologetically uncertain.

Three languages in one poem

I have been translating myself for most of my life. Whether it was from one language to another, or reframing myself to fit in at school, or editing my words to make them legible to any stranger. Through all the translation, I have lost and found myself again. In between, I figured out that I was doing it because I never felt accepted exactly as I am. An alien everywhere I go. Except maybe it’s all in my head.

I move comfortably between the three languages that have shaped me, but I keep coming back to this project of wanting to combine them. I’m not happy with just alternating, I want them to flourish together. If I could get myself into some sort of trance or alternative state of consciousness, would I feel most comfortable combining all three at once? English would be the body of the ship. Mandarin the mast and maybe Hungarian the sail. Though it feels like the ship had been sailing with a broken mast and a sail with holes for too long.

I discovered that I enjoy writing poetry and short prose this year, and I’ve been trying to fix the mast and sail with multilingual poems. Which is funny because I didn’t understand poetry as a kid. It was cryptic to me. I remember being devastated at the fact that there was no way I could ever know what the poet really meant or felt. Then what’s the point of trying to analyze something when there’s no way to get to the source of truth?

I was reading them wrong, of course. I read them like a translator instead of an appreciator of art. Poems don’t need to be deciphered. You feel them or you don’t. To have a poem resonate deeply means it’s articulated or touched something real, maybe something you’ve hidden from yourself.

Where did this urge to write poems come from? All I did was write from a place of truth or as close as I can get to it, and as I inched closer, this form emerged.

Three narratives

My relationship to astrology was rattled when I started reading into Vedic astrology. It’s slowly dismantled everything I’ve internalized about my birth chart according to Western astrology, and I’ve now found the right distance from it all.

There’s uncertainty around the exact time I was born because it didn’t happen easily. This story fits the Capricorn Ascendant: difficult birth, responsibilities too soon and late-bloomer in some ways, reserved personality until later in life. Maybe I didn’t want to come out of my mother’s womb as if I had already felt the burden of becoming before I was even born. Another narrative that fits is that I only wanted to come out on my own terms, not when I was supposed to. Or maybe I was pushed out sooner than I was ready.

The biological story was that my head was too big and I couldn’t fit through, but considering these different narratives gives me the opportunity to question if I might be carrying the imprint of said difficult birth without knowing. Your Ascendant describes the way you show up in the world, the first impression you give and how others see you.

But now — according to Vedic astrology, my Ascendant may not be in Capricorn. I might be a Sagittarius Ascendant instead or both at the same time. Ruled by the planet Jupiter, Sagittarius is known for its expansive, philosophical, and optimistic nature. The narrative thickens, I guess.

Multiple truths can coexist and they don’t need to agree or cancel each other out. This is a necessary tension of an integrated life. Accepting this brings stillness and dampens the need for external chaos.

Settling closes the process by resolving tension too early and returning to the familiar cycle that treats clarity as finality. Sitting with contradiction is different. It requires staying with opposing ideas without forcing one to cancel the other. Movement still happens, but it comes from holding these ideas together rather than eliminating one of them. In that way, what feels like opposition becomes part of the same structure, and clarity emerges as the ability to carry complexity without collapsing it.
— The Mercer Edition

The narratives you accept shape how you live. Discernment between the ones that serve you and the ones holding you back is a lifelong project. I’d tell my younger self to try to recognize when you’re seeing people through the narrative you project onto them instead of who they really are. Look beyond the first impression, the way they want to be seen. Real people don’t enjoy being on the pedestal. Real people want to be seen as unapologetically human.

The more clearly you see yourself, the easier it is to notice when there’s a mismatch between the narrative and reality. By “clearly” I don’t mean knowing yourself very, very well. It means knowing in what ways you do and don’t know yourself. It means having the confidence to say “I don’t know myself.”

I’ve been listening to Not For Threes by Plaid on repeat. This piece is an organic continuation to Shivers of deep resonance.