Take advantage of the archetypes

lessons learned from the year

Thank you for another wonderful year on Substack! This post is made possible by my paid subscribers, to whom I am endlessly grateful. Consider upgrading your subscription today to get access to the archive in addition to the full version of this post, which includes some additional reflections <3

Here’s what I learned in 2025:

1. Choose the hustle over the grind

Recently, I saw an astrologist who told me that Capricorn does their growing up backwards — they are serious children and spend the rest of their lives learning how to find levity. I was a serious child, and I continue to hold onto a certain amount of severity in my twenties. My partner is often reaching over to smooth out the space between my brows where I crunch them together unknowingly, or pulling my nails out of my mouth when I chew out of habit.

In my experience, what helps serious people is serious work. When put to the appropriate task, serious people will find fulfillment and balance in it. The trouble is that serious people often get caught in a grind. This is not always good for us.

There’s two ways to think about hard work, in my opinion.

The grind is dedicated, stable work. It’s doing the same thing over and over again — sometimes in order to gain mastery, and sometimes just because it’s what pays your bills.

The grind is the mindset of the American workforce; it’s the nine-to-five, the tenure-track. It’s also the 3,000-word-a-day writers, the sculptors locked in the basement. There are times when I’ve needed the grind. When I was a rootless teenager in the midst of COVID’s onset, I needed the grind of farmwork. The 6am wakeups, the strict routine. Even when I didn’t want to do it, I did. It built character that I’m proud of, and it gave me something to hold on to when I had nothing. If you have nothing, maybe the grind is for you.

In terms of Tarot, the grind reminds me of the 8 of pentacles. You’re at the workbench, hammering away. The rewards are collecting, but you don’t even look up to see them; that’s how locked in you are.

Hustler energy is different. It’s the forward momentum of The Chariot, with the established past in your rearview. The hustle is the kind of work that requires you to stay flexible and open, to keep moving. Usually, it requires a bit of a fire under your ass in the way of financial or personal pressure. Where the grind is an appointment, the hustle feels more like a quest.

It’s not that the hustle is better than the grind. The grind is essential energy, and some people function best under its rigidity. But people often get stuck in the grind, especially “serious” people, who are assumed to be best suited for it. When this happens, the dedication isn’t rewarding because the action isn’t deliberate. It’s hitting the same nail over and over again which, removed from all romanticism, is just brute force.

It’s my belief that people cannot function well without meaningful, challenging work. It bleeds over into other areas. We get irritable and fussy, neurotic and unbalanced. Not lazy, but unmotivated. It’s part of why this particular era of modern society is so intolerable, with so many of us completely alienated from our work, feeling drained yet unaccomplished, purposeless.

I personally was in major need of some hustling, questing energy. I spent my teenage years and early twenties grinding to build financial security, then I bucked it in favor of chasing that irreplaceable magic of the unknown. Climbed a mountain and I turned around, etc.

It’s alright to turn around. Just make sure that when you come back down the mountain, you’re running.

2. Take advantage of the archetypes

A lot of my year was defined by one essential question: What good is a story about trauma?

I wrote a record about it, read books about it, and thought about it endlessly. In the wake of a traumatic childhood that I pieced together and survived through the vehicle of narrative (and the comfort that narrative provides), I needed to know to what extend I was harming myself by insisting on an exact re-telling, and re-experiencing, of my past.

If you want to know the details of where I landed, listen to the record. But a crucial piece of my exploration has been a study of archetypes — those essential representations prevalent throughout culture, media, and our subconscious. On the theory side, I read some Carl Jung (though I still have plenty of reading to do), and on the practical side, I got into Tarot.

Where a story often left me feeling like I had drawn a line around myself, an archetype felt like looking through a window that was also a mirror. They’re so essential, so familiar — like our greatest stories, but far more flexible. Pulling Tarot for myself, I felt free to spend a day embodying the insular, seeking energy of The Hermit, knowing that there were 71 other cards whose lessons I could tap into at any time.

I am a conclusion-drawer. These are holdovers from a childhood that required hypervigilance and judgement for safety. A necessary lesson for me, into my adulthood, is that my projections are not the truth. I remember that my projections are drawn from the vantage point of a child. It’s not healthy for a child to be the boss, and that’s what I was doing every time I treated those projections as fact. But still, the projections exist. And children are better entertained than saddled with responsibilities.

So, instead of banishing the conclusions, I messed around with them. The archetypes helped me sort out what a certain person, interaction, or situation was doing to my psyche. How am I categorizing these events or this person? What energy are they similar to? What does that remind me of? Can a situation be my Tower one day and my Wheel of Fortune the next? Well…yes!

You don’t have to get into psychoanalysis or Tarot to explore this (though, if you are a beautiful woman in your 20’s or 30’s, it’s probably about time). The good thing about archetypes is that we have immediate, innate access to them. Experiment with external sources of energy or inspiration — animate or inanimate. gabi abrão has been writing about such things for years and her first book, Notes on Shapeshifting, is an excellent resource.

3. Hold loosely

If I had to distill my most important lessons from the year into just two words, it would be these. Hold loosely.

Buddhism teaches non-attachment. As a casual student of the religion for many years, I’ll say this: I am no good at it. Of course, if you speak to many Buddhists, they will tell you that this is the point. That life is a constant balance between holding on and letting go.

It has certainly felt that way to me, that my existence has been a series of contractions, like labor, each squeeze leading to a release that ultimately supports new life. Sometimes, I enjoy these dramatics. That tough pivot, the big break. But, to maintain sanity, most of my life cannot be made up of this kind of thrashing.

I once took a yoga class where the teacher instructed us to think of our breath as a long piece of fabric that was piling up on itself. Each exhale should lead seamlessly into its inhale, like a sine wave. Try it now. You have the conception of the breath, its shape. But mostly, you just watch it go. You let it pass through your hands like water.

This is how I try to relate to my life for the most part. I don’t need to rise above it all, or get down in the mess with each experience. I can touch everything and feel it on my skin. I can try it on and embody it. Then, I can watch it leave me. I often think of these lines from MUNA’s “Loose Garment":”

Used to wear my sadness like a choker
Yeah, it had me by the throat
Tonight I feel I'm draped in it
Like a loose garment, I just let it flow

· · ────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ────── · ·

WHAT’S BEHIND THE PAYWALL: 20 more lessons

The first part of this post dealt with lessons I had to learn over time, things I chewed on for many months and thus required a certain level of extrapolation and nuance to communicate effectively. However, some lessons are simple and even stupid — like “beauty hacks,” the full embrace of certain cliches, or certain personal idiosyncrasies. Here were mine this year: