A Paradoxical Life

Welcome, wild one. I’m Annette ~ artist, storyteller, and medicine woman. These writings are intimate transmissions from my life, offered in the hope they stir something true in yours. When I am not here, you will find me weaving potions over at Wild Nettle, or guiding those ready to deepen into their own becoming. I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to stay a while, your paid subscription is deeply appreciated. Otherwise, sign up for my free newsletter, where I will be sharing exciting ways we get to play and create together!

I remember when I first read my Human Design profile and it said: 3/6 - the Living Contrast - and I quite literally sighed with relief.

My life has felt (and still very much feels) like a continual whirlpool of contradiction and paradox.

I recently found out, though, that contradictions cancel each other out, whilst paradoxes unite opposites into deeper truths.

For example, part of my supposed design is to quite literally fail, get up, and fail again - to jump into the ring knowing that it is purely an experiment.

To play for play’s sake.

The paradox, though, is that the “higher” number, and possibly my “higher” self (the 6 line Role Model), has the wisdom from above and seeks space from the ring, and perspective, rather than the mess and chaos of the game.

I am in constant battle between getting my hands dirty and sitting on the sidelines, watching the shit unfold, knowing in a deep, wise place within me that soon the dust will settle, and the people will find water to wash off the dirt.

Life right now feels like a dust storm.

There are moments when I wake up and have full-blown clarity that Wild Nettle is it (as in IT, you know, the thing I will focus all my energy and resources into). And then other days when I’m like WTF are you doing, woman. It is not working. People don’t care. They want quick fixes. You are delusional. Stop it.

I sometimes feel as though I am pushing a massive lead ball up a very high mountain and will soon be crushed by it.

Squished by my own stupid choices.

Apparently, a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way?

I heard in a podcast recently that Elon Musk said having your own company is like waking up every morning and eating a bowl of broken glass…

I have had moments in my life where I can agree, but I also have a very big contradicting no inside of me that says, fuck that ~ I do not want to suffer to succeed.

I want to (and will) birth a business from a well-resourced, soft, warm, morning-bowl-of-oats kinda place.

The paradox, though, is that a very real part of me knows that actually building something, like something big and impactful, takes a whole lot of fucking fire and forging that can sometimes feel tantamount to shredding your insides.

One of my very first jobs (besides modelling and working at Abercrombie & Fitch - vomit emoji) was working on the door of London’s coolest nightclubs. I was working four nights a week, sometimes five, whilst studying my degree at King’s and consuming copious amounts of free drugs and cocktails (the perks of having the power to permit people entry or not).

My Saturday shift started at 9 p.m. and ended around 6 a.m., only to continue into afterparties that went on, sometimes till Tuesday morning.

Yup, that is two all-nighters in a row.

It was fire and forging of the highest order, but what it taught me was very little about business and a whole ton about humanity, particularly the shadows of humanity.

I stood on the door of nightclubs where humans came to escape their daytime reality. We were the after-hour hideaways, the very sexy lounges which no one could ever get into. We provided the dark corner crevices where you could become completely undone - and in that undoing - catch a glimmer of who you really were.

I’ve seen the power of rich, influential men collapse under the spell of audacious young girls. Young, slim models who were naive enough not to care and radiant enough to command a room with the pout of their lips and the click of their heels.

My beautiful paradox during that era of my life arrived when I met some sober hippies at a park party and found myself working for their company.

I was in my final year of studies, and bless my wise body for becoming allergic to alcohol, but essentially, I had no choice but to get sober, which opened up new worlds that were beyond my grey lecture halls and the dimmed dance floors I called home.

From my seedy nightclub shift, I would get on a bus and head to the early morning sober rave parties - quite literally leaving the darkness for the light.

Morning Gloryville, the company I interned for, was the very first morning sober rave company the world had ever known. They were pioneering a movement that is now worldwide and trending. Back in those days, it was a complete enigma, especially in a city like London.

I remember arriving at my first rave and thinking I had stepped into an alternative universe. What stood out the most was the colour and the kindness. I remember feeling so incredibly uncomfortable with the intimacy between everyone.

The sobering experience of being seen in the daylight.

My favourite was when we left the rave with all our colourful glitter make-up and unicorn-like outfits and went into the tube stations at 8 a.m. to sing and dance (and totally freak out) the suited and booted robots on their way to work.

The contrast was stark.

At night, I held girls’ hair back whilst they puked in toilets and did cocaine to stay thin, complaining about their rich boyfriends and their burning need to get the cover for this or that magazine.

At the morning raves, I watched as women with hairy armpits danced freely with scarily wide smiles on their faces and no drugs in their system, high on a life that was totally outside any box I, or society, could ever have placed them into.

But like with any extreme, I slowly started to see the distortion in the light that too had its faults and facades.

“Free love” became a “spiritual term for the same tactic of ‘I want it all, and I want it now,’ but I don’t want to take any responsibility for it either…

What the men did in the nightclubs, they did at the morning raves, just this time they had guitars and long hair and a little more spiritual swag to their usual seedy suave.

The same goes for the ladies. The seduction and manipulation went from pouty red lipstick and designer minis to “free the nipple” and “goddess-worship-me in my virginal white dress ’cause I am oh-so-pure and oh-so-enlightened.”

I was both the oh-so-enlightened “virginal” goddess and the bitch on the door in a tight black leather skirt, manipulating my way into getting more money out of my big-table spenders.

The Living Contrast, what can I say.

In this current era of my life, though, this contrast is showing up in a wee bit more of a “professional” sense, if I can even put it that way.

I’ve gone from the playground of parties to the bored-room of busy-ness.

And oh, it can be oh so bloody boring.

But it also doesn’t have to be…

And so begins my battle.

I fight on the fence of wanting to grow my business into a big global company, make loads of cash so I can make loads of impact, and a very real desire to run for the hills - away from this strange, alien, AI-robot-grooming society - to a small little safeholding, grow my own food, tend to my own animals, and throw my cell phone into the sea (I actually had a dream I did that).

The 3-line fighter wants to be in this world - in the seedy city mess of it - deeply immersed in systems and the eruption of technological advancements and what that could actually mean for “work,” influence, and humanity…

I am reading Diary of a CEO, for fuck’s sake.

And right next to that book - full of both great little cues for business owners and content creators, and a whole lot of outdated hustle culture - lies my other current read, The Magdalene Manuscript, a portal to this whole other (religious?) spiritual awakening I am having with regards to sacred union, tantra and the apparent romantic relationship between Yeshua and Mary…

I return from festivals where I run around barefoot and evoke madness in women, only to get home, put on make-up, and play a pretty plastic princess for yet another beauty brand on TV.

The one pays me peanuts, the other pays me 3 months’ worth of rent - in a day.

Life is weird.

Do you feel that too?

One final juicy paradox (or contradiction - still waiting to find out) is my current push and pull with dating, love, and family…

I go between the quirky 21st-century aunty who already has two baby-daddy potentials lined up (where we have agreed to full independence and freedom whilst co-parenting) and the very real ache for my one true love - who will meet me intellectually, emotionally, physically… and spiritually.

On my most recent date with someone I have been gently nurturing a situationship with, we had a very real chat about where we were both heading, and I got a rude awakening reflected back at me. I was reminded - with evidence - how very unconducive my life is for family, and how I barely even have time to spend with this said human.

How would a child fit into the current reality I find myself in?

I don’t even have “time” for a pet.

Eish…

Before I spiralled down that rabbit hole, I stopped and called my women (this is why you need a solid sisterhood) and fleshed out my dilemma whilst asking for real and radical feedback.

Luckily, I have some badass working mamma friends who also live colourful, chaotic lives - and who graciously reminded me that there is never a “perfect” time in your life when you are “ready” for family; it just kinda happens.

There is a knowing and a natural progression that steers you in that direction.

Or there is not.

It either is happening… AKA there is action taken toward carving out more space and more time for one another…

Or there is not.

So perhaps the bigger reflection, which started to dawn on me, was that I was not actually invested - or truly interested - in compromising my time. At least not for this particular connection. Or at this particular stage of my life… And so, we got really honest with each other and decided, amicably and maturely (’cause that’s what happens when you date in your 30s), to close the door.

(At least for now).

Did it hurt?

A little…

And yet I woke up the next day and had three events this week which I needed to prepare for, stock that was late and needed ordering, clients who needed sessions, and self-tapes that needed filming.

I looked at my surmounting to-do list this past Monday and felt like I might just collapse with overwhelm and bury myself in the little bit of earth on my balcony.

Pangea (the festival I recently facilitated at) was incredible, but it took out a solid few days of structure, and so my little ritual-creating worker bee felt totally out of place - and behind on her oh so many important projects.

The delicious opportunity, though, was to use this spin-out as a momentary reminder to burn through any old patterns of panic and pressure - that corrupting sense of urgency that has you rushing around like a headless chicken - not really getting anything done properly because you’re meeting some imaginary deadline - almost killing yourself in the process.

Today, my mentor reminded me, “Business is not a set of outcomes to achieve; it is a process of becoming.”

And I truly feel this.

One of my most favourite quotes, which has become a personal mantra, is from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:

“Work is love made visible.”

When I find myself getting caught up in the oh-so-seriousness of busy-ness, I remind myself that I get to do what I do.

That I chose to serve my particular medicine in this particular way, and that it is my own seriousness of said choices that creates my own suffering.

“And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste,
it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine.”

And so, I take a big deep breath, I put on my big granny panties, and I get over myself.

I light a candle, and I write down all the truly wonderful things I am grateful for.

- and I stop fucking scrolling.

There is no greater poison than comparison to deepen that false sense of urgency that tells us… they are already there, which means you must be late or have missed the boat entirely.

We cannot compare our timelines to others.

But what we can do is devote ourselves deeply to the love made visible by the work we are uniquely here to do.

And by do, I mean do.

Work is a verb.

So yes, it requires action.

What, my loves, are you choosing to action?

And in what manner are you going about doing it?

….

PS part of that action is forgiveness.

So yeah, I just wanna take this final moment to publicly forgive myself for not getting my monthly Substack essay out on time.

October flew by, but hey…

Better late than never!

Thank you for witnessing me.

Please share your shit storms in the comments or reply directly - I am here for the muddy marvellous mess of this beautiful paradoxical life.