The Only Way Out Is Through

Dear One,

I have been crying every day this week.

Sometimes quiet tears. Sometimes heaving, gasping, whole-body sobs.

I am a person who has spent her life navigating existential landscapes — it is, in many ways, my path — and still, this week brought me to my knees.

I want to tell you about it. Not from the other side of it. From inside it.

Because I think that’s actually the medicine right now.

What I have been grieving is the lies. Not just the obvious ones. The deeper ones. The ones so woven into the fabric of how we were taught to see the world that we didn’t even know they were lies. The ones about who holds the answers. About what safety looks like. About who is in charge and whether they know what they’re doing.

They don’t. They never really did.

And something in me — in my body, in my ancestral line — is reckoning with that fully for the first time. The grief of it is enormous. Because it’s not just personal. This is collective. We are all, in our own ways, grieving the parent figure that turned out not to exist. The authority that was supposed to know. The structure that was supposed to hold.

And that grief is walking through every door right now. I see it in my clients — a low grade numbness, a dissociation, a helplessness that sits just below the surface of daily life. I see it in the therapists I know who are exhausted because they are trying to hold space for others while quietly drowning themselves. I feel it in my own body when I wake up and reach, instinctively, for something solid and find the ground still shifting.

We are in something unprecedented. And I think the most honest thing I can say is: nobody really knows the way through. Not me. Not anyone with a credential or a platform or a plan.

Here is what I do know.

The only way out is through.

And through means feeling it. Actually feeling it. Which sounds so simple and is so terrifying, because we have built an entire civilization around not doing that. Every scroll, every binge, every frantic doing and fixing and optimizing — these are not character flaws. They are the entirely human response to unbearable uncertainty. I do them too. I reach for distraction just like everyone else before I remember.

Before I remember that the grief needs somewhere to go.

What I have found this week — in the moments when I have let myself actually feel it, with my partner, with the people I love — is that the grief shared is grief halved. Not because talking makes the hard things less hard. But because when I let myself be seen in the mess of it, raw and unpresentable, the person across from me almost always says me too. And something in that me too is more grounding than any answer I could have been given.

We are the ones we have been waiting for. I know that phrase has become almost a cliché in spiritual circles. But I want to offer you the unromantic version of it — the one that doesn’t feel empowering quite yet. Because the antidote to outsourcing our power to institutions is not rugged individualism. It is not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. It is something harder and more beautiful than that.

It is showing up as a whole person, broken and real, and letting others do the same. It is relationality. It is we.

This week, in between the cries, I have been making mandalas.

I want to be clear: I am not a visual artist. I am a little bit of a silly artist, honestly. The mandalas are imperfect. Messy. Made with love and not much else. I have been making them for people I care about, just because it is one of the few things that has felt real to me this week. Love needed somewhere to go, and my hands needed something true to do.

A friend said something to me recently that stopped me cold. He told me that a mentor once said to him: perfection is abuse.

I have been sitting with that ever since.

Because I think that’s what’s breaking down right now, underneath all of it. The performance of having it together. The curated surface. The institutional facade of certainty and control. All of it a kind of perfectionism. And all of it, in its way, a violence against the truth.

The mandalas are imperfect. The cries are ugly. The grief is not resolved. And I am writing this from inside the week, not from the other side of it, because I think that’s what’s actually needed right now.

Not the polished version. The real one.

If you are in it too — if you are feeling the low grade numbness, the helplessness, the rage, the fear — I want you to know that you are not broken. You are not failing to cope. You are a sensitive human being living through a collective reckoning that has no real precedent, and your nervous system is telling you the truth about it.

The invitation, as terrifying as it is, is not to fix it or figure it out. It is to feel it. To find one person, one safe place, and let the grief have some air. To make something imperfect with your hands. To say me too when someone lets you see their mess.

And if you are looking for a place to do exactly that — in person, in community — I want you to know that the Circle of Re-Membering is gathering this Sunday, April 12th at 10am in Southwest Portland. This is a free community space, held with care, for exactly this kind of collective feeling and finding-of-ground together. We have two spots remaining. If one of them is yours, I would love to hold it with you. You can claim your seat here.

The calm does come.

I have lived this enough times to know. Not as a destination you arrive at, but as what’s waiting on the other side of the feeling — a little more space, a little more clarity, a little more of yourself returned to you.

We are in this together. Imperfectly, messily, really.

That is the medicine.

In it with you,

Katrina

Katrina is a heart-centered astrologer, diviner of patterns, and earth-wise companion for those moving through seasons of grief, transition, and reawakening. Her work is shaped by lived experience with loss, illness, and transformation—initiations that led her to the wisdom of the stars and the medicine of nature. With a presence both grounded and poetic, she offers astrology readings and intuitive guidance to help others remember who they are and reclaim the beauty of their becoming. Learn more or schedule a reading at pathofre-membering.com