She Who Rewrites the Story
Some stories were never ours. Passed down from a generation. But our bodies carried them anyway.
This week, I had my first colonoscopy.
And I was afraid.
Not of the procedure itself though it was unfamiliar but of what it might reveal. Of the quiet knowing in my belly. Of the places within me that I’ve kept tightly wound, undigested.
The digestive system is a spiritual landscape. It’s where we process not only food but stories. Experiences. Emotions we haven’t fully named. Beliefs we swallowed whole. It’s where the unspoken becomes somatic.
It wasn’t lost on me that the polyps they found felt like punctuation marks in the body’s language. Protrusions of memory. Small exclamations in the gut.
A nudge from deep within: You can’t hold this in any longer. And just like that, they were extracted. Time to let go.
🪐 The Timing Was No Accident
This happened right after a Gemini New Moon and on a 28/10/1 vibration day. My own birthday holds that same “1” energy: the soul of the pioneer, the one who must chart her own path, even when it means walking away from the map.
Other energy this week includes today’s Mercury Cazimi, the moment when truth enters the heart of the Sun. It was time to be my own storyteller, to rewrite the story. And here I was, having something removed from the place where stories are stored in silence.
All week, I’ve been thinking about the power of the stories we tell ourselves. The ones others tell about us. The ones we internalize, even when they’re laced with shame or shaped by someone else’s sorrow.
And one story of mine in particular has been asking to be rewritten.
🪡There’s a story I carried for decades…
A story written in silence and heartbreak, delivered in a letter, stamped with loss.
My freshman year of college, I received a letter from my grandparents. In it was news so heavy it cracked something open inside me: my beloved great-grandmother, Grandolly as I knew her, had died. I hadn’t known. I had been writing letters, many of them, but none were returned. I imagined she was reading them somewhere, perhaps too busy to reply. But instead, she was already gone. And I hadn’t been told.
Along with the news came a heart-shaped shell locket, a symbolic gesture that broke me even further. And beneath that, more news: my grandparents would only be fulfilling their financial commitments for that semester. After that, I was on my own. Apparently, I had not fulfilled their “expectations.”
I called my mother in confusion. She confirmed it:
“You didn’t write letters like you were supposed to. They want nothing more to do with you.”
That was it.
No discussion.
No appeal.
No context.
Just... severance.
And so, with the chart I was born with Pisces Sun, Cancer Moon, Capricorn Rising, I did what many daughters of silence do: I carried on. I worked, studied, played soccer, picked up shifts at a restaurant, pieced together what I could, and held that wound close like a secret. I believed the story: that I had done something wrong. That I wasn’t wanted.
But it wasn’t true.
💫Truth, Like the Body, Will Not Be Buried Forever
Years later, now a mother, something began to stir. A quiet ache. Questions. Memories that didn’t align with the narrative I’d been given. Once, on a work trip, I slipped a note into my grandparent’s mailbox, just in case. Hoping they would contact me. It wasn’t until 2017 when my mother died, I had to call my grandparents. They were in France. My grandfather wept, not just for her passing, but at the sound of my voice. We reconnected. I brought my daughters to meet them. We scattered ashes. We shared meals. My grandfather was in the stages of advanced dementia, and they were getting to a point that they would need someone to help. Still, though, I didn’t ask the big questions. The wound was too old, too layered. I didn’t want to risk reopening it.
But fate or perhaps grace opened the door.
Two years ago, I was called to help them when family friends discovered my grandparents were the subjects of elder abuse and fraud. They needed me so I went without a thought. This is a story for another substack, one without an ending. Most significant…
Last summer in France while cleaning out their apartment after my grandfather’s passing, I found a folder of my mother’s letters. And there it was: the story she had told them. A story about me. About my silence. About betrayal. None of it true.
She had been the one standing between us all along, cloaked in her own pain, her addiction, her unhealed wounds. I cried for her pain, for my grandparents, for the stories that caused so much separation.
The story I had carried for so long wasn’t mine. It was hers.
Do you have a story that you inherited that may not belong to you? If you do, do you think it may be time to let it go? or to give it over to the Earth, in tears and with a deep breath - surrender.
🌑 Let today’s Cancer Moon hold you.
☀️ Let the Mercury Cazimi bring clarity to what has been clouded.
✍️ And when you are ready - rewrite, reclaim, remember.
Walking along side you,
Penelope