Welcome to the Inner Workroom, Aster & Ash’s subscriber space for the longer, deeper work that can’t always be contained within a weekly newsletter. This is where I stay with a question beyond its first answer, follow an undercurrent into more complicated territory, and create practical ways for readers to explore the material within their own lives.

Inside, you will find extended essays, printable companion journals, guided inquiries, and reflective practices concerned with identity, resilience, power, relationships, spiritual experience, material conditions, and the difficult work of becoming more legible to ourselves. None of it is designed to diagnose you, fix you, or prescribe who you should become. I will offer interpretations, questions, and possibilities; what you recognize, reject, complicate, or leave unresolved remains yours to decide.

The Inner Workroom is spiritually sincere without pretending certainty. Mystery is welcome here, but so are evidence, skepticism, dark humor, structural analysis, and the occasional necessary use of the word fuck. Personal transformation is not treated as a substitute for collective power, and suffering will not be repackaged as a gift simply because a more reassuring conclusion would be easier to sell.

This is a space for readers who want to remain with the work a little longer: to read closely, question inherited patterns, examine what survival has required, and consider what might become possible now. If that is the kind of inquiry you have been looking for, you are welcome inside.

This week I offer it as a gift to all readers.

There are times when I find myself wanting to get back to who I was before. The person I was before the exhaustion, the grief, and the disappointment. Before I’d spent so long in survival mode that survival started to be my personality.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. We talk all the time about finding ourselves again, getting back to ourselves, or returning to the person we used to be. Usually, there’s some imagined version of the self waiting in the past. She’s still alive in there somewhere, apparently. Untouched and uncomplicated. Before the job, the relationship, the illness, the loss, the trauma, the children, the caretaking, the compromises, the bills, or whatever else happened to us.

I feel this longing intimately. When you feel estranged from your own life, the past can look like the place where something important was left behind. Yet returning to the self doesn’t require going backward.

I’m not convinced there is a pristine original self buried beneath everything that has happened. I’m suspicious of any spiritual framework that treats lived experience as contamination, purity as the goal, or human beings as inherently defective. We are shaped by what we survive, love, lose, refuse, and eventually learn to recognize. Some of those changes become discernment; some remain injuries; others are adaptations that were once useful and now suffocate us. They don’t submit easily to neat categories. Life is messy, at times horrendous and, I hope in greater measure, joyful—although much of it seems to be spent in the less dramatic territory of uncertainty and disorientation.

The question, then, is not “How do I get back to who I was?” but “What is still mine beneath everything I have had to become in order to survive?” That question asks us to consider the past, describe the present accurately, and look toward the future. It is not a reversal. It is a movement along a spiral path.

Before I get too far into the spiral, though, I need to talk about resilience. People have spent years complimenting women like me on our resilience, and I’m so fucking sick and tired of it.

“You’re so resilient.”

“I don’t know how you keep bouncing back.”

“I wish I had your strength.”

I know people usually mean well. Sometimes the phrase is offered with genuine tenderness: an attempt to acknowledge what you have survived and the fact that you are still standing. It is often an uninformed way of saying, “I see you." Whatever the intention, I have come to fucking hate it.

I didn’t want to become resilient. I didn’t ask for a life that required me to repeatedly absorb the impact, figure out what was still usable, and somehow keep moving. I didn’t volunteer for the situations that made resilience necessary. I’d have preferred safety, stability, and support. I’d have preferred things to go smoothly more often than they have. Is that too much to ask for?

There is something genuinely hurtful about being praised for how well you survived what you should never have had to survive. Even the language of “bouncing back” bothers me. Back to what—the person I was before the impact? My original shape, as though I were made of rubber rather than flesh, memory, consequence, and a nervous system altered by experience?

I haven’t always bounced back. Usually, I’ve adapted. Sometimes I’ve rebuilt. Oftentimes I’ve dragged myself forward because stopping wasn’t really an option. Sometimes I’ve reorganized my entire life around injuries nobody else could see. I’ve spent my entire life technically functioning but being quite unwell physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

We routinely confuse continued productivity with recovery. Someone keeps working, answering messages, caring for other people, making decisions, and paying bills, so we assume they are coping beautifully. Often, they are functioning because the practical world doesn’t suspend its demands while a person falls apart.

Resilience research itself is much more complicated than the popular story that some people are simply stronger than others. There’s evidence that biological differences, genetic influences, early experiences, relationships, available resources, and current environments all contribute to how people respond to adversity. One longitudinal twin study (Amstadter, Myers, & Kendler, 2014) estimated moderate genetic influence on one particular measure of psychiatric resilience, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single resilience gene or that resilience is fixed at birth. It means biology and environment are entangled, the measurements themselves matter, and the science is nowhere near as simple as “strong people overcome things.” Nature and nurture aren’t standing on opposite sides of a courtroom waiting for us to determine which one committed the personality. They’re interacting with each other constantly.

The temperament a child is born with affects how adults respond to that child. Those responses affect the child in turn. Family systems are bidirectional, even though the adults obviously hold more responsibility and power. Children aren’t passive objects into which an environment is poured. They respond, adapt, resist, seek, withdraw, provoke, soothe, and participate in relationships, and those relationships continue shaping everyone involved (Sameroff, 2009). Research on parenting, temperament, and family development has repeatedly had to move away from simple one-way models and toward more transactional ones.

In short, none of us earned the nervous system we entered the world with. We didn’t choose our childhood environments, the resources our families had, the adults responsible for us, the dangers we encountered, or the coping strategies available to us. We didn’t earn a greater or lesser capacity to recover as though resilience were a prize given to people who performed adversity particularly well.

That doesn’t mean we have no agency. It does mean that our agency has conditions. Some people have more room in which to recover. They have money, time, healthcare, secure housing, flexible work, supportive relationships, or a community that catches them before they hit the ground. Other people are repeatedly called resilient because nobody has any intention of offering the material support that would allow them to stop exercising that resilience.

That’s where the compliment begins to rot. “You’re so resilient” can become a socially acceptable way of saying, “We’ve noticed that you can survive without adequate help, and we’d like you to continue doing that.”

Women are particularly vulnerable to this kind of praise. So are queer people, disabled people, poor people, racialized people, caregivers, and anyone else expected to quietly absorb institutional failure while remaining pleasant, useful, and productive.

“You’ve been through so much.”

“You’re so strong.”

“We know you’ll figure it out.”

Which is lovely, except I’d rather you help.

Resilience can begin to resemble a personality partly because other people fucking praise us for it. I understand why we accept the praise. I understand why we might even begin to seek it. Fine. I’m resilient. That’s something I’m good at. Fucking praise me for it. Tell me I’m strong. Tell me I’m remarkable. Tell me there’s at least one thing about me worth admiring. When praise has been scarce, we may take whatever form of it is available. We may begin protecting the very identity that’s exhausting us because it has become evidence that we have value. Maybe we don’t feel beautiful, successful, lovable, easy to be around, or whatever else we’ve been told we should be, but at least we’re strong.

At least we can take a hit. At least we can survive. The trouble is that once people decide you can endure anything, they start behaving as though you should. Your suffering becomes less urgent because you’ve survived before. Your limits are treated like temporary lapses in character. When you finally say that you can’t do something, everyone acts confused because you’ve always managed before.

Sometimes we participate in this as self-flagellation. We refuse rest because needing rest contradicts the identity we’ve built. We remain in impossible situations because leaving feels like failure. We tell ourselves that we’ve survived worse, which may be true but is also a terrible fucking reason to remain somewhere harmful. We keep accepting the next burden because competence is recognizable. At least survival gets applause.

I’m not interested in being praised for how effectively I can withstand preventable harm.

Resilience may be necessary. It may even become a source of knowledge, confidence, power, or solidarity. I’m not dismissing what we’ve learned through survival. But necessity isn’t the same thing as virtue. Survival isn’t consent, and I don’t fucking consent to circumstances that continually require me to demonstrate my resilience. I would very much fucking appreciate something to come easily without having to earn it through suffering catastrophe. I’d like support before I reach the point of collapse. I’d like things to go smoothly.

Of course, things will not always go smoothly. The wheel turns.

There are periods when life feels surprisingly easy, or at least manageable. Then there are periods when every ordinary task requires mind-numbing, insanity-provoking negotiation. Even these experiences are relative. Something I can manage when I’m healthy, financially secure, rested, and supported may become impossible when those conditions change. That doesn’t mean I’ve become a worse person. It means circumstances matter.

When I think about the Wheel of Fortune in tarot, I don’t read it as a cheerful little promise that good luck is definitely on the way. Sometimes that’s part of it, but the Wheel is also about contingency. Circumstances change. Positions change. What’s above moves below, and what’s below may rise. Things happen that have absolutely nothing to do with whether we deserve them, whether we’re spiritually evolved, or whether we’ve finally learned the correct lesson. Sometimes the wheel turns because the world turns, and this is simply the nature of it.

Bodies become ill, relationships end, jobs disappear, rent rises, governments make cruel decisions, institutions protect themselves, natural disasters hit...the list goes on. People exercise their own agency, generosity, selfishness, wisdom, or breathtaking stupidity. We don’t have much control over any of it, if at all.

That sounds obvious, but a great deal of modern spirituality depends on pretending otherwise. If everything is the result of our mindset, energetic alignment, manifestations, subconscious beliefs, or refusal to “do the work,” then the world becomes controllable. Terrible, maybe, but controllable. It also means that every terrible thing becomes our fault, and this is something that I violently reject.

There are things we influence and contribute to. There are patterns we participate in, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. There are also things that happen because we live inside bodies, systems, histories, relationships, economies, environments, and political structures that don’t rearrange themselves around our personal growth.

No amount of inner work grants total control over what enters our lives, and any spiritual practice shouldn’t require us to pretend otherwise.

The circle, wheel, and spiral share a geometry without carrying the same meaning. A circle returns to its beginning and closes. A wheel turns through changing conditions. A spiral approaches a familiar point again and again without occupying precisely the same position.

Spiral imagery appears across many cultures over time. I’m not going to take a dive into anthropology here. I’m also completely disinterested in taking a five-thousand-year-old carving, stapling a modern self-help slogan to it, and presenting that as recovered ancient wisdom. So I’m using the spiral here interpretively, because it gives me a way to think about repetition without assumptions of stepping back and failure.

There are moments when I find myself facing something painfully familiar. Personally, it’s the times when the same fear crops up, the same desire to be understood by someone committed to misunderstanding me, the same undercurrent in a relationship, and the same questions about safety, belonging, purpose, or power. In these moments, I’ll often think, “For fuck’s sake, am I really here again?! Didn’t I deal with this last time? Why is it happening again? Why don’t I fucking learn?!” See how easy it is to meet these familiar points and see them as steps back? As failure?

The spiral asks me to pause before I call the recurrence a failure. Am I truly in the same place, or have I arrived with different knowledge? Can I recognize and name the pattern more clearly? Do I have language or boundaries that did not exist before? Can I distinguish what belongs to me from what belongs to my family, an institution, a culture, or the person standing across from me?

The spiral doesn’t promise constant improvement. We can move inward as well as outward; we can lose capacity, become less resourced, more frightened, more exhausted, or more constrained. Time doesn’t automatically make us wiser, and pain doesn’t guarantee transformation or elevation. Sometimes something terrible happens, and all we receive from it is the fact that something terrible happened.

What the spiral offers isn’t a promise of progress. It offers the possibility of perspective. I’m not back where I started. I’m encountering something familiar from another perspective. That difference may be enormous, or it may be barely perceptible. It may only be that this time I know what’s happening while it’s happening. Sometimes that’s the beginning of everything.

This brings me to the sphere. Recognizing a pattern isn’t enough. At some point, we have to ask what we can actually do.

When the world feels chaotic, I can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control what lies well beyond my control. I rehearse conversations in which the other person finally understands; I devise the perfect explanation and imagine the evidence that will make an institution behave ethically. I anticipate every outcome as though vigilance might prevent surprise. It will not. Hypervigilance can resemble responsibility because it keeps me busy, but being busy is not the same as having influence over a single damn thing.

Returning to the self means returning to the inner sphere where discernment and meaningful action are still possible. I may not be able to control whether someone approves of me, but I can decide how much authority I give their approval. I may not be able to force an institution to become ethical, but I may be able to document, report, organize, refuse, leave, expose, or withdraw my labor. I may not be able to make another person communicate honestly, but I can stop doing all the interpretive work required to pretend they are. I may not be able to prevent pain, but I can sometimes decide which pain I’ll continue choosing. I may not be able to repair a relationship alone, but I can stop mistaking my effort for mutuality.

That is the inner sphere: our attention, boundaries, words, choices, refusals, commitments, and labour, as well as where we place our limited time, care, and devotion.

That said, some problems can’t be solved within an individual sphere because they’re produced collectively and structurally. Personal boundaries won’t end medical discrimination, economic exploitation, state violence, workplace abuse, housing insecurity, or misogyny. We can’t journal our way out of material conditions.

What we cannot change individually may still be changed collectively. Our sphere of influence expands when we organize through unions, cooperatives, networks of chosen kin, mutual-aid projects, communities of practice, and systems of collective protection. It expands when we share information, bear witness, refuse together, pool resources, and stop treating every structural failure as a private test of character.

Returning to the self isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s a return to the place from which we decide how we’re going to participate in it.

The question isn’t only “What can I control?" It’s also, “What can I influence? What can we influence together? Where am I spending energy on an outcome I can’t produce? Where have I confused vigilance with responsibility? Where have I mistaken powerlessness for acceptance? What belongs to the wheel, what belongs to the spiral, and what belongs within my sphere?”

The wheel asks me to acknowledge contingency; the spiral, to recognize repetition and difference; the sphere, to act where action is possible.

As an Inner Workroom subscriber, I’ve created for you a workbook to assist in your journey through the spiral, exploring the concepts written about here, should you choose. It is downloadable content, available here:

Thank you for sharing your space and time with me today.

Amstadter AB, Myers JM, Kendler KS. (2014). Psychiatric resilience: Longitudinal twin study. Br J Psychiatry. Oct;205(4):275-80. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.113.130906.

Sameroff, A. (Ed.). (2009). The transactional model of development: How children and contexts shape each other. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.103