Trixie Tales: The Stripper Blog — Installment 5“Exhale”
It’s giving — exhale.
Well hot damn! It’s been a whole year of this stripping/OF/overall bad bitch thing and so many things have changed.
I’m a Taurus so I actually have the hardest time with change but I’m also ruled by a mercurial Venus placement and all of the mercury retrogrades have really kicked my ass. The Gemini Venus be popping out.
I’ve had so much time to think about what I was doing and why I was doing it that it really stopped occurring to me at one point that people don’t always do the same internal work as me. That was humbling, because over time I noticed that so many relationships started to morph before my eyes into some shit that I didn’t ever think I was going to see from people. But when you take a step back and give people a rope, you watch them hang themselves. When you put in less effort and let people talk — they’ll tell on themselves if you let them. We want to connect with people so desperately that we look past all the work they haven’t done on themselves in hopes that the work that we have done on our selves can rub off on them.
That’s the “new level, new devil” thing. Watching yourself really have to leave folks behind and then dealing with the grief and loss for long enough to really ask yourself — “why was I keeping that relationship up for as long as I was?”
It stops you from being able to see your own growth. People tell us a lot of shit without telling us anything which is the other reason why self-reflection is so important and listening to other people is so often a bitch. Watch people. Don’t ask. Watch. What people do without prompting will tell you who they are and what their motives are, there are so many ways to indicate desire if you just stay silent enough to listen.
The problem isn’t that something is wrong with you. The problem is that you’re not for everybody, you don’t align with everybody, and you actually shouldn’t take that personal. It’s actually okay to simply walk away because something doesn’t resonate with you anymore. We pride ourselves on being able to make things work but who wants relationships to be work all the time? Like at what point is good enough just simply good enough? At what point have you done enough work, and you sit back and realize that you have covered your needs and are now in a place where you can prioritize your wants? This year, my needs drastically changed. They went from making other people proud of my continuation of their legacy to building my own legacy and the rose colored glasses I had on my life shattered. It was revelatory for sureeeeeee.
Who wants to be “working on themselves” forever?
No, relationships (of any kind — familial, platonic, romantic, sexual) are not rewards for self-development. But, I’ve been in this perpetual Hermit mode where I’m always only working on myself and actually not allowing myself to be in genuine relationships with folks and I’ll have to say I’m pretty tired.
“I’ve paid enough of petty dues. I’ve had enough of shitty news.”
The lesson for 2021 was — you’re allowed to be happy. Yes, the world is up in flames but this is America and at what point was this a safe place to be happy for a black queer single mom stripper bitch? At no point. Lol.
It’s really giving, “they gon hate you anyway.” You alter your life to serve people who hate you and all it does is perpetuate the hate. You can’t love something if you didn’t pick it. If you didn’t choose it for yourself. Yes, collectivism. Yes, community. But the Self is a part of community and this year over and over the Universe reiterated to me the importance of choosing *myself* and letting other people fall off or fall in line — fall out or not. I don’t have to get dramatic to ask you to shut the fuck up. You could just shut the fuck up. If/when I’m not around you I can’t hear you. If I don’t give you an audience, there’s no one for you to speak to.
This year, I just wasn’t hearing it.
I actually learned a lot and simultaneously learned nothing new about the world. The world didn’t change, I did and it just feels — a bit foreign to be honest. But I’m refreshed to wake up from the nightmare of deep mourning and really touch myself and realize that I’m still here, still whole, still standing.
What was important in this chapter of my life was deciding what transparency looked like for me and then understanding who I wanted to be on the Internet vs. who I wanted to be in real life and making sure those two people had enough congruencies between them but also making sure that they had enough space.
There were so many moments where I asked myself if I wanted to be Trixie or if I wanted to be myself, but the reality is that Trixie and I aren’t that different. That’s the thing about strippers. We’re very good at showing how dynamic we are. We act like 4 different bitches in one because we are four bitches in one. The ways that people ask us to define ourselves are often so myopic that they are suffocating.
In 2022, let bitches breathe.
xoxo, Trix.
