What went into the drawer

What went into the drawer

There's something Gen X women do so automatically we forgot it was a choice.

We learned which parts of ourselves were safe to bring into the room. The opinions that would be tolerated, the knowing we could voice without consequence, the version of ourselves that didn't make people shift in their seats. And the rest - the sharper parts, the stranger parts, the parts that knew things we couldn't quite justify in polite company -- those went somewhere else.

Not gone. Just... put away.

For a lot of us it happened gradually, somewhere in our thirties, in the middle of other things. A comment that landed wrong. A room that went quiet when we said the true thing. The slow accumulation of evidence that full-volume was expensive and we were already stretched thin. So we edited. We measured. We got strategic about what we brought out and where.

What went into the drawer wasn't random. It was the most powerful stuff. The spiritual life that didn't fit any acceptable category. The political knowing that felt too raw to perform at a dinner party. The refusal to pretend that things were fine when they clearly weren't. The feral certainty that had always lived in our bodies, the kind that knew before we knew we knew.

All of it, filed away. For safekeeping. For later. For when it was safer.

Here's what I've been sitting with: later never really arrives on its own. You have to decide it's later. You have to find the room where the drawer can open without consequence.

That's what Soul Legacy Collective is. Not a place to perform your unfiltered self for an audience. A place where the drawer can open slowly, in the company of other Gen X women who have their own version of it.

Come find us in the Campfire. Or come deeper - the Hearth Fire is where the drawer actually opens. You'll find it at the Campfire.