Written by Not everyone gets the family story.
Some of us grew up with gaps where the history should have been, or were handed versions of it that didn’t hold up, or came from people who simply weren’t interested in passing anything down. Some of us had mothers who made it very clear, in one way or another, that we were on our own.
I’m one of those people. My family history is full of silence and misdirection, and what little I do know doesn’t light a clear path backward. There’s no grandmother’s windowsill to look back on fondly. No folk wisdom quietly handed down between women over generations.
For a long time I thought this meant I was starting from nothing.
I wasn’t. I just had to learn to look differently.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the path found me before I had words for it. Long before I knew what any of this was called, before I’d read a single book or found a single community, something in me was already oriented in this direction. Toward the unseen. Toward meaning beneath the surface of things. Toward fire and symbol and the question of what persists.