Life is Your Creation

Barbie, Venus Retrograde, and Awakening

OK, I finally got my neurotransmitters back, after days in the netherworld. All you need to know is this: the ecstasy I took was laced with speed, I was up for 37 hours, grinding my teeth like Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black, and thanks to meditation, the Mediterranean sea, good sex and tiramisu, I’m back, baby. Let’s catch up before we get there.

Look, I wrote about the Venus in Leo retrograde for NYLON, and did my best to predict the effects of Barbie opening on the day that Aphrodite reboots and resurrects. But there’s so much more — to the movie and to the cosmic consequences of what’s happening now. I don’t know if it’s because I’m on day 31 of A Course in Miracles, affirming that “above all else, I want to see differently,” but like Barbie sitting on that park bench, it feels like everything is waking up around me.

More and more lately, I’m observing friends and clients “coming online” to their intuitive gifts: lifting veils, seeing what’s beyond the pain, ascending into mastery. It’s an honor to witness. The lightbringers are activating, and not a moment too soon.

This comes as a counter to the other language I can’t seem to escape: Is the world ending? Is it over? Do we tap out? Why bother? If there is nothing I can do about factory farming, animal abuse, Ukraine, abortion bans, transphobia, fascism, microplastics, smog, cobalt battery mining, AI, cellphone addiction, inherited trauma…how should I live? How can I bear a life of consumption and compromise?

But watching the Barbie Dreamhouse Fantasy Disco Dance Sequence, I got it. The last few years have been rough. And yet…cynicism, irony and preemptive disappointment won’t save us. There is only one way out: We have to dance. We have to dance to Kylie Minogue.

In the sign of regality, Venus acts as the the divine monarch, inspiring nobility and beauty in her people. Beauty isn’t just power, it’s belief: this world can be exalted. We can make it so. “Above all else, I wish to see differently.” We can’t just choose to be here. We have to imbue this project with pleasure, majesty, something. We have to commit to the bit, wear the full look, with the pink cowgirl hat. Otherwise, there really is no point.

Barbie is a celebration of life. And though I didn’t really understand what was going on for a lot of it, I found the melding of worlds — plastic idyll and drab “reality” — to be the new way through. Both worlds were shimmering — the make-believe and the all-too-real. Both were full of beauty.

Stay with me here, because this is all going to connect. On Friday, I went to the Barbie-themed Forever Tel Aviv circuit party, a blowout fantasia of trashy music, hard bodies and synthetic drugs. And after weeks of heartbreak, loneliness and inwardly-directed body-shame, it made all the difference to turn up, be seen, smile, and stop making commentary. I made out with beautiful men, danced my tits off, and finally got over him.

But then it came. At 6am, when the drugs were finally hitting, at the peak of the party, I felt a sudden pang of dread. Something was coming up. Not fear. Not panic.

Grief. Uh-oh. Like Zeus in the belly of Saturn, the lightning surge of joy I felt was acting as an emetic, bringing the ancient pain up with it. My friend Daniel asked me, in the middle of the circus: “How is your heart?” I looked down. I was clutching it.

I understood instantly that this was not to be corrected or analyzed or made into a story. It didn’t need to be grappled with or categorized or condescended towards. It just was. It’s a feeling. Let it be felt. I agreed with all my parts: whatever’s coming up, I welcome it. That’s all I can do.

Dawn. Party’s end.

7:30am. Still rolling, I walked home shirtless in the sunlight. I had lost my top, like my hero, Michelle Weinberger. I bought a glass Coca-Cola, and descended into the sea. And then it all came out. I wept in a way you only can when you know that there isn’t a single teenager around.

There’s so much I can’t really share, but the general theme was: if I become happy and healthy, am I abandoning who I was, and the people who brought me up? The happiness, then, yields the grief. But in facing what was dead and lost, and meeting it in gratitude, I returned to what was whole and alive, new and just beginning, which only made me cry more. And so the grief yields the happiness.

The walls between Barbie’s worlds are malleable. And now I am ready to tear down my own. I don’t really care about pathologizing my choices anymore: why I made out with one narcissist over another, why I like buying things, why I check Instagram, why I had fun at a stupid circuit party. I don’t want to uphold purity through misery. I am sure that external validation is meaningless and ephemeral, but it’s also fun and fabulous. I don’t believe that truth can only exist in some hermetically sealed moral vacuum. I want to be happy. I am happy. I’ll figure the rest out as I go.

There is depth in superficiality, agony in harmony, peace in pain. I think Margot Robbie is a fucking real one, and she did it: she embodied Venus, waking up, born anew. She crossed over from idea to incarnation, accepting the pain with the possibility of pleasure. We are alive. It’s complicated. But that shouldn’t stop us from building a dream house, and dancing to Padam Padam. If we’re to start a new world together, that may be enough.