Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Hello, and welcome to this very special episode of Ghost of a Podcast, where I got to sit down with my dear friend, activist, educator, and both author of Love in a Fucked-Up World and also the host of the podcast Love in a Fucked-Up World, Dean Spade. Both of us invited folks over on our individual Patreons to send us a bunch of questions, and here we have some of our answers to those hard-hitting questions. I know you're going to enjoy it, and if you do, make sure to check out Dean's podcast and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. All right.

Dean:              Hi, Jessica. So happy to be back with you.

Jessica:            I'm so excited we're doing this. This is—and also, the enthusiasm with which people responded when we called in for questions on our Patreons was really exciting. So I'm thrilled to be back.

Dean:              Me, too. Let me grab our questions and dive into the first one. Okay. This was a question that I thought would be really interesting to talk about. The person says, "I feel curious to hear you chat more about privacy and confidentiality in our community. I think sharing and community can be important and also notice people sharing things about others that doesn't feel okay. What's the balance here? How can we be an interwoven web of connection and sharing without enmeshment and sharing in a way that leads to fractures?"

                        And then another person adds to this question, "I've been grappling with this, too. There have been a couple of ruptures in my friend groups in the last couple years, one where two mutual friends had a falling out and another where I had a falling out with someone. When this happens, I want to be able to talk about what's going on in a good way with mutual friends, but it can be hard for me to know the line between heartfelt talk about what's going on and more unhealthy habits like gossip, oversharing, judgment, or triangulation. As a result, I've not been talking about these conflicts with other members of the group at all, which doesn't feel right either. Can you help?"

Jessica:            I have so many thoughts. But do you want to start?

Dean:              Okay, sure. Yeah. There's a couple different things this brings up. So I've been talking a lot lately in the workshops I give about confidentiality because I do notice that it's not a well-honed skill in our communities. And one of the big topics of my workshops in the last couple years has been what to do when someone's freaking out and that when people freak out, oftentimes, we either shut down or we give them a bunch of advice to try to shut them up, or we join them and are like, "Let's go on a revenge fantasy against whoever you're upset with."

                        And these kinds of behaviors can be both disorganizing to our communities if it turns into a revenge thing, or it can be a thing where the person doesn't get heard and then they go on a tear around the community trying to be heard. And most of us have experienced so much minimization that that lives in us, the possibility that we might go on a tear and be like, "I'm finally going to be heard." So this is like a pretty common pattern.

                        And so one of the things—I've been talking to you about it—when being with someone who's really emotionally activated or just had a really hard time in the meeting or they're really upset about their breakup or their thing with their roommate, is letting someone freak out in front of you and then holding that in confidentiality, not going and telling the other people, "Oh, did you hear what Dean said about you?" because that really stirs the pot and often leads people to feeling paranoid or attacked—all these things—because everyone's talking behind my back and now I heard about it.

                        So that kind of confidentiality feels really, really important. And the other thing is, a lot of times, we might need to process something with someone, with a friend, like, "Okay. This thing's happening in my friendship with Jessica. Could I talk to you about it? I'm trying to figure out, should I say something to Jessica about this or not?" I might need a friend to talk to me about, help me sort out, what do I want to share with Jessica about the thing I'm struggling with? And can someone hold that confidentially and so that I have a safe place to process that?

                        When I've brought this up, a lot of people have given me pushback of, you know, we need to tell each other things to keep each other safe. That's a really common one. If I hear that Jessica and Dean are dating and we're in the same group together, I need to tell people because I'm worried about the power dynamic or this or—you know. People go into savior mode and stuff.

                        So the first thing I always encourage people to do is, if you think something is a matter of safety, check it out with somebody else confidentially. Ask somebody to help you talk through, "Is this really a matter of safety, or am I making this a matter of safety because I'm stirred up? Do I actually need to share this information about someone else's life?"

                        And then also just asking myself, if I'm about to tell everybody the story about, "Oh, Jessica went on a date with so-and-so," or, "Jessica and her roommate are disagreeing"—blah, blah—why am I saying this? Am I saying it because I want to look important in this group? "Look, I got the goods. I know the tea." Am I doing this in ways that are good for group cohesion and good for the fact that Jessica probably has privacy; this other person probably has privacy? If I look back at the conversation, did Jessica want me to tell that to others when she told me? Probably not. Maybe I could ask her before I do it—this kind of thing.

                        And so, holding all that, what I also hear in the question is the thing about dual roles, like sometimes I'm close friends with Jessica and the roommate that she's fighting with. And I personally believe we can do dual-role relationships in a really loving way. It could actually be really sweet sometimes if I talk to a friend about pain I'm having with my lover or friend or something, and I know they love that person, too, and we're both holding that person with love, even while I'm telling about how I'm struggling with something about them.

That can really work if people actually are tuning in to that love and that wanting the best interest of everyone and not just wanting to grasp opportunities to feel drama or to make it about myself or to be the one with the info. I think we should have dual roles, and we do have dual roles. Someone could be a student at my university and they're in an organizing group I'm in, and they go to the same Gay bar I go to. Good. Absolutely, we should have lives that are integrated with radical stuff everywhere and with Queer stuff everywhere in whatever ways we care about.

It's, for me, like seeing my therapist at the organize. I mean, that is actually great. They shouldn't have to not have that life. I shouldn't have to not have that life. We should cultivate dual roles, but we just have to be more skillful. And so I think it's not about shutting down all communication, but it is, I think, for most people I know, about a little more discernment and care and getting in the right mentality as the listener or speaker to really check in with our motivations and to be willing to look at, maybe, some unsavory motions that we have, which we all have.

Jessica:            We all have.

Dean:              No big deal. No judgment—and then to apologize when we make a mistake. It's really hard. I really think apologizing is hard for people. And I'm interested in this kind of knee-jerk reaction I see when I bring it up, where people are immediately like, "You're taking away something I need for my safety or for others' safety." And I'm like, "How frequently is this really about safety?" because absolutely, if we're working in a context or living in a context where somebody is serially hurting people when he hires them to do this job in his house, we should absolutely fucking have a whisper network to stop that in addition to doing things to stop him where we organize together.

                        Of course, it's okay to have smart methods for avoiding stuff. But I think there's a thing in our society that's so carceral where we think everything is a safety matter and every mistake anyone makes gets raised to a level of being framed as a major safety issue. Curious what this brings up for you.

Jessica:            I mean, I agree 10,000 percent, and I also think that's a little bit of a culture of age issue. I don't think that that is as much of a Gen X or baby boomer cultural issue as much as it is maybe a xennial, millennial, and Gen Z cultural issue. And I think that partially has to do with these generations and the surveillance culture created through social media and being raised online and with that—kind of the, quote unquote, "cancel culture," which I think is a term that has been used in a million terrible ways, and also, we do surveil each other so that we can say, "That's a bad person. That person handled their breakup poorly."

                        And also, I have astrological thoughts about the generational parts, but that's for a different conversation. I personally am of the mind that if you have told me—whether you were explicit that it was in confidence or not—that you and your roommate are beefing, and we're all in community together, and I want to talk to somebody else about it because of how it's impacting me because I'm a fucking gossip, because—whatever it is.

                        Once I start telling the details of your story, I am out of my lane. Once I start telling this other friend the details of how it makes me feel to be like, "Oh, I am kind of in between these two people I care about," or, "I'm seeing something that feels sticky from Dean. I've never experienced Dean this way. I've never seen Dean do this with anyone else, but I'm seeing Dean do this with this roommate, and I have mixed feelings about it"—I think that there's a difference in communication where I'm centering my feelings and my reactions and my impulses as opposed to centering the details of your story because, honestly, none of us have no enemies. None of us have exes who aren't begrudged. None of us have handled all of the situations we're in well.

                        And I have many people in my life who have been in my life for decades and decades who have never wronged me. Now, they've hurt my feelings. We've gotten into arguments. But they're never fucked with me. But that doesn't mean they don't have ex-friends or ex-lovers that feel like they've been fucked with or colleagues that fucking hated working with them. I could do something harmful to you and not harm anyone else in the group because our relationships are sticky, and they bring out different parts of ourselves.

                        And so I do really feel that it is on us, as the people who are gossiping or sharing data or whatever, to track our own motivations and to take confidentiality really seriously. I'm a confidentiality queen. I love confidentiality, and it's because it's a consent practice, really. It's like, if I'm telling x about you and your roommate, you cannot consent to me sharing any of that. I am not centering your capacity to consent or roommate's capacity to consent. I'm centering my own—whatever.

                        And so this is where it becomes my responsibility to focus on, first of all, making sure the person I'm sharing it with is not a huge gossip or not super judgmental or doesn't actually have a grudge against one or the two of you. I have to be mindful about what I'm bringing to the conversation, and I think centering my own experience and my own feelings is a good way.

                        Again, you know, use the word "carceral"—I think that telling on people and tracking who's safe and who's not safe, if someone's not perpetrating actual harm as opposed to making bad calls and having a bad relationship—because I do think there is a space of difference, like a meaningful space of difference—yeah. I think we're participating in a perpetrating surveillance culture in our communities. And that is deeply no bueno. It's like I don't know how else to frame that.

                        And I know that people are really protective of their right to say no, go, and tell, which is, for—some people might not know this. That is like a Nancy Reagan policy against drugs. It's like say no, and then go and tell someone else. Tell on that person. That is what we do. And it is not a great—it doesn't come from a great place. It's not a great practice. It just isn't.

                        And I think we can pull back from those practices while also recognizing, in a personal dispute—which can happen around projects and work as well as love and living and all the things—people are going to be messy. And that doesn't mean that they are bad or wrong inherently as people. And being able to sit with the nuance and not being so quick to involve ourselves or insert ourselves is a practice in listening. It's a practice in listening to all manner of things and is, I think, a really important one for creating authentically safe communities where people have the space to be in shitty relationships with other community members and to still show up, right, because it's hard to do.

                        But there's nothing wrong with—I can think of a situation that I've been in recently where I was in a difficult dynamic with a community member, and I talked about it with someone outside of the community. I didn't need to bring it to the community, because it was my dynamic with that person. And how I decided to handle that was about me and whether or not this person might cause harm to someone else. If I find out that this person fucks with other people in a way that I felt fucked with or whatever, I can always be like, "Okay, now I'm going to step in, share my experience, and navigate it."

But I don't need to preemptively get ahead of every shitty thing a person does, because we all do shitty things by accident—sometimes on purpose. So that's—I know it's a sticky thing, but that's my take.

Dean:              Yeah. This just makes me think—I want to add, too, that I think when it comes to people's sexuality, that's a place to be careful about sharing information. It's like it's just so fun to know about people's sex and dating, and I really have had a lot of experiences in recent years of people being really excited to know about my sex and dating life and talk about it with others. And there's no ill will behind it, but wow, it really is such an invasion of privacy and just makes that area of life harder.

                        And I also have had this experience that I think relates. I know we were talking before a little bit about how there can be a motivation to try to be good. And I think that in the contemporary—the world of polyamory culture that's mostly on books and podcasts and stuff these days, there's a real emphasis on a style of polyamory that's—people call it kitchen table—that's about everyone knowing each other and meeting up with your lover's lovers and forming connections and building a community around that and the idea of a polycule.

                        And because that is such a popular framing that's out there, a lot of people think that's being good, and having any more privacy or anyone wanting any more privacy or separateness would be being bad because it means things are a secret and it means people are cheating or something. You know what I mean? There's a kind of really strong binary that I think, again, is unconscious for most people.

But what that looks like to me in my life is sometimes people just can't wait to tell each other, to tell all parties, everything. And that's actually not the style of polyamory that I practice. And so what it feels like is like, "Why are you coming up to me and telling me that you want to date my boyfriend? He'll tell me. That's part of our arrangement. I don't know you." Do you know what I mean?

Jessica:            Yeah, that's so intense.

Dean:              And so that is something that—regarding commentary that I just gotta throw in here, is just—and I see this also in political groups. If we're all in a political group together and you happen to see Jessica and I out on our own and realize, "Oh, they might have a thing going," it doesn't mean that we are trying to have a public relationship. Or who knows why we were together at the bathhouse or in the Gay bar or wherever, in the car or wherever you saw us?

And just not assuming we know how people have organized their lives, which doesn't mean they're bad and lying to anyone. They just might be practicing different forms of privacy or confidentiality in their own life. And just everyone being a little more boundaried, a little more like, "Oh, before I say something, I'm going to just think about what I might not know," would be incredible.

Jessica:            Yeah. To something that you're speaking to here, when it comes to polyamory, so many things around gender and the way we organize community and connection around sexuality stuff, there are trends and fads. They ebb and flow. They come and go. The way that polyamory is discussed now is not how it was discussed 15 years ago. And it was discussed 15 years ago—maybe not by all the same people, but it was. And 15 years prior to that, it was also discussed, it was also practiced, and it also had a different kind of focus and ethical lens applied to it.

                        And I think that this is part of what might help people—that larger perspective can help people to be like, "Oh. The things that I am centering right now in my polyamory practice and how I navigate gender issues"—whatever the fuck it is, even community guidelines stuff—there are trends. And we do not want to be locked into or rigid about the trends that are currently being practiced. They might resonate for you; they might not resonate for you.

But it's about recognizing that we as communities—as a group, we kind of ebb and flow with things. And rigidity is not a great—it doesn't do a great service to most human practices. And again, I, as a person who's in a monogamous long-term relationship—I'm so private. I am so private about my relationship, and I have been private about my relationships throughout my life. But now, because I do have a public-facing career and the internet is so loud and there are so many people on it, and the world is just so small now, it's made me so much more private.

And I just want to be just an advocate for there's a difference between privacy and secrets. And also, secrets are okay. Not all secrets harm people. Not all secrets are born from shame. And again, when I think about surveillance and the surveillance state that we live in and how Wi-Fi can track how many people are in a house and your movements—Wi-Fi is surveilling you. The level of surveillance we are living under I don't think most people have really thought through or understand yet. Having privacy inside of our trusted communities is a right, and not one we should have to defend.

What's so important about this question that these two people are asking is, really, it requires emotional intelligence and emotional capacity to navigate these things with care because it is really juicy to be like, "I'm going to go say this thing to Dean," or, "I saw Jessica and Dean do this thing." Right? It is delicious to have a story to tell. But I think making a practice of noticing why we like that—and why don't we just tell our own stories—is valuable.

Dean:              Yeah. I also think it's like we could just tend a little bit towards trying to notice confidentiality, and if you have a defensive reaction to hearing that suggestion, maybe even more of a chance to be like, "Okay, where did it keep me safe to tell things in my life? Great. That really was important. And can I have the full range of skills?" You know?

Jessica:            Yeah. I like that.

Dean:              One person asks us what kind of self-care and personal tending work is feeling most effective for each of us lately. I wondered if you—I thought a sweet question.

Jessica:            It's such a sweet question. Do you want to start?

Dean:              You start.

Jessica:            Okay. I'll start. Gardening is my quick and easy, immediate—there's a couple things that have been the most nurturing things to me. I've been gardening. I have flowers, but I have a bunch of food coming in and that has come in throughout the summer. And I couldn't be more nourished by this. So that is such a big thing for me, being in nature, because I've been such a city person my whole life. Being in nature has been incredibly nourishing for me.

                        And then I am a part of a group that meets weekly that does important work, I feel like. And I am maintaining privacy about it. Is that awkward? Is that okay? Do you feel okay with me being private about that?

Dean:              Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Dean:              But you mean like political work or something to do with—

Jessica:            Yes, I do mean political work. And I'm just not trying to narc on myself or anyone else. And that has been incredibly nourishing, and spending time with people who are a lot older than me in this group, which has been just so life affirming, so wonderful. So yeah. Those are my three big things that I've been doing that have been nervous-system-changingly positive for me. How about you?

Dean:              Beautiful. Well, as you know, I've been away from home for a whole year, and I just got back. And I've just been going around the neighborhood and visiting my favorite roses—not all of them which are in bloom, but several of them are in bloom. And there's something just about trying to feel some continuity in my life across all these different spaces and places and all the uncertainty we all carry in our lives and all the transitions and changes, having a relationship to the same plants over and over again and checking in on [indiscernible 00:20:16]. Yeah, there's a honeysuckle that's in bloom just around the corner from my house that's so helpful to visit multiple times a day.

                        And I still just really rely on different forms of silent meditation, breathing practices, and I do this neurofeedback thing that's also just like a having to be with your breathing while you do this activity. And each of those things, it's like I just really need times when I do nothing but pay attention to the internal field instead of having the internal field doing all of its stuff while I'm also doing six other things, which can be the tendency. I really have a problem with packing my time.

                        And so, yeah, just having periods—and because I've been practicing different forms of meditation for 30 years or something, it's like that range of what it feels like to return to myself. How is it now? Sometimes it's just to observe, wow, there's a really activated thought process that won't stop, or sometimes it's to observe a physical discomfort or [indiscernible 00:21:10]. It's not always pleasant, but just even the return to myself, and sometimes I can access a little different perspective or feel into the hundreds of thousands of times I've done this before or remember places where I've done this that held me in a particular way. It's just really essential, especially during times of great transition and movement.

Jessica:            Yeah. I don't meditate, really, much. I mean, I have, but I don't really do it as a practice. And I think I would be a much calmer person if I did. So I really like that you have that. And I also just—I have such a strong feeling about roses. I love the bloom, obviously. I love the smell. I love the way it looks. But I love their thorns because I feel like roses teach us about boundaries in beauty, right? It's like the rose is just such a showboat, but you can't just grab her. You know what I mean? She will cut you. And I love that about the rose, and I love that for you.

Dean:              I should send you some pictures of some of my favorites in the neighborhood.

Jessica:            Please do. I really wish you would because we have just started a garden here. In June we started, so it's new. But I did plant like four different roses. I'm obsessed with—I love roses. But they are a bit—they're like a specialty, learning how to grow them well.

Dean:              Yeah.  I don't know how to grow them, but I definitely appreciate the people in my neighborhood who do.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's awesome.

Dean:              Someone asked this question, and I've gotten this question in different forms often in the events that I do. And I thought it'd be fun for us to talk about. They say, "How do we navigate our friendships when our friends are enmeshed in the romance myth? I'm finding myself often exhausted, tired, sad, holding a fear that as I get older, my friends will disappear into their romances and partners. I'm trying to figure out how to keep building the strong community and platonic family I dream of while not sure if others around me are committed to doing the same."

Jessica:            And do you have a definition of romance myth?

Dean:              I'm guessing that they are referring to the way I use that in Love in a Fucked-Up World, which is it's the kind of very pervasive mythology that the most important relationship is a romantic partnership, that that's what will make us happy, that our lives are empty if we don't have it, that we should risk everything, like give up other stuff like where we live or work we care about or other kinds of friendship and connection in order to prioritize that. Ends up with a lot of people isolating in that relationship.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's what I thought, but I love a definition. Do you have starting thoughts?

Dean:              I mean, I think one of the things is just, whenever anyone brings this up with me, I'm just like, "Yes, this is real. You are not making this up. I want to affirm your experience," because people really do experience their friends disappearing into their romantic relationships, prioritizing those over everything else. You used to go on these trips with me or do these activities with me, and now you give all your time to this or you give all your time to your partner's family, or you have kids together and then you're only oriented towards your natal families. There are different versions of it—or whenever you get with somebody, you stopped calling me back, and now when you break up, you call me back again, depending on—you know, many versions of this.

                        But I do think there's a kind of life-arc version when people see a bunch of their friends disappear into serious relationships and perhaps move away or move further out of town or become more interested in their domicile and less in connecting over community work or going to social events together, or just that they are no longer as important to their friend because this is the really important thing.

                        This just happens a lot. We can all try to know about it and try to transform our culture by emphasizing friendship and emphasizing having diverse social networks, and it's okay to grieve if this is happening to you and your friends. I think you know that I spent most of my adult life living in a household with other adults and kids and doing this kind of Queer thing where we were having multiple adults in the house, not just their parents, raising the kids together and being support for each other.

                        A lot of people are like, "I want that. Wow. That sounds much better. It's such a bummer to have a kid with just one or two people in our society. It's unsupported." But then people find it very hard to do because it means you have to commit to not moving away and not falling in love with someone [indiscernible 00:25:19] you're leaving the family or—you know what I mean? It's a lot to ask people to make commitments that are not just to a romantic partner.

                        And so, for me, I think both grieving how that is and also being like, "Well, what would it take? What kinds of commitment would I want to cultivate with others that's different than that, and what would it mean? What would be, maybe, choice points where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I have a new boyfriend here. I really want to spend the holidays with him, but I'm actually going to spend it with this family I created again. And if and when I want to, I can invite him"? But you know, just what does it mean to try to practice that?

And I think it's unusual, and then to build friendships where we really talk about that and where we support each other to make non-normative decisions. I think I also see this with friends who are like, "Yeah, all my friends are suddenly getting these more mainstream kind of jobs, or they're—suddenly, all they care about is owning property"—you know, whatever. They're leading our more punk, more Queer, more anarchist—whatever—life. And it's sad and scary.

And so the question just becomes, how do I find people who do value what I value and relate with them? How do I not be judgmental of my friends but also have a vibrant, curious engagement with each other where we talk about why those mainstream things can be so compelling and what it would mean to try to hold on to our values, not in a rigid or arbitrary way, but just to be like, "Wow, why have I been told that owning a house will make me feel x or y or that having a certain kind of partnership or body or salary will make me feel x or y? And do I really believe that? And how can I support myself and others to keep that question?"

Or if you go and try that and you're not enjoying it, it's okay to divorce. It's okay to quit. It's okay to—you know what I mean? Like helping each other get out of things if we've made agreements or arrangements that turned out to be not really coming from us but coming from a kind of expectation from the society. I just think that happens to everybody in some ways, you know? Yeah, I'm curious what you think.

Jessica:            I wonder how old the person who asked this question was because it's giving pre-Saturn Return. And I'm wondering if this person is 26 to 30 or 29 years old, right?

Dean:              Can I answer that?

Jessica:            Oh, do you actually know?

Dean:              They actually put it in their question, and I didn't say it because I wanted to see what you would say because—

Jessica:            Oh.

Dean:              —they said they're 27.

Jessica:            Sure did.

Dean:              So you're completely right.

Jessica:            Yep. Mm-hmm.

Dean:              When I usually get this question at my events, I actually get it from, most frequently, older women—

Jessica:            How older?

Dean:              —who are maybe between 40 and 60 and are like, "I want"—maybe 45 and 60—"I want this vibrant friendship life, and everybody's coupled off." And so I was really fascinated that this person who was 27 asking it.

Jessica:            So I've gotten this question mainly from people who are younger. I have so many thoughts about this. So my astrological perspective is that Saturn—the Saturn Return happens at around 29 and then around 59 and then closer to 90. So those first two Saturn Returns—and in particular, that cycle between 30 and 60—it is a Saturnian cycle of adulthood, quote unquote. Right?

                        And so it is very common throughout time for people to want kids, and the most common and accessible way to co-parent is to co-parent—two parents—and to do it in a way that is economically and emotionally most accessible. Now, personally, me, I never wanted kids. That is not my path. But I understand that I am an outlier and I'm not the norm. And I think we can call it mainstream, but it doesn't even feel like it's mainstream to me because how it spans culture and time. It's, again, completely the opposite of what I'm interested in, but it is what resonates for most people.

                        I have actually experienced in my life very few people making the choices you've made to live in cohabitation with kids, and in particular to do it for a long period of time. To me, you are definitely an outlier in that regard. I've not known a lot of people to do that. I've known so many people in my very Queer, very radical communities to just pair off and have kids, and specifically to procreate kids, too, which is not at all what people were talking about when I was in my 20s. That is what people did, in my experience, a lot of time.

                        And I want to just acknowledge that it does mean that if you don't make those choices, or if you wish you could have but then you didn't, whether it's choice or not choice, it's going to feel sad and bad. And we can't change how other people behave. We can't change the way other people choose to orient their lives. But we can seek to find each other and build community and connection and family with each other. And it's hard. And as you were saying, Dean, why act like it's not hard? Why act like that's not real? It's real, and it's hard.

                        And there is something really—this is like a particular thing that I'm thinking about about my own life. I am really introverted. I'm a little bit of an extroverted introvert, but I am introverted. So living in a group situation is not my happy place. And also, I've had lots of kids in my life. There are so many ways that we can live that are different, but it's really about finding people who are aligned instead of being in relationships where people evolve and make different choices than you might wish they made and letting the grief that you must inevitably experience be the end, the wall that you just set up camp at.

                        Grieve and then seek to make connections with new people. That's the best we can do. The older you get, the harder it is to make friends, to make community, to make connection. It just is. And that is because people do exactly what this questioner is talking about. They siphon off and they spend more time with creature comforts, maybe, is a Saturnian way of putting it. But we can find people who are more aligned with us. It just takes more time and more effort.

                        And to tie together something that's been a throughline in a lot of the questions we've answered, that requires actually processing your grief about your expectations, maybe about individual relationships or communities you were a part of. You have to actually process that grief so that that grief doesn't kind of get twisted up inside of you and then turn to bitterness and defensiveness and isolationism, which it does. It does. And we can just look to so many people in our lives to see how that's happened for them. And it's easy to have happen. It's harder to process grief. But that is the assignment, I feel, of all of this.

Also, not to me like myself, but I will also say what an individual wants pre-Saturn Return and what an individual wants post-Saturn Return deep into the first Saturn Return cycle and then the second Saturn Return cycle. They're different things. So this is why you see certain spaces full of only young people or only older people, because people's priorities shift based on their health, their energy, based on communities—based on a myriad of factors.

And I think creating a practice within how we hold these things with being like, "This is what I want right now. This is what feels real to me right now. This is what I'm experiencing right now," can help you to create more adaptability for how other people choose to live and more space for you to evolve, "This month, I feel this way. This year, I feel that way," or whatever. Is that making sense the way I'm saying it?

Dean:              Yeah. I think there's something, too, like not judging ourselves for wanting, sometimes, rest or peace or calm in our living situation if we can get that or something like that. And also having a practice of being like, "How weird can I be?"—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Dean:              —that feels like—I think I've spent my life kind of toggling between those two. I really remember when I graduated from law school and I got this job that was a terrible fit clerking for a judge. And I was reading this zine about these punk people who took this trip, and when they got off the plane, they never knew what time it was again for the whole six months. They were wandering around. They didn't know where they were going to eat their next meal, and they would just wander to some squat they had heard about and see if they could sleep there. But if they couldn't, they would sleep outside.

                        And I just feel like, "This is the opposite of what I'm doing." And the zine really helped me quit the job. You know? [indiscernible 00:33:26] quit that job, which was something that was high stakes to quit. Also just thinking about like I've had this experience, I remember, in my late 20s and early 30s, a lot of my friends going towards settling in different ways and feeling mixed about that in different ways, or painful seeing certain consumer patterns that I was like, "I thought we weren't into that or whatever," you know? Which are tendencies that come out when people are parenting that can seem kind of conservative or whatever.

                        And then I had this experience that was so—so I had years of, yeah, also trying to gravitate towards, can I go stay at this weird Queer land project and meet people who live in this van? I'm like, how do I find this? And then I had this experience in 2022. I went on and did a little book tour about mutual aid in Europe, and I was just—all of the events were with these small anarchist presses and these squatted spaces. And now we're staying with these people.

                        And one of the people I was staying with, her politics is she does not eat except for from the trash. And she was taking me to her places in this regional area, and so I was only eating from the trash with her, and I was sleeping wherever she came up with, which was really, really different from what I was used to. And I was like, "This is so good for me. This is so freeing to see how this person has organized her life around the kind of freedom she wants, the way she organized, when she worked, and how she had enough money she wanted and her combined values about food politics and being free from certain kinds of capitalist norms.

                        God, what a gift to encounter this incredibly principled person who's living in a way that's not exactly what I want to live all the time but is showing me my own flexibility. And I've had a lot of similar experiences over the course of my life with other Trans people, like other Trans people who are a little more free than me and have a little less internalized gender norms or transphobia in some way, and they demonstrate that to me. And then I'm like, they're making space that I can take up by showing me how it's done.

                        So I think there's something about both really not spending a lot of time being judgmental of our friends who choose things that don't feel quite right, engaging with them on it if there's space. Don't do it when they're exhausted and haven't slept in three months because they just had a baby or whatever. Be careful and loving towards your friends when you want to say, "Hey, I thought we weren't into that," or whatever.

                        I think it's good to have feedback in relationships, and also finding inspiration where we can to be as free as we can be in this lifetime and as flexible, if you see that rigidity is an option that's emerging—because it's kind of an aging norm in a lot of the cultures that we're in, is to get more rigid about how you want your house and what you're willing to eat and—you know what I mean? Just—it can be a tendency.

                        And so just finding a balance of non-judgment, care, engagement, and seeking out weirdos who make you feel like you can be weirder. You know?

Jessica:            Yeah. And as the Capricorn in the room, I'll also say, if you find being super weird in whatever way is your yes, and then five years later, it's actually not your yes, or something that you thought was way too normie/was a hard pass, but now it's a hard yes, embrace, because I've been really surprised at some of the things I've just rejected and some of the things I've really come around to love, like owning my own home, actually. I never wanted to own a home, and then when I did, I was like, "Oh my God. I fucking love this." And that doesn't mean that I don't have a lot of critiques of land ownership, for the record.

                        But this is, again, about we are living in such broken systems in such a problematic world. We will make all kinds of compromises, hopefully in efforts to create a life that feels good and does good. But that is like an inevitability of life. And I just—I really like the idea of being like, "How weird can I make my life?"

And also, for me, the question I've always focused is, how authentic can I make my life? How aligned can I make my life? And sometimes that has me really doing weird shit, and sometimes it has me doing actually super fucking normie shit. And I try not to think about it in those terms for myself. I think about it as, how aligned is this?

And back to the questioner, what people say they're going to do at 27 years old is not necessarily what they're going to do. You know what I mean? It's like it's what you think you're going to do, and that doesn't mean it's what you're going to do. And the same thing at 57 years old, right? It's like we have intentions, and then life happens and things evolve.

And so, again, I think something, Dean, that you've kind of been bringing into a lot of these questions is curiosity, adaptability, a willingness to just fucking play with it and see can help to navigate what is a very real issue that happens in our communities, people pairing up.

Dean:              Yeah, and I think there's—what's something what my political principles can help me weigh in on? Because it's like I think sometimes people can be like, "Fuck it. I'm old. I'm just going to buy everything on Amazon." It's like, actually, no, you don't have to do that. There's nothing about that that's authentic to you. That's actually"—or, "I'm just going to have everything made of plastic," or whatever, you know—

Jessica:            Yep.

Dean:              —versus—I think some people have this [indiscernible 00:38:22] about monogamy and polyamory or nonbinary. My personal belief is there's not something politically important about any one person's choice around that. If you're doing things that don't feel right to you, that's going to go poorly, period. In any direction. And that's not like buying from Amazon. You know what I mean? It's not the same—so that's how we need friends, is to help us figure out—because there's so much gray area. It's really, really, really hard to tell, and especially, as you were saying, since we live inside these systems, there's not a non-compromised way to eat or to have housing or etc., for most people most of the time.

                        So we need friends who share our political values, who can help us talk through the real day-to-day dilemmas about work and food and housing and having to clothe ourselves and children and dealing with our ex. And figure out what is something that's a political issue, and what's like I'm actually using that as a shame baton to hurt myself or I'm using this one thing I do to make myself better than everyone else? I ride a bike and don't have a car, so everybody else is terrible and I'm amazing?

Actually, there's just 10 billion things you do every hour that are inside our systems and are politically complex, and [indiscernible 00:39:28] like, what is the friendship network I need? And possibly, that includes books and zines and getting inspiration from others. That helps me—at least I have a process that has integrity to myself around these really hard decisions. And that doesn't make any one thing the end-all, be-all that my friend is doing that I'm doing that becomes like this moralized shame tool towards myself or others.

Jessica:            Having [indiscernible 00:39:50] such a powerful and overlooked directive, really just making sure that we maintain friendships. It is hard at times, and it is so important for so many of the reasons that you name and more, and so many more. And I'm aware that we are kind of coming close to our time. These have been great questions. I could have done an hour on each question, to be honest. Dean, this has been so much fun. I feel like we should do it again.

Dean:              I love talking to you about these questions. And thank you to everybody who contributed questions. Sorry we didn't get to all of them, but perhaps in the future.

Jessica:            Perhaps in the future.