Gemini Curse. 🎭

How bouncing between Palo Alto private school and food stamps in Santa Cruz shaped my pull towards the beautiful chaos of living in extremes.

True to its nature, Gemini season produced the juiciest highs and the most shattering lows.

There are many times when I think to myself, "Why can't I just be normal?"

I fantasize about a reality where my soul is drawn to the middle of the road: stability, comfort, predictability, atomic habits, risk aversion.

My Reality

The only way I know how to live is pulling an audible to spend 48 hours in Marrakech while crawling my way to Tanzania to meet my dear ones at a safari wedding. What the f*ck.

There really are only two speeds in my book: 0 or 100.

"The Middle" or even "The Standard" has never made any sense to me. Perhaps it's a personality thing, perhaps it's a Gemini thing, perhaps it's both. I know there are other creatures like me slinking through the audience. Welcome Home.

I do believe that our souls choose a path to weave through. That there is some beautiful map of experience your frisky little soul chooses to plug into. That there are through lines. Themes. That there is some ancient mapmaker with a long gray beard watching the papyrus slowly become drenched in ink as your story moves forward through time and space. That if you looked at the story end-to-end, a complete novel, it would all make some type of coherent sense. The bird's-eye view of your story has meaning.

One of my themes…polarity.

I am either dressed soup to nuts delicious, donning a red lip, Mariana corset, and hitting the town with my hot Brooklyn honeys or I'm wearing no body products (oh yes, deodorant included) for a few weeks, deep in the Amazon jungle, dancing and frolicking with the plants and birds.

I melt and flow between opposites.

My soul is drawn to going to the most disparate, far sides of the spectrum, and uncovering the pleasures and pains of each reality.

Growing up, I flowed between two worlds every other week.

Part of the time, I grew up with my grandmother and bipolar mother in Palo Alto, California. An upper-middle-class family living more than comfortably. I attended a gorgeous private all-girls school that had endless bowls of fresh fruit, afternoon snacks, and accomplished parents who were part of the original venture capital boom and owned beautifully groomed estates in Atherton.

Every other weekend, I left the comforts of Palo Alto to go to my dad's house in Santa Cruz. It was the wild west.

Santa Cruz Girlie 4ever

My stepmom smoked weed out of a towering hookah, sitting on the floor like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, puffing thick smoke rings like clouds of cotton candy into the air. We cashed in food stamps and my dad's disability checks to buy groceries. We had hot bowls of beef-flavored Top Ramen noodles and went on family outings to Dairy Queen.

In Palo Alto, I had the comforts of money, a fantastic education, and a loving grandmother who nurtured me the way only a parent can.

In Santa Cruz, I had a house full of exciting half and step siblings, an unpredictable plot, tons of intrigue, and the feeling of a house full of energy and love that only a real family unit can produce.

I ebbed and flowed between endless resources in Silicon Valley and living on the edge, begging my dad to buy one carton of raspberries as a treat in Capitola by the sea.

I danced between the eccentricities of a very bipolar, unstable, and unpredictable mother and an alcoholic father who was struggling with chronic back pain and addictive tendencies.

This begs the question of… where does it come from?

What is the root cause of this natural magnetism and inclination towards extremes?

Am I somehow programmed to be this way? Or, is it a product of conditioning? The gestalt of all the situations I’ve navigated from a young age—all of the things I subconsciously absorbed over the years?

Was I destined to live between two poles because I'm born a Gemini? Because my mother is bipolar? Because my time was split between two distinct and disparate realms as a child of divorced parents? Or, because it's innately me?

These are the threads I like to pull. To wonder why.

And, simultaneously, to accept that it doesn’t really matter why. Regardless of why we are here, regardless of how we are here, je suis arrivée. I cannot change the true yearning of my soul. And more recently, I feel conviction about the fact that I wouldn’t want to.

The more I ponder it, the more I feel my soul is meant to live a life of polarity.

That this thread is critical to my personal story, my narrative, my perspective in this lifetime. Perhaps the gift it brings is the ability to see both sides. To have empathy for the most radical ends of the spectrum. To learn by doing. To learn by authentically existing within two disparate, seemingly antithetical realms. And, by nature of doing this, to become a bridge between.

Last week, I was in a dark hole.

I went from exploring Tarangire National Park by jeep, gazing at giraffes from afar with Natasha, and dancing for 24 hours at a Burning Man level rave under the Tanzanian stars to landing back home sick as a dog, being rejected from two potential jobs, and wondering whether I’ll ever be employed again. Maybe I’m ~meant~ to sail in the stars and then be drop-kicked back into the trenches within the span of a month. Maybe it’s my path, my choosing, my soul's desire. Or, it’s just…life? We are all pole dancers? We are all constantly navigating the shadows, the light. Joy, tragedy, love, jealousy. I may have a knack for bright, blazing highs and dim, wrenching lows, but polarity is innate to the universal human experience in many ways.

Yesterday, the sun came out.

I dipped into the salt water pool nestled amongst the trees in my new home in Woodstock. I went on a farm stand crawl with one of my new roomies. We snacked on fresh strawberries on the drive home and I picked my favorite R&B album from a box of CDs in the backseat. I remembered what it was like to feel sunny, hopeful, limitless.

I’m trying to get comfortable.

With the inevitable ups and downs of life, and with living a life of extremes. Gemini season, thanks for the ride, but also #seeyoulater. Seeking some stable, solid earth for as long as my chaotic soul will allow. Cancer season, go easy on us, plz!

Until next year,

Ciao Gemini Szn

The Author, Babs, is a Gemini born on May 27th in Palo Alto, California. She now wreaks havoc on the state of New York, most recently in Woodstock. Photo by Luana @thelu.mag