If time doesn’t feel real right now, you’re not malfunctioning.
Between school breaks, end-of-year work parties, sales drowning your socials, and systems demanding cheer while your body is demanding truth, we’re all suspended in that weird week/month where the calendar looks like a suggestion, not structure.
So before we talk about consumption and giving, I need you to do one thing for yourself first:
Somatic Pause
Unclench your jaw.Drop your tongue from where it’s bracing.Let your inhale reach your belly without apologizing for how tired it is.
Exhale long enough to feel yourself instead of rehearsing yourself.That’s it. You’re in. Now we can dig.
Media Handed Out the Roles Before We Ever Questioned the Seating
You learned who you were supposed to be at family gatherings from television, not inner truth.Media trained us into archetypes long before capitalism trained us into cart totals.
You aren’t just unlearning consumption.You’re unlearning the narrative jurisdiction that assigned you a position in the first place.And now you finally feel the gap between who you are and who people expect you to resurrect at the potluck of lineage.
We’re Not Unlearning the Holidays: We’re Unlearning the Scripts That Framed Them
The real battlefield of this season isn’t between joy and grief.It’s between consumption, narrative control, and inherited family roles that you are finally noticing somatically.
Talking Point 1: The Reality You Feel Isn’t Failure, It’s Liminality
Reframes
* Time feels strange because the system disrupted your rhythm, not because you can’t hold one.
* The blur isn’t confusion,it’s decompression your body never had language for before.
* You’re not “falling off”… you’re hovering between worlds that are asking different things from you.
Reflections
* The moments that feel unreal are the ones where you have to shift identities quickly: parent, professional, caregiver, student, human.
* The body recognizes liminal space as “I don’t know what to expect next.”
* Feeling untethered means you’re finally noticing the tether.
✍🏾 Practice Your Praxis prompt
What does time feel like in my body when it isn’t being rushed, demanded, or scheduled for extraction?
Talking Point 2: Breaks, Parties, and Pushes Are Not the Season… They Are the System Overloading Your Thresholds
Reframes
* School breaks and work parties are not rest by default; rest is the thing you CLAIM inside of them.
* You don’t lack boundaries; you’ve been living in a world that punishes you for having them.
* The pressure to show up “everywhere at once” is capitalism cosplaying community.
Reflections
* The system wants your social calendar to be louder than your self-awareness.
* The emotional hangover of “small escapes” comes from running on a schedule bigger than your spirit.
* When your capacity compresses, shame tries to narrate. Don’t let it.
✍🏾 Practice Your Praxis prompt
What event on my calendar is asking for the oldest version of me to show up on its behalf, and how do I say “no” without abandoning love?
Talking Point 3: Thoughtful Presence Looks Like Fewer Gatherings, Not No Gatherings… and a Better Gathering of Self
Reframes
* You don’t have to go to every gathering to gather well.
* Saying no to excess is not saying no to belonging.
* Gratitude without grandiosity is still gratitude.
Reflections
* The holidays are not evidence that the system works; they are evidence that YOU are working on yourself inside of it.
* Shame shows up when systems crash into your humanity uninvited.
* Embodied generosity means giving WITHIN your limits, not despising them.
✍🏾 Practice Your Praxis prompt
What is the smallest form of giving or gathering that my body can do without collapsing, and how can that become enough this year?
Collective Grief + Economic Pressure
Here’s a statistic that hits harder than any holiday ad:
62% of Americans would rather go into debt than disappoint the people they love.If you’re nodding, you’re not alone… you’re part of a lineage of people holding it together on credit, not comfort… like ME!
But let’s get one thing straight:
Consumerism didn’t come from a shortage of love.It came from a shortage of time, paid leave, fair wages, and dignity.
Systems sold you the myth that tradition equals receipt totals, when the real theft was always:
* budgets too thin for breathing room
* calendars too packed for presence
* paychecks that sustain corporations, not caretaking
Capitalism extracts more than it shelters. And your body has been carrying that truth long before you ever said it out loud in a sentence.
So when the holidays land and you feel overwhelmed, stretched, or unreal, it isn’t because you lack love.
It’s because love was forced to operate inside a system that refuses consent, mocks limits, and scales human connection into commerce.
Giving less or differently is valid.Just don’t abandon your body to do it.
Because when generosity is thoughtful, it looks like:
* connection over coordination
* presence over piles
* specificity over surplus
* consent over coercion
Embodied generosity isn’t logistics.
It’s showing up real, smaller, softer, slower, and still in your breath.
That is how you disrupt the pattern the system never asked permission to create.That is how you honor love without performing it into collapse.That is how liberation becomes practical, not plenty.
Somatic Pause
Hand to your chest.Not to hold the moment together for anyone else… just to hold YOU inside of it.
Inhale: I am.Exhale: Enough.
Release the clock from your jaw.Release the urgency from your diaphragm.
Tell your body slowly:
“I don’t have to numb to move through. I can feel my way back into real time.”
Respect My No Like You Respect My Yes
We grew up in a culture that celebrates your yes but interrogates your no.That interrogation was never curiosity.It was control.
Let’s name it clean:
* Supremacy culture is coercive.
* Capitalism is extractive.
* Control doesn’t ask permission.
* Liberation does.
Your “yes” gets applause.Your “no” gets pushback.
But here’s the truth that changes taxonomy:
No is a complete sentence.No is not a detour, it’s a declaration.No is a rupture in the inherited architecture that claimed entitlement over your presence.
You don’t have to rupture love to refuse overload.
Some of the deepest acts of resistance this season look quiet:
* declining gatherings that demand old identities
* refusing the systems that extract from your thresholds
* giving care, but not collapse
* saying no, but not despising your softness
Because consent breaks the script coercion depends on.
Every enthusiastic YES you give yourself breaks the pattern because it comes from your body’s own authority, not its punishment.
So say it with your diaphragm open, not edited:
“Respect my no, like you respect my yes.”
This is the Season of You Coming Inside
This is not the moment to force yourself into bloom when your soil is asking for stillness.
Dormancy is not death.It is contraction doing protection work your body learned long before your mind had language for it.Winter pulls you inward not to diminish you, but to preserve what is most alive so nothing freezes over from exposure, extraction, or performance.
The world calls it the new year, but nature whispers the truth:your renewal isn’t scheduled for January… it’s cultivated through winter.
Right now, your work is not expansion.It is containment, reflection, survival, and self-remembering.
Let your no be the fence around your roots, quiet but impenetrable.Let your yes be chosen sunlight, not obligation spotlight.Let your gatherings be small, intentional, reciprocal, and perennial.Let your generosity be witnessed, not weaponized into logistics.
Because the system taught you urgency, but the Earth teaches you rhythm.
And here is the permission slip your nervous system has been waiting for:
You can bring yourself inside.You can close the window not out of protest, but preservation.You can let things fall quiet without falling apart.
Give yourself the gift of your presence.
Ways to Journey Deeper
I want to invite you to keep walking this path with me:
✨ Table Talk Unpacked A somatic companion for conversations that bristle, border, or break your breath.Navigate gatherings with grounding, scripts for boundaries, and nervous system care not debate rehearsals.➡️ Open the Table Talk
✨ 31 Days of Shadow Work for Liberation (App)
Step into the Season of Descent with 31 guided prompts, somatic practices, and altar invitations for just $11.A sacred container to support your shadow work and liberation journey.➡️ Download the App
✨ Ebook: Dismantling Supremacy Culture (2nd edition)
Understanding and Overcoming Its 15 Pillars — a foundational guide to identify, name, and unlearn the habits of dominance within ourselves and our systems.➡️ Download the Ebook
✨ Support the Work & the Healing Homestead
Partner with me and LadySpeech Sankofa in building the Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead — a sacred initiative to purchase land that will serve as a community healing, education, and retreat space.
Your offerings sustain the vision of land stewardship, communal healing, and intergenerational repair.➡️ Support the Healing Homestead
✨ Direct Offerings of Gratitude
Support my ongoing journey into becoming a PsychoSomatic Practitioner (began September 15th), or simply offer gratitude for the labor and love that goes into this work. Venmo • Cash app • PayPal: SeleniteandSage@gmail.comEvery gesture of reciprocity sustains the work of liberation and care.
✨ Explore More Tools and Resources
From e-books to guided meditations, workshops, and more — explore the growing library of liberation tools.➡️ Visit My Resource Hub
In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. StephensEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation
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