Gnosis Fish

Hello lovelings! Please be aware that due to censorship by Medium.com, I will be writing on my personal platform https://alicengrey.substack.com/ from now on. All my essays, including this one, are now available there.

As some of you know because I never shut up about it, my spirit animal is the deep sea anglerfish. That’s a whole story in and of itself, about which I am writing a play to get all the complicated ~feels~ out of my system. But until that’s finished, this post will have to hold me over.

After meeting the anglerfish in that fateful spirit animal meditation 5 years ago, I went into full-on denial. I didn’t want it to be true that this frightening sea beast was my soul symbol. Why couldn’t I be a wolf? Or a moth? Or, I don’t know, something not scary and evil? From that meditation forward, I avoided encountering her as best I could.

But last year I found myself on the other side of the country, reeling from an indescribably damaging breakup, in a city where I knew nobody. There was nothing left to do but analyze how the hell I’d gotten here, through interrogating my shadows, patterns and deeper motives. Without falling back on finger-pointing or reductive victim-blaming, I was determined to find out how much of a role I did play in creating this toxic relationship. Nothing like a cross-country attempt at running away from oneself to bring one face-to-face with…