Greetings from the Chaos Realm,
I know. I know.
It's been a while. Several whiles, actually. A whole collection of whiles stacked on top of each other like a very unstable pile of things I meant to get to.
The last time I landed in your inbox, it was mid-November, and I was waxing poetic about the thinning of the veil and the ominous drumbeat of Black Friday. Very ominous. Very theatrical. Very me.
And then nothing.
No Issue 9. No dramatic sign-off. Just silence, the way a story does when someone slams the book shut mid-chapter and forgets to come back.
So here is what happened. And here is who I found waiting for me at the bottom of it.
Let me introduce you to someone.
Her name is Inanna. She is a Sumerian goddess war, desire, heaven, earth, all of it, she claimed the whole portfolio and she is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,500 years old. She predates most mythology you've encountered. She predates most everything you've encountered. She was being written down in cuneiform on clay tablets while the rest of the ancient world was still working out the details.
And at some point in her long, complicated divine career, Inanna decided she needed to visit the underworld.
Nobody asked her to. Nobody dared her. She simply turned her ear to the great below which is one of the most haunting phrases in any mythology, ever, because the Sumerian word for "ear" and "mind" are the same thing and she went.
At the first gate of the underworld, the gatekeeper stopped her.
Remove your crown.
So she did.
At the second gate: Remove your necklace. Gone.
Her breastplate. Her golden ring. Her royal garments. Her scepter the rod of power itself.
Gate by gate. Item by item. Every symbol of who she was, stripped away. By the time she reached the throne room of her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead, Inanna arrived naked and bowed low. Powerless. Unrecognizable as the goddess who had walked in.
And then Ereshkigal struck her with the eye of death, and Inanna was hung on a hook on the wall.
Like a piece of meat. Like an afterthought. Like someone who had been very powerful and was now very, very still.
She hung there for three days.
I have been thinking about those gates a lot lately.
It was the end of November.
I don't remember all of it. That's one of the things nobody tells you about accidents that your brain, in its infinite mercy, decides to handle the filing of certain memories on its own schedule, and sometimes that schedule involves not filing them at all.
What I know is this: there was a car accident. It was serious enough to make everything stop. And what followed was a long, unglamorous season of being taken apart.
The first thing to go was momentum. (First gate.) I had been building something this newsletter, the YouTube series, the whole Unverified empire of chaos and suddenly all of that became a distant country I couldn't quite reach from my body.
Then went independence. (Second gate.) The simple things. Driving myself somewhere. Deciding my own schedule. The quiet dignity of being able to get up and just go, which you don't notice until you can't.
Then went the creative identity. (Third gate.) This one was sneaky. It didn't announce itself. It just showed up one day in the form of me sitting in front of a blank document and feeling absolutely nothing. Not blocked. Not overwhelmed. Just... absent. As though the part of my brain that makes the words had packed a bag and left without a forwarding address.
Then came the fog. (Fourth gate.) The kind that lives in your thoughts when your body is trying to heal faster than your nervous system is ready for. You try to think clearly and the thought slides sideways. You try to remember something and it evaporates. You try to plan and you end up just staring at the wall, which is its own kind of plan, I suppose.
And somewhere in all of that, I was hanging on a hook. Not dramatic. Not mythic. Just very, very still, in a way that felt permanent even though it wasn't.
Inanna hung there for three days before help arrived.
My three days took considerably longer. Months have a way of doing that.
But here's the thing about Inanna's story that most retellings gloss over: she didn't rescue herself. She had set up her rescue before she went down. Before she ever set foot at the first gate, she gave her servant Ninshubur specific instructions: if I am not back in three days, go get help. Go to the gods. Be loud about it. Don't stop until someone listens.
She planned for the possibility of falling apart.
I did not plan for the possibility of falling apart. I never do. I don't think any of us do. But the people around me showed up anyway, which is maybe the version of Ninshubur that the rest of us get. Not because we were wise enough to arrange it, but because we were lucky enough to have them.
The help came. The gates slowly, one by one, in reverse order, began to open again.
I am not going to pretend I came back fully reassembled. Some things that got taken at the gates haven't entirely returned. That might just be the cost of the descent. Inanna came back, but she came back different: sharper in some places, quieter in others, and with a very specific score to settle. (We won't get into that part today. This is a comeback issue, not a revenge arc. The revenge arc comes later.)
What I will say is this: I'm here. The gates are behind me. And I turned my ear back to the upper world, and what I heard was this newsletter, waiting.
So. Here we are.
Inanna came back from the underworld without her crown, without her scepter, without the armor she had worn in. She came back raw and changed and furious in the most magnificent way.
But she came back.
That's the part that matters. Not the gates. Not the stripping. Not the three days on the hook. The part that matters is the turning around, the climbing, the slow and occasionally undignified journey back to the surface.
Stay curious and stubbornly, unreasonably alive,
Tabitha
PS - I have added a new section of upcoming events. Sometimes they're for Entrepreneurs, and sometimes they're for Storytellers. All are welcome.