12/12/2025
The Year of the Snake has not been subtle. It has been spicy. Uncomfortable. A year of reckoning with oneself. Raw-dogging reality with the invitation to turn the s**t into compost 💩
Old pain I thought had long dissolved has been dredged up from deep within the soil of my cells, trauma loops I genuinely believed were closed barging back in, unannounced and loud: “OH HAI GIRLFRIEND, IT ME!”
As a fellow victim-survivor of childhood abuse (statistically, I know many of you reading this are too 🫂), we were forced to grow up fast. We learned to protect ourselves. Staunch independence for many of us became both our strength and our curse.
This year, smells alone have cracked open memories I did not remember, decades of my mind’s self-imposed amnesia splitting at the seams. I’ve been wading through muck, rage, despair, numbness and the entire spectrum of human emotion.
It’s been an exhausting year, mate. I know.
Outside of tea, I work a desk job where I connect with countless humans deeply suffering from abuse and systems designed to fail them. Receiving other people’s trauma has been a mirror for my own. Some days the human experience feels like a rollercoaster with no safety bar.
And yet, somehow I have aligned with Cha Dao in this lifetime. A place to rest against the walls of my bowl. To find small pockets of peace and find pieces of myself.
This morning, I was reflecting on my earliest memory of tea. I was about 7 years old. My stepmother hurled a pot of tea over me in one of her fits of rage. Living with her was terrifying; I genuinely thought she might kill me.
I never drank tea, or any hot drink really, for decades. Sometimes I wonder if that moment was the imprint. Then, in 2018, in a tent in Hong Kong, I met tea in ceremony for the first time.
What was once used against me as a tool for violence became the balm that has slowly brought my heart back online, challenging my lone-wolf narratives, my illusions of separateness, my ideas of safety and self-protection.
Tea doesn’t erase, or distract me from the pain, it meets me. And through that meeting, I am able to return to the forgotten parts of myself. 🐍>🐎
