Queen of Pentacles: Cozy w/ Who I Am

***Content disclosure: eating disorders, bulimia, body dysmorphia***

Recently, I had the joy and privilege of witnessing a Virgo Sun, Queen of Pentacles live in person: Jinkx Monsoon. Jinkx Monsoon is a transfemme, nonbinary performer. I first watched Jinkx win season 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013. Edited to look like the outcast, they prevailed over Rolaskatox to take the crown. Jinkx is a witch and has proven that words are spells. I still say “water off a duck’s back” to myself once in a while. They declared during season 5 that they wanted to do drag on Broadway and it manifested this year when Jinkx portrayed Mama Morton in Chicago. They also won season 7 of RPDR All Stars which featured previous winners. I was lucky enough to attend her current tour Everything at Stake which is 2 hours of comedic, empowering ritual.

Jinkx is only 35-years-old but encompasses the insight of an old soul. As a 42-year-old, I rarely seek others who are younger than me. I enjoy drinking in the aged wisdom from those with lived life experiences and find it rare in younger people. Maybe it is because Jinkx always played older and does not seem to bother with youth culture. They would rather age themselves which is more relatable for me than the Botoxed middle-aged figures we are bombarded with in pop culture. I loathe the clickbait headlines of “Why 40 is the new 20" or “Fabulous after 50”. Fuck off with that shit. I don’t want to be 20. 20-year-olds don’t know jack shit. You can be fabulous at any fucking age you want.

Amanda Yates Garcia writes about aging with raw poeticism on her Mystery Cult Substack: “the more bear we become, the more we belong in the woods…. the more we conform to the beauty standards of coloniality, the more we belong in a shopping mall in Orange County.” I want to be a bear.

Queen of Pentacles is Water + Earth, compassionate grounding. Practical, down-to-earth nurturing to confront the complexities of existing as a human being. My birth chart has no placements in any Earth signs except my Chiron wound in Taurus, my 7th house of relationships. Oof, that’s a juicy topic I am trying to untangle. Ultimately, I feel disconnected from Earth energy. My chart is Air dominant with my Sun and Venus in Aquarius and a stellium of Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto in Libra. My ASC is in Scorpio and my Moon is in Aries. Getting stuck in my thoughts, deep in the feels is how I function and how I spiral out of control. Learning these aspects of my birth chart has been super beneficial in focusing my witchcraft. Grounding exercises and connecting to the Wheel of the Year has brought my spiral back to center.

Scorpio season 2022 was a transformative season in my life. I embraced my Scorpio Rising self and transformed a huge area of my life. It is still too raw and fresh to share with others. I am still processing everything, but it was life changing. After months of setting intentions with the New Moons, I finally felt accomplished. This witchcraft shit was working. I almost felt happy. Almost…

I have disordered eating and body dysmorphia. After the birth of my daughter at age 20, I slipped into bulimia. I had felt fat my whole life. I have always been larger than my younger sister who I felt constantly compared to in my youth. My hand me down clothes were too big for her. She was praised for her light appetite while I voraciously wanted second helpings and dessert. I find myself constantly comparing my size to other people. It’s really hard working in healthcare when patients who are larger than me weigh less than I do. It’s a mindfuck that makes me feel like a Mack truck.

I finally controlled my disordered eating behavior in my late 20s after I went through a breakup of a long term relationship. It was my first real adult relationship and I was sad that it didn’t turn out the way I expected. I let myself grieve for 6 months. I drank massive amounts of alcohol. My bulimia went crazy. It’s a disgusting disorder so I will spare the details. I don’t remember exactly why, but my behaviors shifted.

The year I spent single after that breakup was one of the best years of my life. I was 29. I didn’t know it back then, but I was in my Saturn Return. Saturn Return is associated with adulthood. I personally think being an adult is overrated and see it as one of many cycles of time. One of my favorite astrologers is Alice Sparkly Kat. They wrote the book Postcolonial Astrology that I am slowly absorbing right now. They have an awesome resource discussing the 7-ish year cycles of Saturn in your birth chart. I always thought my life cycled in 7s and astrology gave me an answer for the why. It was Saturn.

That year, Saturn returned to my natal placement in Libra. I strived for balance. I stopped my disordered eating by developing a strict dietary and exercise plan. That year I was a runner. I became one of those crazy people who couldn’t relax until I had ran at least 3 miles. I bragged about feeling the runner’s high. That year I didn’t need sleeping medications. I stopped drinking alcohol for a few months. I also stopped weighing myself and just went by how my clothes fit. I felt healthy, physically and mentally. One year into my Saturn Return, after my period of reconditioning, I met the person who would be my future husband.

Husband and wife are gendered terms, but I cannot get myself to stop using them. Calling my husband, my spouse or partner, even life partner, does not feel the same. Spouse doesn’t feel as intimate and partner just rings very business-like to me. While marriage definitely runs like a business with juggling schedules and finances, partner just feels wrong. He is so much more than a partner and so am I. It’s more societal conditioning I am trying to evolve away from and if anyone knows of any more potent and inclusive terms, please let me know.

Growing up, I never dreamt of getting married. I hate weddings. I always say my wedding was the best one I have ever been to as we got married on my lunch break at the courthouse. The ceremony was like 5 minutes and only my mother, my daughter, and his parents were in attendance. I was also 8 months pregnant at the time. I liked being pregnant because it gave me the ultimate excuse for having a protuberant belly and overeating whatever the fuck I wanted. We had Chinese food afterwards. It was perfect.

When I met my husband, I was in the best physical shape of my life. I still had body issues (I think I always will) but they were not as prominent. As we dated, my strict diet and exercise plan went to the wayside. I started to gain weight, Love Weight. My daily 3-5 mile runs dwindled down to a couple times per week until I stopped. I replaced my runner’s high with the high of being in love. After I gave birth to our child, my weight gain accelerated. I am now the fattest I have ever been in my whole life. It negatively impacted many aspects of my life for the past several years. After a Scorpio season spent shedding spiritual and emotional baggage, I decided I needed to shed this part of me too.

To be honest, my first goal was a physical transformation. I thought back to my Saturn Return year and knew I had what it took to be a motivated exerciser and diet planner. Running was meditative and I do miss taking in the deep breaths of fresh air as my feet hit the earth to the musical beats in my ears. I would listen to Against Me’s New Wave album start to finish in one 3 mile run. The more I thought about what my plan would be, the more it just didn’t feel right. Something felt off. I was expanding myself in so many other ways, but why was I clinging to these antiquated societal beauty standards?

I discovered Kait Fowlie from the back of The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Card Meanings by Brigit Esselmont. Her free download about the Taurus/Scorpio axis and eclipses of 2022 was vital in my Scorpio season metamorphosis and I will be forever grateful to her for providing this resource. I decided to complete her self-love spells course with the intention of increasing my self-love in order to develop healthier habits to transform my body. My intention did not manifest, but the Universe offered me something better: self-acceptance.

Fowlie’s course called for choosing a self-love mentor tarot card. I chose this Queen of Coins from Tarot of the Divine. I was drawn to the aura of self-confidence surrounding this Queen. This card depicts Waramurungundju, a North Australian deity, birth giver to the first people, and the Rainbow Serpent who created the typography of Earth and led Waramurungundju out of the sea. This Queen’s bodily exposure was the opposite of my concealment. Even during humid summers, I would wear long sleeves and avoid swimwear. I would rather sweat and feel physical discomfort than experience the psychological discomfort of exposing my fat body. I felt like a failure because I had let myself go or whatever societal bullshit I was holding onto.

As I progressed through Fowlie’s self-love spells, I found that I did not want to lose weight. What I wanted was self-acceptance. I wanted to accept my body as it is, for what it is. My current body is larger than the one I had 10 years ago, but it has nothing to do with my self-worth, beauty, or ability to be loved. Unlike my childhood, no one else was making negative comments about my body except for me. My inner saboteur had taken over. I was the obstacle standing in my way of self-love. I abandoned all plans for a physical transformation. I again sought to transmute my thought patterns.

Pentacles, or Coins/Disks/Roots depending on the tarot deck, correspond with Earth which is the medicine for my Air heavy birth chart. Initially, that is why I chose this Queen of Coins as my mentor, but I as reflect on my real world self-love mentors, they are all people of color and queer people. Lizzo. TS Madison. Nicole Byer. The podcast episode below is a fun, powerful, and empowering conversation between Byer and Madison about “the battles and victories that come with being Black, trans, and unapologetically visible.”

One of my favorite podcasts is Sloppy Seconds with Big Dipper and Meatball. Big Dipper is a queer music artist and self identifies as a Bear, a gay term for a larger-sized hairy person. Meatball is a Black drag performer who hosts a live show called Fat Slut, a celebration of all bodies and audience members compete to be the Fattest Slut of the Night. They are both very honest about their struggles with weight and societal beauty standards, but ultimately they celebrate each other for who they are.

Reflecting on my severe bulimic years, my body mentors were all white, cis-het women. As I have pivoted my pop culture intake towards more racially diverse and queer content, I see many more bodies of all shapes, colors, and ages. Googling for “fat white female celebrities” results in people from Kate Winslet to Chrissy Metz. If you were around when Titanic was released in 1997, you remember how Winslet was ridiculed for her size as she was larger than the thin, waifs we were used to seeing in the 90s. That did not help my 16-year-old self’s body image. I personally don’t see many white, cis-het women out there accepting their bodies without trying to change them first, but I am also not looking for them.

As a grad student, I’m super fucking sick of scholarly articles, but I actually found one that exemplifies my point. Griffin et al.1 performed an intersectionality review of #BodyPositivity on Instagram and found that it has mainly been co-opted by white, lean, able-bodied, cisgendered individuals. They write that the origins of the body positivity movement was started by Black feminists:

Body positivity was rooted in Black fat activism to resist the rise of anti-fat discourse in North America, and to refuse mainstream white thin appearance-focused representations that (continue to) discriminate against Black bodies. In general, fat activism is an unapologetic embrace and acceptance of fatness as a political identity and culture, seeking to challenge unjust stigmas and discrimination against people who are unjustly positioned as less worthy based solely on body size. Strings traces the racial origin of the fear of fat, outlining how the contemporary ideal of slenderness both is racialized and racist, where fatphobia is not about health, but is instead a means to validate (whilst concealing) racial prejudice.

Griffin et al. write that “some scholars believe it holds power to liberate individuals from patriarchal, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial ideologies of what constitutes a ‘good’ body.” I am no scholar, but I do believe this about body positivity.

Capitalism wants you to hate your body. It wants you to buy shit to change your body. The patriarchal, white supremacists want to devalue the Black, indigenous, female, transgender, non-binary body. Ableism projects weakness and futility onto the disabled body. Self-worth should not be tied to productivity or consumption. My self-worth is not tied to the societal beauty standards I have been bombarded with for the past 42 years. My body image is a constant ebb and flow, but I know that I must stand on the right side of this issue. Indulging in the aesthetic normative is indulging in capitalistic, patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial bullshit. I love and accept my 42-year-old fat, Korean/white, postpartum, perimenopausal body. Cozy with who I am, I love myself goddamn.