Shallow Locks, Split Ends was first published on my Substack, atomic honey, on February 13, 2026.

---

I have long found myself simmering in the question of willful blind obedience: “where have I been complicit where I could have been fully authentic?” The answer, I know, lies wherever I have shrunk or erased parts of myself in order to remain palatable. It’s a matter of self-abandonment. Plain and simple.

As the Year of the Snake comes to a close, answers have begun to surface through the compost.

I recently made a habit of trimming my split ends each day. It’s meditative. My hair rewards the ritual by becoming sleeker and more manageable. And the more I trim, the more I see the parallel in my relational field. The connections I’ve made over the last 5, 10, 20 years number in the thousands — and only a small handful now witness all of my colors. That isn’t wrong, as not everyone is meant to fit neatly into my inner circle, but there was something more sinister going on that I was nurturing, myself.

Over the years I’ve amassed friends and followers (the internet is wild), many gathered during seasons when loneliness and my instinct for belonging drew me through open doors without discernment. I wanted quantity. I trusted that within it I would find quality. I wasn’t wrong. A small handful of those thousands have clicked into place like keys designed to fit.

And then there were the ones I desperately wished would click. I would have done well to heed my mother’s craft-table wisdom sooner:

“If something doesn’t fit easily, don’t force it.”

Her hobbies involved delicate, rare, sometimes irreplaceable components. The principle was simple: force it, and you risk breaking something you cannot repair.

Sometimes we learn the hard way. In building relationships, I wore a cap of palatability more often than one of radical authenticity. I gravitated toward people who embodied qualities I admired — confidence, charisma, boldness, risk tolerance, generosity. I’d heard we become the sum of those we spend the most time around, and feeling incomplete (my own perception), I surrounded myself with traits I thought I lacked or wanted amplified.

I wasn’t entirely inauthentic. I showed some of my colors. But I muted others out of fear that they wouldn’t be understood — that the rift would be irreparable. And then I invited people who could only half-see me in as close as I could, as if they were natural fits.

What I was really doing was filing down my own keys so they would slide into locks that couldn’t receive my full shape. I reshaped myself to fit shallow mechanisms. I was forcing.

It worked, at first. But the filings didn’t disappear. They followed me, waiting to be gathered and smelted back into something whole. How could I know who deserved a seat in my inner circle if I made a habit of fragmenting myself?

I didn’t always hide. I have the profound privilege of an inner circle of real ones — people with whom I can speak freely. They may not understand every layer, but they lean in instead of away. They challenge me with curiosity. I leave those conversations feeling more myself, not less. And crucially, they do too.

When I trim my hair now and see the frayed ends, I think of the relationships I nurtured even though they could never hold all of me without fraying themselves. Like applying conditioner and masks to damaged strands, I chauffeured myself to brunches, festivals, Discord chatrooms, white elephants, holiday parties, barbecues, sports ball events — hoping proximity would heal what was misaligned.

I poured time, energy, and resources into resolving loneliness, when the wiser move would have been to trim what was splitting and pour that devotion back into my own wholeness. I don’t feel lonely when I’m whole.

When I embrace all of my colors, something simple happens: people who love the full spectrum gravitate toward me. If I only output blue and orange, I attract blue and orange. And once I know they like those, I keep showing them to stay safe. Maybe I test purple. If it’s met with glaze or recoil, back in the box it goes.

But when I pour the whole spectrum forward, the ones who love rainbows light up. Around them, I don’t ration color. I don’t edit. I’m not just unlonely — I’m met.

So how does this translate online?

The internet is strange. We engage with fragments of people — whatever slice they choose to display. Many aren’t exuding rainbows. So how do I find the others?

By showing mine.

If I show up as a full spectrum, I will be too much for some. That’s fine. It isn’t my role to make every color palatable. Someone may abhor yellow — may even dress their discomfort up as ideological disagreement. That doesn’t make yellow wrong. It doesn’t require me to dim it.

Yellow is still someone else’s favorite color.

For many years, I approached the internet the same way I approached those split-end relationships: I muted color to preserve connection, because something in me sensed that rainbow presence destabilizes established palettes. That instinct wasn’t wrong — I just understand it differently now. The internet amplifies fragments. Singular colors scale. Blue content finds blue people. Orange finds orange. Algorithms, at their core, are color sorters.

But I’m not a color. I’m a prism.

My lane is not “purple”; my lane is peace — and peace is what coherence radiates. Fullness. Truth without fragmentation.

From where I stand now, centered in my array, I feel devoted to a new mode of operation: unabashed wholeness. If someone recoils at my yellow, I can see the fray without absorbing it. Illumination exposes what isn’t ready to be seen. That’s not a referendum on yellow, nor a cue for me to dim it. I don’t need to perform clarity for those committed to misunderstanding, or translate sunlight for someone determined to live in the shade.

So my question is no longer, “How do I find the other rainbows?” It’s, “How steadily can I hold the full spectrum without collapsing into defensiveness or performance?” The steadier I become, the more I trust that somewhere — perhaps in many quiet corners — someone will take purple out of their own box and wear it openly.

The truth is, when I brought in color, I didn’t mean it as an abstraction. Color is a form of language. Each hue names a facet of reality. Together, they form a coherent field of felt experience. The chakra system is one map among many that speaks this dialect.

In my world, the two colors I most often muted were gold and purple.

Gold is unapologetic sovereignty. Purple is depth — psychic permeability, and intimacy with the unseen.

Dimming gold was a natural consequence of dimming everything else. Purple, though? I trembled at the thought of revealing PURPLE to my in-group. To the people who move comfortably through orange, yellow, and light blue, who anchor their worth to old-paradigm red. They weave spells into the world in rich blue. Some even sing in green. But purple? Never.

And I knew it.

Because I loved them. I loved the version of myself that belonged among them. I spoke their colors fluently, and those colors upheld an agreed-upon scaffolding of authority — a system that felt solid, earned, and legitimate.

To step publicly into gold and purple wouldn’t simply introduce new ideas; it would expose that scaffolding as partial. And if the structure cracked, so might my place within it. Belonging was not separate from that stability. It depended on it.

And I understood something else: when identity feels threatened, especially in those unacquainted with purple, it can register as existential danger. I knew these “new ideas” would not be received as expansion but as attack — that the energy I brought to their foundations would be met with projections meant to discharge it. “Crazy.” “Witch.” “Woo-woo.” Whatever it took to feel intact.

So purple went into the box.

And that was the tragedy. Because purple is one of the hues I was born to sing. Filing that edge down to match their locks cost me clarity — and years I might have spent singing to those already listening for the melody.

But the calls for purple rang louder and louder, to the point where I couldn’t look away anymore because the sound was deafening. In quiet rooms with trusted healers who would say “you are incredibly gifted. Whenever you have a scheduling system, I have people to send your way.” At the beach, when chosen family I’d helped time and time again said “there should really be a way for me to pay you for this.” In private text messages, when friends spilled from the woodwork to inquire about grounding, protection spells, readings, energy calibration, hypnosis, working with archetypes, guides, and ancestors, or help making sense of a metaphysical concept. I’d pull purple out in these private moments, and while part of me felt grateful for the experience, a larger part knew that that was a truer calling than nodding along smiling during conversations about investment portfolios ever was.

When I muted purple, it wasn’t just me who lost something. The rooms I was in remained narrower than they could have been. The conversations stayed safer. The medicine stayed undelivered. When I muted purple, I wasn’t protecting them; I was delaying myself. And in doing so, I delayed the people who might have recognized themselves in what I refused to say.

Many times over, I’d drop acid in the desert with the “ooh, pretty colors” crowd while my mind whispered, “whoa… reality is porous, and I am responsible for what I build into it.” I’d remember my mission, my nature, my connection to magic — that what I do in this plane of reality matters — and I’d have no one to speak with about it. If I tested purple then, they’d reflect “it’s not that deep, bro.” I’m strangely grateful for those brief moments of accompanied loneliness.

To say I’m completely past the fear of not belonging would be untrue. She’s still there — lingering behind my words, urging me in her gravelly voice to remember my place. My place in the grand paradigm of fragmentation that’s tearing this world at the seams.

She hisses, “They’ll call you the unspeakable names, cast you out like the heathen you are! They’ll say you’ve lost it — that you are not to be trusted! You’ll destroy your credibility and any chance of worldly success.”

To her, I ask, “Whose?”

Shallow locks. Split ends.

And so I return to the only question that really matters: how steadily can I hold the full spectrum?

Most of the time, people don’t really need all of the colors at once, so my experience holding specific frequencies is still valuable. What matters now is that I don’t favor some at the expense of others, when my gift is to be abundant in all of them and select with discernment.

At the end of my life, I would rather look back and agree with my choice to live life in full color than to look back with regret at a life half-lived.

---

Author’s Note

This piece has been sitting in my body for a long time, waiting for the gun to say “go.” The green light shone this week when I witnessed a woman in congress loudly defend billionaire pedophiles and refuse to answer questions intended to bring justice to survivors of an international crime ring. I saw her leash, plain as day: the one that makes her feel safe or favored among her chosen people, and I saw her putting it around her own neck. I know that leash — thankfully one with much lower stakes — and I remember how I have put on my own when belonging ferociously beckoned.

At the same time, my work — a sprawling body spanning about as many fields and topics as the colors in the rainbow — is threading together seamlessly into a cohesive structure. It isn’t an option for me to hide anymore. And yes, it’s highly likely that many of the people I once held close to my heart will shun me when they see more of what I am and what I do, but I don’t believe in martyr myths, and honoring myself means living that truth wide open.