Saturn Returns with Caggie - 3.6 Pain and Vulnerability with Nikita Gill

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Nikita Gill is a British-Indian poet, playwright, writer and illustrator living in the south of England, who first became known through Tumblr. She has published five collections of poetry, edited anthologies, and written a novel called The Girl and the Goddess. Caggie and Nikita discuss using poetry as a form of therapy, the importance of self expression, and how we can use painful experiences to create things of beauty. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. My job is to overthink. My job is to reach for trauma, reprocess it, overthink and turn it into something that may change someone or may help someone. In this episode of Settlement Turns, I'm joined by poet, playwright, writer and illustrator Nikita Gill. Nikita began writing at a young age and has now published five collections of poetry, a novel and edited her own poetry anthologies.

five collections of poetry, a novel and edited her own poetry anthologies. She first became known by publishing her work on social media site Tumblr and is now described as one of the most successful insta poets. As someone who dabbles in poetry myself I was interested to talk to her about her craft because I'm a big believer that finding a creative outlet can be a powerful form of therapy and self-expression. When we are young, we create so much, and we often lose touch with that creativity as we get older, unless it's our career. I'm very drawn to Nikita's work and the world that she creates, which is both introspective and relatable.

She questions the status quo and the concept of destiny, and also writes of witches, queens, and power. To me, she really embodies a fiery femininity and as I initiate into my own womanhood, I feel grateful to have had this conversation with her as she is such an inspiration to me. But before we get to Nikita, let's hear from our astrological guide, Nora. Saturn rules the winter. The moment that the sun moves into Capricorn and Aquarius throughout December and February every year,

we are officially in the realm of Saturn. And what do we see around us at that time? Nothing. Everything is barren and cold. The days are short, nights are long. Darkness hits before we even get used to the sunlight. And yet, energetically, it is one of the most hopeful personal times of the year because we finally get a break from having to shine. It's a time where we get a chance to hibernate and take a break from sunny, forest positivity.

forest positivity. Rather, behind the mundanity, the opportunity arises to explore our pain, discomforts, and own them without trying to fix the causes of them right away. We're given a chance to sit in the darkness, explore shadow sides, and find the comfort in pain. Energetically, Saturn returns carries the same themes. It is a time of peeling back the layers so we get to the core of our true selves. It's a time of preserving energy and using it only in what is of service to our self-sovereignty and anything that is truly worth our time. Once we've moved through the Saturnian phase, the spring of our lives arises and we get a moment under the sun, feeling renewed and closer than we were before to a more raw and genuine expression of our soul. I've been a fan of literature since I was very young. My dad and my mom were both readers, so I grew up in a house full of books

and books of all sorts because they liked different things. And I think when I was really, I must've been about 10, my dad actually handed me Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. And I have to say, like, there's something very revolutionary about Baldwin's work and it changes you after you read, there's like before you read Baldwin and there's after you read Borgman. There's like before you read Borgman and then after you read Borgman. It's just, he hits the issue like head on. I was the first time I had seen someone write in a way which was, which was a gut punch. It was designed to be a gut punch. Like you should care about these things because these things affect you. That's what kind of changed me a little bit. And it made me go, I really want to be a writer when I grew up. You know, I thought that would be a privilege to be able to change someone that way, to spur them into action, to make them want to change the world. So a few years later,

I discovered poetry and I discovered it as most of us do. When I was nine years old, it as most of us do in when I was nine years old in fourth grade where we read Walking by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost and I thought it was amazing how every single one of the students we were nine and all of us had a different interpretation of that poem some of them were silly interpretations some of them were funny ones some of them were really really deep and meaningful for a bunch of nine-year-olds now that I think back on it I just thought it was fascinating that a small poem which was like a beautiful piece of literature you know which rhymed could affect a bunch of nine year olds that much that we all thought something completely different about it and that's my first experience with poetry. What was the first poem you wrote do

you remember? Do you know my grandmother gave me a notebook to write in and I didn't realize what I was doing was writing poetry I think my mum read something which I wrote in the diary and she was like you do know you're writing poetry and I said I didn't know that and then she introduced me to the work of Maya Angelou and Audrey Lorde and Tony Morrison I think I owe my parents a lot because they're radical readers they encouraged you because I think my sort of view on poetry and like my personal experience of it has been a very hidden one in the sense that I wrote poetry as, I don't want to sound dramatic, but a bit of a means for survival when I was little. And I felt like when I was very young, even though you'd never noticed this from the outside, I felt quite alone, I think. And I used to use poetry as an outlet for that expression. So I have hundreds of diaries and journals that are honestly my most prized possessions. If my mother's house was burning

down, heaven forbid, that's what I would save but for me I've never felt the need to share it with the world so it's interesting that you had obviously that innate calling to do it and you're like this is what I'm supposed to be sharing did you ever feel that it was too private to share because obviously it is like you're alchemizing your pain in your words so much at the time it can be an incredibly exposing thing. Have you ever felt that resistance in sharing your work with the world? So I love that you asked me that question because I think that it's really important to talk about vulnerability and why poets do the work that we do. Because so much of our work is, like you said, alchemizing our pain and talking about a very

real trauma that we have gone through and then offering it to the world right that's terrifying yeah and making it open for criticism and judgment and all the rest which of course on the internet today like you're gonna get regardless of who you are how successful successful you are. And a lot of it does come from people who are afraid of a vulnerability or who are bitter because they either haven't found a way to express themselves in a way that speaks to a lot of people or it comes from misogyny, you know. And the reason it's never about you, I find that fascinating about online trolls.

When they attack you, it is never about you. I find that fascinating about online trolls. When they attack you, it is never about you. It's about them and their issues. And when I learned that, it really changed the way that I looked at human beings. Yeah. So I quite openly talk about like how mental health is so important. And, you know, you need to know how to set up your boundaries

and walk away from things. So yesterday I just, you know, walked away from Twitter for a while because I've noticed that it really deeply affects my mood and my creativity has to come from a place of like a certain amount of joy and stability because I'm reaching for such traumatic experiences I need to have something to hold on to to anchor myself with you know because when you reach for trauma you have to know how to reach for it in a way that doesn't it doesn't hurt you again doesn't derail you exactly exactly so you have to have an anchor yeah to hold space for yourself

in that process otherwise you could spin out of control let's touch on you mentioned something that I really want to explore a bit more with you because obviously it is so connected is this kind of concept of vulnerability because I think it's a big buzzword at the moment people all are like wanting it but I don't know if people know exactly how to practice it and of course the paradoxical aspect to it is that you have to have boundaries with it. Whereas sometimes I think I fear I share too much and then I feel unstable and wobbly and like, you know, navigating that space where we're sailing close enough to the wind without like going straight into it, you know, and that's what vulnerability is both in relationships,

in our careers careers in our public life so what does like vulnerability really mean to you um I think the thing with vulnerability is the the letting people see you for who you exactly are which means your pain your joys everything so for me the the word literally means a radical honesty and a radical honesty to the point that even you might not like what you see about yourself in the mirror, but you have to accept that part of yourself. Like one of the things that was really getting to me for a long time, and especially with like, you know, Instagram, social media, people, oh, love yourself, love yourself,

love. It's, it's great to say that, but loving yourself is so hard. And if you dig deeper than just the, the love yourself, those two words, you, you pull apart things, which will make you so uncomfortable and you have to love yourself through those things. You can't walk away from yourself. You have to sit with yourself through every terrible thing that you have done. And we all do terrible things. We hurt people we love. We harm the people who mean well for us. We lash out at someone who really doesn't deserve it, that is all part of being human, right? You disappoint people. That is the hardest thing I've had to learn when I was young, is that as much as I feel that I will not disappoint people that I love, I will.

And all of us do. It's a brutal part of being human, but it's who we are. And when you do something like that, when you do something that you regret, you need to sit with that discomfort and you have to sit inside your own skin as much as you want to be out of it and love yourself through it. And when I say love yourself, that means you just have to sit there

and you have to process what you've done and you have to say, I will try to do better. And you have to find a way to make amends and you have to find a way not to hate yourself for that one thing that you've done and fill yourself with self-loathing that is hard yeah and especially like you say we are living in this time through the sort of prism and lens of social media that you know creates these things of self-love self-worth but like it only kind of gives you the surface level stuff. So I think people then just do the surface level stuff and kind of project that image.

But being able to sit with those things. Also, I think as a society at large, we are allergic to pain, which is so ridiculous because it is the universal thing that binds us. But we literally are so like, I don't want to feel that negative feeling. We are so intolerant to being able to sit with our own pain. And I think a big part of that is shame. It is. It is. So Brene Brown is amazing. I swear, like reading her book, Daring Greatly greatly and I only got around to reading it last

week um it it talks about all of this in such a such an interesting way because like you said shame shame is something that we as a society have become so allergic to and yet we we heft it onto other people like so seamlessly right Like we weaponize shame for other people and we're allergic to it ourselves. So we know the harm it can do and we shove it onto other people. Like I do think that for there's some stuff which people need to face consequences for, right?

Like when a man says a horribly misogynistic thing and like he has no qualms for saying it and he knows what he's doing when he does when he says that you know and he gets cancelled um as people like i think he's just facing the consequences you know he's being criticized but then there's people who make actual mistakes who are just like oh i'm really sorry i did that like they put up a big apology and a genuine sincere apology you know they don't ask for forgiveness they they say it in a way which is like I am going to sit and I'm going to learn with this and I'm going to take this discomfort I'm going to sit with this and people are like

oh this was such a PR response and I'm just like what do you what do you want what do you want this person to do they've apologized they've said they're going to sit with it they've said they're uncomfortable with what they've done they haven't even said oh I'm sorry I offended you they've said I'm sorry my actions have been hurtful you know and I can see why they're hurtful and it just people are still like you know well that's not good enough what do you want yeah I think we find it so hard to sit with our own inadequacies and failures but it's easier to project onto other people it's because we see the places we haven't taken responsibility and we see someone displaying something that we lack in and it makes us angrier and shove things more things at them to see how much they can take until they become

like us again until they break and that that is where so much of it comes from if we took the time to process our trauma and really reflect on our actions every single day i was asked um a while back at like one of these at a really interesting event if you could give. If you could ask the world to do one thing and everyone in the world had to do it, what would that thing be? And I said that I would make sure my request would be an hour of reflection. One hour every single day of reflecting on your actions,

on how you could have changed the way that you behave towards someone. And no phones, no TV, nothing to distract you with. Just one hour with your own thoughts every day, thinking things over. It doesn't sound like very much when you say it, but most people would really struggle to give an hour of that because we are so used to stimulating ourselves all the time. I mean, I'm like always drinking tea. And sometimes I know that when I wake up and I go and drink tea first thing, I stop spinning out into this like anxious mode rather than being grounded and being present do you do that though do you do an hour every day of reflection every day my job is to overthink like I say this often

I'm like my job is to reach for trauma reprocess it overthink and turn it into something yeah alchemize it and then turn it into something that may change someone or may help someone and this like I have notebooks and notebooks and notebooks and I'll pick something and I'll share it when I feel like it needs to be shared so that's a very organic thing for me it's I'm not I find it really hard to post every single day on social media oh yeah me too because you should post when you have something to say but of course we live in a time of algorithms and like the algorithm has to the algorithm gods have to favor you you must make a sacrifice to the algorithm gods every single day that is such a good way of putting it I hate it I loathe it I really do but I mean at the same time

you created this very strong social media presence so you're obviously doing something right and doing it enough what was that kind of experience like so it happened by accident um I didn't plan for any of this I would work on a lot of like quite crap machines and because they were all secondhand, I was poor. So I had a lot of secondhand machines and they would crash and the motherboards would break and like my work would disappear. And this happened twice that I lost like an entire novel. Two times.

And I, it, it, it breaks you as a writer when that happens like you lose your years of work a bit of your soul yeah yeah and it's gone it's gone you can never go back to it you can never reflect and I was like my soul my heart my spirit can't take another one of these things happening so I started putting my work online on a blog just so that that didn't happen to me again like it just at least I know it's on the internet and you know I get a note like this is on tumblr so I would get one note or like two notes and I feel I was like oh people are reading this that's really interesting because that was my first experience of someone like reacting to something I wrote. And then like just one fine day, I opened up my Tumblr account and it just, there were like thousands and thousands and thousands of notes happening.

And I was just like, what? Did I, did I accidentally hack someone else's account? Well, what is going on? Like I freaked out and I just like shut the laptop down. I'm like, I think I've, I think I've broken something. I don't know what I've done. So I opened it up again and it just it was one of my poems um on tumblr and it had just gone because if I spoken to a lot of people I've got I think it got like 90,000 notes like overnight it was insane what poem was it it was um a poem

called almost do you remember it yeah yeah yeah it's I think it just it starts with I haven't looked at the poem in a long time and it's like um the saddest word in the whole wide world is the word almost he was almost in love they almost made it I think it ends with they almost made it and it just is a series of going through a relationship of almost and I think a lot of people identify with the concept of an almost love you know where things almost work out for you oh that's gonna make me cry so I'm a bit in my feels today I feel I feel you oh that's really beautiful it just it's it's um I think it spoke to a lot of people because we've all had an almost love you know and so many of us have people who we wish we had more with

and it just yeah it overnight it took off and then people start discovering the older posts I did and then some of those took off and that's kind of how it happened for me it was very organic I didn't plan for any of it did you did you have like hopes and aspirations of things going in a certain direction or was it just you really communicating your soul and putting it out there and just letting the universe take hold I mean genuinely speaking I just I think the tumblr community was fantastic at the time because there were a lot of young women writing on there. So we had a really strong community of women who were like, well, I don't know if they ever noticed me, but I was like interacting with their work a lot.

You know, I would see their work and I'd be like, you know, I'd like it or I'd leave like a little like message for them going, oh, this really moved me. I really love that you did this and I think we ended up developing like a community without even trying to develop a community like it happened and um I I have friends from like six seven years ago on tumblr that are real life friends with me now which was really interesting who are also writers you know who exist in the same space as me so it we all started on tumblr we were like tumblr girls basically and and it that's amazing yeah it just it we developed a community we were all going through things some kind of trauma a lot of it was sexual trauma because you know

you realize in your 20s how messed up the world is I think and why it's like that your 20s are such a turbulent time like I I've spoken about this with so many young women they really are well this is kind of the the entire like construct of the podcast was based around my turbulent 20s and me just being like right can't handle this anymore you know get grounded and rooted so yeah I'd love to explore that a little bit with you because obviously we all I think we all feel like it's very personal yes and our our lives are just chaotic and upside down everywhere I always describe it as like everyone else got the handbook of life mine got lost in the mail yes oh my god that is like the perfect way to describe it like it just it it's

like it's like my friends who became parents in their 20s they really struggled they have really struggled and the literature out there for especially for women um was oh you should be so grateful the literature out there completely seem to ignore how hard it is to be a mother how hard it is to now you've created something that has come out of your body and now that that child that child has changed your life and there's no grieving for that old life nothing prepares you to grieve for that old life so so many of my friends like were like they have to they've had to form like support circles like because they're just they're not the the perfect stereotype of what a mother should be you've spoken a lot about like misogyny and the patriarchy and do you feel that that plays a big part in sort of a woman's identity in in motherhood absolutely womanhood and motherhood for so many

centuries has been intrinsically linked. I'm in my 30s. I don't have children. And there's so many people who talk to me like there's something wrong with me. Like, do you not want children? Oh, why is that? Oh, maybe you haven't met the right person yet. There's a thousand excuses to tell me why I don't have children other than the one which I give to people like the reason I give to people which is I'm not ready I don't know if I ever will be that is not good enough for people I think it's just years of patriarchal structuring of what womanhood is supposed to be and all womanhood has to end at motherhood basically for them for them. Well, and in being chosen. Exactly. Exactly.

Because I'm 31, and I've noticed even over the last year, how much of a dramatic shift happens in people's perception of women basically in their 30s. It's very, very toxic, and it's very outdated, yet we're all still behaving like it's okay and acceptable the idea that being that there's a sort of hierarchy in society and that there's a hierarchy and like being a woman and that being married and with a child makes you like a proper woman yeah anything else you're just like what's wrong with you kind of thing well this is so damaging no one's asked me if I want marriage you know thank you it's just like a given it's like well of

course you want to get married and have babies but I was like but why who who's telling me I have to want those things I might not want those things that doesn't make me any less than no exactly I've surrounded myself recently with a lot of women who are writers and who are also in their 50s and 60s who've never married and never had kids and I can't tell you how nourishing that experience is to know that there are women who are in their 50s and 60s who are very successful writers and very successful artists who have never had children because they've never who are very successful writers and very successful artists who have never had children because they've never felt that way in blind and never been married it is so empowering to see it and also it is is that thing of the circle you surround yourself

with is going to kind of echo your beliefs and your feelings so of course if you're hanging out with people not to say that you should disregard your friends that have like families and have got married. But if that's all you're hanging out with, of course, it's going to make you feel like that's the only way of being. And that you just have to broaden your horizons a little bit because there are such a diverse groups of people in this world doing things in amazing ways that are outside the status quo. And it's just about finding them like it just children aren't for everyone right like that's actually a healthy attitude to life that everyone isn't meant to be a parent it is a very difficult job to raise a person it is hard and it it may not be for everyone because it's that hard, right? Like I look at my friends who have children and I'm like, I don't know how you do it.

That's amazing. That's wonderful. But I don't know if it's for me. I'm like that as well. I'm like, this is amazing. Here, you can have it back now. That's precisely it. Honestly.

I wanted to ask you you you said a quote from you you said that I have a habit of holding on to things that I should have let go of ages ago now obviously with what you do it's important to hold on to certain things and experiences do you find that sometimes you hold on to too many and this actually can be problematic oh yeah oh yeah I'm I say it often I'm a work in progress I hold on to things I shouldn't be holding on to I I have an issue letting things go and I think the reason and that this would explain a lot of my relationships actually you know whether they're friendships or whether they're romantic relationships it's almost like for me, letting go is directly synonymous with giving up. Somewhere in my childhood, someone taught me that when you let something go, you are giving up.

And when you give up, that makes you weak. And that thinking, yeah only I only recognized it a few weeks ago that that is the problem that is why oh wow that's a big realization it was huge it was like a midnight epiphany I was like sitting and reading and I forget what I was reading and I was looking at I think it was the character I was like studying the character as a writer and looking at her from here, you know, as opposed to looking at her like this. And I looked at him like, you've been taught at an early age that giving up and letting go are exactly the same thing. And that's why you're struggling right now. And I was like, oh, she's me. Yeah, we end up burdening ourselves with all these things that aren't ours to carry anymore

and actually there's something incredibly liberating and empowering about letting go and it is in giving up I think like one of the biggest things for me is like giving up on someone I love which is why letting go of a person that I love was so hard for me is that you know I've given up on them that was someone I invested love and time and they invested love and time in me and I'm giving them up like what is wrong with me why can't I and examining that and realizing that this is the wrong way to process pain and process the act of letting go it is not weakness in fact In fact, in so many places, it is an immense amount of strength to take yourself out of a situation and say that I need to let this go

because it's not healthy for me and it's not healthy for the other person. Until I learned this, I was doomed to repeat that cycle again and again and again. And now that I've been able to learn that lesson, I won't repeat the cycle right and that's that's what we're cyclic beings we repeat the same we are doomed to repeat those behaviors until we learn something from them I know and this is what because I think people often say you know I'm attracting this person into my life or this keeps happening but it's like you can call for something you can say what you want to the universe and it will go okay we're going to bring you these experiences so you can heal this part of yourself before you get that and so we'll keep bringing them until you

do and I'm such a big believer in that so you've got to really be grateful for everything that's coming into your life because it is encouraging you to to grow yeah blessing or lesson right both of them are good for you yeah a friend of mine actually always says to me like it's quite I was going through something that was not a fun experience and I was really upset and she just looked at me and she goes just say thank you and I was like okay I looked at the and she goes, just say thank you. And I was like, okay. I looked at the universe and I was like, thank you. And now I do it all the time. Whenever something awful happens, I'm like, thank you. Oh, yeah.

I did this yesterday. I was going through something horrible and I literally was in tears and I was like thank you but that's the thing we have to change our understanding in our relationship to pain because like if we went look back on every painful experience it led us somewhere amazing and I always say that like if we were like a piece of clay it's like pain is the hand that sculpts the clay you know that's how we that's the process of our becoming. I think that's so beautiful.

Like the way you said that was, that was very poetic actually. Well, I'm telling you, I'm a hidden poet. I'm actually speaking to you. I'm like, maybe I should start releasing some of my poetry, but I get very territorial about it. I'm like, I'm not sharing it with anyone. It is hard. It is because there's so much work I don't share with anyone, you know,

it's only for me. Like there's some work, which is just like, this is, this is for me and no one else. And that's good. That's healthy. You should have work that you don't give to anybody, you know, paintings that you never showed to a soul, like that are just done for you and I I think that's like really I think I know we live in a culture where everything is very voyeuristic and everyone should um oversharing is encouraged hopefully and to an extent which is just like I'm just like did I need to know that um no no I had a call I had a call about it yesterday and it was like, you know, share what you're having for breakfast. Do sharing your yoga practice.

Like who wants to see that shit? But you're right. We are living in this time where we can't get enough of the mundane. Yeah. I don't get it. I don't get it either. I feel like, so I, you know, my relationship with social media, I find this really funny, but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. She's like, you,

you only use it for work. You only use it for work. Like I share poems, I share thoughts. And that's it. People don't know anything about my partner. People don't know anything about my parents. People don't know, like they know what I've said in interviews, but they don't know anything about my parents. People don't know, like they know what I've said in interviews, but they don't know who they are, where they live, nothing. And that's what my personal Facebook as well, like my, you know, protected personal Facebook where only my friends and family can see. I don't share anything other than work stuff.

Well, I guess that's your boundary. I didn't even know I'd established it. I guess that's your boundary around your vulnerability because even know I'd established it. I guess that's your boundary around your vulnerability because you are sharing such a massive part of who you are through your words. So you have to create those parameters around it. Yeah, yeah. Yesterday, putting up that tweet,

just saying, look, I'm really struggling. My mental health is really bad right now. So I'm going to have to take some time away from this app. It took me a day to put that up because I was admitting something which was it was there's no poetry there's nothing to hide behind there's no beautiful lyrical language nothing it was just it was a truth that I was looking at and going I'm gonna have to tell people that I'm going away for a while because people tweet me and then you feel rude.

I appreciate you doing this then. This was really nourishing. I really enjoyed this. Good, good. And is it, I mean, I don't want to ask too much. I'm aware we don't have that much time left, but is it, is it a sort of a circumstantial thing or is this something that you experience from time to time? thing or is this something that you experience from time to time because I mean just to I I definitely struggle with it and I would say that there is a correlation between poets and mental health a hundred percent because for me it was always my therapy um I'll be honest with you what it is I'm I'm a I'm a workaholic I have issues pulling away from my work because I'm always thinking of the new idea new thought new new thing to do pulling away from my work because I'm always thinking of the new idea,

new thought, new thing to do. And I love my work because it is part of my soul. It's my passion. I wrote a book called The Girl and the Goddess. And it's a really important book to me because it talks about partition, which affected my family very deeply, the partition of India. It talks about the relationship know, the relationship between grandmothers and mothers and daughters and how complicated they can be. It talks about being bisexual. And it talks about the Hindu gods and goddesses and the stories they give us. It's an important book, not just for me, but it's about a queer South Asian girl. There are not a lot of books out there about queer South Asian girls growing up. And it came out during the pandemic. So it didn't get the marketing or any of the things because,

you know, publishing was shut down. It didn't get the love that it needed to be able to thrive. Readers have found it and they've really accessed it and they've loved it. readers have found it and they've really accessed it and they've loved it whoever has been able to find it but I took that failure I'm putting that in air quotes because it's not a failure it it it was such a big accomplishment for me to have published this novel um I took it really personally really personally and I think the thing that was that that hurt me even more was people started DMing me, a certain demographic of people started DMing me saying, I'm so disappointed that you chose to focus so much on being Indian and being Kashmiri and being Hindu. You know, like those three things, like I'm so disappointed why don't you your work is

universal you should stick to writing universally oh wow yeah yeah and then of course there was like there was this biphobia that came in from you know South Asian people as well and it just it was a lot to process and a lot to take whilst watching this book not do as well as I had hoped it would. In the sense that it's done well, it's just there were certain dreams I had for it and it didn't reach those dreams. It was hard to process that alongside the biphobia and the misogyny and the racism that came alongside, you know, from DMs or reviewers or people. And it just, I realized that I need to take the time to walk away and grieve this.

And being online all the time is not going to help me process that. And when you're in that space as well, and then you are just open to anybody and everybody saying whatever they want it's like that's where you really need to draw a clear boundary so I think that you definitely did the right thing yeah especially twitter I just was like this is not helpful I need to walk away but yeah so that's that's why I've taken the time away but these kind of conversations I was having

a lovely conversation with a friend of mine yesterday was a writer as well they are really helpful you know they and I feel like I can come back into myself when I have conversations like this so thank you for doing this with me today I really appreciate it this has been very nourishing for me too so Nikita thank you so so much for joining us today oh thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful and nurturing and very nourishing. So really appreciate it. I love talking to Nikita and found it really interesting to hear her views on motherhood and identity and about her struggles with letting things go and how she always felt this was synonymous with giving up something that really gave me food for thought in my own life what I loved about this conversation was how we should change our relationship to pain and how brave it is to put our artistic

work out into the world and how I feel we need to do that more so I hope it inspires some of you to start writing painting and creating and to express yourself. You can find Nikita on Instagram at Nikita underscore Gil. The novel we discussed in our interview, The Girl and the Goddess, is out now, as is her poetry collection, Where Hope Comes From. If you would like a reading with our astrological guide Nora, you can find her at Stars Incline on Instagram and follow me at Kagi's World. find her at stars incline on instagram and follow me at kaggy's world on the 27th of may we'll be having a saturn returns live show at the clapham ground in london where i'll be speaking with catherine gray so you still have time to get your tickets from dice fm if you enjoyed listening to this episode i would love it if you could follow the show and leave us a review on apple podcasts

or just share it with a friend. Saturn Returns is a Feast Collective production. The producer is Hannah Varrell and the executive producer is Kate Taylor. Thank you so much for listening and remember you are not alone. Goodbye.