Whining at a Dinner Party

Please invite me back though?

Jul 09, 2026

For most of Q2 this year I considered giving-up on Venus of the Mind and would ponder (whine) about my inclinations to my loved ones who patiently listened but made no attempts at dissuasion.

I course-corrected one night at a dinner party I’d been invited to this past June. Being 5”6 and well fed, my build is deceiving as I’m quite the lightweight so when my Scorpio-rising-at-the-party-projection slipped off after a strong Negroni courtesy of the host, I began to ponder (whine) again. Let the record show that a question was directed my way about my public writing, I did not self-promote unprompted (a final frontier that I have crossed on occasion just not at dinner parties).

Anyways, instead of self-promotion I leaned into self-doubt while confidently justifying my sense of creative futility with data sets (a false idol!) when an eavesdropping guest had the unsolicited nerve to tell me “Look, I have no skin in the game but it sounds like you’re saying no to yourself. You should keep writing.” My response: “…(O_O)…You know what girl, you’re right…I think the Universe may be speaking through you, thank you.” Which surprised her back? In a good way I hope. She was endearingly bashful and silly the rest of the night.

Sometimes I do not consciously know what I want or need until it’s given and here was such a case. Of course as I write this out it’s now clear that my subconscious had been begging for somebody, anybody, to tell me to not give up. Sometimes I can’t always be my own best cheerleader given that my inner Pollyanna has a nihilistic shadow — what a liability!

Maybe my parents were right y el tiempo de Dios es perfecto, that kind of timing is impervious to conversational decorum and degrees of proximity. It freely moved through someone who just moments before was a stranger but had the gumption to give a word when the Spirit moved them. I’m grateful to have heard what I’d been needing to hear exactly when I was ready to hear it.

Stay human out there, it’s what connects us to the Divine.

Con amor y cariño,

Ivana

If this blog post were a song it would be