Your Purpose is NOT a Mystery!
Tools for Finding and Grounding in Purpose.
This is who I am: As a child, when I looked across the splayed dress-up supplies, I selected the pink tutu. I did not put the tutu around my waist; I put it around my head. I saw myself as lion.
Thank you for joining this month’s offering of The Magick Artist. If you’re new here, my newsletters are collages—composites of concepts and commentary, divination, and divulges. They are rarely singular topics, but they usually carry a theme and are always a channeling.
The theme of this letter is purpose.
Part of clarifying my purpose is accepting that I am not a content creator; I’m a writer. I’m a beast of intuitive rhythms. My nose, my antennae, my highly sensitive tongue that collects scents to the roof of my mouth, go where they sense life, prey, inspiration (and often dopamine). I’m not a migratory creature. I’m a scavenger, a hunter. I can’t promise a schedule of posts, though my monthly goal remains.
But I am dropping this freshly killed prey onto your doorstep, my mouth covered in blood as I smile up at you proud with a look of “for you,” and you wonder how I managed to kill something so large. So yeah, okay, I didn’t give you a February post, but I am giving you a juicy February-March post.
*squelching plop of bleeding supper landing heavy*
Most of you read this via email, where it might not show up in its entirety! Substack is always the best way to enjoy this visually or Click “View Entire Message” on your email.
Here are the meats of your meal:
Table of Offerings:
2025 Black Zine Fair Poster Development
Your Purpose is NOT a Mystery - Tools for finding your purpose in this life
BABY’S FIRST PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE: In Our Fight for Sexual Liberation, We Must Not Forget About Sex Workers
Black Zine Fair Poster Process
One reason my February letter didn’t happen is that the end of February was engulfed by creating the 2025 Black Zine Fair Poster for Sojourners for Justice Press.
This is the second year of this incredible event, and I was asked to return as the poster illustrator. Not only that, but the director, Neta, said I would be the Black Zine Fair poster artist indefinitely, and words cannot express how honored I am. If you can, head to Brooklyn on May 3rd for this incredible event. I will share the final posters with text next month. For now, you shall have a behind-the-scenes peek at my process. The theme/prompt I was given was “Discursive Circus.” I was given references to shadow puppets, Janet Jackson’s 1998 Velvet Rope tour, Ananse Ntentan’s Black Folktale and Pan-African Archive, and more.
I am a lover of clowns and all manner of ornately silly and decadently fanciful storytelling.
To prove it, here’s a photo of me from my 2018-2019 clown era. I’m still a bard, but my aesthetics are no longer so rainbow. I’m more of a lavish yet understated bard who slips into the courts through charm, seduces all the wives, and implodes the upper crusts through an elegant fey chaos kind of vibe these days.
Here is the poster’s progress!
Your Purpose is NOT a Mystery!
Or at least, it does not have to be.
Why is purpose work important right now?
It’s fucking scary out here bro*!!!!
*used agenderly
How do you keep yourself from becoming passive? Overwhelmed? Complacent? You lean into your purpose. By knowing your role, you can ground yourself and learn to listen to yourself better—not just your fear voice or even your want voice, but the voice that connects you to your growth and expansion.
I oscillate between needing to give up my desire for control and flow into the universe and understanding that I am the creator of my own reality. To “let go of control to the universe” is a little too close to the “give it up to God” passivity I was raised in. And fixating too much on being the creator of my reality can spin one quickly into the self-blame game. The answer, as always, is to find balance. After a wonderful conversation with my physical therapist, we talked about being co-creators with others. Our universe bumps against and intersects, divides, and mutates with other universes around us. Our universe is a single cell in the collective body. I am my own animal, but together we are a whole animal.
"I have a universe inside me Where I can go and spirit guides me There I can ask oh any question I get the answers if I listen" ~ The Healing Room by Sinéad O'Connor
When you know your role, you become a more realized creator. Be you blood cell or lymphatic tissue? A cell can become disease when it tries to exist beyond its purpose.
No one's life is wrong if it does not align with their purpose. Most people never know. There is no judgment day. There is only existence, and we have time to become and be all sorts of things. I am offering an opportunity to know. Whatever you do or don’t do with the knowledge is valid.
I will offer three tools for purpose work that I have found useful.
Divination
Inner Child Work + Pattern Work
Tool #1 Divination
I will provide some context for my worldview.
You do not need to share my worldview to use these tools or learn from me. I like to be transparent about my perspective, even if it puts me at risk of being too “woo-woo” for some. Boo hoo, I’m too too woo-woo for you you? Then shoo shoo.
Your purpose is not just connected to the life you are experiencing right now. It’s influenced by your ancestors, your environment, your culture, but its source is beyond this reality. Your purpose exists as a collective lesson between you and your other selves—some call this reincarnation, which requires the concept of linear time. My understanding is even more fluid than cyclical time, though I love the cyclical time the Earth tries to teach us very much.
As I have said before, you are like an octopus; more specifically, you are the tentacle of an octopus. Like an octopus, each tentacle has its own brain, as you have your own life and way of experiencing, but you ultimately pull that information back to the central brain. The central brain is your ego, which takes all the lessons from your material lives and processes them for whenever and whatever your next journey is. No one is ever alone.
Let’s get into it.
In October, I sunk into one of the deepest lows I’ve ever experienced, one that made me question my existence. I will spare you the dread.
When my sulking tried to eat me alive, I would not let it. I turned to my divination tools, particularly my Enochian cards, which you can learn about in my anniversary article.
I needed to know why the fuck I even exist.
Different divination tools have different strengths, personalities, and energies leading them. My Enochian cards focus more on the journey beyond human experience—the journey of consciousness and experiential evolution (how your soul grows). My cards are particularly suited for this work, but your best divination tool is based on your relationship to it. I also used my Sapphomanteion, which is also mentioned in my anniversary article.
"I'm not only human for you I was passing through" ~ Afterlife by Spelling
Maybe the octopus imagery was too bizarre? Let me explain my point to you this way. My perspective on finding our purpose extends beyond this one life you’re experiencing. Think of your life as not a book but a chapter in a book that extends into infinity in all directions. I guess we can barely call that a book. Your existence is nothing like a book, and everything like a book, as the book is a medium that reflects only a fraction of the truth of reality. The truth is that we love stories. We write stories because we write our own story of reality with our co-authors. I will provide an example of this by talking about the purpose reading I gave myself.
I’ve debated back and forth on whether or not I should write what I specifically learned about myself. It seems a bit on the nose with what I’m doing, so on the nose, I worry you will think I’m making it up. But ultimately, whether you believe me or not doesn’t matter. I deciphered their language. I felt the voices in their meaning. I smelled the story they were tasting me to hear.
According to my divination tools, my purpose ultimately comes down to this:
My purpose is to support “the collective” in finding/remembering order. I am to do this through my energy work, my words, and my art.
So yes, the existence of my Substack sure does seem apt.
My cards gave me the core of my lesson/purpose, and my Sapphomanteion told me how to embody the lesson.
Questions from this are: What is the order I am cultivating? On what scale am I supposed to support the collective? What should my art look like to best facilitate this purpose? I have some fractal answers. I am still learning. In my next letter, I’m going to dive into versions of this question and get real into the rust, the nitty, the gritty, the fiberglass of what the fuck is the purpose of art???
Here’s an example of how it looks to align myself to my purpose.
I am a being of vast imagination, a veritable rest stop for worlds to come in and through my head. To align myself with my purpose, I should only choose to bring to fruition the ideas that will support instilling order in the collective. A week after I received this clarity, I had the most horrific dream. I call it a dream, not a nightmare, because it was beautiful, and I felt in control of the surreal horror. I awoke with such fierce understanding that I could become quite “famous” in this world as a writer of horror. I can channel such fear into this world, but that would be channeling a type of *chaos, and that does not align with my purpose. Horror is still a part of my practice, but I must use it to heal our relationship with death, not drive emotional separation from ourselves and death, as much horror delights in doing.
*Chaos in and of itself is not evil. It simply is. Chaos is currently being used as a tool of mass violence and oppression.
My reading did not begin with telling me what I was supposed to do.
My reading began with what I have done (to put it in linear time). My reading started as choking on burnt, black coffee, telling me that I have spent MANY of my other lives as men of power in leadership roles that funneled chaos into their reality. OOFT. My cards don’t tell me what I want to hear. They said, ATONEMENT TIME BITCH. And THEN I asked how, and that’s when they gave me the “nice” stuff. This is not the first time I’ve heard this message of my “American Psycho” lives. I received visions of it in my early 20s when I first learned about my Scorpio North Node and my Taurus South Node, but now I can say the reality is solidified in my understanding. Not all lives have such pressure to atone or “do it right this time;” it simply makes the most sense that mine does as I am not, nor have I ever been, a subtle spirit.
I have done a few purpose readings for others.
The diversity in purpose has been fascinating. I’m particularly fascinated by the “scale” of purpose. I’ve been given a “collective” scale, which seems quite broad, whereas I’ve deciphered another’s purpose with an “individual” scale. What they do to or for the world almost doesn’t matter as long as they align with their truest self and most internal lessons.
If you find yourself with an individually-centered purpose, that does not mean you do not engage with the world. It means you engage with the world through your lesson and purpose. And when you filter through that lens and you still find your purpose manifests best as a kind of hermitage, that is the truth of your existence. Many throughout history have preserved knowledge or left behind wisdom because they dedicated themselves to their aloneness. Nothing exists in isolation.
If you’ve come this far and thought purpose meant what you’re supposed to do FOR the world, that’s not necessarily what purpose is.
A core understanding of my energy work is that we all aim to move through lessons. We live to learn lessons, to grow and fail, to expand and shrink, and to try again and again. To find your purpose, you need to get the framing for your lessons so that you can, hopefully, move through them more intentionally and, hopefully, easily. You will go through them either way, so why not a little clarity?
I’ve seen warnings for others in purpose readings that say that focusing on what to do for the “world” is a distraction from their purpose, and their purpose is actually about immediate interpersonal relationships. In contrast, I must think thoroughly about how my actions affect the “world.” Creating or doing things only for myself does not align with my specific purpose.
Every purpose and lesson matters. Our purposes knead in on ourselves like dough or swallow ourselves like the ouroboros. No matter the scale of your purpose or how simple or small, you are changing the world. How? As Sinéad O’Connor sang, “You have a universe inside you.”
Remember, we all make reality just as cells cooperate to create a body. But you are also an entire individual cell; a single cell is still a complex animal. Your function impacts the body’s function, but does a cell know it is a part of a body? When we forget our ability to shape reality, we quickly give up our power to those who have no problem claiming reality as there’s and there’s alone. Belief alone will not change the world. But everything begins as thought. How do you see yourself?
I’ll say this hard thing. Popular messages, some with the most appealing and “radical” and anti-capitalist messages, are NOT FOR EVERYONE. Again, popular collective messages are not necessarily for you specifically. If you see messages like “It’s time to rest,” “It’s time to slow down,” or “Your resistance is your pleasure and your play,” THEY MIGHT NOT BE FOR YOU. Your activism and purpose might not be pleasure, Susan! It might be fighting the good fight, and you’re using popular movements to validate your inaction.
Now, this is not a hard and fast rule, but I have witnessed a pattern of white people adopting messages of purpose that are not meant for them. I must be specific about how I move through the world and want to support others in that specificity.
I have a purpose of labor.
I could use my lineage as an excuse for inaction. I could say, “I’m Black! I don’t have to do anything but stay Black and die!” But I do not. And that might be your lesson as a Black person: understanding your purpose is to claim rest. It’s not mine. I must commit to the labor of re-balancing because of my privileges as a light-skin Black person with white ancestry, “high-functioning” disability, being able-bodied, small-bodied, and a “cis-passing” trans person, etc. My lesson of labor is beyond those identities, but I think because I can be a dense soul who doesn’t always pick up on subtle cues, I was born into a liminal body (biracial, nonbinary, intersex, etc.). A heavy-handed author wrote me into the world. No matter what I could look like, I know I would have this lesson of labor, and my existence is no more special or tragic than anyone else. I exist in a body that underlines MY lessons.
There are also collective purposes and lessons.
Black people have a collective lesson of water—cleansing and flow, of returning to a cycle of malleability to stillness to gushing to soaking to birthing. Within that lesson are themes of rest and play. Some Black people have personal lessons of labor; as warriors, they must balance this purpose with the collective lesson of rest. There are some white individuals for whom their lesson is play, but the individual lesson of play does not negate the collective lesson of white fire.
White people have a fire lesson of burning down the structures and oppression created by white people. White people must be their own refiner’s fire and burn away the poison of white supremacy, hoarding, colonization, etc. White fire has been used to destroy the foundations of this Earth and her world for too long. It’s time to turn that fire inward and rebirth society for others. White people of this reality are born with the responsibility of that inferno for re-balancing.
How do you contribute to this transmutation? You find your purpose and work from that core. Most importantly, you listen to what is being asked of you, as that is a part of your collective lesson. Whiteness must be turned from an explosion into a campfire, a hearth, and that requires making yourself smaller in the eyes of the world and not consuming all in your path.
This is not to say Black people are not to contribute to the fire of revitalization. The point is that Black people, the water people, have PRIMARILY been fulfilling the healing role of fire. We’ve been marching in the streets, and all inches of our sacrifices are being erased. We’ve created systems of community care, and you sent agents to “discredit, disrupt, and destroy” us. We’ve been shot down in the streets, and you grew weary of protesting for us and hiring us. We’ve cast spells in the forest, and you brought more insidious weapons to silence us. We’ve created communities, and you bombed us for speaking out.
Is it any wonder why so many Black people hide beneath thin shields of believing in America, making money, that racism will be solved by just getting along and marrying interracially, and even voting for Trump to show they’re “not like those…?” Our fight has been and is being summarily destroyed. Our hope is dry and barren.
So when I tell you white people need to embrace their fire lesson, it is because Black people need to focus on filling our wells. As we burn ourselves up to survive, we do not have enough water to put out the fires. White people must wholly and fully atone with action.
Does that thought make you panic? Stop. Breathe. Ground into your purpose. Find your role. Organize together. Take inventory of your skills and accesses. Work together. I’ve been talking to YOU, but you are the collective. It has to be.
Whatever your background and experience, I encourage you to listen to “Message in a Hammer.” If I ever DJ again, I have dreams of creating a ritual with this song.
This song is water and fire working together. Water and heat making blood boil. I hope you feel inspired, too.
"Born in trouble water Every stroke is war They drowned the ones before us But we'll make it to shore... ...I have seen the future In the future we won We have been reborn To build we must destroy I don't want peace, oh We don't talk 'til we tire I won't say please, oh We fight fire with fire We are the people We won't sit and be quiet Government devils All of dem liars All of dem liars... ...Message in a hammer Burning down the order Tearing down the walls for a New day, new breath I can feel the tide turn Let the fire pour Can't you see its time for a new day New dawn, new dawn...." ~ Message in a Hammer by Obongjayar
There is no hierarchy in purpose. Purpose is profoundly personal.
Before I say this next part, I want to emphasize that you can do this on your own. You can do this on your own. YOU can do this on your own. AND I want to offer my abilities as an interpreter to support you in learning and remembering your purpose. You can also use the following two tools, inner child work, and pattern work, on your own.
If you want support from me as a honed channel, a messenger, a malachi, there’s nothing I would love more than to support you. As I was NOT born into power or money…a monetary tribute for my energy is appreciated.
Sliding scale for both free and paid subscribers, BUT:
Free subscribers get a max 1-hour reading.
Paid subscribers get an additional 30 minutes for FREE.
All subscribers get a sliding scale of $40-140 for the, which is less than if you found me in the wild and booked via my website.
Fill out a Calendly to book the session.
Pay the $20 Deposit via Venmo: mmayi or Cashapp: themagickartist (please use emojis in Venmo)
$20 is the down payment for my editing service. This is not the final fee. The down payment is nonrefundable, but if you let me know 24 hours before your consultation session that you cannot make it, it will go toward booking a new session.
Tool #2 Inner Child Work + Pattern Work
Some of us become ourselves through what we were taught and loved as children.
Some of us become ourselves because of what we were not allowed to do.
Inner child work is certainly less woo-woo than divination, at least it seems that way.
Much of psychology focuses on the impacts on your childhood and how they affect your development. That is undoubtedly a part of this work. Because that is such an accessible mode of self-discovery, as there are a lot of resources about it, I will not be discussing that in specific detail.
The inner child work I offer is influenced by Black Quantum Futurism’s understanding of cyclical time, which states that we can influence the future and the past to affect our present.
My belief in this is simple. I discuss it in my introductory letter, where you can read some of the results of my inner child work.
Your childself is your purest self, as in, yourself distilled.
You do not have to have a childhood to learn from your childself.
You know what I mean. You grew up too fast. You saw too much. They hurt you and took your wonder. You were expected to be grown before you could spell grown. You are/were the eldest daughter. You’ve taken care of babies since you were a baby. Your religion or culture told you, you were wrong. These are all things I relate to, too.
Despite it all, you were still you. Many children have eyes that wander the sidewalk. What caught your eye? Many children have ears that take in the music. What struck the cords of your inner heart? Many children have hands that hit and create or feet that kick and dance. What compelled you to move?
Pattern work overlaps with child work.
Child work is conversations with your inner child and observing yourself as a child.
Pattern work zooms out on your life and will be an ever-active force in your existence.
For the sake of length and your precious attention span, I have compiled the skeletal outline of my workshop and this tool here:
Speaking to Your Inner Child and Spelling the Patterns
on my blog. Click this link ^^ to access the exercises and do them on your own time.
Now my inner marketer is yelling at me from their cigarette-smoke-filled back office (I don’t smoke, but my inner marketer chain smokes), and they’re telling me in a raspy trans-Atlantic accent this is the perfect kind of “content” that should be behind a paywall. And to that, I say, BLEH!
Pay me for my time doing a reading for you.
Pay me for making you art.
Pay me by becoming a paid subscriber.
Pay me through redistribution or a gratitude offering.
Venmo: mmayi Cashapp: $themagickartist ;)
Pay me by hiring me for a gig or job.
But I will not keep this life-changing knowledge behind a paywall. I won’t turn this message into a marketing scheme *glares at the back office where only grumbling and coughing can be heard*
I want to run this information as a workshop (especially about world-building) in the future, where I hope to be paid for my abilities and time. When you see that offering, I hope you will think, “It would be wonderful to receive this and whatever comes through Malachi in real-time, and that is worth giving them money. " If not, you will have the information you need, which matters to me.
Again, please check out this blog post to learn more about child labor and receive an exercise to do that work yourself.
And there you have it!
Techniques for tapping into your purpose.
So you have found your purpose. Now what?
Finding your purpose DOES NOT actually do anything. It is data collection. I looooove data collection, but much like scrolling endlessly on endless feeds, inundating yourself with information is not supportive, radical, or helpful in and of itself. Instead, we must be discerning with the data we give ourselves and turn knowledge into action.
Learning your purpose allows you to reflect on each facet of your life and how it aligns with you.
Such as:
SUBSTANCES - What substances are distracting me from my purpose? Which specific substances are giving me clarity about my purpose?
WORK - Is my work aligned with who I am and what I’m supposed to learn? How can I offer my labor for the balance of this world?
RELATIONSHIPS - Are there relationships that impede me from living my purpose? Are there others with purposes that contrast or relate to mine so that we can uplift each other in our lessons?
DREAMS - Which of my dreams distract me from my purpose? And why do I have those dreams? What dreams have I silenced because external forces told me I couldn’t do it?
Let’s allow for a moment of specificity.
Here, let this song be a prayer for you.
How can you lean into your purpose to not lose yourself in chaos?
How can your purpose create a stronghold for your community?
How can your purpose connect you to your neighbor?
How can your purpose specify your contributions, and how you show up?
What has your purpose and life given you access to, and how can you use it to heal, transform, and support?
Who do I need to be for myself to survive this?
There is always SOMETHING to do! You’re never nothing. You’re never powerless. Some people have positions (material and energetic) that can directly impact and transform what is happening with the government. Whether they align with that purpose is unknown and not your responsibility. Focus on what you can do.
You have responsibility for yourself, so focus on how your positionality, purpose, and life lessons shape your course of action.
How can you sustainably resist this?
How can you protect those who are more vulnerable than you? Can your house become a shelter for your immigrant neighbor? Can you make sure your neighbor has enough to eat?
Can you paint a wall to inspire resistance?
Can you translate for your neighbor?
Can you? Can you? Yes, you can do many things. But do not be overwhelmed with possibility; ground in your purpose.
What are your lessons teaching you, and how are they guiding you?
BIG SLOW INHALE
BIG SLOW EXHALE
DO THAT THREE MORE TIMES PLEASE.
Some Final Life Updates:
As promised, here is my first BIG KID article published in In These Times magazine as of February 11th, 2025:
Pursuit of Pleasure
I also was hired to do the illustration, which feels special. I hope I can do more of that.
This article talks about Hot Bits, my local queer porn film festival, but it also provides a direct perspective and tools and steps about achieving sexual liberation—and why sex worker rights are a key part of that.
Feel free to share it with the whorephobic feminist in your life *tight, tight smile my white Midwest ancestors would be proud of*
I do feel a sense of wide-eyed, “Oh boy,” as this first article enters the world we live in.
But I won’t be shutting up anytime soon. I just received a grant from the Trans Journalists Association to take a generative journalism class this summer! There is more to come and there is room and welcome for it.
DON’T WORRY I WILL ALSO WRITE MY FREAKY LIL STORIES OF REBELLION!
I was recently (March) accepted into the SFWA Career Mentorship Program! SFWA stands for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association! It’s not money, but it's a chance to network, and we all know that’s all that seems to matter these days. I don’t have any formal networks like this, nor do I have a mentor, so I’m excited to step into this space to ask a million questions and learn a lot :)
This could lead to me finishing a novel someday, HA. Will the publishing industry even exist by the time I’m done? Well, that’s a question for my next newsletter.
May your purpose illuminate your path, and may your path wind in ways of joy and transformation.