Hello friends,
who remembers the golden years of Lady Gaga? A time when Katy Perry and Ugg boots were still a thing, Rihanna had a red bob and toxic boyfriends, Bad Romance was playing non stop everywhere. This is peak Gaga; her 2011 Grammys performance when she was carried into a huge glowing alien egg about to be hatched on stage and she emerged out of it as a humanoid in flesh colored latex to sing “it doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H-I-M…”
Lady Gaga afterwards said that she spent 72 hours in the egg in a “creative embryonic incubation”.
“[..] it was time for me to prepare and really think about the meaning of [“Born This Way”] and get prepared for the performance. I really wanted to be born on stage.”

I remember Lady Gaga saying that when she’s down she likes to take some time to incubate, to get inside a cocoon and then, after she’s done thinking and resting, she emerges as a beautiful butterfly. I think she made that analogy, or that she enters the egg phase. Either way, cocoon or egg it’s the same. I loved this analogy. I do the same, too. I love the shape of an egg, the idea that inside it there’s enough nutrients to form a new life. And the cocoon, which transforms a creature into a more glamorous version of themselves. Rest is always needed. Even if you are not doing much. Especially if you are not doing much. Probably you haven’t escaped anxiety. Living in this part of the world, in a country stagnated in a constant crisis, economical as well as humanitarian, anxiety has crept up on me the last seven or eight years of my life. Thinking about it, I graduated from high school in 2008 when the global crisis began. In 2010, it had fully settled in Greece. So, all my adult life has been lived through a never ending crisis. To be honest though, I believe that there was/is always a crisis. Only it has exacerbated significantly.
My fascination with the egg phase is somehow connected with the idea that there are multiple versions of one’s self, depending on the choices you make, the things you went through, and how incubation time can produce a new one. One that has survived its trauma and emerged glamorous as Gandalf the White after a fight with a demon of depression and fire. Through the years we change, our whole body changes, our cells are being replaced. We constantly exist in a state of metamorphosis. On a threshold of change. Every person we meet, every interaction we have changes us.
I used to be deeply ashamed of a part of myself, a part of my life. To some people what I went through may not seem like something terrible, but to me it was so disturbing at the time to acknowledge it. There was one deeply disturbing moment that I understood how easily I had gone through a dangerous road, one that my social circle hasn’t. I thought I didn’t have a voice. I thought I shouldn’t have one. I did specifically tell myself that after seven years my whole body would be different. And then I’d be a different person. That’s how it was when I got out of a traumatic relationship. The truth is I lacked the language then, and I had to go and acquire it to console myself, to allow myself to live.
As the years went by, I went through several transformations. I entered different spaces, I went essentially in a journey of trying new things, new relationships, making new friends, leaving others, cutting people out of my life, reading and studying in a different domain. I was trying to find what I was supposed to be by navigating myself in this world one step at a time. I understand that now. I felt so lost eight years ago. Acknowledging some things made me grieve for the place I put myself in. I put myself in a very toxic relationship that now, I understand was a product of my childhood trauma and a lot of unresolved issues. My need to surpass in a superficial way my trauma lead me to become the worst version of myself; literally this was me in the darkest timeline. I didn’t like myself when this relationship ended. This made me obsess about the fact that I’ll be new one day, because back then I believed that I didn’t deserve anything. I thought that my mistakes identified me. And the thing that soothed me were mantras like this one, that “one day I’ll be new”. It’s as if I was accepting my place in a situation between life and death. The thought of a small symbolic death for several years soothed me. Or maybe I entered a long egg phase.
I know it sounds awfully religious and spiritual for an atheist. I struggled a lot with it. As a person who never believed in God, who had always proclaimed themselves an atheist from a very young age to the dismay of my religious family, it was difficult to accept that I used spirituality as a coping mechanism. I developed some spiritual coping mechanisms to handle my fears and anxieties. Some mantras that stemmed from beliefs that I had at the time, which I used to repeat when I felt overwhelmed with anxiety. I believe that’s because my brain had always been in a state of emergency and it couldn’t stop even if things were seemingly good. My brain runs faster than I do.
I was ashamed of my spirituality. I could never confess to anyone my deepest anxieties that gave me panic attacks and I most certainly wouldn’t confess the absurd ideas that helped ground me. I knew that’s what it was; absurd and illogical. And yet my spirituality could help me get through the day. I’m still very much ashamed of this and also, I am still someone who doesn’t easily let others in. I try to. Self-medicating helped a lot.
I was very much in denial of my need for spirituality but after some years it became apparent that everyone needs it. About a year ago I went to a live performance in the old Asteroskopeio, the National Observatory of Athens in Nymphon hill near Pnyx, to listen to a guy playing experimental ambient music. After the performance as we were sitting outside in the garden of the observatory, waiting to take a look at Mars through the ancient telescope, a woman said that “it feels like going to the church”. I was thinking the same thing. We had all gathered in that small place with a huge old telescope in the middle to listen to beautiful noises. During the event I kept my eyes closed. The whole experience felt very relaxing and ethereal. I emerged content and re-energized as if I had been in a brief spa for my brain cells. It was indeed as if we were in a church. But one that didn’t need words, meaning the best kind of church.
I’m not the only one that needs some kind of spirituality in their life. I noticed that most of my friends experience spirituality through music. Techno parties are rituals of ecstasy to shed anxiety and fears. In that sense raves are some of the most religious practices today. The truth is that these days my way of dealing with spirituality and anxiety has changed a lot. When I started opening up to others (drugs), the small mantras or rituals I used to say or do faded. At the same time I acknowledged my need to own my spirituality and to not judge harshly my coping mechanisms.
I needed incubation time to rethink and to learn. Reading Judith Butler’s An Account of Oneself, I understood the importance of having time to rethink. Nobody can rethink what they have done if a line is drawn between what’s ethical and unethical and they are always placed on one side. We need space to rethink ourselves. I have always judged myself too much and it is exhausting. Social media exacerbates the importance of performing ethically in front of an audience and having to give an account of oneself that doesn’t have leaks and dark spots. When I entered political circles and started socializing with feminist activists through Facebook I soon became confused and overwhelmed by this performativity of morality. We form narratives about ourselves and social media bring you face to face with your own inconsistencies, with criticism that may or may not be constructive, but most of all, there’s no space to rethink in social media. It’s a constant streaming of content that’s out of context and we don’t have the space to think, we are reacting to it as Jenny Odell says. I needed an egg to crawl into. The egg provides rest and rest means rethinking.
Last summer I had an Orphic egg tattooed on me. I’ve always felt a strange attraction to eggs as I said, and their mystical power. I hadn’t really researched what an Orphic or cosmic egg is, but I knew I felt connected to it. I decided to have it tattooed when I came across an image of the Orphic egg with an explanation below about its origins. The egg- serpent unity signifies the Cosmos. Also “the egg represents the soul of the philosopher and serpent the Mysteries”. After several months of Instagram browsing I found an amazing tattoo artist that specializes in tattoos that feel like body spells. When she met me in person she told me: “You know what this is about eh? It’s the creation of the universe, very powerful. Bing Bang!"
There are some pop culture references that have been burned in my brain. Robert De Niro in a movie playing the part of the Devil himself peeling an egg with his long perfectly manicured nails. The video clip of Venus as a boy by Bjork, where she fries an egg in the most aesthetically pleasing kitchen while talking about beauty and desire, is my cottagecore dream.


Today, I stumbled upon this: “The egg is the story of the beginning of the universe: the Cosmic Egg. It runs throughout all religious traditions—like, I could teach a course on the egg and how it became such a symbol. But in essence, what it's saying is that all life comes from within.
This isn’t just about giving birth! In other words, if you want to resurrect your life—if you want to recreate yourself—it comes from within, not the outside of you. The only way you're going to create a new life, a new perspective, a new level of consciousness, comes from within. It's not anything anyone could ever give you, no matter how Oprah they might be.”
It’s an excerpt from an interview of the feminist theologian Meggan Watterson included in this essay by Phillip Picardi about the story of Mary Magdalene. Excellent Easter reading material.
If you look it up on Wikipedia you’ll read that: “The Orphic Egg in the Ancient Greek Orphic tradition is the cosmic egg from which hatched the primordial hermaphroditic deity Phanes/Protogonus [..]
the golden winged primordial being who was hatched from the shining cosmic egg that was the source of the universe”. A hermaphrodite being as the source of the universe. No gender in my egg, please!
Right now we are going through a crisis again but this time most of us are inside a house. It’s incubation time. It may be exceptionally hard on those of us who have to live with toxic partners or parents, on those who suffer from mental illness. It may flare your normal anxiety levels. Let’s remind ourselves that this is not some kind of vacations, it’s a quarantine and it’s messing with our lives.
But I hope we’ll get out of this involuntary incubation time like beautiful butterflies with our chopped hair, regrown mustache, bad DIY poked tattoos, after having watched hundreds of hours of TV series or films, lost in RPG games, having baked bread enough to last for an eternity.
Then we’ll once again walk on the same roads. Only a bit more beautiful after leaving our egg.
Love u,
Olga
P.S. Thank u Abby
<3