Man, I gotta tell you, a couple years ago, if you’d slapped a title like that—Your Dark Pixie Pisces Weekly Reading Just Dropped: What to Watch Out For—in front of me, I would’ve laughed you right out of the room. I mean, “Dark Pixie”? Sounds like some goofy teenage mood board or a bad band name. I was all about logic, clean code, stuff you could measure. Anything that smelled like woo-woo? Hard pass.
The Mess That Made Me A Believer
The whole thing flipped because my life became one big unmaintainable spaghetti-code mess. I’ve always thought I was the master of my own fate, right? The guy who optimizes everything. But last year, I watched a five-year project—a real passion project, not just a job—implode. Not because of a technical bug, but because I utterly and completely failed to see a personal blind spot that the whole structure was built on.
I was so busy optimizing the platform, I forgot to optimize the people. Specifically, me.
I got dumped by my partner, the project went belly-up, and suddenly I was sitting here with nothing but credit card debt and a fancy but useless server farm I’d bought on a whim. That whole period was like being kicked out of my own life. I was trying to figure out what was broken. I bought all the self-help books—the stoicism, the productivity hacks, the “wake up at 5 am and crush it” nonsense. None of it landed. It all felt like just painting over the rust.
One night, scrolling through stuff, feeling completely aimless and angry, that “Dark Pixie Pisces” title popped up. My sign. The “Dark Pixie” part got me. It wasn’t promising sunshine and success; it was promising a warning. It felt blunt. It felt like maybe, just maybe, it would call me out on my own BS instead of just being fluffy motivation.
I clicked.
How I Ran This Stupid Test
The reading itself was rough. It basically said, “You are pretending to work on X, but you are actually running away from Y. The thing you need to watch out for this week is the deep, urgent desire to distract yourself with shiny new projects, specifically to avoid dealing with that one email you keep ignoring.”
My first reaction was, “What email?” My second reaction was, “This is garbage.” My third reaction was that pit in my stomach that said, “Oh no, he’s talking about that email.” It was an email from my former partner’s lawyer, the one I hadn’t even opened because dealing with the final financial fallout felt too painful.
I decided to treat this like a real-world debugging process. A full sprint week dedicated to validating this ridiculous reading.
This is what I did:
- I started a “Distraction Log”: I used a physical notebook, not my phone. Every time I felt that urge to start a new side hustle, buy a new piece of equipment, or endlessly scroll, I logged it.
- I defined the “Fail State”: The reading warned about distraction to avoid the truth. The fail state was avoiding that email for another seven days. The success state was opening it, reading it, and sending a reply.
- I observed the self-sabotage: Day 1, I almost bought a drone to “start a new media project.” Logged it. Day 3, I spent four hours rewriting my entire resume just to avoid the five minutes of mental pain. Logged it. Day 5, I argued with a friend about something entirely unrelated just to burn emotional energy. Logged it.
The amount of energy I was spending on avoidance was staggering. It wasn’t subtle. It was a five alarm fire in my own brain, and I was throwing logs on it.
The Final Realization and The Pivot
This whole thing brought back memories of how I ended up in that previous implosion—the big project failure. I had ignored similar small warnings, little pings of reality, until the whole system went critical. Funny thing is, the reason I got into project management in the first place was because I needed to make damn sure I never repeated a screw-up from my early career.
I once had a boss—a real old-school hacker—who told me my code was fine, but my life was the actual bug. I got mad, quit that job, and went out to prove him wrong. And look where that landed me: broke and avoiding an attorney’s email. He wasn’t talking about my syntax; he was talking about my avoidance patterns.
Anyway, Day 7 rolls around. I have a whole notebook full of logged avoidance behavior. It looked like a crazy person’s diary. But the data was clean: every single attempted “solution” was a distraction from the root problem. The “Dark Pixie” was right. You needed the shadowy perspective to see the shadow-work.
I opened the email. It was tough, it was messy, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just an outcome. It’s what I’d been avoiding. Once I replied, it was done. The immediate feeling of relief was like finally running the garbage collector on a full disk.
The funny thing about these kind of weekly readings is that they don’t solve your problems. They just shine a nasty, bright, uncomfortable light on the part of your own system you built to fail. They don’t give you the answer; they just tell you the right question to ask yourself. And sometimes, you need that rough, almost mean energy to cut through your own carefully constructed lies. I’m still a skeptic, mostly, but I’m now a skeptic who checks the warning label every week. Because my personal logging process showed the hit rate is way too high to ignore. It’s a cheap, easy-to-run diagnostic on your own BS. Try it. See what happens.
