Jagged Little Seed

Pomegranates are in season…somewhere warm, not here, but they are appearing in grocery stores this time of year, tucked into crates, heavy blush-pink orbs that promise sweetness and demand work. I love eating them, but I loath coaxing their juicy little gems from their fibrous mesh. Cracking one open feels almost violent. It stains your hands, it refuses neatness. It insists on being known in pieces rather than as a whole. They require effort and know they are worth it and I love them for their unapologetic complexity.

Inevitably, they bring my thoughts around to Persephone of the Ancient Greek Pantheon. Her experience with pomegranates was not a juicy pleasure, but a sneaky ploy to revoke her sovereignty.

If you know the myth, you probably heard like this: Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is taken by Hades into the underworld to be his wife. Her father, Zeus, sanctioned the marriage without her consent. Demeter’s grief over the loss of her daughter is catastrophic. She withdraws her blessings from the land and it withers, famine follows. To save humanity, Zeus orders Hades to return Persephone, but there is a catch. Persephone has eaten a pomegranate seed in the underworld. In some versions, it’s unclear if she knew the rules, but eating any food from the underworld binds the living there. Because of this, she will be forced to return there for part of the year, forever.

The myth is most often told as an explanation for the seasons. Persephone’s return to her freedom brings spring; her descent brings winter.

But myths don’t only explain nature, they encode values. They teach (and warn) us about how power works. And for women, they often function as quiet instructions about obedience, endurance, and consequence.

In many versions of the story, Persephone eats only one seed. Sometimes she is tricked into eating, sometimes she is starving, and sometimes, she is simply ignorant of the rules. Sometimes the story doesn’t bother investigating Persephone as an individual enough to explain why she eats it at all, she is simply the empty vessel used to carry the story, her agency is erased. No matter the reason or the telling, the outcome is always the same: she chooses to swallow the seed, and it costs her dearly.

Over time, this message has hardened into something familiar and has become so intertwined with womanhood that I can’t even recall when I swallowed it and internalized it: accept what you’ve been given, even if it doesn't feel right…because it could always be worse.

In Persephone’s case, “worse” is total erasure. Permanent darkness in the underworld. No return to the land of the living at all. Compared to that, partial freedom, a half-life, is framed as mercy. This logic has echoed through women’s lives for millennia.

To understand why this matters, we have to remember the world this myth emerged from. Ancient Greek society was, for the most part, profoundly patriarchal. Women were legally bound to fathers, husbands, or male guardians. Marriage was often transactional and consent was not a priority. Survival, for women, depended on compliance.

Seen from this context, Persephone’s story isn’t exceptional, it’s representative. A young woman is taken; a deal is made between men. In this case, a mother’s grief is acknowledged only because it disrupts the status quo. And the woman herself is utterly alone to bear the consequences.

When examined through a trauma-informed lens, Persephone’s choice to swallow the seed stops looking like a mistake or failure and starts looking like an act of survival. When faced with the hopelessness of feeling trapped, should she have added starvation to her woes? She did what she had to do, to carry on. We all do what we have to do, to survive.

And so it goes, for millennia, in western patriarchal society, women’s safety has been tied to appeasement and adaptability. The ability we master to make ourselves smaller, softer, more accommodating, resilient in ways that erase our own needs. When survival depends on remaining likeable or useful, boundaries are not useful tools, they are risks. When livelihood, shelter, or safety are at stake, self-abandonment can become a strategy.

Yet most of the seeds we swallow aren’t so dramatic. They are quiet.

Just one more obligation, one more kindness, one more thing we carry because we can.

We feel it in our bodies before we can name it, a tightening, a fatigue, a subtle grief. And still, we swallow the seed. Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that care is compulsory and that generosity without end is a virtue. We are still swallowing the story that by saying yes, even when it costs us, we are demonstrating “strength”.    

This is especially evident in invisible labour, the emotional work, the planning, smoothing tensions, holding everything together. It’s unpaid, unseen, framed as natural and expected.

And this is where the myth becomes so dangerous if we don’t question it.

Because “it could be worse” has been used to teach women not to ask for more  — not just materially, but existentially. To accept partial authenticity, partial safety, partial selfhood. To live some of the time in the light, as long as we’re willing to disappear the rest of the time.

And this is the part I want to simply notice and acknowledge. Not because I want to demand empowerment, not to prescribe boundaries that may not be safe or possible, but to offer a subtle starting point.

What if rewriting the myth doesn’t mean escaping the underworld? What if it begins with recognition?

What if we can start noticing when we are swallowing the seeds? Can we spot when offering care to others is chosen rather than unconsciously coerced? Can we give ourselves grace knowing conditioned responses are often a result of constrained choices?

This kind of awareness doesn’t “fix” everything. It doesn’t dismantle systems overnight, and it certainly doesn’t magically grant safety where none exists.

Yet it does do something quietly radical, it interrupts the lie that what we endure is what we deserve. To me that feels like a loosening of the grip of inevitability.

The work is not to pretend that the underworld doesn’t exist. The work is to question why we were taught to believe it was our only option.

I want us to rewrite the myth, calmly, honestly, in community, in joy. Can we learn to see and name the seeds we’ve been handed, the ones we’ve swallowed, and the ones we might choose to refuse?

That choice doesn’t have to be loud, or even immediate. Perhaps we begin simply by saying:

This costs me something. And that matters.