Sethie to Venus: My Story of Becoming a Trans Mystic on my Spiritual Journey to Happiness by Venus Rountree is a sweeping, intimate memoir that carries the reader through decades of pain, healing, and spiritual discovery. Venus opens her story in the 1960s, a period often romanticized as a time of liberation and cultural transformation, yet for her it unfolded as a childhood marked by trauma, neglect, and the perpetual ache of feeling unseen. As a child of divorce at a time when such fractures were still spoken of in hushed tones, she grew up wrestling with the consequences of abandonment while surviving an environment steeped in instability. In this vulnerable space, she began to develop the questions and longings that would later guide her toward mysticism and self-understanding.
Her early life was shaped by the upheaval of the era: the soundtrack of rock and roll playing against the backdrop of broken homes, shifting social norms, and a world that refused to recognize the identity she carried quietly within her. Venus describes how the California Department of Corrections system became an unexpected chapter of her life, one where past trauma collided with an institution ill-equipped to understand the complexity of her needs. Within those walls she struggled not only with the weight of her history but also with the mental health challenges that had followed her since childhood, including post-traumatic stress disorder and the constant feeling of having to fight simply to exist.
