Shadow Work in the Desert

After I walked away —
from the marriage, the family, the life I had built —
I thought I had entered the wilderness.

But the real desert came next.

A head-on collision
with a drunk driver sent me spiraling.
A second one, months later,
finished what was left of the old life.

My career — the last hold of identity,
the last mask I still wore — was taken from me.

It was the final undoing.
Not out of punishment,
but initiation.

I had no choice but to surrender.
So I did.

I etched it into my skin —
“Surrender,”
tattooed on my right foot,
a vow written in ink and intention:
to walk this earth as I truly am,
no longer hidden, no longer masked.

My feet had carried so many roles.

Now, they carried truth.

I moved into the cabin —
a quiet sanctuary tucked into a horse ranch,
surrounded by silence
and stripped of everything familiar.

There were no voices but my own.
No shadows but mine.

No gods, no guides.

Just breath.

Just me.

And so,
I allowed.

I allowed the tears that had waited decades to fall.
The buried screams to rise like howls in the night.
The pain I had numbed,
The rage I had swallowed.
The grief I had disguised as strength —

The wounded girl..

The silent wife.

The starving mother.

The never-functioning daughter.

The people-pleasing sister.

The career woman hiding behind her success.
I felt it all.

In that sacred stillness,
I met myself.

All of me.

The wounded girl.
The silent wife.
The striving mother.
The over-functioning daughter.
The people-pleasing sister.
The career woman hiding behind her success.

Every mask fell.
Every identity burned.

And what was left was raw.
Tender.
Vulnerable.
True.

I saw my patterns.
My maladaptive coping.
The ways I had abandoned myself to be loved.

And I grieved.

Because no one prepares you
for how lonely healing can be.

Especially in a culture that doesn’t understand
the soul’s dark night —
that path of descent that looks like madness
but is actually holy rebirth.

The family had their meetings.
Their judgments.
Their confusion.

But I was no longer living in their paradigm.

I called to the earth.

Not for answers.

But to be held.

I was walking the underworld path —
the Heroine’s Journey —
where healing is sacred,
where silence is sanctuary,
where no one else can walk it for you.

And yet… I wasn’t alone.

There were whispers in the quiet.

Wings I could not yet see.

Not in white robes,
but with warm meals,
rides to appointments,
blankets in the cold,
and hearts that listened without fixing.

They were my witnesses.
My holders of space.
My holy company in the cave.

It was in that dark,
without the mirrors of expectation or performance,
that I met the truest version of me.

The woman beneath all roles.
The soul before the stories.

I died into the quiet.

And what rose was not a name,

but a knowing.

And I began, ever so softly,
to remember her.

Next: The Ordeal

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