Hello, Darkness, My Old…
“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which (s)he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain
Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash
The authenticity gap reopened so slowly that I didn’t even notice it happening. Like the proverbial amphibian in hot water, I found myself suddenly, rather radically, and quite surprisingly out of alignment, my inner landscape colored with darkness and sorrow as my outward-facing self-expression radiated the joyful aliveness of new — at-long-last-true — love. The longer I tried to straddle the growing divide between my inner emotional experience and the blissed-out state I presented to the world and to my partner, the more discomfort nibbled away at my insides, and the more I denied that dis-ease when the loving, concerned inquiries came.
I had finally met “the one”, my forever love, and I knew it in every cell of my being from the earliest moments of our journey from me to we. When our hearts connected, I was 15+ years in on a deep dive to do the inner work my mother was tragically unable to do. To discover and integrate the existential truths, core wounds, and shadows within, soul work that her suicide in 2008 inspired and that I believed readied me for a relationship like this. I was certain I could be with whatever arose on the path forward — that I could hold what needed holding and witness what needed witnessing. What I didn’t consider was that I might not be ready to reciprocally share the darker emotions and inconvenient truths that surfaced within me as our love fest progressed and my journey of becoming continued. Holding space for another, even one so loved, so longed for, no problem! Sharing what’s on my heart in a space of curious, loving witness with someone I loved this deeply, and who really saw and felt me fully, oof, not so much! Through my journey of Contagious Vulnerability, I had come to pride myself on living and loving authentically, courageously giving voice to my soul’s experience with only the narrowest of authenticity gaps between how I felt inside and how I showed up in the world. And yet, when I met my beloved last year, I soon learned that my commitment to authentic relating was, in truth, more conceptual than actual when it came to romantic relationships.
It all started with a candle spell, a gift for my 58th birthday. I’d been chasing love for a year, trying to rekindle an old flame that had once burned hot but now was not, and I was growing frustrated. Despite having peak experiences every few weeks, experiences that felt like the best dates of my life, but were sadly, in truth, not dates at all, I found myself stuck in a weird corner of the friend zone, a DMZ of sorts, where I was neither friend nor lover. Our engagement neither broadening my queer community as it would if we were actually friends, nor progressing into the romance I’d dreamed of since we met, yet only fleetingly experienced.
I shared my frustrations with a wise, witchy friend, a woman whose queerness was more confidently embodied and practiced than my own. She responded, “I worry that you’ll never meet anyone living alone in the woods. You should really try the apps.” When this loving suggestion was met with my hard, hell no — “I am NOT a dating app person!” — she decided to engage higher powers. She gifted me a candle and a spell. The candle a red, hyper-realistic, life-sized vulva — yup, you read that correctly! — and the spell an elaborate ritual to call in love. Now, I’m a heart-based being for sure, but I was definitely not that kind of woo! I had zero experience with, or honestly much faith in, candle spells, but 5 years into my journey of living into my queerness and seeking Sapphic love, I was out of other ideas, so I decided to go for it. After all, the Universal currents had brought this new, rather unorthodox answer to my prayers onto my shores; who was I to question the form it took?
I followed her detailed instructions, which involved getting intimate with my wax replica, treating it as the lover I was asking the universe to send me. A degree of intimacy that was well outside my comfort zone, but which I engaged in anyway because I didn’t want to look a gift goddess in the mouth and risk years of bad luck in love and/or in bed. Once the “sacred bonding” was complete, I planted it atop a devotional prayer for love, in a bed of sacred earth with magnets, seeds, honey water, and coins in the four directions. I placed it on the altar in my bedroom with the labia facing east, the direction of new beginnings, and lit it just as the lunar cycle approached fullness, ensuring that the burning completed before the moon was full. As it burned into the wee hours of the night, its shadows dancing on my bedroom walls, I had to admit I felt some glimmers of mystical magic.
Two weeks later, on the eve of the new moon lunar eclipse, I was called to move the remains of the spell from my altar to a spot outside under the redwoods. That night, in a circle of divine feminine beings, in a sacred space with a direct view of my candle’s new outdoor altar, I experienced the most powerful ceremony of my life so far. At a moment of heightened consciousness, I engaged in a heartfelt, energetic exchange with the Universe and the candle prayer: “I want a partner who makes me feel like this, whose soul lights me up this brightly and activates me this completely. A woman who’s strong AF and all in. If love doesn’t feel like this, I don’t want it.” As these thoughts flowed from my heart into the sea of divine oneness that held it, I intuitively felt the truth of the relationship I had been chasing and found it wanting. The next day, at the peak of the new moon’s eclipse, I buried the candle on the land in a sacred fairy circle and continued on with my life, honestly never giving the magical spell a whole lot of thought after that. A month or so later, I courageously spoke my truth to my old flame, resulting in greater clarity and an invitation to join her and her friends at Pride, and, on Pink Saturday of Pride weekend, surrounded by a sea of lesbians in Dolores Park, I met the woman who would, in time, answer my heart’s prayers.
The initial months of our relational blossoming were beyond blissful. So much so that I quickly brushed aside the initial tinges of darkness when they crept in, barely registering them in the ocean of love I was swimming in. I had my love goggles firmly affixed to my face, and I wasn’t going to let anything eclipse their rosy-golden glow. At some point, maybe 5–6 months in, the dark presence within grew strong and persistent enough that I could no longer ignore it. I started to feel like my mother, a realization that was deeply disturbing to me, given her life’s journey. If I were more woo, I’d say it felt like she had come into my body and was haunting me. But at my core, despite calling Northern California home for over three decades and practicing candle spells to find love, my inner New Yorker is still alive and well, rolling her third eye at me when I think thoughts like “I’m being haunted by my mother’s spirit.” Sure, I’m a bit woo, but I’m a very practical kinda woo, and spiritual possession by loved ones beyond the veil was beyond the pale. Too out there, even for this West County Woo Girl.
What was actually happening for me was that I was starting to feel her feelings, or rather, starting to feel firsthand what I imagined to be her inner emotional experience as her downward spiral began. Her deep sadness, her heightened self-doubt and self-criticism, her fears, all of it. I started to react like she did in interpersonal exchanges, tentatively, gloomily, fearfully, especially when engaging with members of my family constellation. I felt like her understudy, playing the part of Wendy in today’s show, and, like her, feeling like I needed to put on the performance of a lifetime for love rather than stand in my worthiness to receive it.
Was I really being invited to do more shadow work?!?! I thought I’d made peace with my shadow and befriended all aspects of my psyche, both dark and light. Then, all of a sudden, it was, “Hello, Darkness, my old…” and friendship was not at all what I was feeling about my shadow’s sudden reemergence and intrusion into my new relationship energy.
On a road trip to pick up our new kittens in Oregon, we started listening to an episode of The Oprah Podcast. She was interviewing menopause expert Dr. Sharon Malone about hormone replacement therapy, or HRT. After it was over, my girlfriend turned to me and gently offered that perhaps my mother’s journey of mental health challenges had hormonal roots or at least contributors. I’d never considered this, and we started to wonder out loud what her journey would have looked like had she tried this therapeutic intervention rather than the tortured decades-long journey of psychopharmacology and psychotherapy that she ended up on instead.
Up until that moment, I had prided myself on having the easiest menopause ever. Easy as in barely perceptible. One minute I was bleeding, the next minute, at 57, the bleeding stopped, and that was it. No hot flashes, no brain fog, no sleepless nights, no hair loss, papery skin, nothing. I wore this identity with great pride, as a badge of honor, for over a year, but as I considered what had been shared in the podcast and the powerful question my girlfriend had posed about my mother’s journey, it occurred to me that perhaps the dark sadness I was experiencing might be hormones.
I decided to give HRT a try, choosing the route of bioidenticals under the supervision of a holistic, integrative practitioner I trusted. My first few weeks with higher levels of estrogen and progesterone flowing in my body were life-changing, reanimating me in a way I didn’t expect or even know I needed, because I’d had none of the symptoms that women typically turn to HRT to ameliorate. In addition to physiological benefits, including increased desire, greater capacity for arousal, and heightened sensation, my internal emotional experience transformed, the dark, brooding clouds lifting, and optimism’s light starting to shine once again. I marveled at the transformation and thought I’d fixed the problem — it was just hormones after all! I was flooded with compassion for my mother, who was offered Prozac instead of HRT in the late 80s when her mental health struggles began. What would her life’s journey have looked like had things been different? Would she have descended into the dark depths of madness and taken her own life, feeling that we would all be better without her as she took that fateful leap onto the tracks, or would another, more life-giving pathway have opened up for her?
About a month in, I began to notice the darkness creeping back into my inner landscape. I kept trying to deny its truth, to shake myself out of it, to refocus on the light, but my shadowy emotions defied all my valiant attempts at suppression. I thought I’d fixed it with HRT, that it was all just a hormone imbalance. I was suddenly confronted with the reality that the mental wellness challenges I was facing were more nuanced. While they may have had a hormonal dimension, there were deeper roots that I was being invited to be with and explore more fully, and boy, did I resist this uncomfortable truth.
Like my old flame, my old friend, Darkness, was not really a friend after all. Finding true love drew me into a vast, relational container with depths and breadths of intimacy I’d never before experienced, one in which new dimensions of my shadow became visible. Yes, I really was being invited to do deeper shadow work. Yes, an authenticity gap had reopened inside of me that challenged my courageously authentic self-concept and needed tending. As Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which (s)he never shows to anybody.” As the darkness resurged within, I mounted a resistance, doing my best to keep my dark side hidden once again, living in inward and outward denial about my true emotional state.
Maintaining a “Keep calm and carry on” demeanor when all is not right inside takes A LOT of energy. It left me emotionally drained, reactive, and shut down. When I was out in the world and asked about my life and work, I struggled to articulate a meaningful response. When asked about the book I was supposedly writing, I felt myself a fraud. Thoroughly disconnected from my inner wisdom and my soul’s purpose and practice of Contagious Vulnerability, I couldn’t imagine trying to craft something that would serve and inspire others on their own journeys of becoming. It was a lot to carry, especially because I tried to bear the burden alone, keeping my dark side to myself, or trying.
The cracks began to show, as they always do. Lying in bed one morning, my girlfriend lovingly shared that she’d felt my discomfort when a friend had asked me about my book the previous evening. The dam broke, and I dissolved into tears in her arms, giving voice to all that I’d kept inside, all my fears and doubts and feelings of inadequacy. And just like that, the clouds started to lift, and my energy shift, a subtle transformation from I can’t to maybe, just maybe I can. All it took was the courage to give voice to my true inner experience in a space of loving, compassionate witnessing. To have the courage to show my moon’s dark face to the woman I love and trust that she would only love me more for knowing me more deeply and completely. Rather than trying to write my first book, I committed to a daily writing practice, and an idea for this piece soon surfaced. Yesterday, I opened up my computer and started to pour these words onto this page.
And so it continues, the shadow work ongoing, always new depths and dimensions to explore in the multiverse of me. Old Darkness, perhaps not yet a friend, but certainly a familiar companion. If you are navigating darkness and find that the light within is elusive, know that you are not alone, that others are experiencing their own internal challenges, too. And if you could use a compassionate witness, I’m always down for a curious conversation.