There's a kind of pain that doesn't have a tidy name. The betrayal you never saw coming. The divorce that took the future with it. The moment you look at your own life and don't recognize it — or yourself.
That's the dark night of the soul. And I want to be honest with you about it, because I lived it.
In my dark night, my body stopped cooperating. I was exhausted in a way sleep didn't touch. Inflamed. Anxious before I'd had a thought. The life I'd built quietly stopped fitting, and I didn't have the energy to pretend it still did.
Here's what nobody tells you: the dark night isn't a detour from your life. It's a demolition of the life that was too small for you. Everything false gets stripped away — the pretending, the performing, the version of you that was built to keep other people comfortable. It's brutal. And it's precise.
What moved me through it wasn't thinking harder. I couldn't insight my way out. It was the slow, unglamorous work of the body: breath, gentle movement, energy, nourishment. Teaching my nervous system, one day at a time, that the danger had passed.
And on the other side of that — not quickly, but surely — came the remembering. Who I was before the world told me who to be. What I actually wanted. What I was always meant to do.
If you're in the dark right now, I won't insult you with silver linings. I'll just say this: it's a passage, not a home. You don't have to walk it alone, and you don't have to have it figured out. You just have to keep breathing.
If this found you at the right moment, you know where to find me.