Series: The Exiled Feminine

A psychological descent into the labyrinth of relationship: projection, eros, shame, patriarchy, and the recovery of wholeness.

For the last decade, I have found myself returning to the same questions:

Why do women feel unseen inside relationships where they are loved? Why do love and desire become divided? Why do women feel reduced to a role while other aspects of themselves seem to disappear from view? And why do men appear caught between longing for intimacy and defending against it?

For years, I found myself wandering through the labyrinth of my own marriage, trying to understand experiences I could feel but not explain. There were moments when my body seemed to know something long before my mind did. Moments of confusion, longing, grief, invisibility, desire, betrayal, love, resentment, devotion, and loss. Questions that refused to leave me alone.

Why did I feel unseen in places where I was deeply loved?

The deeper I followed this question, the less interested I became in assigning blame and the more interested I became in understanding the psyche itself. What began as an attempt to understand my relationship slowly became an attempt to understand projection, eros, shame, attraction, fantasy, patriarchy, and the feminine.

As I followed those threads, I began encountering the same questions everywhere. I heard them in conversations with friends. I heard them in stories shared by clients (both men and women). I heard them in the private griefs women carried about relationships, visibility, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, creativity, and identity. Again and again, different lives seemed to orbit the same mystery.

This series is my attempt to follow that mystery. Not as an expert standing outside it, but as someone who has spent years wandering within it. Throughout this series, we’ll explore projection, eros, pornography, patriarchy, shame, religion, visibility, and the long journey toward wholeness. We’ll draw from psychology, mythology, relationship, culture, and lived experience in an effort to understand what happens when parts of ourselves become fragmented, hidden, or exiled — and what it might take to bring them home again.

In this first essay, we begin with the origin of the split itself: the ancient and enduring divide between the woman who is loved and the woman who is desired.

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli (1485)

Part One : The Woman He Loves and the Woman He Desires

How the feminine became divided and why love and desire so often part ways.

What happens when a woman is loved but not seen? Not unloved, not abandoned, not rejected entirely — but loved. Chosen. Committed to. Admired. Perhaps even placed upon a pedestal. And yet somehow, unseen.

For years, I have listened to women describe a particular kind of grief that seems difficult to name. It is not the grief of being unwanted. In many cases, these women are deeply wanted. Their husbands describe them as wonderful mothers, loyal partners, beautiful women, best friends, and the safest people they have ever known. Yet beneath the praise lives a quiet ache.

Again and again, I hear women describe the same paradox. The truth is, I know this grief intimately.

They feel respected but not desired, loved but not encountered, valued but not known. They are seen clearly in certain places and strangely invisible in others. Their goodness is recognized. Their loyalty is recognized. Their reliability is recognized. Yet the parts of them that feel most alive — the instinctive, creative, sensual, playful, and erotic dimensions of their being — often seem to exist just beyond the relationship’s field of vision.

The parts that seem to disappear are often the very parts that make them feel most alive. Their sensuality. Their instinct. Their creativity. Their playfulness. Their wildness. Their mystery. Over time, many begin questioning themselves. They wonder whether they have become less attractive, less interesting, less erotic, less alive. Yet I have often found myself wondering whether the problem lies somewhere else entirely. What if the issue is not the woman, but the lens through which she is being perceived?

More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud observed a phenomenon that would later become known as the Madonna-Whore Complex. Freud noticed that some men seemed unable to unite love and desire within the same relationship. The woman they loved became difficult to desire, while the woman they desired became difficult to love. The beloved wife became associated with goodness, loyalty, stability, motherhood, and devotion. She was elevated, respected, and protected. Meanwhile, erotic energy drifted elsewhere, attaching itself to fantasy, novelty, transgression, or women who existed outside the role of partner and wife.

Freud’s explanation has been debated for generations, but the pattern itself remains surprisingly recognizable. What interests me is not whether Freud was entirely correct. But why this phenomenon continues appearing across cultures, generations, and relationships. Why do so many women describe feeling trapped inside the role of the good woman while watching their partners seek vitality somewhere else? And why do so many men appear equally trapped by the very split they unconsciously create yet despise?

To explore those questions, we have to move beyond Freud and into the world of depth psychology. For Jung, the issue was never simply sexuality. It was wholeness.

Jung believed that every man carries within him an inner feminine dimension of the psyche that he called the Anima. The Anima is not merely a collection of feminine traits. She represents feeling, imagination, intuition, vulnerability, creativity, eros, and relationship itself. Through her, a man encounters mystery. Through her, he encounters soul. She serves as a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious, carrying him toward dimensions of life that cannot be reached through reason alone.

When the Anima is welcomed into consciousness, she becomes a source of vitality and psychological growth. When she is feared, rejected, or shamed, however, she does not disappear. She retreats into the unconscious. And what is unconscious has a peculiar habit of returning. Jung famously wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Few concepts capture the nature of projection more clearly. Qualities we cannot recognize within ourselves often appear outside ourselves. We become fascinated by them, threatened by them, obsessed with them, or drawn toward them. What belongs to the psyche becomes attached to another person.

This is particularly true of the feminine. The more disconnected a man becomes from feeling, vulnerability, instinct, eros, imagination, and emotional depth within himself, the more likely he is to encounter these qualities in projected form. Certain women begin carrying extraordinary psychological significance. They appear magnetic, mysterious, dangerous, fascinating, or intoxicating. Yet what is being pursued is not always the woman herself. Often it is a lost part of the psyche.

The ancient myths understood this long before psychology did. Across cultures, the feminine appears as goddess, muse, witch, enchantress, lover, mother, destroyer, healer, and guide. Inanna descends into the underworld. Aphrodite emerges from the sea. Isis resurrects Osiris. Kali destroys and transforms. These figures are not merely stories. They are symbolic representations of psychic reality.

What strikes me most about many goddess traditions is that the feminine was not divided into separate categories. The goddess could be erotic and sacred, maternal and powerful, compassionate and terrifying, creative and destructive. She was not required to choose between instinct and virtue, sexuality and wisdom, nurturance and power. She contained them all.

Perhaps this is why Jungian analyst Esther Harding devoted much of her work to recovering what she believed had been lost in modern culture. In The Way of All Women, Harding argued that the instinctive feminine had become increasingly estranged from consciousness. Women were often confined to narrow social roles while men became increasingly disconnected from the deeper feminine dimensions of their own psyches. Something that had once been experienced as whole had become fragmented.

Over time, the nurturing feminine remained acceptable. The maternal feminine remained acceptable. The obedient feminine remained acceptable. Yet the instinctive feminine — the erotic, autonomous, and emotionally powerful feminine increasingly became associated with temptation, irrationality, danger, and chaos.

The goddess divided.

And from her fragments emerged two familiar figures: the Madonna and the Whore.

What Freud observed clinically may have been part of a much older story. Not simply the fragmentation of women, but the fragmentation of the feminine itself.

Coming Next..

Understanding a wound and living inside it are rarely the same thing.

The Madonna-Whore split may begin in the psyche, but it does not remain there. It enters relationships. It shapes perception. It influences what is seen, desired, and disappears from view.

What happens to a woman when she becomes trapped inside someone else’s image of her?

In the next essay, we’ll move from theory into lived experience and explore the quiet grief of being loved, admired, and still somehow unrealized.

→ Next Essay: The Woman Inside the Projection

The months leading up to pregnancy, I was making my way through The Artist’s Way for the third time. I had already completed morning pages for a few years and found myself craving a different conversation with the unconscious. Instead of writing, I let the streams of consciousness emerge through watercolor, mandalas, collage, and music. Some mornings I would sit on the floor with my guitar, press record on my phone, and allow whatever wanted to come through to come through.

Honestly, most of what came out felt like a dream you try to recall from 4 a.m. Fragments. Ramblings. Half-finished thoughts. But every now and then something would emerge that felt channeled. One morning a song arrived that immediately caught my attention. When I listened back to the recording later that day, I remember feeling deeply emotional. The lyrics felt like an echo of grief that I wasn’t sure was even solely mine.

“two hearts sharing borrowed weather,

a hand reaching through time

what she couldn’t hold still found a body,

still found mine —

this isn’t absence, its an echo

hunger learning how to speak

what she couldn’t hold still found a body,

still found me.”

At the same time, my luteal phase was hitting me harder than it had in years. I found myself raging about the patriarch (nothing new) and watching thriller horror shows just to validate the horror that was surfacing and processing through my body. Literally had no idea where that came from. Other days I wanted to escape into my phone and caught myself doom scrolling for a sickening amount of time. Apathy would appear out of nowhere. Grief would hit like a brick. And most days I felt like I was carrying an emotional landscape larger than myself.

Yet it all felt so sovereign.

I remember talking with a girlfriend who was also moving through an intense luteal phase that month and telling her, “This feels so sovereign, dude. Like so sovereign to go crazy. And rage. And cry. And feel. So sovereign to be unhinged.”

What felt so good amidst the intensity wasn’t the feelings themselves, but my relationship to them. I found myself sharing how strange and beautiful it felt to have enough capacity to simply experience what was happening. Not fix it. Not numb it. Not even analyze it. Just feel it.

For the past few years I’ve come to view my cycle as ceremony. A monthly katabasis. A descent into the underworld and a return. A cycle woven into the body itself. What feels so beautiful is that the invitation keeps arriving on its own. Month after month. Asking nothing more than my willingness to listen. To feel. To release. To enter into relationship with the parts of myself that are often subtle but eventually come knocking with a luteal-natured feminine force.

And when my period finally came, a message seemed to broadcast itself across my psyche:

BREAKING NEWS: WE’RE GOING TO BE OKAY.

A few weeks later, I found myself sitting beside a fire preparing for a sweat lodge. What I had planned to release into the flames was not just my own victim story, but a story that felt much older than me. A story carried by the lineage of women before me. I wanted to release it for them, for me, and for the daughters to come.

Then we entered the lodge.

There is something profoundly human about sitting butt ass naked in a pitch-black sweat lodge with a circle of women. No identity to maintain. Just bodies. Breath. Sweat. Song.

As the darkness settled around us, prayers began moving through the space. Women sang. Women cried. Women laughed. We growled, we chanted, we even chee hoo’d. Sweat rolled down our bodies as the heat continued to build. Between the steam, the darkness, and the sound of their voices, it felt as though time itself had softened.

Sitting there listening to the songs and prayers move through the lodge, I became aware of something I still struggle to put language to. I wasn’t thinking about seven generations behind me and seven generations ahead of me as a timeline. It felt more like all of it existed simultaneously. The women who came before me. The daughter I hoped to meet one day. The life unfolding through my own body. For a moment they all seemed to occupy the same space.

The closest word I can find is lineage, but even that feels too linear. What I experienced felt more like a living field moving through me. As though my body was less an individual body and more a meeting place. A threshold where past, present, and future briefly lost their boundaries.

I remember sitting there contemplating how healing feels so mysterious. How grief often arrives without a story. How a song can emerge before understanding. How certain fears, longings, and patterns seem to move through generations searching for relationship. Not because we are trapped by the past, but because life itself appears far less linear than we’ve been taught.

The older I get, the less convinced I am that memory exists solely in the mind. The body remembers things language struggles to articulate. It remembers through sensation, emotion, instinct, attraction, and aversion. It remembers through dreams and symptoms and seemingly irrational reactions. I feel the body is an archive. I feel the psyche is a living ecology. And sometimes I know both ideas sound absurd until I remember how often my own life has confirmed them.

Within that cycle, I became pregnant.

Even writing that now makes me smile. Not because I think pregnancy was some cosmic reward for healing. But I do find it interesting that after months of feeling as though something was moving through me, something was. It had also been exactly nine years since my last miscarriage. When I realized that, I just sat there for a while. Allowing myself to feel the strange poetry of it all.

Looking back, every pregnancy has opened me. Every miscarriage has opened me. Again and again, it has been my womb that has brought me back into relationship with myself. Not because she gives me answers, but because she continually invites me into deeper questions. Questions about life, grief, creativity, trust, and what it means to participate in something larger than my own pulse.

Now, watching life form within my body week after week, I find myself feeling less certain about almost everything and more in awe of nearly everything. The body knows how to create a heart before it creates a brain. Cells organize themselves without my instruction. Life unfolds according to an intelligence I can participate in but never control.

The deeper I go into psychology, spirituality, the esotericism of the unconscious, the less interested I become in certainty. What interests me is mystery. The unfolding of process. And the becoming.

Most days, I think we’re truly here to listen. And whatever comes after, just comes.

For years I have admired much of Jung’s work. I’ve enjoyed the subjectivity of his analysis. How he explored the unconscious within his own psychosis and gave language to the human experience; to the soul wandering in the dark. His writing initiated connection between ego and soul. His words gave me a place to rest. A space to feel uncertain and that be okay. A place to belong somewhere, even if it meant only my inner world. Even if home was a liminal space.

His courage to engage with his experience and meet himself deeply allowed his words to stand through time. His writing meets each of his readers beyond his passing, a lighthouse for spiritual thinkers in a Western culture. Where much of the mind is pathologized, there’s a refreshment found in a depth lens which seeks to understand with sacred regard.

He gave me language for the feminine, revealing her in myth and symbol. He brought her back into my life where religion had erased her. The archetypal nature hovered above ground like a beautiful constellation. Something I could admire with awe and reverence. But awareness without integration felt disembodied. How could I reach her beyond vision and dream? How could I walk through the symbolic door he had opened with my own body?

Somatics became my next venture. Connecting to emotion, not just awareness. A way of creating safety by aligning my actions, my environments, and my community with what I could actually feel.

I learned to enter the depths.
To breathe through each state of joy and grief.
To let grief crack me open into something softer.
To let emotions cycle through me like seasons.

It felt as though I had been holding the map for years but had only then began the journey — meeting the felt sense, letting presence become the first language between her and me. Trusting her. Coming home to sensation. Listening for the subtle voices. Honoring truth as it rises in the body. Feeding my doll bread.

I’ll never forget the first time I read Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. My own myth appeared before my eyes. My heroine’s journey became clear. The narrow path I had walked for years: following the whispers of my soul just enough to keep myself intact but not lose everything I loved. Grief hit me like a brick. The sacrifice I would have to make unearthed itself before me. My ego wrestled my soul, trying to negotiate who I might lose. It felt like an awakening. A realization from the inside out. Something no one could argue or negotiate me out of, not even myself.

The wild woman is an endangered species — this replayed in my mind. Yes, she was. And I suddenly knew the most important work I could do as a woman was bring her back. Through my own body. Through my own myth.

I began my journey as an analysand and was introduced to the work of Marion Woodman. Her understanding of the unconscious as the body itself landed in me like a knowing. Of course. This archetypal resonance bridged my understanding of psyche to my understanding of soma, like a rainbow connecting heaven and earth. Marion pulled her into body through the wound. Through craving. Through blood and bone. Cycles and creativity. Eros and sexuality. The moon mirroring the seasons of earth. She pulled the feminine back down where she could breathe and bleed with me.

Marion studied addiction through the doorway of her own body — through disordered eating, through longing, through the way hunger is a map back home. Clarissa whispered her stories into the caves of my psyche, returning me to the wolf tracks, the body as a compass, bone by bone. She didn’t speak to the feminine as a haloed light but as cycles, instincts, the wild and wounded both.

As I reflected on my own experience, I couldn’t reconcile the split between light and dark feminine. Could she really be so black and white? Who divided her in two? Was “light feminine” ever feminine at all, or simply the masculine masquerading as her? The good woman society offered me always felt like a lifeless doll. A pretty thing. Easy to monetize and control. Part of an image, but never the whole picture.

And in my own body I felt this tension. I was raised to split her into good and bad, light and dark, saint and shadow.. a fracture in her wholeness. Yet my body held another gospel. see my accompanying reflection on the twins

She was never two.
She was never divided.

She was not a symbol to decode.
She was not a moral category.

She had always been a single pulse. Moving through shadow and sunlight with the same steady heartbeat. She was a living presence, threading herself through instinct, hunger, creativity, grief, desire, and dream.

The work was not to choose between her faces, but to remember the body where they meet. The body where she becomes whole again.

I admire Jung’s courage to open the symbolic door to her mysteries. To meet her within his psyche, within his creativity, within his own embodied practice. And I feel ever grateful to Marion and Clarissa for carrying her back into marrow, bone, womb, and hunger <3

At fifteen, I knew myself deeply, yet I often felt divided by circumstance. Certain parts of me emerged naturally in the presence of others, while other parts only revealed themselves in solitude. I couldn’t understand why some of my deepest thoughts, creativity, and authenticity seemed to arrive after midnight, when the rest of the world was asleep. I often wondered if that meant I was being inauthentic during the day, or if there was something wrong with me for containing such different expressions of self.

Yet I continued trusting the experience. Something inside felt intelligent, even when it appeared strange or contradictory. I accepted that I very well could be crazy. Yet there seemed little point in denying my inner reality simply to be perceived as normal. Whatever was happening inside me felt alive. And over time, I began to realize I wasn’t witnessing a fracture at all. I was witnessing a relationship.

In my psyche there were teenage twins. One light, one dark. I would often refer to them as light teenager and dark teenager. Dark teenager revealed herself to me in grief. Deeply connected to my inner muse. Perhaps, she is my muse. She collapses into destruction as an act of creating. She breaks down, deconstructs, dies, and decomposes in order to be born again. She is honest, raw. Fearless and unstoppable. Like a force of nature. She is wild, unapologetic, untamed. She is blood and bones. Dirt and grit. She represents night — when the soul is free to live without being tamed or censored by society.

Then there’s light teenager, who is deeply connected to my inner artist. And perhaps, she is both my inner artist and lover. She is my inner child preserved. She is life fully inhabited. She’s deeply connected to the beauty and romance that is all around. She holds her heart close to animals and often greets the sun with a kiss. She is amazed by all of life which keeps her humbly and utterly human. To be human is to be nature. To recognize the plants and rocks as beautiful kin. She represents day — the color, the magic, the awe, the wonder when realized, felt. She often embodies presence, gratitude, peace, empathy, and joy.

Together, they feel whole. One cannot live without the other. And it fascinates me they have always lived as twins within my psyche. Two parts of a whole. Dark teenager feels like vitality, blood, bones. Like the pulse of truth running through my flesh. Without her, depth and truth would cease to exist. And within depth lives possibility, growth, awe, and wonder. Light teenager wouldn’t be able to fully receive life. To make love with it. To create. She would have no seed, no potential, no expansion.

The religious community I was raised in would have never approved of dark teenager. To exile her for survival would have costed my connection to my own soul. So I paused time. As a 15 year old girl I waited patiently for night time. Specifically, three to five am. When the world felt silent and still. And she would pilot our body. She would create and sing. She would reorganize the room and hang up new art. Usually the art she created the night before. She would stargaze and engage in free thinking. She saw the philosophy in everything. She would witness life in inanimate objects. Feel wisdom in her pain. She created, uncensored. But for her eyes only. She lived in the shadows, simply grateful to breathe.

When the sun would rise, its as if the twins sat side by side together. Admiring the relationship between the sun and moon. The moments where they both lived together in the sky. And light teenager would listen to the morning bird song. She’d find romance in her first cup of tea. Joy in playing with her animals. Peace when playing her guitar on the slope of a tree. Alive when singing her songs to the flowers. She witnessed and noticed both the silent and grand beauty all around, and picked up her camera to preserve it.

I didn’t have the language to name what they were, only the instinct to let them live. An act of quiet defiance, a devotional kind of survival. Perhaps they were the map back home to my soul, again and again.

In 2023 I rebirthed my photography business with the wish to integrate all parts of myself into one offering, one space. Like a mandala. I realized light teenager had been running the artistic show for decades. She made the creative decisions. She connected with clients. She held space.

Yet my deepest art — the work that always rearranged me — lived unseen. Expressions of dark teenager. To truly integrate her meant allowing her to live under the sun. To take up space. To stop hiding to protect others. So I moved all creative and business decisions to her: the rebrand, the creative direction, the color palette, the body of work we would carry forward. Photography became depth work — a space to unearth, witness, attune, express, and make the unconscious conscious.

To move forward in life from my deepest alignment feels like a blessing. Not because the twins disappeared, but because they no longer live in separate worlds. They sit at the same table now. The artist and the muse. The girl who greets the sun and the girl who waits patiently for midnight. Neither one asks the other to shrink.

And since then, I haven’t had a single creative block. Creative energy feels accessible, like an underground spring I no longer have to search for. The work arrives when it wants to. Sometimes through grief. Sometimes through wonder. Sometimes through a bird song at dawn. Sometimes through a sleepless night.

When I look back now, I don’t think those girls were evidence of fragmentation. I think they were the earliest evidence of feminine wholeness.

I put my hands in the soil and feel the heartbeat of the earth. She breathes. Each pore opens and closes, receiving oxygen the way we do.

To touch the soil and truly pay attention. To eat food that still holds the sun. To grow medicine from seed. To listen for the quiet ways the body speaks. Each small act, a path back home.

My feet pressed to earth feel like an old language I once knew by heart. A belonging my soul remembers. The knowing that I am always held, always seen as kin by nature.

I do not know how the birds and bees simply know what to do, while I keep searching for meaning. But I know how the wild and feral feels like the soul. I know the wholeness that comes from reclaiming everything as apart of me. Sometimes I think love is simply reclamation, the feeling of interconnection returning to its place.

It feels strange to study nature only through an analytical lens. There is a gaze that dissects to understand, naming and labeling and cataloguing. the same gaze shows up in psychology. It can keep us at a distance if we are not careful. It treats the plant, or the mind and body, as separate. It treats humans as other. As something to analyze and control from objectivity instead of something to relate to, learn with, and connect to.

So now I sit with one plant. Not to master her, but to meet her. To feel her essence. To notice how my body shifts in her presence. To let presence itself be the first language between us.

Sometimes she speaks first. in the emotion of wind, in the slow decay of fallen leaves, in the hum of a loyal bee, in the softening of buds in bloom. She teaches me what i had forgotten. That cycles regenerate, not just sustain. That seeds must be planted with trust. That life is an ecosystem of reciprocity, where nothing thrives alone. that playing is not earned. That seasons have their own patience. That quiet is its own kind of power.

This intimacy comes from relationship. From remembering we are nature. The way I live, move, feel, and respond is mirrored in the seasons, in the soil, in the quiet and wild places.

I only had to slow down and listen.

Because the quietest voices, the subtle expressions the world often drowns out, are the ones that guide us home.

This is why I love gardening, foraging, wandering into the green until I am lost in it. Because she feels honest. She embodies truth.

She reminds me of things I have forgotten. Small, wild insights that were buried under programming and indoctrination. I am grateful to her for that. In her quiet and subtle ways, she is saving the children of earth. She is saving herself.

I often worry about the state of the world. How humanity swings between order and chaos. How the earth has been treated like a factory of resources instead of a living, breathing being we are meant to be in relationship with. I worry about the heat, the melting, the migrations, the forests falling. I worry about how far we have gone.

But then I remember we are nature too. Whether i'm here to witness it or not, life and death will still unfold. Growth and decay, expansion and rest.. they belong to her rhythm.

I'm not saying the earth has a plan, but in her feminine nature, she does know how to regulate. To move powerfully toward wholeness, again and again. And that both humbles and inspires me. I want to be a voice for her, to express what she teaches, and give back what she has graciously given me.

She is waking us up. Not with force, but through the ache of misalignment. Through the suffering that rises when we forget who we are, resist the process of healing, or do not recognize the deeper call. The overall illness and disease is not a punishment but an invitation for us to remember we are nature. And we must come home to our cycles.

I tried to make it light
Like a strawberry popsicle
dripping down the hands of a child in summer

I tried to make it soft
like a cloud
cradled by a baby blue sky

I tried to make it kind
like a yellow flower
blooming in a field of pastels

But I surfaced — heavy again

A mythological creature
dragging kelp behind her
breathing saltwater
still blinking from the dark

an anima rising

To be a girl
with the mind of a strange professor
romanticizing conspiracy
and finding kinship
in disturbing works of art

I just wanted to be a soft artist

But my heart
slid down
to the ocean floor
only to find no bottom

I could blame it on the trauma
like an ode to my generation

But maybe
we’ve started calling life trauma
as if joy were the default
and everything else
a glitch

Maybe..
life is life

Strange
Complex
Uneven
Terrifying
And beautiful

A slow burn toward understanding

A widening of beauty

Maybe it’s more than a flower
or a strawberry popsicle

Maybe it’s fungi
feeding on dead flesh
the brutal elegance
of the wilderness

I tried to be her
the soft
radiant
romantic

But I ended up
the wolf girl

Too feral
to be painted
Too covered in earth
to star in the french indie film

And maybe
beauty isn’t only pretty

Maybe tenderness
lives inside
the bloody and raw

Maybe soft
is naming your ghosts
and letting them stay for dinner
Showing them the sun
introducing them to the trees

Maybe
it’s sleeping in shipwrecks
and napping in wildflowers

Maybe it’s honesty —
the kind that stays alive
through every messy
sacred
silly poem ever told

i think i’m ashamed of death.

i don’t know when it started —
this quiet shame that wraps itself around the fact
that everything i love will end.

not just the people.
the moments, too.
the way the light hits the kitchen table just right,
the sound of laughter i’ll forget the shape of,
the parts of me i haven’t even met yet —
all of it slipping through before i’m ready.

and instead of grieving,
i turned it inward.
ashamed i couldn’t hold it tighter.
ashamed i couldn’t stop time,
or save anyone,
or change the ending.

ashamed that i’ll die too.
that no matter how much I know.. or love.. or try..
i’ll still return to the earth like everyone else.

i think i believed, somewhere deep,
that dying was failure.
that loss meant we did something wrong.
that if we were good enough — wise enough —
we could make it all stay.

but that’s the delusion, isn’t it?
thinking that love ends when life does,
when the grace of it was never bound to staying.

i don’t want to be ashamed anymore.
i want to know death as a doorway, not a punishment.
i want to love what i have without gripping it bloody.
i want to stand at the edge,
look it in the eye,
and humbly bow in surrender.

because the truth is —
i’m not afraid of death.
i’m afraid of what it asks me to feel.
of how soft i have to be in order to hold it.

but maybe that’s the point.

maybe death is just love —
in its final, most honest form.

the kind that lets everything go.
the kind that trusts there’s something waiting,
even when we cannot see it.

maybe we don’t solve death.
maybe we don’t fix it.

maybe we just meet it —
the way we meet each other,
ourselves,
or the setting sun..
with nothing left to do but witness.

maybe I miss a place that only exists in dreams.

both a feeling and a fantasy, a softness wrapped in story.

found in every travel plan, every scene that fits the arc, every moment dressed in meaning long after it's gone.

as if pretending gave shape to something i couldn’t touch in the present.

and the memories that gently play — a cinema i wished were true.

the story I need.

—

we still play house, only now call it life.

still writing roles and tracing arcs to feed the fantasy.

where memory becomes more about desire than truth.

the child within us still setting scenes, casting characters, hoping the play will feel like home.

where innocence and belief feed the mythologies we write to feel something real.

and maybe that's okay.

maybe it's tender and beautifully human.

maybe we were always meant to live in the warmth of what we wished was true.

not for the accuracy of memory, but for the longing beneath it.

whispering off our lips, “i wanted to feel this”

and the wanting itself is honest.

like a drawing of a castle, made by a child who’s never seen one, but somehow remembers. somehow believes.

maybe that’s what makes us whole.

not the perfection of presence, but the sweetness of feeling the stories our bodies never forgot.

even if life was only ever make believe. even if the stories never happened as we wished.

they mattered because we did

<3

hold me gently

like a seed resting in cold earth,
waiting for its time.

breathing,
becoming.

wrap around me,
press into my edges.

as the light within me
gives you shape.

i exhale softly into your pull,

where the soil is damp
and the roots find their way —

the womb of the earth,
the deep underground.
the dance of unearthing,
the beauty unfolding.

i think it fears them
to be where they do not know.

in the places that smell of earth and old wood.
pressed outside of lines,
touching the texture of chaos.

they must fear me too,
because i am held by you.

—

you taste honest, untamed.
feral, like the wolves who run unashamed.

the animal brothers who say to us,

“to deny,
is to be in denial.
to reject,
is to break the mirror
and fragment what could have been whole.”

—

we are partners in a dance,
and i will love you forever —
because honesty is the greatest defense against evil.

and you, my love,
are the honest one.

x a love note to shadow