I was the oldest child who loved Jesus, lived at ballet class, and made straight A’s.
In church, the body was suspect, desire was dangerous, and goodness was the currency that bought you love, belonging, divine approval, and everlasting safety. I took the deal.
When all my friends were going to parties, hooking up, and having fun. I was studying, working, and waiting for marriage. I was devoted, obedient, and absolutely convinced that if I was good enough for long enough, the life I wanted would magically open up and come to me.
It didn’t.
After two decades of doing everything right, I was rejected once again from a full-time dance job — after ruthlessly pursuing it for my whole life — and I felt my whole identity dissolve. No contract. No plan B. Just the wreckage of a life built entirely on performance, and the slow, terrible realization that those rules I’d been following didn’t do shit.
The life you’re aching for — the devoted, turned-on partnership, the passionate creativity, the full expression of your work and your gifts, intimacy that feeds you — what if none of that comes from doing more of what you’re already doing?
You’ve become very good at understanding your patterns, but very bad at letting yourself live what you want.
You don’t have to be good. You don’t have to be better, more deserving, or more worthy. You just have to become shamelessly hot for Life.
That’s when everything you’ve been chasing starts chasing you. That’s when you start living with a delicious wholeness no one can take from you.
So I dropped everything. I left religion, stopped dancing, and spent years pissed at the universe. I started to get this sense that maybe life was more like art than math, more about beauty than right answers.
I started to remake myself from scratch, learning about things I grew up hearing were evil - like ceremonial magic, energy work, and sex. I became a skillful teacher with devoted clients who helped me open a Pilates and yoga studio. I bet on myself, hard.
But a few years in, and I was struggling to pay the rent. I was lying on the floor when I heard a voice break through the ethers and say, “This is not going to work. You need to get out. Now.” So I did. I watched it all fail and fall. I filed for bankruptcy. Lost so much of my and other people’s money. I lost all my clients, and I was afraid to leave the house.
So I dropped everything. I left religion, stopped dancing, and spent years pissed at the universe. I started to get this sense that maybe life was more like art than math, more about beauty than right answers.
I started to remake myself from scratch, learning about things I grew up hearing were evil - like ceremonial magic, energy work, and sex. I became a skillful
teacher with devoted clients who helped me open a Pilates and yoga studio. I bet on myself, hard.
But a few years in, and I was struggling to pay the rent. I was lying on the floor when I heard a voice break through the ethers and say, “This is not going to work. You need to get out. Now.” So I did. I watched it all fail and fall. I filed for bankruptcy. Lost so much of my and other people’s money. I lost all my clients, and I was afraid to leave the house.
But I learned something very important…
What I had been running from was the place I would get free. And it would keep happening until I learned that.
Ground zero taught me something that no amount of education, therapy, or spiritual practice had been able to reach: that the Dark is not the enemy. It is the medicine.
After years of rolling my eyes at any mention of the Divine Feminine — all that language felt so soft and suspicious — I had a series of mystical encounters that turned me upside down. All those years of good or bad, heaven or hell, the worship of suffering and abstinence — and then suddenly: a Presence that transgressed all of it. With delight. With giggles. With darkness and ecstasy.
Mary Magdalene sat on my chest like a weighted blanket and touched every ashamed, shut-down, over-responsible corner of me with such tenderness I finally felt understood — down to my core. She didn't ask me to do better. She didn't ask me to earn it. She simply showed me the door I had been standing in front of my entire life.
The one marked with both Whore and Holy.
Every cell in my body turned on.
What I found on the other side wasn’t transcendence.
It wasn’t an escape.
It was the full, ferocious, transgressive, unapologetic aliveness that no amount of goodness had ever been able to touch. And I understood — for the first time in my life — that the Dark wasn’t something to survive. It was the Great Womb of Ecstatic Mercy. The Mother Herself, and there was nothing to fear.