The morning feels sharper today, the reckoning of a life I desired with the one that has met me.  I watch with curiosity, fascination and horror, the dissolution of the identity that brought me this far. I’ve stop fighting to hold onto what has been actively dissolving. I walk through the narrow corridor that is my current reality and look at the sign hanging above the threshold I am about to step over, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” My internal voice says, “that tracks.” I look behind me at the long hallway, doors once opened, now closed. I know that while I don’t like it, I might not understand it, I am in this place I am supposed to be. Hope was part of the identity that has been dissolving. Hope is what kept me polished and propped up, and looking around the next corner. Hope is also what kept me suffering when things didn’t work out the way I thought they would. Hope is what kept me looking out the window for the proverbial package that wouldn’t arrive. I hold Hope in my hands, turn it around one last time, thank it, then set it down and walk through the threshold.

The second awakening, a concept I stumbled across just recently, describes the stage of life I am walking through right now and it is brutal. I think being torn apart by a pack of wolves might be a more enjoyable experience. These videos explain the process in better detail and carry the energy of clarity and explanation that I just don’t have at the moment.

I remember my first awakening; it was in my late 20’s and it was savage and brutal at the time. A cascade of events triggered and systematically unwound my world. The loss of a job that had been defining me, the dissolution of my social circle, an illness that brought me face to face with my own mortality, a death of a close relative, a break up with a person I thought to be, “the one,” and it all happened within months of one another, one event after the other.  Even though I walked through that time alone, there was external support. There was literature to explain what was happening, there were groups of kindred spirits, there were classes, and books and teachers that all supported, “awakening,” and I lathered it on as soul salve as I slowly pulled myself out of the quagmire.  I emerged as a beautiful, kind, loving, compassionate, sensitive and wise soul. I had asshole parts of me too, but they were cleanly tucked away in the closets of my psyche. I thought I had made it through the worst, that there was this one, “big awakening” that you go through in the journey of being human then life turns around and things are good.  For a long while, it did turn around. I had beautiful experiences, I felt blessed, I laughed a lot, loved and was loved, and I was happy, I had a good life until it all started crumbling. You know the story, I’ve shared it here in my blog.

It is only now that I can look back and see the identity that I had built in response to my life. I was proud of who I had become, proud of my tenacity and my unwillingness to let life break me no matter what it threw at me. Proud that I was steel and unbreakable, proud that I could carry myself and others. Proud that I could carry way more than what I saw others carrying. I loved the shiny parts of me that I presented to the world, and gleefully ignored my less polished aspects: my inner cynic who liked to point out, “realities” to me, the emotional geologist who kept sending me worried measurements of the diverging tectonic plates within me between the life I wanted to live versus the life I was living, and the soft and exhausted feminine who was deeply, soul tired. She was the quietest but the one I worried about the most. She was the one no one gets to see. She was the one who wanted a soft place to fall into so she could emerge but had been forced to take on roles that kept her braced, hardened and in survival.

I’ve documented a lot of process from this past year. I sometimes wonder why I share this honest look into my life to strangers across the world, and I realize it is more to be a mirror to myself. I hope that people find resonance in what I write but I’m not here to change or convince anyone of anything. It would be easier, less vulnerable, and probably smarter to keep these thoughts hidden away in a journal but carving out a tiny, quiet, splice of the internet, that hardly anyone comes to, gives me a place in the world where I can carve my initials and say, “I was here.”

There’s not a lot of information about the second awakening, or individuation but what I know is that it is a journey one walks alone. I find that tidbits of Carl Jung’s work keep coming to me in strange ways and I listen because it resonates in this moment. There is no, “10 steps to identity dissolution,” no manual on how to survive this transition, and no map to individuation because it is an internal process. I don’t even know what the destination is at this point, because it just feels like death. I thought it was my Golden Era, with its sacred partnership, aligned work, and soul community and so far, it is not that at all. My visions, insights, knowing have quieted, and I see nothing in the future. I fought this for a long time, I bartered with my soul, I begged, I fought, cursed, threw tantrums in the privacy of my own home, I tried all the manifestation tricks and then, I stopped. Nothing was working or shifting or responding and so I stopped asking. I stopped trying to build, architect, create movement in seized up spaces and then it hit, the existential loneliness, the feeling of being completely and utterly abandoned by my own soul, by my own energy, by life itself. I watched life line up things for everyone around me, and I sat there with an empty bowl. Patiently waiting, wearing my good girl identity, wearing my belief that if I give enough or show up enough or be loving enough that something would respond. It didn’t respond, the formulas, the tactics, the approach to creating life no longer worked so I gave myself permission to set it all down. The dreams, the hopes, the feelings, the visions, the desires, the expectations, the building, and the trying. This wasn’t a light switch that I turned off, it’s more like a dimmer switch that has been slowly turning down after a long time of trying and exhaustion.

The odd thing is, I don’t feel despair, nor do I feel numb, I just feel present and accepting. I grab my cup of coffee, sit down and say, “oh, this is where we are? Yuck.” When I think there is nothing left to be removed from my life, the next piece is revealed and removed and now I just pick up the piece that needs to go and hand it over. In hindsight, this dissolution began in 2018, then had a tremendous peak last year and just as I was thinking I was about to summit, a whole deeper round of dissolution comes up. Now I am being asked to give up all pillars of my Golden Era and love 2.0 which may be part of the identity that I was trying to stand up and is now dissolving as well. I guess it can go too.

I find myself curious about this process. I don’t like it, in fact, it is awful some if not most days. I think dying would be easier and some days I wish my soul would take me but I am curious about the end game. “Where do I end up? What is left of me when this current version is gone? Do I cease to exist? Is there a plan? WAS this the plan? Will life ever meet me? Is there anything for me? Do I even care if I cease to exist?” Those are questions from a dying identity, and they used to shake me to the core but now, my tired self just watches. There is something else here, a version of me that is present. I feel steady, I feel aware, and accepting in a way that says, “take it all, I will not fight what was already in the process of dissolving.” Holding on too tight and trying too hard was causing me to suffer deeply. This turn of events, the letting go, feels like rest. That might make me very enlightened or very dumb, time will tell. What I know is, I will keep writing these stories as my own record of this time through this non-linear labyrinth of discovery of “Self.”

I don’t have the answers, I can’t tell you the 10 steps to individuation or identity dissolution, but I can offer honesty, rawness and authenticity to illuminate an experience that doesn’t get air time. I seriously hope there isn’t a third awakening hiding around some corner in the future and just in case this is all that is here for me, then at least I can say, “I was here.”