And still, months go by. Again.

I watch it happen the way I’ve watched it happen before. My focus, fierce and devotional and almost ecstatic, gathers around something I love, something that feels alive and essential. I dive in completely. I build a world around it. I give it my breath and my marrow and my prayer. And then something in me burns through its own fuel. The intensity becomes unsustainable. The current drops. I cannot hold that voltage anymore.

I have done this with projects. With people. With dreams I swore were forever.

So perhaps this is an apology for the silence. To myself first, and to you.

A lot has happened. Something very dear to my heart ended. Not gently. Not ceremonially. Just ended.

I’ve been sitting with how deeply we identify with the places we work, the communities we weave ourselves into, the things we help create. We wrap our roots around them. We say mine without saying it out loud.

I built that.
I held that.
I belong there.

And when it shifts or disappears or closes its doors, something primal rises up. Outrage. Righteousness. Grief dressed as anger. The inner cry of how could they take that away from me.

The victim mind is an easy chair to fall into. It fits the body quickly. It feeds on old stories. It speaks in familiar voices of not-enoughness and exile and being unchosen.

For weeks my nights were restless. I would lie in the dark while my mind spun its webs, thought after thought, looping and sharpening and distorting, building elaborate inner courtrooms where I was both wounded child and passionate prosecutor. Every thread led back to the same ancient ache. Not lovable enough. Not wanted enough. Not safe inside belonging.

Sleep became a negotiation.

I found myself returning, almost desperately, to something I teach every Tuesday and Thursday in meditation. Find the space between the thoughts.

Usually, I{s that space like slipping through a doorway. This time, the doorway was bricked over. The mind was loud, electric, and relentless.

My body told the truth before my mind would. I was stimming, using repetitive touch and small rhythmic motions, trying to anchor myself back into flesh and gravity. I needed weight on my body to sleep. Sound became too sharp, too invasive. Each memory of the situation landed like a gut punch.

And slowly, not all at once, clarity arrived. Not as a revelation, but as a soft unmasking.

It was not the job itself.
It was the loss of belonging.
The feeling of exclusion from a circle I had quietly named home.

My friends. My people. My place.

Except they were never mine in the way my nervous system wanted them to be. Community is shared, not possessed. Belonging is experienced, not owned.

That realization hurt and freed me at the same time.

Projection is a motherfucker. The psyche will build entire mythologies to shield an old wound. I watched myself construct meaning, motive, betrayal, symbolism, turning a human ending into a cosmic indictment.

But it was simpler than that.

It was an ending.
Just an ending.

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And didn’t I write not long ago, during Scorpio season, that I was working on my relationship with endings? Life has a wicked and sacred sense of humor. It keeps handing us the exact curriculum we declare we are ready to study. Not in theory, but in the body. In the trigger. In the burn.

Because that is where the bindings are revealed. The attachments. The identities. The stories we mistake for truth. The places we are not yet free.

And though I resisted it, this too was an invitation. Another opening to grow with grace instead of grievance. With gratitude instead of defense.

It took time to arrive there. Longer than I wanted. Exactly as long as it took.

But the moment I did, the mental looping stopped. The courtroom closed. The nervous system softened its grip. Gratitude began to seep back in through the cracks.

I remembered the hundreds of evenings I knelt singing to the setting sun as it disappeared behind the Ojai mountains. I remembered the breath in my lungs. The music is still in my bones, a love that remains untouched by circumstance.

Nothing real had been taken.
A chapter had closed.

So here we are again. Back at the page. Back at the pulse.

Thank you for being here, and for reading with me.

The question “What is wrong with me?” kept zipping through my mind, sharp and insistent.

I spent a lot of time trying to answer it.

“Well, it could be this. Yes, that makes sense. And it could also be that.”

One explanation after another presented itself, and I found myself agreeing with them, giving these stories my full attention, my belief, my energy. Without realizing it, I was handing them so much power. Each answer bred another reason, another justification, another narrative.

Before I knew it, three days had passed, and I was deep inside it.

Ruminating.

Carefully, almost proudly, stirring my pot of intrusive thoughts. Searching for evidence that I was right and they were wrong. My mind rummaged through the vault of constantly shifting past memories, pulling out whatever it could find to prove its case.

“Yes. This is definitely why. Of course. This makes sense.”

I was exhausted.
I was dissociating.
I was locked in a protective survival state, triggered, braced, waiting for something terrible to happen.

Then yesterday morning, I received a text from a very old and dear friend. A ride or die, in all the best ways.

We had plans, and I was already preparing to wiggle my way out of them. Socializing is hard for me. Hermiting is often easier.

Her message came at 7:48 a.m.

“Ok, I’m coming to you. I’m on my way because I want to hug my old friend. I need a hug. So there it is.”

It ended with a heart.

Judging by how I usually feel about people just showing up, you might think I wouldn’t want that. It often feels like pressure. But yesterday, it was exactly what I needed.

Seeing her. Being with someone I have loved my whole life. Someone who has never placed expectations on me, never asked me to be anything other than who I am.

That kind of ease is rare. And it softened something in me that had been clenched for days.

Later, I found myself thinking about something I’ve been saying in the meditation classes I’ve been guiding.

What energy do we want to end 2025 with?

Endings matter.
We can’t have beginnings without them.
And it is okay for things to end.

Situations change.
People change.
Circumstances change.
Life is constantly moving.

Everything is impermanent.

My thoughts.
My moods.
My feelings.
My hopes and dreams.
My likes and dislikes.
Even the things I love deeply, and my desire to keep them in my life.

I want to end things gracefully when they are ready to be released.
I no longer want to ride things out, hoping they will get better, to let them drag on, to force myself to feel what I no longer feel.

Clinging to what once was feels like an awful way to live.
To me, it feels like a desperate act of despair. Longing that has turned divisive and obsessive. And I know how easily I can do that, with almost anything.

So I am choosing to honor what has passed.
To grieve what has passed.
To grieve all that has passed.

And now, as we close, I invite a pause.

Take a slow breath in through the nose.
Let it travel all the way down into the belly.
And exhale gently through the mouth.

Feel where your body is supported.
The ground beneath you.
The chair, the bed, the earth holding your weight.

With each breath, allow yourself to release what you are ready to let go of.
Not all at once.
Not forcefully.
Just what is ready.

Notice what space begins to open.
Notice the quiet that follows letting go.

Bring to mind the energy you want to carry forward as this year comes to a close.
Not what you think you should feel, but what feels true.
Peace.
Clarity.
Softness.
Courage.
Trust.
Rest.

Let that energy settle into your chest.
Into your breath.
Into your body.

Offer gratitude for each moment that led you here.
For each breath that continues to move through you.
For the courage it takes to release, to grieve, and to begin again.

Thank you for sharing this with me, from my heart to yours.

We were only together for 14 of those years, but he has lived inside me for all 28.
Half my life spent inside the echo of a love that broke me open and broke me apart.
Half my life still dreaming of him, sometimes every night, sometimes every moment.

As this season approaches, and with it, Thanksgiving, our anniversary, I feel everything in me stirring again.

A day of gratitude.
A day for what’s real.
A day for what’s left.
A day for what I’ve survived,
and who I’ve become.

Because 28 years is a long time to love someone, even when the relationship ended, even when the body left, even when death took him somewhere I couldn’t follow. He never left my heart, and he never left my dreams.

And those dreams…
They come every night like a haunting I’ve grown used to carrying.
He is always hurting, angry, lost, or causing harm.
I’m always trying to soothe him, save him, fix what cannot be fixed.
And at some point in the dream, I remember:
He’s dead.
And I say it out loud, hoping it will bring clarity or peace.

But it never does.
The dream always begins to distort, darken, unravel.

It makes me wonder how much of my life I’m actually here for.
How much of me is born each new moment,
and how much is still gripping the past, clinging to the ghost of who I was,
and who we were.

I spend so much of my life trying to heal myself, calm my mind, stay with my breath,
forgive myself, return to presence.
And there are moments, brief, crystalline, where I feel fully here:
peace, joy, inner connection, and the holiness of nature.
The soft animal of my body is finally at rest.

But I also know I’m still tied to the man I fell in love with when I was 19.
Even through death, it feels like he’s still here with me.

Part of me loves that I’m capable of this kind of devotion,
this depth of feeling, this soul-level attachment.
And another part of me wonders who I would be if I were free.

That longing for freedom lived inside our relationship too.
Back then, the drugs and the violence were the cage.
Now, I am the healthiest I’ve ever been, I am free,
and yet there are still cages I build inside myself.

It shapes everything.

It colors the beauty, my gratitude, my survival, my awe at the life I’ve built.
And it shadows the tender places.
The ways I show up in relationships,
my difficulty trusting my instincts,
mistaking trauma echoes for intuition,
my avoidant attachment born from a love so enmeshed, so consuming,
I vowed never to disappear into someone again.

And beneath it all,
a quiet loyalty.
A fear that moving on would betray him.
Even now.

The truth is, the dreams come from guilt.
The guilt of leaving.
The guilt of surviving.
The guilt of choosing myself when he could not choose life.
Night after night, I’m tending to wounds that no longer exist,
trying to save someone who is already gone.

But maybe…
this 28-year mark
is not just a number.

Maybe it is the threshold.
The turning of the cycle.
The place where something ancient in me completes itself.

Maybe I can ask:

What if loving him doesn’t have to mean carrying him?
What if remembering him doesn’t require abandoning myself?
What if the cycle completes here?

Because this morning, the ocean reminded me of something.

I watched her breathe,
and something inside me exhaled with her,
a soft release I didn’t know I was still holding.

The waves didn’t ask me to forget him.
They didn’t ask me to let go before I was ready.
They only asked me to stay here,
in this moment,
in this life that keeps choosing me back.

They showed me that forgiveness can sound like water,
that possibility can look like sky,
and that healing sometimes happens one breath at a time,
without fanfare, without arrival.

And maybe this is the real gift of this season,
not the holiday, not the ritual, not the performance,
but the quiet remembering that gratitude can live in my bones
without denying my grief.

Maybe this is the beginning of being fully here
with the person I have become.

Still breathing.
Still rising.
Still learning how to live gently in this body
that has endured so much
and still wants to stay.

And as the wind moved across the water,
I found myself whispering the simplest prayer:

Thank you.
Thank you for this breath.
Thank you for this moment.
Thank you for this beautiful life I am still growing into.

I began writing this piece two years ago, during Scorpio season, in the middle of a very emotionally intense time. I tucked the draft away and forgot about it. Recently, while working on my memoir, I found it again. It felt like the right time to finish it. What follows is a blending of two versions of me. Half was written then, and the rest was completed today.

Yesterday was hard. In truth, the entire month has been heavy, but something about yesterday crested into an emotional crescendo. Every old trigger I carry lit up, one after another, until I was raw and exposed.

This is the season when everything rises to the surface. The muck, the shadows, the truths we would rather not face. Scorpio season always demands honesty. It strips us bare. It asks:

How do we hold ourselves when the world seems to crumble?
What monsters still rattle their cages inside us?
Which parts remain exiled or bound to patterns that no longer belong?
Do we fight them, or bow, allowing shadow to transform through love and radical forgiveness?

Yesterday, on my way to work, a panic attack gripped me with a ferocity I have not felt in years. Looking back, I can sense the careful hand of the Universe in it, a quiet intervention. But in the moment, it was chaos. A familiar, terrible chaos that once ruled my life.

I do not miss those days. One hand on the wheel, the other clutching my phone, screaming into the void while tears poured down my face. Panic rising fast. A spark becoming a flood.

And then came the vision. Sudden. Sharp. Hauntingly familiar:

The urge to press down on the gas and veer my car directly into a tree.

Instead, I pulled over.
My breath shallow.
My hands trembling.

And then I broke open.

The sobs came hard and messy, the kind that belong to a child. Big, gulping cries that shake the entire ribcage. Tears and snot pooling in my lap. A complete unraveling. Too much stress. Too much uncertainty. Too much grief spilling from a well that never truly empties.

Then my phone rang. A dear friend calling at just the right time, love on the line.

“Kelly, I know you are in pain. I can feel it. Please, can we breathe together?”

In the smallest voice, little-girl Kelly whispered, “Yes.”

They guided me through slow breaths, anchoring me back into my heart, reminding me that even chaos can soften if I stay with my breath. We prayed together, calling in Grace, Wisdom, and Strength.

And slowly, it worked. For me, it always does.

I am safe in my body.
I am safe in my body.
I am safe in my body.

The difference now is everything.

This panic did not consume me.
I did not act on the urge.
Once, I would have.

Because the urge was not born in me.
It was inherited.

I learned the urge sitting beside my father.

We would drive north on the 14 freeway toward Santa Clarita, his white Ford Explorer immaculate, smelling of Old Spice. When he was lighthearted, he would turn up the radio and sing. “Travelin’ Man” was our favorite, and I would harmonize, our voices braiding together like something holy. He would tell me to roll the window down.

“Put your arms out, Kelly. It feels like flying.”

And it did.
Eyes closed.
Wind roaring past.
A small bird soaring above the desert.

But when his shadows came, the air inside the car shifted. The same exit became a different world.

“Fasten your seatbelt,” he would say, voice low and weighted.

The on-ramp rose into a gentle incline that revealed the long drop beside us. My stomach clenched. I folded inward, knees tucked, breath held hostage. The singing stopped.

Just before the curve, he would press the gas. Hard.

And then, in a voice steeped in sorrow:

“Sometimes I imagine driving right off the edge.”

Every time I braced for death.
Every time he pulled the wheel at the last second.
Only then did I breathe again.

In my young mind, if he ever chose to end it with me in the car, it meant I was the one he loved most. I carried that belief as if it were sacred.

Years later, after INSEX, after burying what had broken me, after moving back to California with Kentucky, the urges resurfaced. This time inside my own body.

Intrusive thoughts.
Sudden flashes of violence.
Visions of disappearing over the edge of overpasses.
A nervous system frayed and burning.

I did not know what CPTSD was.
I thought trauma only counted if it was not your fault.
I believed I had chosen my pain, so I forfeited the right to say I was hurting.

Psych meds numbed and disconnected me.
Derealization.
Depersonalization.
A drifting soul in a half-remembered life.

I cut myself once in New York with a dull razor, dragging it back and forth until the world tilted and my body collapsed into vomit and shame. I realized I did not have the stomach for it.

So I punched myself instead.
Black eyes.
Bruised cheeks.
Invented stories about running into doors or bar fights.

But bruises heal slowly.
And the pain was never enough.

So I made a better plan.
Pills.

I hoarded them in a dark wooden box etched with symbols. I checked the box often, counting the pills, making sure I had enough for the moment I decided I could no longer stay. The ritual gave me a strange sense of control. A way out.

A doctor once suggested breathing.
I scoffed at her.

“Breathing cannot help someone as sick as I am.”

I was drowning.
Lost.
Addicted.
Unaware that my mind and body were screaming for help.

I attempted suicide five times.

Twice, they pumped my stomach and sent me home.
Three times I was hospitalized.
Once for three weeks.
Twice for well over a month.
The last time I was in a medically induced coma for five days because my liver had begun to fail.

In that coma, I traveled far into the out-of-body realms and near-death landscapes.
Mysteries I still carry and think of often.

My father drank every day I can remember. Not wildly, but steadily. Quietly. To manage the storms inside him. I loved him deeply. I still do. And I never made it to his funeral. I was too high, too ashamed, too afraid to face what I had lost.

We shared so much, he and I.
Our love of singing.
Our tender hearts.
Our inherited pull toward addiction and self-destruction.

When I learned Kentucky had taken his life, something ancient tore through me. A force like the earth cracking open. Every suicidal urge I had ever known came rushing back. Every cruel belief I held about myself surged to the surface. My throat closed. My chest seized. I punched my thighs, desperate to feel anything but the wave swallowing me.

Then a dear friend’s words echoed through my mind from years before.

“Kelly, after all the times you tried to end your life, if you were meant to be dead, you would be. Why not let the Universe show you your purpose?”

I return to that moment often.

I also think of the doctor I dismissed years ago when she told me to breathe. I always chose the harder path. I ran from monsters that lived inside me. I mistook trauma for truth. Fear for prophecy.

Now I understand that under the wrong conditions, I can unravel quickly. Lack of sleep. Fear. Stimulants. Stress. These things stir the old pot. But something is different now.

Breath is the first tool I reach for.
Always.

What I know now is that breath is not small or simple.
It is a doorway.
It is the medicine that leads me back to myself.
It is Spirit moving through my body, reminding me that even when everything feels impossible, there is a place inside me that is untouched by fear.

When I breathe with intention, something shifts. My chest loosens. My mind softens. The world becomes inhabitable again. And I remember the truth beneath all the noise: there is a quiet, luminous place inside me that I can always return to.

Breath takes me there because breath is Spirit.
It is the thread that reconnects me to what is real, what is loving, what is eternal.

And every time I choose to breathe, I choose to return to the world that once felt too heavy to bear.

Not because the world has changed, but because I have.

Breath is the presence that holds me.
The teacher who guides me back into my body.
The reminder that Spirit has never left me, even when I had left myself.

It is the path to peace, the way home, and the softest miracle I know.

Thank you for reading this piece with me, for walking beside me as I recover these lost parts of myself. Writing and sharing these stories is its own kind of healing, and knowing you are here with me means more than I can say.

If anything in this piece resonates with you, or stirs something tender or familiar, I would love to hear from you. You are welcome to reflect, share your own story, or simply let me know how this landed in your heart.

Your presence here matters.
Your voice matters.
And if you feel called to speak, I am listening.

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This is a wildly powerful time, and I know better than to hope for ease. I know that I am going to be dragged through the mud of my patterns, confused, overwhelmed, utterly exhausted, and begging for mercy. And then, as always, I hear that still small voice in my mind: Breathe, silly.

So I do. I close my right nostril and breathe through the left, long, slow, and deep, until a calm begins to wash through my body. My shoulders drop. My chest softens. A few tears of relief slide down my cheeks. The alchemy begins, not through effort, but through surrender.

A few weeks ago, my best friend and housemate, Joey, was let go from his full-time job. For about six years, we had both worked at a beautiful spiritual center in Ojai. I was let go back in April. It felt like a gift from the Universe, a gentle nudge that allowed me to step into my power and focus more deeply on healing arts and music. I had no trouble letting go of that version of me. It felt complete.

But when Joey was let go, something inside me cracked open.

I read his text while sitting in my car, and an immediate wave of terror flooded through me. My hands began to shake. My chest tightened. I couldn’t even drive. I just sat there, trembling. I called a dear friend and left a long, emotional voicemail. As I listened to my own voice, I could hear the fragility, the trembling, the smallness of the version of me that felt unsafe.

Then my mind began spinning its stories. I imagined us selling everything and living in a van again. The van we used to have, back when we were using. The one that carried us through chaos and desperation. Suddenly, that life felt real again, like I had time-traveled into an old nightmare. And before I could stop myself, the words came out of my mouth:

“Well, I guess I’m going to have to go back to sex work.”

And I broke. Big sobs, heavy with grief, tore through me. The little girl inside was screaming, Please don’t do this to us again. For a few minutes, it felt utterly real, like I had already fallen back into that version of myself I’ve worked so hard to heal.

But then another part of me watched it unfold. I saw the story for what it was, an old Hydra rearing its heads.

Because the truth is, we’re safe now. Joey wasn’t worried at all. We are capable and supported in ways we never were before. Yet the fear still had me by the throat, looping and gnawing at every corner of my mind.

And then it came again, that still small voice: breathe, silly.

So I did. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, over and over, until my body softened and the memories began to surface. I remembered the last time Joey was let go, when he lost the Leonard Cohen tour. That loss hit him so hard, and neither of us knew how to hold it. So we did what we knew. We ran straight into chaos. We burned it all down. The drugs, the money, the oblivion. I went back to sex work because I didn’t know another way to survive.

Yes, there were moments of magic and intensity during those years, and it was a fucking nightmare. A nightmare I still carry in my body.

And yet, the moment I recognized it, the moment I named the pattern and saw its shadow rising, it began to dissolve. The fear lost its fangs. The Hydra shrank back into myth. I was flooded with gratitude, laughter, and relief. Tears streamed down my face again, but this time they were light, cleansing, and holy.

In the old stories, Hercules was tasked with slaying the Lernaean Hydra, a serpent born from the swamps of the underworld. Each time he cut off one of its heads, two more grew in its place. The harder he fought, the stronger it became.

It wasn’t until he stopped reacting and began to burn each wound closed with fire that the Hydra lost its power. The beast was never just a monster. It was a mirror of Hercules’ own inner chaos. You can’t destroy the darkness by fighting it. You transform it through consciousness.

That is the medicine of Scorpio. The descent. The shadow. The sacred confrontation.

There are three stages of Scorpio’s evolution.

The Scorpion — instinctual, reactive, living close to the ground. It stings out of fear and defense.
The Eagle — rising higher, seeing with clarity. It learns to witness rather than attack.
The Phoenix — the final stage, the one who burns completely and is reborn through surrender and the holy fire of transformation.

Every Scorpio season calls us into this process, to descend, to face what still hurts, and to rise again, luminous and bare.

That day in the car, I met my Hydra. I faced the fear that had been waiting all along, patient and alive, ready to remind me that healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means remembering with love.

Fucking Scorpio season. Wild, brutal, holy. I bow in reverence and devotion to this painfully beautiful life, this endless cycle of death and becoming.

Scorpio season doesn’t come to ruin us. It comes to reveal what’s still alive beneath the surface: the fears that whisper, the wounds that still ache, the patterns that long to be seen. It is the season of death and rebirth, of surrendering what no longer fits so that our truest form can breathe again.

We all carry our own Hydras, our own stories that rise from the depths when the light thins. But the invitation isn’t to fight them. It’s to meet them with breath, with tenderness, with the unwavering awareness that every descent is a doorway to something sacred.

This is the medicine of Scorpio.
To face what burns.
To love on what we once feared.
To rise, shimmering, from our own ashes again and again

.

Lately, my insides have felt like a storm of contradictions. One moment I am open, raw, unguarded, spilling words and songs and truths into the world, peeling back the layers of my c-PTSD until something luminous shines through. Then, suddenly, the door slams shut. My hips ache as if centuries of grief have been stored there on the right side. My body whispers enough. It slows me down, folds me inward. I retreat into the cave of silence, into repair.

I want to meet these cycles with grace. To honor that these hormonal waves, these descents into stillness, are not weakness but part of the weaving. And yet, I often slide into shame. Shame for retreating. Shame for not staying endlessly open. Shame for needing rest.

This same pattern ripples through my relationships. I have a few close angels in my life who hold me gently through these tides, but it still makes the world of traditional relationships, family, friendship, and romance difficult to navigate. My neurodivergence, living with both autism and ADHD, means I process the world through a different filter. My trauma history means my nervous system was wired for survival, not ease. Together, they shape the way I connect, the way I flee, the way I ache for belonging.

Lately, I have been experimenting with felt sense, listening to my body in those fleeting, pre-verbal moments before the mind names what is happening. The tremble of breath before a wave of grief. The tightening in my throat before fear declares itself. It feels like learning a new language, one written in the pulse of blood and the ache of bone.

This writing journey has carried me deeper than I imagined. I thought I knew the weight of my past, but speaking it aloud, to people I love, to the page, and to myself, revealed a density I had not fully grasped. I have spent hours pouring memory onto paper, body buzzing, words tumbling faster than I could catch them. Reading them aloud afterward was like meeting my own ghost, realizing that the pain is still living in the architecture of my body.

For so long, I believed I was simply a highly sexual person. That desire was my natural state. I never connected it to trauma, that my earliest coping mechanism was masturbation at five years old, a secret ritual of self-soothing. I did not know the language then, but my body knew how to quiet itself, even in hiding. Layered on top of this were inappropriate encounters, assaults, and the heavy silence of never telling anyone. I thought it was all my fault. I thought I attracted it. And because attention, even unwanted attention, felt like a form of being seen, I kept longing for it.

Recently, I learned about sexual fawning, a trauma response threaded through complex PTSD. Just as the body may fight, flee, or freeze, it can also fawn. And when fawning weaves itself into sexuality, sex becomes a survival tool.

It can look like:

• Offering sex to avoid conflict or danger.

• Using sex as a shortcut for belonging and connection, because boundaries feel too unsafe to hold.

• Choosing sex as a way to regulate emotions, to escape the terror of silence or loneliness.

• Abandoning your own needs and body signals in order to please someone else.

The first time I read this definition, my throat closed, my breath shortened, heat rushed through me, my hands trembled, and tears spilled without warning. My body knew before my mind could catch up. These were the felt senses beneath the fear, recognition, grief, truth arriving in the language of the nervous system.

Looking back, I can see how often I used sex as a tool. A currency. A way to smooth conflict, to stitch myself temporarily into someone else’s warmth, to feel, if only for a fleeting moment, that I was wanted, safe, tethered. Sometimes it even felt like aliveness, as if my body was burning bright in intimacy, even though beneath it I was fragmenting. The paradox of feeling both deeply connected and utterly absent at the same time.

A few months ago, when the writing was pulling me into the marrow of these memories, I made a decision: no sex while I walk this road. My body is still unwinding its knots, still learning how to say “no” without shame, still remembering that intimacy does not require self-abandonment.

I went on a date recently with this intention clear. I even voiced it aloud. And yet, halfway through, I felt the pull of old patterns: It would be so much easier to just kiss him, to just give in, rather than to feel this rising awkwardness, this dissociation, this fear of disappointing someone. But I did not. I sat with the trembling. I said no, even though my body whispered how easy it would be to disappear into yes. And afterward, I was bone-deep exhausted, but also quietly proud.

I do not have a tidy ending for this. Perhaps there is not one yet. What feels important is that I wrote. That I told the truth of this moment, even in its mess. That I am still here, still listening, still finding language for the places I once silenced.

And if you find echoes of your own story in mine, please know that you are not alone. These patterns are heavy, but they are also human. We carry them in our bodies and we can also lay them down, piece by piece, with gentleness. If this speaks to you, I invite you to pause with me here, breathe into your own felt sense, and remember that your story, like mine, deserves to be witnessed with compassion.

From my heart to yours.

It is difficult for me to share this piece. Touched by Grace speaks openly about domestic violence, addiction, and the painful realities of loving someone with mental illness. Our years together were full of chaos and heartbreak, but also of tenderness, laughter, magic, music and profound love. We were both unwell and both lost in our addictions, trying to find our way with the only tools we had. I want to honor the complicated, tangled nature of our love and hold the beauty and the violence side by side with compassion for us both.

I fucking miss him. The feeling sinks into my bones like a physical ache, a weight that makes my ribs tighten and my throat close. Sometimes all I want is to scream until there is nothing left inside me. I wanted a do over. I wanted to get the band back together, to make music and write songs with him without the alcohol and stimulants that stole us away. For years I avoided music that reminded me of him. And then, today in the car singing at the top of my lungs to Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, he was there: passenger side, his hand on my thigh, tapping the beat. I did not dare turn to look at him in fear of losing the moment. So I stayed with his warm touch and let the tears fall.

I am taking time now to sit with all of it, the ruptures and the tenderness, and to bring the secret, scarred things into the light so they can be held with love. Below is the piece I wrote about his death. It contains hard, fractured memories that leave marks where no one can see them. I share it because those parts of me deserve to be witnessed, and because perhaps, in seeing my pieces, your own load might feel a little lighter.

Reader advisory: this work contains descriptions of domestic violence, graphic description of suicide, drug use, and mental illness; please read only if you feel safe and tend to your own heart with care.

Touched By Grace

This was not how I had imagined it.

I stood on a high overlook in the New Mexico mountains, surrounded by vast dark green pines stretching endlessly in every direction. It was June, and the heat was punishing, over 100 degrees, and this was only the first day.

I had booked a four-day Solo Nature Immersion almost a year earlier, back when life still felt spacious, when I believed in balance, clarity, and forward motion. I imagined long, quiet days of meditation beneath ancient trees... breath, prayer, and song guiding me deeper into my body and the land, drawing on the tools I had gathered during my first three years of recovery.

This was not how I imagined it.

I was unraveling. Naked, trembling, soaked in sweat, crouched beneath the thin shade of a lone pine, desperate to shield my skin from the relentless sun. The air was electric with the sound of cicadas, a deafening, hypnotic chorus that pushed me into a trance. My mind spun in an obsessive loop around one unbearable truth: Kentucky was gone.

Two weeks earlier, he had taken his life. He hung himself in his parents’ garage.

We had been enmeshed, entangled, and entwined for fourteen years. I had left him when the chaos consumed us, when it became too dangerous to stay. Still, the connection never broke. We wrote each other from across the void.

His last message was gentle. “I miss you. You’re still my best friend,” he said.

For a moment, I let myself feel the tenderness in it. But I knew too well how fragile the moment was, how quickly tenderness could twist into something else. Responding had always felt like walking a tightrope. And sure enough, the next message came like a blade.

“I KNOW HOW EVIL YOU ARE.”

My heart stopped. I froze. I couldn’t breathe.

I am not safe. It’s happening again. I can’t live like this.

Floods of memory, fear, violence, and survival washed through me.

I ran to the bathroom, cradling myself on the floor, covering my ears and rocking until the static in my head dissolved into a distant, ringing silence.

When I returned to the computer, I took a deep breath and did something I had never done before. I blocked him. I cut off all communication. I knew I might try again in a few months, but for now, my nervous system couldn’t take another unraveling. I needed space. I needed time to heal. I needed to tend to my heart.

And now, here I was, on this mountain, stripped of everything but the truth I had tried to avoid.

As the sun climbed to its highest point, I adjusted my body to the thin sliver of shade and closed my swollen eyes. I felt miserable, disoriented. I didn’t want to be there. What was I thinking? I longed for the comfort of my bed, the cool softness of cotton sheets, the grounding weight of Lucky’s freckled muzzle pressed to my side. I wanted to escape the grief. I felt exposed, raw, and completely unsafe.

There was no hiding here. That was the point. No food. No phone. No journals. No people. Only the land, the silence, the elements, and myself. It had sounded so right when I first signed up. I had felt a magnetic pull toward this experience.

And still, this was not how I imagined it.

Each time I closed my eyes that first day, I saw him. I saw the noose, the chair, his final moment. Sometimes I imagined the sound of his neck breaking. Other times, I saw him panic, struggling against the tightening cord. Each version ended the same. Each time, my body reacted, I screamed, I sobbed, I recoiled, begging some unseen force to stop it.

Eventually, the vision shifted. He saw me. Looked directly into my eyes. I tried to escape by opening mine, but it was no use. I was drowning in the weight of it. I clung to the earth, face in the dirt, searching for something, anything that could hold me.

Then came the rage. A fire I had never felt before. I was burning with guilt.

So I said the thing I had been avoiding since the day he died:

If I had not blocked him, he would still be alive. I could have helped him. I could have fixed this. I could have saved him.

This is my fault.

This is my fault.

This is all my fucking fault.

I sat with that pain. Let it swallow me, sitting in the dirt, rocking back and forth, mumbling to myself. Twitching every time the vision looped. I was remembering all the times he begged me to come home. I would always leave after one of our fights, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, holed up in some stranger’s apartment, high, trying to numb the ache, trying to make sense of how we became what we were.

Violent. Shattered. Lost.

I remembered that day in Louisville, eight years into our relationship. I had left him a year before and moved to Nashville with another man. I snuck away from my new life to see him. He was living in his parents' basement, and I had come for just a few hours. As I was getting ready to leave, he sat on the basement steps, reached out his hand, and passed me a note. It said, "I love you. Will you marry me?" For years, I had longed for those words. But now, everything had changed. The violence, the madness, the pain. He looked so innocent in that moment, sober, hopeful, scared. I looked at the note, smiled, tears spilling down my cheeks, and said, "It’s too late now." And I walked out and left him again, but it was not the last time.

When I was deep in addiction, living in Hollywood, I would leave for domination sessions with clients and ignore his texts asking if I was okay. I would be high with a stranger, lost in a meth-fueled spiral, craving the rush that erased my shame, the hit that made regret and panic disappear. I could not bear the weight of who I was becoming. I could not do my job without the high. I could not look at myself sober.

When I came home, the door would always be locked. I’d find the apartment destroyed, hammers and hatchets strewn across the floor, holes in the walls, words scrawled everywhere: “EVIL.” “YOU DESTROYED MY HEART.” “I LOVE YOU.” “YOU ARE MY BEST FRIEND.” “I HATE YOU.”

There was one Halloween night that had started out beautifully. We were getting along so well, laughing, connecting. Halloween was always our favorite holiday. We had spent weeks preparing. I sewed my own corpse bride dress. He had found the perfect black suit and a top hat. We spent the day watching Rob Zombie movies, applying zombie makeup on each other. We felt like ourselves again, creative, playful, in sync.

We drove to a party in Hollywood, high on a few lines of cocaine. There was a thick haze from the fog machine, blue lights spinning across the walls, loud music reverberating through our bones. We went straight to the bar. He ordered a double whiskey and a beer and drank them both immediately. His social anxiety was always intense, and drinking helped him manage it, at least that’s what he believed.

I went to the bathroom. When I came out, he was glaring at me, his eyes wild and unfamiliar. “Where were you?” he snapped. I tried to nervously laugh it off. “I was just in the bathroom. Do you want another drink?” I said, fawning nervously, always trying to fix it.

His jaw clenched. “Where the fuck were you? Did you fuck him?” He pointed to an empty corner. My stomach dropped.

“What are you talking about?” I said, trying to stay calm. “I was gone five minutes.”

“I know what you did. You’ve been gone all night.” He kept pointing to the corner like someone, or something was there.

I started to feel afraid. The light inside him was gone again. I told him I wanted to leave. We walked out to the car in tense silence. He stared out the window the entire drive, still and unreadable.

At a red light, he suddenly screamed, not in anger, but in terror and punched the side of my face. My head hit the driver’s side window. Pain exploded through my jaw. I screamed and started to cry, holding my face.

He looked at me, eyes wide with horror, screaming again and pointing like I was a monster. Then he threw the door open and stumbled out into the intersection. Someone shouted, “I saw what you did! Somebody stop him!” but he ran.

I slammed the door and drove off, heart pounding. More than anything, I was worried about him. I couldn’t stop seeing the terror in his eyes. What did he see when he looked at me?

I stayed up all night doing lines of cocaine, texting him, asking if he was okay. The next morning, I drove around looking for him. I found him curled up in an abandoned lot a mile from our place, bruised, bloodied, missing a shoe, suit torn. He looked like a dead body. I sobbed as I knelt beside him.

Eventually, I woke him enough to help him to the car. He smelled like vomit, and his arm hung heavy around my shoulder. When our faces were close, he reached out and touched my bruised jaw.

“What happened to you?” he asked softly, his eyes filled with tears. “Who did this?”

He didn’t remember.

And I didn’t tell him.

I never told him.

He would always forget what he did the next day. Look at me with tenderness and confusion, asking who had hurt me. And I would say nothing. I always said nothing.

Other flashbacks flooded in, blurry moments burned into my memory. Like waking from a nap to find him standing over me, swinging an orange extension cord, yelling about the demons inside me. I tried to protect myself with my arms. I broke a finger. My whole side bruised black for weeks. Or the time in Louisville, he stood at the top of the stairs holding a metal folding chair, shouting, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Then he hurled the chair at me. It hit me in the head. I blacked out. When I came to, he was standing over me, muttering about demons, then walked back upstairs and locked the door.

Sometimes I hurt him too. Once, during a fight in our practice space before a show, I grabbed one of his drum cymbals and threw it at him. It sliced his leg open from knee to ankle. The blood poured fast, like a truth too long silenced, spilling into the open before either of us could stop it. I took him to the hospital.

We never talked about it afterwards.

When I was in pain, I turned it inward. Bottles of pills. Punching myself in the face and thighs. Walking into traffic without looking. Sleeping with men who scared and excited me. Taking risks I hoped would end badly. I kept trying to punish myself, as if by suffering enough I could somehow atone for everything I couldn’t fix. I craved pain because it was a familiar language, one I had grown up speaking fluently.

Everything felt like it was too much. I was in constant overwhelm, drowning in tidal waves of shame, self-loathing, unworthiness, anxiety and fear. The intensity of my inner world made it unbearable to sit still. Hurting myself was a way to quiet the storm inside me, an attempt to silence the screaming voices of blame and guilt that never seemed to let up. I didn’t know how to soothe myself. I only knew how to suffer.

Other times, I hurt myself to feel anything at all. A twisted attempt to prove that I still existed beneath the panic and the pressure. We were both unraveling hard, in slow motion, flailing toward each other and away from ourselves.

His pain spilled out through blackout drinking, relentless accusations, crude insults, and haunted conversations with beings only he could see, sometimes naming them as demons. His eyes turned wild. Nights vanished into blank spaces.

My pain turned inward, silence, self-destruction, layers of lies. I disappeared piece by piece, burying truths so deep I couldn't admit them to myself.

And still, in the beginning, we had loved each other. We were drawn together. We were inseparable. When we were sober, we laughed and made love and planned our lives like the world was full of possibility. But every night, once the drinking started, everything changed. There was always a sense of unsafety, like waiting for a glass to break.

If I could go back and speak to that younger version of myself, the one who kept running, kept leaving, kept trying to hold it all together, I would hold her. I would tell her it’s not her fault. That she couldn’t fix him. That he was sick. That love isn’t meant to hurt like that. I would tell her she was worthy of a soft, safe place. And I would tell her the bravest thing she did was to walk away, even if it took her fourteen years.

The memories began to loosen their grip, uncoiling like smoke. And slowly, I felt myself returning, not to the past, but to the present.

Back to that mountain. Back to the heat, the dust, the sound of cicadas rising all around me like a wall of noise. There was no silence, only the deafening, pulsing chorus that mirrored the storm inside me. My bare skin pressed against the dirt, the vast sky arched overhead, and the ache in my chest pulsed louder than anything else.

I knew why I was there. If I had been anywhere else in the world, I might have used again, I might have attempted to end my life again. But here, stripped of distraction, stripped of escape, I faced it. I had to. I let the visions come. I let myself imagine him die, again and again, until the sun fell and the moon rose above the mountain.

As the sky began to darken, the air finally cooled. The cicadas fell silent, their electric chorus dissolving into a deep, encompassing stillness. I felt it then, the first full breath I'd taken in days, maybe weeks. It filled my lungs like water in a dry riverbed. I exhaled slowly, the weight of everything I had carried beginning, at last, to lift.

I rose on shaky legs and stepped toward the edge of the overlook. The trees below were a living ocean of green. The sky stretched wide, littered with stars. I took it all in, the vastness, the stillness, the unbearable beauty. And I let it break my heart open.

I lifted my arms to the stars and dropped to my knees.

It was a prayer. It was a surrender. It was everything I had never been able to say out loud. I poured it into the sky, into the trees, into the ache of the earth beneath me.

I am sorry. Please forgive me. I thank you. I love you.

That’s when it shifted. Something invisible and holy moved through me. My arms and legs lit up with goosebumps. The crown of my head pulsed. It felt like a current of light, of grief, of grace, rising from the earth and surging through my body, hollowing me out and filling me all at once.

Everything shimmered. The trees, the stars, the rocks. It was all alive, vibrating, interconnected. And I realized then: I wasn’t just speaking to Kentucky.

I was speaking to myself.

I loved him. I missed him. I was sorry for the ways I hurt him. And I was saying those same things to the wounded parts of me, the girl who stayed too long, the woman who ran, the one who kept trying to love through pain and survive by disappearing.

I saw her now. I saw all of her. And I didn't look away.

It had always been easy to forgive others. I had compassion for their wounds, their stories, their shadows. I understood that. But myself? That had always been impossible. I carried my guilt like armor, convinced that holding on to the shame was the price I had to pay to keep from becoming what I feared.

But there, in the dirt, beneath a sky scattered with stars, I felt it loosen.

I forgive myself for everything. For not knowing what to do. For the self-harm. For the things I did to survive. For not knowing how to love. For the lies. For the silence. For walking away. For choosing myself. For choosing to live.

I whispered it like a spell. A vow. A homecoming.

I knew it was only the beginning. But something had shifted. Something had softened.

I had been touched by Grace.

Forgiveness, now, feels like a softening. Like breath returning to the body after years of holding it. It feels like telling the truth without flinching. Like radical transparency, like never abandoning myself again. It feels like letting the past be what it was, not excusing it, not erasing it, but witnessing it with open eyes and an open heart. It feels like saying: We were sick. We were drowning in pain, trapped in patterns we didn’t yet know how to break. We were lost, both of us, stumbling through the dark with wounded hearts and desperate hands. And we were doing the best we could with the tools we had, with the awareness we had, with the limited consciousness we carried at the time.

And it feels like choosing, over and over again, not to let that story define the rest of my life.

I stayed on that mountain for three more days. No one came. Nothing interrupted me.

Each morning, I rose before the sun, standing naked in the morning light. Breathing full and deep and sensing the magic all around me. I walked barefoot on the dry pine needles, listening to the cicadas begin a new day. I hiked down to the water station about a half mile away, filled up my bottles, drank warm water from my canteen, and let the hot breeze move over my skin like prayer.

The pain didn’t vanish, but it no longer owned me. I cried. I laughed. I sang. I lay on the ground and watched the clouds roll in, a storm building in the distance. I saw the first lightning strikes far off, and when the thunder came, I was ready for it. I stood on the edge of the mountain again, naked, arms raised in a V, my right leg bent at the knee and resting against my left thigh—and I invoked the Goddess Kali with dance. I called in fierce liberation, radical transformation, primal power, and sacred destruction that clears the way for rebirth.

The temperature dropped, the wind picked up, soft at first, then stronger, then wild. Clouds rolled across the sky like waves gathering speed. And then the rain came, sudden and fierce, drenching my body, turning the ground beneath me to slick, fragrant mud. Still, I stayed.

I continued my devotion, dancing in the storm, arms raised, heart open, offering myself to the Goddess, to the Earth Mother, to the pain that had scorched me for decades. My voice rose with the thunder. My feet pounded the soaked ground in rhythm with the lightning overhead.

When the wind grew too strong to stand in, I collapsed onto the earth, pressing my naked body into the wet, trembling soil.. Lightning split the sky all around me, and I did not flinch. I felt it in my bones, this was a holy moment. A sacred communion between my grief and the wildness of the world. The earth held me the way I had always longed to be held, not gently, but powerfully, fiercely, as if to say: You belong here. You are part of this. You do not carry this alone.

My final morning, I woke feeling brave. I had made it. I had not quit. I had walked through every fire. I had cried a lifetime of tears, screamed a thousand silent prayers, and unearthed the parts of myself I once thought I had lost forever.

I drove back to my home in Ventura with the windows down and the sky wide open above me. I felt reborn, lighter, softer, more whole. Something had shifted in me. There had never been room to fully grieve our relationship while he was still alive. But now, in the silence of his absence, I finally began to touch those memories and start to heal. And for the first time in years, I felt the space to begin again.

Thank you so much for reading this. From my heart, to yours.

I told myself I was going in search of adventure. I told myself I was going to fall in love, to find the person I was meant to be with. I felt a strong pull toward Cabo, and I followed it. That is something I have always done, follow the pull without a plan. No structure. Just a hunger for something else and the belief that love would find me if I kept moving.

The memories from that time are foggy. Blurred. They have stitched themselves together into a patchwork of scent, light, and emotion more than a linear story. I think that is what trauma does. My timelines don’t just blur, they fracture, overlap, vanish, reappear. Sometimes it feels like trying to hold water in my hands.

But I remember this: I was looking for something. I wanted to be loved enough to finally feel okay. I thought if I could just find the right person, they might reach into the hollowed-out parts of me and fill them with something beautiful.

I made friends with some of the locals and drifted into a rhythm of wandering. Most days were a haze of sunshine, weed, cheap tequila, and fish tacos. I roamed the beaches, floated through the markets, let time melt in the heat. At night, I slipped into the clubs, dark, humid spaces pulsing with music, and danced until I was slick with sweat.

Then I would scan the crowd for someone handsome. A tourist. Someone I could make want me.

I loved the game. The moment I saw desire spark in his eyes, it checked every validation box. It made me feel powerful, wanted, in control, and even special for a little while.

Sometimes these encounters turned into brief romances, four or five days if they were staying long enough. We would wake up tangled in sheets, and he would order breakfast like we were something real. He would kiss me like he meant it, talk about plans for the rest of the week. And I would believe it. I always thought I was falling in love.

And when he left my heart would break, and then I would start over again, like hitting reset on a loop I did not yet know I was caught in.

Sometimes it was just one night.

There were plenty of times I slipped out quietly after they had fallen asleep, pulling on my clothes in the dark, avoiding the mirror, trying not to make a sound. Often, it hit me as soon as the high wore off: I was not attracted to this person. Not really. Maybe I never was. Maybe it was just the game, the rush, the momentary illusion that I had power. And when that illusion cracked, when the liquor ran out or the drugs wore off, I would feel it. The emptiness. The shame.

I would find myself back out on the streets of Cabo at 3 a.m., barefoot in my heels, the night pressing in around me like a truth I could not bear to name.

There was a deep, cavernous emptiness that followed me home on those nights. A kind of loneliness that did not just ache, it echoed. It asked questions I wasn’t ready to answer. What is wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? Why does it feel worse after?

It was not just shame, it was grief. Grief for the parts of me I kept handing away in exchange for attention. Grief for the girl who kept hoping to feel chosen, but always walked away emptier than before.

I did not know then that I was chasing connection through disconnection. I only knew that I felt hollow, and I did not know how to stop.

Sometimes, he would leave in the night. And I would wake up to a pile of cash on the nightstand.

The first time it happened, I thought it was… sweet. A little odd, yes, there was no note, no goodbye. But I told myself he must have liked me, and just did not know how to say so. I even remember thinking: If I ever left money for someone I cared about, I would at least leave a note…

I shared this thought with my friend Rachel, one of the locals I had grown close to. She was an escort, and when I told her, she burst into laughter. Bent over, tears streaming down her face. She could hardly breathe.

I laughed with her for a minute, confused, trying to keep up, until I realized she was not laughing with me. That was the moment it landed: He thought I was a prostitute.
He probably thought that from the second I approached him, confident, charming, playing my usual game. I thought I was in control. He thought I was for sale.

And just like that, something shifted. My stomach dropped. My face flushed.
I felt foolish. Exposed. Dirty. Not because anything had changed, but because I suddenly saw the same night through a different lens. And it devastated me.

That shift in perspective cracked something open. For a brief moment, I felt like I could see, like I understood how this version of the world worked. It was dizzying. Jarring. But it also made sense in a way nothing else had.

And then, just like that, I would forget.

That was the pattern for decades. A flash of clarity, then the slow dissolve back into delusion. It would repeat over and over. That aching in-between, knowing for a second, then losing it again, was almost worse than not knowing at all.

It is like catching a glimpse of the truth in the dark, just long enough to know it is there… and then stumbling forward again, blind.

So there are countless stories, brief romances, one-night tangles of sweat and tequila, hungry touches that never reached the places that really ached. Sex became a repeating motif, a way to feel momentarily chosen, to believe I had power, to quiet whatever was howling inside me. I followed every spark of desire without pausing to ask where it came from or what it cost. I did not see the patterns; I only saw the next face, the next mouth, the next chance to be wanted. Each encounter fed the same illusion and deepened the same wound: I kept mistaking attention for intimacy, validation for love. I did not reflect, I reacted. I compulsively moved from urge to impulse without stopping to ask why, without wondering what wound I was feeding.

After a while, the money ran out.

I did not want to escort, not intentionally, anyway. The thought of it stirred up so much fear. There was a new strip club in town, and it happened to be run by someone I knew from the clubs I had worked at in Los Angeles. He told me that, because I was American, I was not allowed to work there full-time, but I could dance on their Amateur Night and keep whatever I made on stage.

The idea of stripping in the same small town where I wandered the beaches and bought groceries made my skin crawl. It felt exposed. Shameful. But I did not see another option. So when Monday came around, I showed up.

Word got out quickly. A few of the locals, people I knew, came to watch. They said they were there to "support" me. But it did not feel like support. It felt like humiliation.

I have always been ruled by at least three versions of myself. There are more, I am sure, but these three are the most familiar.

One is confident, unshakable, commanding. She knows exactly what to do and how to do it. She walks in heels like she owns the earth and never hesitates.

The second is soft-spoken. Timid. Uncomfortable in her own skin. She folds into herself when people look too closely. She says yes when she wants to say no. She does not know how to ask for help. She does not know how to leave.

And then there’s the third. The cruel one. The voice that lurks beneath every moment of vulnerability, ready to lash out. She is sharp-tongued and relentless, a self-appointed warden of shame.

And on that night, they all came alive inside me, pulling in opposite directions.

The dread began before I even got there. I had tried to get other jobs, selling timeshares, handing out flyers, but nothing paid. Nothing stuck. So I drank to quiet the voice in my head, the one that hissed, You’re disgusting. Everyone’s going to see how ugly you are. They’re going to laugh at your body. You’ll never be able to show your face in this town again.

That was my mind without meth.

I told myself I could get through the night without it, but as the music started and the lights shifted, I felt my body shutting down. Fear swelled. My throat tightened. I peered out at the crowd, searching for something, anything to hold onto. And that’s when I saw him.

The man from the hotel room. The one who had given us the meth a few days earlier.

That memory returned in a flash, the sourness of it, the grime.

Rachel owed money to someone dangerous, and getting drugs from this man was the only way to pay them back. She asked me to come with her, to help, to stay safe. The hotel room was rank with the smell of sweat and piss. He was obese, twitchy, paranoid. He hadn’t showered in weeks, and I could literally smell his asshole.

He wouldn’t sit down. Wouldn’t stop peering through the curtains. Rachel tried to distract him, to seduce him, but nothing worked. So I took off my top. She took off hers. We started laughing, pretending to enjoy ourselves. He finally turned away from the window and pressed himself against me, sweaty, clammy, reeking. My skin crawled. I turned my head to hide the tears forming in my eyes.

Rachel saw. She pulled his attention back to her, and that was enough. He gave us a few lines of coke and a couple of shots. Then they disappeared to the back of the room, and I sat alone, surrounded by filth and fear.

But we left with the meth.

Rachel gave me some to take with me, “in case of emergency.” And standing backstage that night, shaking in my heels, it felt like the emergency had arrived.

I pulled the meth from my pocket and did a big line. It burned like fire and made everything inside me go still. Fear dissolved. Insecurity vanished. And the other version of me rose up like smoke, like she was always there, powerful, unshakable, and impossible to hurt.

I had made a hundred dollars that night. It doesn’t seem like much now, but this was almost 30 years ago, and down there, it was enough to eat for a few weeks. Enough to survive. I was still onstage, standing at the edge of the runway, when a group of four American men caught my attention in one of the booths. They were loud, wild, half-drunk, and full of life, shouting over the music, knocking back shots, leaning into each other like they’d been friends forever.

At first, I just felt relief. Something familiar. Something that reminded me, even faintly, of home.

But then I saw him.

One of the men was not part of the chaos. He sat still, slouched back in the booth, staring off into the opposite corner of the club with an expression I could not read. An escort was draped over his lap like a blanket, her arms around his neck, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was not touching her. He barely blinked.

He was beautiful in the way James Dean was beautiful, like a fallen angel with a secret. Brooding. Messy. Perfect.

And something inside me ached at the sight of him. I wanted to be the girl on his lap. I wanted to be the thing that woke him up.

While I stood there, watching him, the other three noticed me and lit up, waving like they had just spotted an old friend. One of them broke away from the group and swaggered down toward the stage. He was charming in a musician kind of way, talkative, a little cocky, totally at ease.

“We’re playing a few shows around town,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see another American girl here.”

He smiled widely, his eyes glassy with booze, and opened his hands like he had a gift.

“Hold out your hands,” he said.

I hesitated, then opened my palms. He dropped a handful of pills into them.

“Ecstasy,” he said, grinning like Santa Claus. “They’re good.”

I nodded, murmured something like thanks, but my eyes kept drifting past him, back up to the booth, to the man with the suit and the faraway stare.

He still had not looked my way. He still hadn’t moved.

“Maybe we’ll see you around,” he said, and then turned and climbed back up to his friends.

I went backstage, heart buzzing and strange, and started getting dressed as the lights came up and the music died out. I peeked back toward the booth one more time, but they were already gone.

I do not know what I was expecting. I just knew I felt it, that pull. Something in him was calling to something in me. And whatever it was, it was not done yet.

As I walked outside, I saw him stumbling out of the liquor store. The man behind the counter ran out, yelling for him to stop. Just as this happened, the Federales pulled up. They grabbed him, yanked open his jacket, and pulled out a small bottle of stolen wine.

He could barely stand. His eyes were glazed over. His body swayed with the drunken weight of someone who had long since blacked out. He was not making sense. He was not resisting. And then one of them hit him hard in the side of the head.

He crumpled, and they laughed. Blood streamed from his nose as he hit the pavement. Then they kicked him a few times, and he didn’t move.

My heart seized. Without thinking, I ran toward them, shouting “¡Alto! ¡Alto, por favor!”

I had no plan. Just a hundred dollars in my pocket and a handful of drugs. But I could not watch them hurt him.

In broken Spanish and frantic English, I tried to explain. “He’s my cousin. He didn’t mean to steal it. He thought I paid. He’s drunk. He didn’t know.”

They laughed again. At me. At him.

One of them kicked him hard again, in the ribs, while he lay unconscious. I cried out and dropped to my knees. Tears welled up in my eyes. My voice cracked.

“Please don’t hurt him,” I begged. “Please… I will give you whatever you want.”

And I meant it. I meant it with all of my heart. I felt like I was there to save him.

And that feeling, that ache to save him, never ever left.

They wanted $100. I could not believe it. I was beyond grateful to give them all of the money I had. In exchange, they gave me Kentucky.

That first night…
I did not know his name. He had no ID. No phone. No hotel room key.
Just a bloodied face, a limp body, and a sweetness in him that peeked through the wreckage.

I used my shirt to wipe the blood from his face. Sometimes, he would come to, just for a moment, and smile at me like I was the moon. He touched my face like I was something precious, and in those brief flashes of lucidity, I felt it: I love you. Not the kind of love that comes from knowing someone. The kind that comes from remembering them.

It was just after 4 a.m. when I finally got him to his feet. He could barely walk, but we started the two-mile journey back to where I was staying. Most of the time, I dragged him, holding him upright with everything I had.

Other times, he would suddenly jolt awake, straighten up like nothing was wrong, and begin to march forward, knees up high, like he knew exactly where he was going. He would look at me, and we would both laugh this strange, breathless laughter that felt like magic.

In those moments, I felt like we were already something. Like fate had sewn us together under a foreign sky. I did not know his name. I did not know anything about him. But I was sure, I was absolutely sure, that meeting him, saving him, was the reason I had come to Cabo in the first place, and I knew that I was carrying him home.

By the time we slipped back into the tiny apartment, dawn had already bleached the sky. Rachel was still asleep, but her ten‑year‑old daughter, Amber, padded out to meet us, eyes wide with quiet purpose. She offered to help me tend to the stranger I carried.

Together we eased him onto the couch, my usual bed, unlaced his dusty shoes, and bathed the dried blood from his face. We coaxed a few sips of water past his cracked lips before tucking a blanket around him.

When Amber finally crawled back into bed, I stayed. Sitting cross‑legged on the floor with my back against the couch, I studied the delicate slope of his nose, the dirty blond brown gleam of his hair, the crescent of his mouth. I did not even know his name, yet something in me recognized him.

In that soft, blue hour, I fell, utterly and without warning, for an unconscious, nameless man I would spend the next fourteen years trying to save.

But Sixx was born because I needed someone else to be. Kentucky named me in the parking lot of the Olive View County Hospital, the day we were supposed to visit his brother, who was dying of cancer. We sat in my white Ford Explorer, grief and cocaine colliding under the shade of a tree. I wanted to fix it for him, to distract him from the ache, anything to not sit in the weight of death. He said the name Sixx out loud, and I felt it land in my body with a subtle shift. My posture straightened, a little taller, a little prouder. A crooked half-smile curled across my lips. In that moment, I became her. I buried Betty beneath the floorboards and locked her away with a thousand bolts. I would not let her rise again.

As Sixx, I apprenticed with a master. I learned the craft of BDSM like an ancient trade; voice lowered, movements slowed, every gesture deliberate. Power radiated from restraint, from silence, from the precision in presence. And then one day, I walked into a room and felt my client tremble at the mere sight of me. Mistress Sixx. In that moment, I knew she had fully taken root. I loved her. I loved the power. I loved the intoxication of command. But the techniques I carried forward were not born out of nowhere. They were inherited from INSEX, from the things that had once been done to me. Reenactment disguised as art. Trauma passed along, reframed as ritual, but still echoing with shadows.

By the time I had been working as a Professional Dominatrix for many years, INSEX had only grown in popularity. Eventually, some clients began to recognize me as Betty. What once felt like a buried secret suddenly became a lure. My name spread. Curiosity turned into obsession, and soon the requests arrived for me to reenact my old scenes. Only now, the roles were reversed: I was the one wielding the power, inflicting the pain.

Among countless encounters, one stands apart: the night I entered a sprawling mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Even now, I can feel my body tense when I remember stepping inside. Something in the house felt off. It was an energy I encountered often going into these homes, like echoes of the past rising up into the present. The air was heavy and quiet until I heard it: muffled cries of a woman, the sharp crack of a whip, and then, worse than anything, the sound of PD’s voice, laughing as he tormented another girl. The sound hit my body like ice water. My throat closed, my steps faltered. My heels clicked against white marble as I followed a stranger down the long hallway lined with windows. Beyond the glass, Los Angeles sprawled below, lit up in a million trembling lights.

The hallway seemed to stretch on forever, bright and sterile. Each click of my stiletto heels echoed louder, my pace slowing as dread climbed up my spine. Halfway down, I heard a voice from inside the room, thick with excitement: "Is she here?" The words cut through me, confirming what waited ahead as I realized they were watching My Video. At last, we reached the doors, red, tall, gleaming. My breath slowed, shallow. When the doors opened, I walked into a theatre of my own fragmentation.

The room was drenched in red and black. A man, ancient, lay propped up in a bed, oxygen mask clinging to his face. Beside him, a young woman knelt, her eyes cast down, refusing to meet mine. On a black loveseat sat a couple, their gaze locked on the screen. The screen, larger than life, was frozen on an image of Betty. Blue eyes wide with terror, a plastic bag taped around her neck, screaming silently into the camera. I almost never looked at the lens back then, but here she was, pleading through the glass for it to stop. And now I stood in that same room, unable to turn away from her gaze, unable to turn away from myself.

It felt like an eternity. I could have screamed. I could have shattered everything in that room with the rage that rose in me. But I swallowed it. I pushed her down again, deeper into the basement, locked her away once more. Fragility could not be shown here. Not in front of him. Not in front of anyone.

The old man’s eyes were wild, hungry, trembling with excitement. There was a pride flickering in his expression too, as if congratulating himself for pausing the video at the exact moment of my terror, the briefest moment of eye contact captured forever on the screen.

“Huh,” I said, nodding my head as I took in the entire scene. A smirk curled at my lips as I slid into Mistress Sixx. “You've been waiting for this a long time, haven't you, old man?” A moan rattled from deep in his chest as he licked his dry, cracked lips. I knew his fantasy: to see me reverse the roles, inflicting on her, the young woman, the very cruelties that had once broken me.

My body revolted.

Instead, I reached down, took her hand, and, locking eyes with the old man, said, “I know exactly what to do with her.” I pulled her off the floor and led her to the huge bathroom, locking the door behind us.

Her eyes darted everywhere but mine, her body taut with fear. I told her clearly, firmly, that I wasn’t going to hurt her, that we could change the dynamic of the night, she just needed to trust me and do as I said.

I lit the pipe and we smoked meth together, the chemical heat scratching at our throats, and in that twisted instant it bonded us, two women caught in a storm, clinging to the same toxic breath. She whispered her fear, her arrangement, her silence, and I reassured her again that tonight, she had a choice. For the first time, a flicker of relief crossed her face.

So I dressed her in latex, handed her a whip, and made her my assistant. We walked back out together, hand in hand, two dominatrixes stepping into the spotlight as I shifted the focus. I collared the couple, reenacted the video with them, and redirected the hunger away from her.

A small victory, a fragile triumph. But inside, I knew what had happened: I had stared into Betty’s eyes, and once again, I chose to abandon her. Part of me understood that by taking the girl as my assistant, I was trying to save myself in that frozen frame on the screen, but I didn’t save her. I didn’t even acknowledge her, the terrified version of me staring back, pleading to be seen.

This was the truth of my life as Mistress Sixx. Power and hollowness. Mastery and fragmentation. I held my clients’ shadows, their darkest secrets, their urges and confessions, and I carried my own. It was intoxicating, yes, but the weight of it hollowed me out. I became responsible for everyone, for their pain, their shame, their brokenness. The burden was unbearable. I carried it in my bones, a weight that pressed against my chest and followed me long after the sessions ended. The echoes of cries, confessions, and whispered revelations of men who laid their darkest truths at my feet clung to me like smoke. There was no rest, only the steady march of sleeplessness, each breath pulled deeper into a haze that blurred every edge of reality. Their shadows bled into mine until I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

Now, I see it differently. Betty and Sixx were not separate lives, but opposite poles of the same wound. Betty, abandoned and silenced. Sixx, armored and worshipped. Both fragments of me.

Today, I am learning to hold them both, to cradle their extremes in the same pair of hands. Power is no longer the mask I wear, nor the absence that hollowed me out. It is the river that runs through me, carrying tenderness and fire, destruction and creation. It is not about domination or escape, but compassion, the ability to embrace every version of myself and whisper to each, You belong here too.

I see Betty’s empty stare, the hollow blue eyes that once pleaded for release, and I do not turn away. I see Sixx’s crooked smirk, her deliberate movements, her intoxicating command, and I do not deny her either. They stand on opposite shores of the same body, and I am the bridge between them.

The alchemy is not in erasing them, but in finally letting them coexist: Betty with her silence, Sixx with her fire, fragments no longer, but a whole. In this wholeness, I find something new, an openness that is not performance, a strength that is not armor, a presence that is grounded in compassion and heart-centered connection. I am all of them, and I am more. The work now is to keep holding, to keep loving, until the wound itself becomes the doorway to grace

.

Scattered in my way, I saw you stumbling, you came into my life full blast.
The walls around us kept on crumbling, and I fell for you, I felt real fast.

You were the only one, you were the only one, you were the only one…for me.

We burned so bright it left us blinded, two tangled souls in a heavy haze.
I lived in dreams, my heart misguided, and we stumbled through that hollow daze.

And you were the only one, you were the only one, you were the only one…for me.

I can feel you in the silence, breathing in I let it be.
Through this grief, I find my center, in the stillness I can see.
’Cause you were the only one… for me.

We fell apart, our wounds wide open, bound by the weight we couldn’t take.
I hid my truth in lies and in the shadow, caught in the dark we couldn’t face.

You were the only one, you were the only one, you were the only one…for me.

I can feel you in the silence, breathing in, I let it be.
Through this grief, I find my center, in the stillness I can free.
’Cause you were the only one…You were the only one… You were the only one for me.

Grief has become a portal for me. It strips away the illusions and distractions and delivers me straight into the marrow of being alive. Yes, of course it hurts, and it also cracks us wide open.

I remember the night I found out about Kentucky’s suicide. It was a full moon and everything in my mind shattered. I began rocking back and forth, rubbing my thighs with heavy hands, curling my fists, and punching my legs, something I used to do in addiction to calm the pain of intrusive thinking. A far-off howl rose out of me, pure animal, filled with despair and regret, the longing for all that would never be. All my old violent thoughts returned in a flood: ending my life, slitting my wrists, stepping into traffic, jumping from a mountain. If you have never experienced the intensity of intrusive thoughts, it is hard to grasp how seductive the compulsion can feel.

Joey was beside me, steady and watchful, making sure I did not sink too far into my own mind. The unhealed trauma of my years with Kentucky came roaring back with more force than I ever remembered. I wanted to resist, but it was too strong. So I did the thing I had avoided all my life: I felt it. I surrendered to the waves of emotion so fierce I was sure they would kill me.

Early in recovery, I worked at the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai. From all the listening and reading, one teaching settled in my ribs: radical presence. If I gave myself to the thoughts, the guilt, the regret, the endless what-ifs, I would drown. If I stayed with the bare, living moment, there was a chance. So I let the moment hold me and reached for the thread I could trust: my voice. It began with the simplest sound, a hum. Soft. Gentle. Here.

In those rawest edges of grief, I discovered the hum that remains, a sound that threads me back to those I’ve lost and to the hidden places inside myself I thought I could never touch again. My own voice, I realized, has always been medicine. Long before I understood the science of the nervous system or the sacred power of vibration, I had been humming to survive. As a child, when I was overstimulated or frightened, I would rock and let little sounds spill out, tones repeated over and over that softened the overwhelm. Now I see that this was my body’s wisdom, a form of vocal stimming that helped regulate my system before I even knew the word regulation.

Still, in the moments of deepest fear, when an old storm froze me completely, my throat would clamp shut. Silence became my armor. No voice, no sound, no breath. It has taken years of remembering to learn that the way back is not force but gentleness: to hum. To close my mouth, breathe through my nose, and let a quiet vibration rise.

Sometimes, though, when the throat is locked and the chest feels bound, those first attempts at sound make me feel even smaller. The tones come out thin, cracked, and painful. Yet if I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths through the nose, then let a hum slip out in the lowest note I can comfortably hold, the vibration begins to move through me. The lower the tone, the deeper and more soothing the resonance in the body. After a few minutes, something shifts, the grip around my throat loosens, the tightness softens, the clenched hand of fear releases. Doing this outside, in contact with the earth, makes the softening even more profound.

Nose-breathing paired with humming guides the body into the parasympathetic state, slowing the heart, lowering blood pressure, and activating the vagus nerve. Science confirms what my body had been telling me all along: sound heals.

But voice is more than physiology. It is the language of the soul. Voice is prayer. Breath is prayer. Every hum, every chant, every trembling note we allow to pass through our throats is a way of reaching toward the unseen realms, of weaving ourselves into the fabric of something larger than our own bodies.

I sing to the mountains to honor their stillness and their ancient, unshakable wisdom.
I sing to the wind to rediscover my own breath and remember its freedom.
I sing to the waters to enter the deep emotional currents that move through me and remind me that all things flow.
I sing to the fire to ignite my power, creativity, and passion, letting the spark become flame.
And I sing to the ether, to the void, to the vast and infinite expanse, to remember that consciousness is endless, and that my luminous human voice belongs to it, belongs with it, belongs within it, and beyond belonging, IT IS IT. In each vibration, we hold the wisdom of all that has ever been and all that will ever be.

In sound, I am not separate; I am in union with All That Is.

This is how grief has taught me to live: not by turning away from the silence, but by leaning into it. By humming into the ache, by singing to the elements, by letting the vibration carry what words alone cannot hold.

And always, in the stillness, I hear them, the beloveds who remain just beyond the veil. Their presence lives in the resonance. Their love hums back to me through the song.

Grief is not only a wound but also a teacher. It invites us to use what we already carry, our own breath, our own vibration, our own voice, as medicine. We do not need to be singers to sing. We do not need to be healed to hum. We only need to remember that sound is ancient, primal, and deeply human.

So when the silence feels heavy, when fear closes the throat, when sorrow feels unbearable, hum. Hum to yourself. Hum to the ones you’ve lost. Hum to the mountains, to the wind, to the waters, to the fire, to the vastness of ether. Let your hum become a thread between worlds, a prayer that softens grief into connection.

Because sometimes the simplest sound carries us home.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this work. If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you! Reply, share your story, or say hi. We heal together.

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Even as I remember.

This work is not only for me, it is for them too. For the men I loved so deeply, and those fractured, frightened versions of us, still pacing through the haunted corridors of memory. It is for the ones who could not yet see beyond the static in their minds, or the shadows in the corners, or the demons they swore lived inside my skin. We have the power to shift the narrative and the timeline, to soften the edges, to release each other from the bonds we forged in fear.

And So It Is.

The Shack

We were living high in the mountains, in a borrowed shack that was never truly ours, long past the point of welcome. There was nowhere else to go, so we stayed, the walls closing in around us. Inside, the air was thick with dust and the sour scent of sweat and stale urine. Bottles of yellow liquid, crumpled foil, glass pipes, oversized lighters, restraints, and broken pieces of pleasure, every corner carried the debris of lives unraveling.

When the drugs ran out, the tension began, slow, certain, coiling itself through the small space until every breath felt taut and dangerous. As the last bowl burned away, I braced for the change, for the moment his gaze would widen, his voice would sharpen, and the weight of his need would crush the air between us.

I thought it was about me then, a belief carved in childhood. I had learned early to think I was the sole reason for someone else’s pain, that if I could be good enough, careful enough, loving enough, they would be okay. That old pattern took the wheel without me even noticing. I thought if I could only say the right words, do the right thing, love him hard enough, I could anchor him. Instead, my words were salt in a wound I could not see. I followed him, tried to soothe him, but in my urgency, I cornered him, until he was no longer a man I knew but an animal pressed against the bars.

He screamed, fell to the floor, crawled into the trash heap in the corner, and came up with a length of wood, a two-by-four, splintered and raw. For a heartbeat, I thought it would come down on me. His eyes locked on mine, black with pain, and then turned inward. He brought the wood down on his own head again and again, each blow a thunderclap in the small room, shouting about the pain in his head, the static, the noise that wouldn’t stop. I could not move. I could only taste the dust, thick in my throat, feel the fear rooting my feet to the floor.

Here in the remembering, I feel my chest tighten. I draw a slow breath in through my nose, then let it leave me through pursed lips, the sound like wind through a narrow canyon. Again and again. My thumb and ring finger meet in Prithvi Mudra, the gesture of Earth, grounding me. I whisper to her, the frozen girl in the corner, You are safe now. You are safe, and you are loved. And to him, I send love into his heart, press a calm cool hand to his forehead, and forgive us both for all the ways we burned each other.

The Hatchet

Different town. Different man. But the air was the same, thin, sharp with the taste of sleepless days. We had been up for eight nights, our bodies brittle from deprivation, our minds bending at the edges of reason. He carried a hatchet, bare legs pale in his white underwear, moving from room to room with the slow, deliberate gait of a soldier in enemy territory. The snow outside, rare and fragile, caught the streetlamp glow and made the night feel otherworldly, unreal.

His paranoia had been growing for days, a shadow slipping between us. Sometimes he would look at me and see me. Then his eyes would shift, and I knew he was seeing something far more sinister, a skin-walker wearing my face and body, but not me at all. I stood by the window, trying to remember what normal felt like, when he crept in, lights out, low to the ground. His hand was ice cold as it clamped over my mouth.

It was a whisper, but there was an urgency and a loudness that cut into me.

Shhh. They’re out there. Don’t let them see you. DID YOU BRING THEM HERE?

His breath came in sharp bursts, his grip unrelenting. He kept me pinned to the ground for what felt like an endless stretch of time, his palm sealing my mouth, shifting between suspicion and certainty, and sometimes even giggling as he promised he knew he would catch them this time. My eyes caught our shapes in the mirror, suspicion and captivity twisting together, a writhing tangle of flesh, my sight fractured by fear and the long ache of sleeplessness, until his head tilted toward a sound only he could hear.

Without warning, he sprang to his feet and yelled, PERIMETER CHECK! before vanishing into the snow, weaving between trees, crouching behind rocks, bare feet sinking into the cold.

Now, I return to that moment in meditation. I kneel beside him in the snow, not to argue him out of his vision, but to meet him in it. To say, I hear you. I may not see what you see, but I know that you do. I send love into his heart, not to change him, but to set us both free from the cold grip of that night.

The Pillow

Years later, another chapter, and yet the same undercurrent. We had been making music again, finding a fragile rhythm that felt almost like normal. After a show, whiskey found his lips, and with it the old shadows returned. His eyes grew darker, more suspicious; he glared at me with disdain. By the time we got home, he seemed distracted, avoiding my presence entirely. I had taken a pill to sleep, letting my body sink into the mattress, hoping to end the night before the chaos began. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was my own breath against the pillow, and the small, quiet relief of believing we had ended the evening without any drama after the show.

I woke to darkness, thick and suffocating. A crushing weight pressed over my face, sealing my mouth, flooding my lungs with fire. My eyes flew open but saw nothing. My arms flailed in panic, my mind sluggish from the sedative, unable to comprehend. Above me, his voice trembled, breaking between sobs and conviction: I love you, I’m not trying to hurt you, I just need to get the demons out before they kill us.

The more I thrashed, the tighter he pressed the pillow down. My lungs screamed. My hands found his beard, yanking hard, my legs kicking with whatever strength the pill hadn’t stolen from me. I rolled away, gasping, scrambling to the corner on all fours, animal-quick and trembling. He stumbled toward the nightstand, grabbed whatever bottle was closest, rubbing alcohol, and drank, eyes wide with fear and something like devotion.

We have to get them out of you, he said, as if it were the only truth in the world. And I believed him. Somewhere deep inside, a part of me felt he was right, that there was something in me, dark and dangerous, that needed to be purged. It was the same thread woven through my childhood: the belief that I was the cause of someone else’s pain, and that if I could only be good enough, pure enough, it would fix everything. That if I allowed myself to be remade, stripped of whatever demons they saw, maybe we could both be free.

And here, now, I enter the room in my mind. I walk to the girl crouched by the door, trembling, animal-eyed. I kneel beside her. My hand rests over her heart, and I call her back to me:

Every part of you that splintered in this moment, come home. We are safe now.

I can see a gold circle of light rising around him and me, wide enough for us both. We look up at each other, and in that glow, we truly see that our wounding and our pain have bled into everything, yet beneath it all, our hearts have always carried the purest love. I hum low, the vibration weaving through my bones, until her breath steadies and his shoulders drop.

These men are the loves of my life, my best friends and my biggest mirrors. Every moment we shared was electric, charged with both tenderness and the raw edge of mental illness, overwhelm, addiction, and autistic intensity. When drug-induced psychosis entered the room, love became tangled with fear, and neither of us could see the shape of what was happening. We didn’t understand that we were burning from the inside.

They have been my greatest teachers. Returning to the love without the harm is a practice, one that asks me to see every part of us: the wounds, the stories, the hurt that brought us here. I can look back now and watch my own chaos, my own thrashing, raging through those moments like lightning splitting a quiet sky. And still, I can soften.

I believe these memories are alive. They are not just stories from the past, they pulse in my present, shaping my thoughts, my beliefs, the way I meet the world. Dropping into these timelines with conscious awareness, love, radical acceptance, and radical forgiveness is a blessing. It is an energy healing. It bends the arc of what was. Maybe it even reaches those versions of us in some other timeline, some other dimension.

Forgiveness has been my most powerful medicine. For years, I was chained to these moments, hating myself for the way I handled things, blaming others for outcomes I had helped create. My inner chaos and self-loathing shaped my reality, casting everything in the shadow of my own fear. Learning to forgive myself and them does not mean I condone the harm; it means I understand that we are human, we are wounded, and without tools of mindfulness and compassion, we can spin until we destroy everything in our wake, and then hand the blame to the one closest to us.

To forgive is to lay down the weapons, to release the chains. It is to hold the love apart from the harm and to see, with clear eyes, that even in our darkest hours, there was always light.

I imagine stepping back into one of these moments with the tools I have now. My hand rests on his shoulder and my own, a bridge between us. I let breath move slowly into my body, deep and steady, until it fills the air between us. Presence hums in my bones; love spills into the space like light breaking through cracks in a darkened room. His eyes soften, and my body loosens. The static quiets. In that shared field, suspicion gives way to recognition, two wounded hearts seeing each other without the armor of fear. The weight we carried together begins to lift, not erased, but transformed, as if the breath itself has untied a knot that bound us for years. And what is released is not just pain, but the belief that we were ever each other’s enemy.

Thank you for walking beside me in this work of tracing the threads of my past and tending to what still lives within me. If any part of this story stirs something in you, I welcome your voice. We mend in the meeting places between us, in the honest sharing, in the quiet knowing that none of us carries it alone. I love you.

The Farewell Shoot

9/11 had just happened, and New York felt like it was breathing in unison, one long, aching inhale no one knew how to let go. On the subway, in bars, in parks, people stood shoulder to shoulder, holding each other’s hands, lighting candles, whispering the names of the missing into the dense autumn air. The city smelled faintly of smoke and metal. Sirens had quieted, but the grief was constant, threaded through every glance, every gesture. Planes overhead made my chest tighten. It felt like the sky itself had become dangerous.

Kentucky and I decided to leave, and I thought I was done. But before we left, PD, the owner of INSEX, called and said he wanted to send me off with “something special.” I told myself it would be a farewell shoot, a way to close the door.

It was a live shoot, lasting more than eight hours without a single break. No pauses, no reprieve, only fear that quickly blossomed into terror, pain, and regret. From the first moment, everything was intensified: the restraints cinched tighter, the gags forced deeper, the pace unrelenting. It looked like something out of the movie Hostel, grotesque, surreal, a nightmare staged in real time. Because I could not speak and could barely breathe, my safe word was not a word at all but a sound, a loud, urgent “Uh-huh,” meant to stop or pause, to make him check in with me. I made that sound more than thirty times. I know this because I went back years later and watched, counting each desperate attempt to be heard. He never stopped. My face cycled from deep crimson to maroon to a pale, sickly purple. My breath came in ragged gasps. My vision tunneled until the edges went black. More than once, I lost consciousness. Each time I surfaced, I told myself: just finish. Just survive this. This is the last one.

When it was over, I did not feel triumphant. I felt like something in me had been extinguished.

Back in California

We moved in with my parents. I had not been home in years. They wanted to help us land somewhere safe, but I was already fractured. I carried resentment like a stone in my pocket, blaming them for choices they had never been part of, blaming Kentucky for not protecting me from myself. I felt like my shame was visible, like people could see it in my posture, my face, what I had done, what I had let happen. I told myself they knew and had left me to endure it alone.

We were both alcoholics by then. We stole bottles of wine from my parents, hiding them in strange corners for the housekeeper to find later. We were running out of money quickly.

We had been living in California with my parents for six months when INSEX called again.

The Drip

Enough time had passed for me to forget what I had sworn to myself after the farewell shoot. PD said this one would be easy, no intense pain, just an experiment with the Chinese Water Torture. A slow drip on the forehead. He offered to pay for the trip, the hotel, the fee, and it felt like more than enough, so again, I agreed.

The moment I arrived, the truth hit me: I was not a guest. I was property. He locked a thick metal collar around my neck with a cowbell hanging from it so he could hear me wherever I went. We went to dinner that night like that, my humiliation not staged for a camera, but lived out loud. Each step sent the bell clanging, drawing eyes toward me that I could not meet. Shame pooled hot under my skin.

A couple had been flown in from Germany to witness the scene. They were kind, almost tender, in contrast to the brutality unfolding. In the end, it was the woman who would speak the words that stopped it.

An hour into the Drip, I began to hallucinate. The water striking my forehead was no longer a droplet; it was a hammer driving a nail into my skull. The water running into my eyes turned red. I believed I was being killed. I could not remember my name. Even the name they had given me, Betty, was gone. The room dissolved. All that existed was the relentless strike of water, the splitting agony in my skull, and the distant, distorted sound of screaming, my own voice, as if carried from miles away.

When the German woman finally intervened, they sat me up under the bright lights. I was naked, trembling, my face swollen and deep red from hysteria. The cameras kept flashing. People’s voices floated around me, but I did not know where I was or why I was there. I had lost myself in a way I did not think was possible.

It was the only INSEX shoot I did not finish, and they used it anyway.

The Echo Years

Years later, deep in my meth journey, I learned the Drip had never really stopped. After three days without sleep, the world would tilt into another kind of reality, one where the veil was gone and spirits and shadows walked freely. Three days was the minimum. Sometimes it lasted ten, even thirteen. By then, time became elastic, stretching and collapsing at will.

Once, in a stranger’s Beverly Hills mansion, a friend convinced me to try to sleep. Sleep was impossible without Xanax, and since I had run out days before, I decided to smoke heroin from a homemade contraption, a bong attached to a breathing mask. The minute I exhaled, my legs began to stomp uncontrollably, like a Clydesdale pounding the earth. I lay down, drank my first sip of water in what felt like days, and passed out.

Moments later, a glass shattered. I woke up certain I had been abducted. I ran barefoot into the street, wearing only a tank top and underwear, hiding behind a parked car, heart slamming in my ears. I could not speak. I could not move. I did not know my own name.

When recognition returned, the street, my car, the wild-eyed woman in the side mirror who was me, the shame hit harder than the fear.

It happened often. Waking up next to someone I knew well, a friend, a lover, and not recognizing them. Believing they had kidnapped me. Watching their faces twist with confusion, not sure if I was joking or insane. I did not understand then that it was the past bleeding into the present, my nervous system still trapped in a loop of captivity and escape.

I had left Kentucky quite a few years earlier by then, and Joey had become my closest companion in that descent. Out of everyone, I wore the fewest masks with him. I let him see me at my most fractured, and by that point, there was no way to hide it anymore. We mirrored each other in that way, spiraling together into the same darkness. When I was with Joey, he was the only one who could anchor me in those moments. Even if I did not remember myself, I would call for him, "Joey? Bun? Are you here?" as if saying his name could tether me back to the world, and it usually did.

The Road Back to Myself

Complex PTSD has a way of folding time in on itself. Moments decades apart can bleed together until you cannot tell which life you are living. Missing time, fugue states, sudden dislocation from self, they were not just symptoms, they were the ground I walked on. My nervous system had been trained to expect captivity, to prepare for escape, over and over, whether the danger was real or imagined.

There were whole stretches of my life where I slipped out of myself without warning. One moment I was here, the next I was gone, adrift in a fog where years and minutes shared the same breath. These fugue states felt like vanishing into another version of me, a shadow self who knew nothing of my name, my history, my place in the world.

I used to think these episodes were proof that I was broken beyond repair, the blank spaces, the lost hours, the sudden panic of not knowing who or where I was. But now I understand they were the echoes of a body that had lived too long in survival mode, still bracing for the next blow, still trying to find its way back to safety. They were my mind’s way of disappearing when disappearing was the only way it knew to keep me alive.

I believe our timelines can be mended, that what is wounded can be reached across the distance. Time is not linear; we do not yet hold the full truth of what it is. Somewhere, perhaps out there, but more likely deep within, that version of me still exists: bewildered, trembling, searching for a place to land. This letter is for her, for the girl still caught in those moments, still wandering the dark corridors, so she may know she has never been alone.

Dear Kelly,
You feel things so deeply. You always have. You even feel things that were never yours to carry. And I know this pain you are in, it feels unbearable. You want to outrun it, bury it, break it down before it breaks you. But I need you to know something, and I need you to believe me: this pain is not meant to be feared. It is meant to be felt.

I promise you, it will not destroy you.

I know you are scared it will, that if you open that door and let the feelings rush in, they’ll swallow you whole, and you will never find your way back. That you will lose your mind, or your worth, or your place in the world. But that is not what is going to happen.

There are gentler ways to grow. Softer ways to learn. You do not have to suffer to evolve.

You are doing the best you can. You always have.

You are not alone; you have me. I am with you. I live inside you. And those voices in your head, the cruel ones, the ones that say you are broken or unworthy or too far gone, they are not yours. You do not have to listen to them. They only have power if you give it to them.

And there are other voices in there too, quieter ones. A whisper, almost. Gentle. Wise. Kind. That is you. That is the voice of your truth, your intuition, your healing. The more you listen to it, the stronger it becomes. You get to choose which energy to feed.

I know this may feel like the darkest moment, like there is no way out.

But the only way out is through.

Learning to trust yourself will become one of your greatest lessons. And when you do, you will understand you were never truly alone. You will begin to make space for grace to move through you.

There are forces beyond you, forces of good, of love, of peace, of forgiveness. Energies that will one day guide you, fill you, transform you. You will learn to pray to them. Embody them. You will begin to walk with them.

And in time, you will gather all your wounded parts with such tenderness, such reverence, that it will feel HOLY. Your heart will grow so wide and radiant that it will be able to hold the pain of others, too. You will become a soft place for others to land.

You will remember your gifts, the ones you have now but are too afraid to touch, and you will begin to use them. They will lead you somewhere extraordinary. Somewhere magical. And when they do, you will feel something you never expected: Gratitude.

Gratitude for the pain. Gratitude for the shame. Gratitude for the path you carved through fire.

Because Kelly, our most potent medicine, lives inside our deepest wounds. And you are an alchemist.

One day, you will stand fully in your truth. You will feel the power of it. The relief of it. You will know, in your bones, what it means to live in integrity. To be an open book.

And when that day comes, every lesson, even the brutal ones, will be held.
Loved.
Valued.
Forgiven.
You will find meaning and purpose in ALL of it.
I Love You.
You do not carry this alone.

*** Thank you for taking the time to step into my story and support my journey. If these words land in the hollow places of your own story, if you have known the long night of CPTSD, the vanishing of self in a fugue state, may you know this truth: there is nothing in you that cannot be met with love. There is no wound so deep it cannot be touched by light. Healing does not happen all at once, but piece by piece, breath by breath. We do not walk this road alone. Somewhere within, there is a version of you who still holds the map back to yourself. Take their hand. Let them lead you home.

The company was called INSEX.

INSEX was a pornographic website and video production company active from 1997 to 2005, known for its extreme and controversial BDSM content. It featured live streams and highly orchestrated scenes of sadomasochism, bondage, humiliation, and psychological control, often involving extended restraint, physical torment, and elaborate mind games. It gained a cult following among hardcore BDSM enthusiasts for its realism and severity. Eventually, the site shut down in response to mounting pressure from the U.S. Justice Department. But during its run, INSEX was one of the most polarizing and boundary-pushing presences in the world of BDSM porn, a place where consent was negotiated, but the performances often blurred the line between theater and trauma.

At the time, I had little to no experience with kink. I didn’t identify as submissive. I barely understood what BDSM meant. I had dabbled in bondage and the occasional spanking. I thought maybe this would be artistic. Maybe it would make me feel something. Maybe it would give me something to hold onto.

When I arrived at the casting call, I met the creator of INSEX. He was smart, funny, intense, quick with a joke, and sharp behind the eyes. I could tell he wanted me to be intrigued. He began showing me his work: images that moved from women in tight hogties and punishing suspensions to scenes of genitals sewn shut, eyelids pulled wide from the eyeball like something out of a sci-fi torture ritual. He watched as he showed me his work, beaming, almost boyish, asking if I would ever consider modeling for him. I felt magnetized and terrified all at once. Like a portal had opened. Like some hidden part of me had been waiting for this. I felt like I was standing at the mouth of the underworld, and something in me had already said yes. A pulse deep in my body responded, and before I could even name it, I had already agreed.

What I found was a world that blurred every line between performance and pain, between consent and collapse, between being chosen and being consumed.

I think I was 20 in my first video. They called it a “test shoot.” They explained everything beforehand...kind of. But once it started, the explanations dissolved.
The lights. The cameras. The restraints.
Something primal took over.
And I began to disappear.

I dropped so deep into the fear that I forgot it was a job.
My body did not know the difference.
The threats, the degradation, the pain, they were real.
Terrifyingly real.

This was not just kink or consensual punishment.
INSEX prided itself on building medieval torture devices, recreating serial killer crime scenes from the past. It was performance, yes, but also something darker.

A theater of violence draped in the illusion of consent.

My reactions were raw, unscripted.
That is what made it electric.
They loved me for that.
And I hated myself for it.

When it ended, I told myself I was okay.
I had survived. I got paid. They were pleased.

But the truth was more complex.

When it was over, I felt high on relief, grateful just to be breathing, to feel my lungs expand without resistance, to be back in my body.

There is a kind of euphoria that happens when your body is released from physical bondage. A powerful cascade of neurochemical and physiological responses floods the system: endorphins, dopamine, adrenaline.

It is not just emotional, it is biological.
An intense high. A rush. A wave of something ancient and electric.

Because nothing feels better than surviving when you thought you might not.

And then came the praise. Compliments showered down like confetti:
You were amazing. So brave. He was thrilled with how much you could take.

But I was still floating,
adrift just beyond the edges of myself.
My hands trembled. My voice wavered.
Someone pressed a sugary treat into my palm.
Another wrapped me in a soft blanket, rubbed slow circles into my back.
Small gestures that felt enormous in that moment.
I was being cared for. Tended to.

When he returned, he said he had chosen my name—Betty, like Betty Paige. He said I was special. Most of the other girls had numbers for names. Then he asked if I would return for another shoot. I nodded.

And I did go back.
Again. And again.
Eleven more times.

The fractures were real.
Each return pulled me further from myself, more elaborate, more violent, more grotesque. My skin marked like a map of pain, but the real damage settled deeper, in the silence of my mind.

I learned to disappear.
To fold my feelings into corners.
To act like it did not matter.
To pretend I was still choosing.

For years, I said nothing. Kentucky knew I had done a few scenes, but I never showed him the truth. I kept the bruises hidden, the videos buried.

I told myself the internet was too big, too vast, no one would ever find it.
I tried to forget the sound of my own voice in them. And I buried the girl in the video, the one who never said no.

But you cannot erase what the body remembers. You cannot silence what still trembles.

Recently, I watched my very first INSEX video. I sat down, pressed play, and let the ghosts return.

And I wrote it down, frame by frame, not just as memory,
but as witness, as ritual, as reclamation.

I knew I was watching myself, but I did not recognize the girl on the screen. I had no memory of it in my body. She moved like me. Screamed like me. Flinched like me.

But I could not feel her.
She hovered just beyond reach, a ghost inside my skin.
A hollowed-out version of someone who wanted so badly to be chosen
that she let herself be destroyed in plain sight.

I watched them do things to my body that I had named as hard limits. Watched myself gagged and bound, eyes wide with terror, as it happened. Powerless. Silent. I knew, even then, that this would not fade. That it had marked me. That it would haunt me forever.

One of the biggest reasons I began to write was to create a contained space to return to these traumas, to enter them deliberately, safely, instead of being ambushed by fragments in the dark.

For years, I couldn’t find my way in. Every time I tried to remember, my mind would get wobbly, like trying to focus through water, and sometimes all I would see was black.

So I started circling the edges.

Dipping into pieces of my story from around the time of INSEX.
New York, the drugs, the men, the longing, the desperation to be seen.
I dropped back into the moments that surrounded it, into the silence that had been humming beneath it all.

And the more I wrote about my past, the more accessible the blacked-out places became. They did not rush in all at once, but slowly, like old photographs developing in a darkroom. Grainy at first. Then vivid. Then sharp.

And still, I ask myself, why did I go back?
Why did I keep going?

The question loops, restless, through my mind.

Sometimes I find an answer. Sometimes I do not.

But I know it lives in the unspoken places, in the fractures of childhood,
in the places where no became maybe, where love blurred with pain,
and worth was something to be earned.

There is something I have always loved about myself, something untouched.
At my core, I’m childlike. Innocent. I take things literally. I believe what people say.
I believe in the goodness beneath the damage, the light still burning inside people, even when they have forgotten it is there.

And maybe that is why I stayed so long, why I endured.
Because I thought pain might be a path to love.
That if I gave enough, hurt enough, waited long enough,
I might finally become enough.

That is what they exploited.

And what followed was more than fifteen years of trauma,
self-harm, dissociation, sex work, addiction, and a slow, aching erasure of the girl who once believed.

I became a stranger to myself, shapeshifting to survive a world that kept asking me to disappear.

In the years after I stopped working with INSEX, I slipped into the deepest depression of my life. Intrusive thoughts. Suicidal ideation.
An unbearable fog, I could not find my way out of.

I tried to end my life five times.

There were long hospital stays. Blank stares. Numb prayers.
I did not yet understand that the INSEX memories I had buried so far down
were still pulsing through my body, still whispering the lie that I did not deserve to live.

And that is what I am reclaiming.

This is not the whole story.
But it is a door.
One I have been afraid to open for a very long time.
One that needed me to be steady enough to walk through without splintering.

So here I am. And here it is.

The years I forgot… until I remembered.

I think I need to pause now.

I am going to take a moment to breathe.
Placing one hand on my heart, one on my belly.

Can we do this together?
Inhale gently through the nose, long, slow, and deep.
Exhale through the mouth, letting the sound of the breath soothe something deep within.

Let’s take seven breaths like this.
Seven soft moments to come home to ourselves.

Feel what rises…
Feel what softens…
Let yourself linger in the space between.

We do not have to fix anything.
We do not have to carry it alone.

We are here, right now, in this beautiful present moment.
Safe in our bodies.
Safe to remember the things we once had to forget.
Safe to hold them with tenderness.

We can offer grace to the younger versions of ourselves, the ones we blamed, buried, or tried to forget.

There is no space for punishment here.

Only love.
Only forgiveness.
Only grace.

One breath at a time.

From my heart to yours, thank you for holding this sacred space. These are not easy truths to carry, tell, or hear. Your presence, your witnessing, is a blessing and an honor. I am deeply, humbly grateful.

Photo of me, taken before an INSEX shoot. The date on the image was 3 years after it was taken.

This chapter, The Weight of What We Carried , is where I began to let him in. To write about the love I couldn’t hold. The one I still carry.

Kentucky is never far. I talk to him more than I talk to most of the living. And sometimes, when I’m driving alone, I see him. Perched in the passenger seat, square-toed brown leather boot on the dash, red bandana tied around his forehead, right arm out the window, hand gliding through the wind. He looks over and smiles.

So I roll down my window too. I match him. I ride the current. And I pray he stays.

This is the chapter where I finally began to speak his name again. I wanted you to have it.

The Weight of What We Carried

It’s hard to talk about Kentucky, harder than I expect it to be, every time. His name alone catches in my throat like a splinter. Even now, after everything, he lives inside me like a ghost, tangled into the fibers of my memory, haunting the quiet spaces of my day. There’s a part of me that still flinches when I speak his name out loud, like I’m summoning something too big, dangerous, sacred and broken to hold.

I spent over fourteen years of my life with him. He was my best friend, my lover, my mirror, my home, and sometimes, my undoing. There was a time I would’ve laid down my life for him without hesitation. And there was a time, closer to the end, when I truly believed he might take mine, in a moment of psychosis or madness, when the weight of everything we carried twisted reality into something dark and dangerous. We loved each other with a kind of desperate purity, born from loneliness and forged in shared pain. At our core, we were two people who never learned how to be loved, trying to love each other with broken hands and broken hearts.

Our relationship was a tangle of deep tenderness and quiet violence, like honey poured over broken glass. We loved hard, clung tighter, and never quite knew where one of us ended and the other began. We didn’t know how to hold each other without hurting, how to stay without disappearing. Our love was a firestorm, karmic, consuming, and somehow still innocent at its core. But it was soaked in the pain of the past, in unhealed wounds and needs we never learned how to name, let alone meet.

We were trying to build a home on a fault line, laying down dreams over cracked foundations, pretending the ground beneath us wasn’t always shifting. We mistook chaos for passion, collapse for closeness. We confused rescue with love, thinking if we just held on tighter, we could save each other from ourselves. We were unskillful, both of us, fumbling through the dark, mistaking obsession for devotion, enmeshment for intimacy, and suffering for proof of love.

Even now, thirteen years after I walked away and five years after his death, I can still feel those tangled cords of attachment pulling at my gut, my solar plexus, my heart. It’s like the body remembers what the mind tries so hard to forget, the way it all felt, the way I disappeared inside him, the way I stayed, quietly erasing myself piece by piece, convinced that love meant endurance, that surviving the storm was the same thing as being cherished.

He was everything. And I abandoned myself completely to become one with him. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just knew it felt like love. I felt pulled toward him with a force I couldn’t explain, compelled to be near him, like a moth to a flame, both drawn and doomed. The merging felt like survival, like the only way I knew how to be close to someone was to vanish inside them. I folded myself into him without question, giving up my own shape to fit into his. I thought that self-sacrifice was sacred, that disappearing was devotion, that if I could love him hard enough, I would finally be safe, and he would finally feel whole, like I could be the cure for all the things that haunted him.

No one had ever shown us a different way. We were both so wounded, so unskillful. Our love was a raw wound wrapped in silence. We didn’t know how to ask for what we needed, or how to speak the language of hurt without tearing each other apart. The raw, aching wounds of the heart stayed buried, festering just beneath the surface of every argument, every silence, every desperate embrace.

I’m writing about him today because a few days ago, I opened my front door and found a large Dillard’s box wrapped in masking tape on the porch. It was addressed to me, with a return label from Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown, his resting place, the shadow of our old life.

This happens every couple of months.

And still, every single time, my heart drops to my stomach like it’s the very first. I always know it’s coming. I even know what’s inside. But something about the sight of that box, sealed tight, marked with his origins, undoes me. It’s like opening the door and finding him standing there. Not the man he became, not even the boy I loved, but some other version of him that lives in the spaces between memory and grief, guilt and projection, a version shaped as much by my longing as by my self-punishment, by the weight of all the things I couldn't fix, and all the things I still blame myself for.

I stare at the box, frozen. My hand goes to my heart. I try to breathe through the sudden sting of tears. I already know this is going to hurt.

It always hurts. Not just now. Not just when he died. And not even when I left him, without warning, without a single word. One day, I just walked out and never went back. No explanation. No closure. Just silence.

I’ve carried the guilt of that exit like a stone in my chest ever since. But the reality was, I left because I had too. We had become violent and volatile. I was unraveling. Strung out, terrified, and confused, I didn’t know what was real anymore. I didn’t know how to stay without losing what little was left of me. I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t even know how to say I was drowning. So I vanished. It wasn’t graceful or brave. It was survival.

The pain isn’t new. It was there long before him, old, familiar, and unspoken. But it found something to cling too in our relationship, something to echo inside. It’s the same ache that lived in my body the whole time we were together, amplified by every wound we didn’t know how to heal, every silence we didn’t know how to fill.

Every year, every month, every day, it carried a weight I could never quite set down. The heaviness was constant, like a low-grade fever or a bruise that never faded. It settled in my bones and pressed into my chest, threading itself through every moment of tenderness, every fight, every silence. Back then, I mistook it for passion. For intensity. For proof that what we had was real. For evidence that I was alive, because feeling something that deeply, especially pain, was better than feeling nothing at all.

It was always heavy.

He had the word, HEAVY, tattooed across his left hand like an oversized bar stamp. And it had been heavy since day one. Not just the tattoo, but everything, his presence, our connection, the atmosphere between us. Back then, that weight called to me. I didn’t just tolerate it, I craved it. I was drawn to him with a kind of reverence, convinced that his shadow mirrored my own. That if I could stay close enough, love him hard enough, I might understand something about myself. Or maybe, somehow, I’d heal us both.

The volatile blend of depression, addiction, alcoholism, and sexual trauma, it wasn't just something we lived with, it was something that bonded us. Our traumas recognized each other. The damage fit. And when layered with the invisible superglue of childhood wounds, dysfunctional patterns, and inherited beliefs, it created a bond that felt unbreakable, even when it should have been broken. That was the foundation of our relationship: pain disguised as passion, survival disguised as love.

And layered over all of it was the mythology I built around us, that we were destined. Soulmates. Twin flames. That all the chaos meant it was meant to be.

And, in my heart, in my deepest sense of knowing, it still feels true. Not destined to last, but destined to collide. To learn. To burn through lifetimes of pain in the fire of each other. Without him, I wouldn’t be who I am now. Our love shattered me open, and in the wreckage, I found something real. Something I could grow from.

We weren’t meant to save each other. We were meant to awaken each other.

I lift the box. It’s heavier than usual, and then I remember: jackets. Four of them. Denim and leather, thick and heavy, worn for years and stitched with pieces of his story. He had collected them from thrift stores, adding to them over time, metal studs, rock 'n' roll patches, old-fashioned bait-and-tackle shop logos, even that weirdly perfect "Pigs is Beautiful" patch he loved so much. Each jacket felt like a part of him, a second skin he wore into the world.

Opening the box, the scent of him rises up, faint but unmistakable. I press one of the jackets to my face and close my eyes. My whole body reacts. I breathe him in slowly, deeply. I try each one on, one after the other, wrapping myself in the weight of him, remembering the way it felt to be held by him, to laugh with him, to lose myself in him. It's not just fabric. It's a portal.

I keep them all in a special drawer. My Kentucky drawer. A place where memory lives in fabric and scent and folded corners of paper. Sometimes his mom includes old photographs that tear my heart wide open. Other times, small, strange relics of our life together.

This time, there’s just a single sheet of lined paper, cut into the shape of a pumpkin. I remember buying that notepad for him twenty years ago at the 99-cent store for Halloween. He had kept it all this time, tucked away somewhere among his things.

The note reads:

Kelly,
Finally, please, have good memories of my wonderful son.
Love,
Kentucky’s Mom

The words knock the air out of me. My heart tries to armor itself, but I don’t let it. I place the note in my lap, press my palm to my chest, and breathe. With each inhale, the crushing tightness eases slightly, loosening its grip around my ribs. My body trembles. Quiet sounds of pain escape my lips, soft, involuntary sobs that seem to rise from somewhere far beneath the surface. Tears spill down my cheeks, not just for him, but for the version of me who loved him with everything she had, and the one who had to walk away to survive.

I slow down. I let the ache move through me. I know I have to feel this, my life depends on it. This grief, this mess we made of each other, of ourselves, of everything we touched... it almost killed me. So many times.

And I never thought it would be him.

Not in my wildest dreams, or nightmares, did I imagine it would end like this. That I would outlive him. That I would still be sifting through boxes of his belongings, trying to piece together a story I already lived, one that feels scattered and hazy, full of blank spots I can’t quite touch. Trauma and drugs left whole stretches of memory frayed or missing, like scenes torn out of a book I know by heart but can’t read. I’m always searching for the thread, trying to understand how it all fits together, trying to remember myself inside it.

I can however, tell you how we met.

But first, I need to take you back a little further, to the months before Cabo. Because I didn’t just end up in Cabo, I fled there. I was young, reckless, and already burning from the inside out.

There was a slow unraveling, a quiet storm gathering beneath the surface. Everything around me, and inside me, had begun to slip. I was drifting through my days in a fog of numbing and pretending, aching for escape and connection but chasing both in all the wrong places. I kept searching for something I couldn’t name, something I hoped might make me feel real, or whole, or worthy. I didn’t find it. Not then. Not yet. But the search is what took me there.

This photo came in one of the boxes — another unexpected fragment of him, of us. I’m sharing it because it feels important. I want you to see him. To see us, when there was still light in our eyes and love in our hearts. I want him to be remembered.

This is the shadow and the light of a story I’m still learning how to tell.

The ones I lived in pieces. The ones I barely remember. The ones I still wake from in a sweat, heart pounding, only to realize I never truly left them behind, that they’re still alive in my body, humming just beneath the surface.

For most of my life, I felt like I was living behind glass. Watching the world move around me while I stayed stuck in an invisible current, pulled by something I couldn’t name. I felt things too deeply. I didn’t know how to filter or flatten myself to fit in. The world was too loud. My thoughts strange, intrusive, and relentless. My emotions felt like tidal waves I couldn’t outrun.

No one ever used the word spectrum back then. No one explained what sensory overwhelm or emotional dysregulation meant. I was just called “too much.” I was sensitive, intense and complicated to love.

So I tried to disappear.

Into substances. Into sex. Into work. Into personas I created to survive.

My twenties and thirties were a blur of medication, manipulation, and mental health diagnoses that never quite fit. I took pills for everything: anxiety, depression, mood swings, attention, sleep, no sleep. I kept shape-shifting, numbing out what hurt, exaggerating what was praised, hiding what felt dangerous to reveal.

It wasn’t until my forties that I finally saw the pattern: I wasn’t broken. I was trying to survive a world that never made space for the way I feel and process and move.

Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, between the drugs and the disappearing acts, between the sex work and the spiritual bypassing, between the grief and the glitter, I started hearing something.

A breath.

A beat.

A whisper that maybe… just maybe… I could come home to myself.

That whisper came just before the collapse. But before that, for years, there were flickers. Moments I now recognize as exit signs, flashing past like neon on a dark freeway. I saw them, felt them, knew in my gut what they meant: Stop. Leave. Change. And yet, I was moving too fast. Or maybe too afraid. I missed the exits every time.

Something in me knew I needed to go. But I would take another hit, and lose another year.

The drug that once carried me, gave me fire, focus, power, turned on me almost exactly one year in. What felt like a miracle began to rot from the inside. But I stayed. I kept using. For nineteen more years, I kept chasing that first rush, even as it hollowed me out. I told myself I had control. I told myself I could stop. But deep down, I knew, the drug had already made its decision. It was no longer helping me survive. It was slowly killing me, and I was letting it.

I still remember the first time I used meth. It felt like clarity. Like God. Like all the static in my mind had finally been dialed in. I could focus. I could create. I could clean my house, finish my projects, talk to strangers, make music. I felt unstoppable.

For someone who had spent her life feeling scattered, foggy, and too much and not enough at the same time, meth felt like a solution. A miracle. A key.

But miracles borrowed on interest.

And within months, the brilliance curdled into obsession. The fire that once made me feel invincible began to burn through everything. The confidence morphed into desperation. The power became depravity. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. Until I did and couldn’t.

What began as freedom became a fresh kind of hell, dressed up in power, cloaked in charisma, but rotting from the inside.

What once felt like control twisted into paranoia. The edges sharpened. I started looking over my shoulder, reading danger into every glance, every silence. But it wasn’t just behind me, it was everywhere. I saw things in the dark, in the corners of rooms, in shadows that didn’t move quite right. I saw things in people’s eyes, flickers of menace, messages that weren’t there. And sometimes, I saw it in myself. The paranoia wasn’t just fear. It was a haunting. The artistry turned to ashes. I became a shell, haunted, hunted, half here. A thousand open browser tabs in my mind. Days bleeding into nights, conversations fraying at the edges, my body moving but my soul parked somewhere far away.

This went on for years.

And still, somewhere inside me, there was a voice, faint, but steady. Waiting. Whispering.

Not this. Not forever.

The voice didn’t speak in sentences. It spoke in sensation, a flicker of discomfort in the middle of the high, a sudden flood of tears in the middle of a transaction. A quiet revolt against the performance of being okay.

It spoke when I least expected it, in motel bathrooms, on cold floors, in stolen moments of stillness when the noise paused long enough for truth to rise. It lingered, low and insistent, refusing to disappear.

It was that voice that pulled me toward something I hadn’t yet named: healing.

At first, healing looked like stopping. Stopping the meth. Stopping the sex work. Stopping the lies.

But stopping is never the whole story. Anyone who has tried to walk away from an identity knows this. The unraveling doesn’t end when you quit. In fact, that’s often where it begins.

When I got clean, I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt flayed. Raw. Grieving the version of myself I had wrapped in glamor, control, seduction, survival. I didn’t yet know who I was without the chaos.

But I knew I couldn’t go back.

So I began again. Slowly. Quietly. I learned how to breathe, really breathe. I started sitting in silence, even though it made me squirm. I found my way to sound, not in the music I used to perform, but the kind that cracked me open from the inside. Vibration. Bowls, gongs, harmonium. The sounds that soothed my animal body, fractured heart, and overwhelmed nervous system.

And I began telling the truth.

Not all at once. But enough.

Just enough to keep walking.

Just enough to keep living.

Just enough to choose the next right thing.

Healing, it turned out, wasn’t a grand revelation. It was breath by breath. A series of tiny, trembling choices. Drinking water. Making the bed. Going for a walk instead of disappearing. Saying no when I meant no. Saying yes only when it didn’t cost me my peace.

I didn’t know how to trust myself yet. I could barley look at my own reflection. I was grieving a thousand things at once, people, places, dreams, identities. Addictions don’t just vanish when you stop using. They shapeshift. They wait in the wings. They dress up as relationships, food, scrolling, chaos, emotions, the constant need for more. So I had to learn new ways to live. New ways to listen.

Breath became my compass. Sound became my sanctuary. And silence, once unbearable, began to hold me.

That’s when the stories began to rise.

Not in perfect order or with poetic closure. But in fragments, flashes, like old film reels clicking to life in a dark room. I started writing them down. At first, only for myself. Then, slowly, with the hope that maybe they weren’t just mine. Maybe they were portals. Mirrors. Medicine.

So I’ll leave this here, for now, a beginning inside a beginning.

Thank you for reading, for witnessing and for breathing beside me.

Strangers, friends, even passing acquaintances, the moment they heard a sliver of my story, something would light up in their eyes. And something in me would stir too, like a bell being struck in a far-off room I hadn’t visited in years.

The truth is, I’ve lived more lives than I can count. Some I barely survived. Some I still carry in my bones. For a long time, the weight of it all felt too heavy to even name, let alone write. But eventually, a doorway opened, and a few years ago, I began to walk through it.

This space is part of that walk.

It began slowly. Hesitantly. At first, I could only write in fragments, a paragraph here, a memory there, dipping my toes into the waters of remembrance, then pulling back when the waves crashed too hard. But something kept calling me to the page. Not for catharsis, but for integration. For weaving together what had long been scattered.

In the past six months, I’ve crossed a threshold. I’ve begun writing consistently, diving deep into the moments I once buried, the ones that felt too jagged, tangled, and raw to touch. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I write something and find myself in a grief coma for a week. Sometimes my body aches with memories before my mind even knows what I’m trying to say. But I keep going, and in that going, something softens. Something brightens. Places that once felt dark and unspeakable are beginning to glow with the light of awareness.

This isn’t just a memoir project. It’s a reclamation.

There was a time when I couldn’t be honest, not with others, and certainly not with myself. I split myself into compartments, shapeshifting to survive, building masks so layered that I forgot what my real face looked like. I lied to protect myself, to protect others, to escape the shame that swallowed me whole. But the more I lied, the more lost I became. Until everything fell apart, or rather, dissolved into something unrecognizable. It wasn’t a breakdown. It was an unraveling. And at the center of the unraveling, I found something unexpected: me.

I recently read a meme that said "Shame dies when stories are told in safe places".

This is my safe space. This space is where I will begin sharing the whole of who I am. Not just the polished parts. Not just the healed parts. But all of it. The beauty, the chaos, the grief, the longing, the radiant moments of remembering.

This is not meant to be a trauma dump.

It’s a love letter to the pieces of myself I once left behind.

And maybe, in reading, you’ll find pieces of yourself too.

With love, breath and reverence,
Kelly Jean

A constant sense of unsafety, an invisible dread that would take over my whole system and shut everything down. I learned to freeze, to fawn, to mask. My nervous system was a storm I didn’t know how to calm, so I disappeared instead.

But something began to shift when I got clean at 40. When I let go completely, when I trusted that my body might actually know what to do. I surrendered to the tides, the elements, the unseen hands of Nature and Love, our Guides and Ancestors, the whispers of Angels. That surrender cracked me open. I discovered gratitude. I discovered presence. I discovered that healing lives in the body, too.

This was the beginning.

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Last year, I had a hysterectomy. And something else changed.

A deeper pull inward, into the places memory had forgotten. I started to notice how much I still carry, how loudly my body speaks when I’m quiet enough to listen. Lately, the past has been living in me again, not as stories, but as sensations: a burning under my shoulder blades, a sharp, aching throb in my chest, shallow, tight breath, the sweat and heat that rises when I try to sleep, a tightness in my throat when I need to speak and don’t.

Sometimes it feels like the blood itself is dense with memory.

Memoires rise like steam, slowly, and I can feel it all at once—the prickling skin, the shallow breath, the way my heart breaks open again. And instead of hiding from it, like I used to, I say:

“I am safe to feel this.”
And I do.
I let it come.
I breathe through it.
I stay.

Dissociation feels like claymation in my body. Slow, thick, distant. I’m there, but not. Empty, but also heavy. It’s a strange kind of disappearing.

Even now, certain places in my body still carry the weight of things I wasn’t allowed to feel.

• My shoulders hold guilt and sorrow.

• My jaw grips the belief that I am not enough.

• My hands pulse with my overwhelm, my self-soothing, the stimming I learned to survive.

• My throat, every time I said yes instead of no.

• My chest holds the grief, the life, the love that could have been, all the versions of me I abandoned.

• My solar plexus, the power I gave away.

• My womb space, rage, and self-loathing.

• My root that holds so much fear.

Even my feet feel confused sometimes, unsure where to go. That’s when I take my shoes off and dig my toes deep into the dirt until the earth gets stuck between them. And I breathe, deep enough to feel it in my bones.

I know this pain is unprocessed trauma. Unfinished cycles. Moments that never got to complete. Wounds that never had time to close.

Whether I shoved them down or my body held them for me, this is where they live.

I remember one of the early times I left my body. I was in fourth grade, waiting for the bus near the VFW. Our new house had a lake in the backyard, a little paddle boat, and iron gates engraved with our family’s initial. From the outside, it looked like a dream—something out of a magazine. But inside, something never settled. Even at nine years old, my body felt the mismatch between how things looked and how they really were.

Some mornings at the bus stop, a man would linger in his beat-up car. He’d be drinking out of a flask, occasionally snorting something and stare at me. I’d avoid his eyes, but track him in my periphery. One morning, he brought a woman with him. They kept bending forward, laughing, then kissing, then something rougher. He grabbed her hair and pulled her down. His eyes found mine and he smiled. Then he pointed at me.

Like I was next.

The sound of the bus arriving cut through the moment like a lifeline. I climbed aboard with tears running down my face. I don’t remember the ride. Only sinking into my seat and rocking back and forth until my gaze found something to settle on and some fantasy to slip into. It was one more moment in a long line of them—another notch in the pattern that had started much earlier—the art of disappearing while still appearing whole.

It took decades to notice the ways I had vanished from myself. But slowly, through breath and presence, I began to find my way back.

Returning to my body isn’t a single act—it’s a devotion. A slow, daily tending to the places that still go quiet, the parts of me that flinch or hide. I’ve learned to listen not just when things fall apart, but in the spaces in between.

I trace my way back through breath, mantra, voice, movement, and the earth beneath my feet. These are my medicines. These are my rememberings.

And at the end of the day, when I slide beneath the sheets, I feel it—the quiet ceremony of return. The light dimmed, the world hushed, and my body finally allowed to soften. I place one hand over the hollow where my womb once lived, the other over my heart—earplugs in, eye mask on, breath slowing. I inhale until my ribs expand and my diaphragm yields, until the colors begin to bloom behind my closed eyes—violet, pink, gold. A shimmering triangle of light pulses there, steady and luminous, like a signal from within, calling me home.

And I whisper:

“I am safe in my body.”
“Thank you for staying.”
“I love you.”

This breath is my prayer. This body is my home. And I am still remembering how to live here.

You don’t have to remember alone. If something in your body is speaking, I invite you to listen. To pause. To breathe. And if it feels right, please share your story, your questions, and your return.

We’re building this space together. One truth at a time.

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This space, Rosemary Soul, has been growing quietly in the dark for a long time, like breath before the first note, or a seed waiting for the right season to break open.

I created this Substack to share what I’ve long carried in my body, my voice, and my heart: the healing power of sound, the alchemy of breath, the wisdom of ritual, and the beauty of honest story and reclamation.

I am a singer, writer, ceremonialist, and guide, but more than titles, I am a woman who has walked through fire and returned with songs.

I listen deeply.
I breathe to feel.
I write to remember.

This space is part of that remembering.

Here, I’ll be sharing transmissions from the heart of the sacred — essays, poems, songs, rituals, reflections, and truths from the breath-soaked edges of healing.

Raw. Reverent. True.

This is a place for the seekers, the sensitives, the wild-hearted ones. For those reclaiming their power after trauma, addiction, loss, and long seasons in the dark, calling the soul back into the body, breath by breath.

This is a place to exhale.
To feel.
To come home.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here.

From my heart to yours,
Kelly Jean