Leaning Into Me: A Memoir-Meets-Guide for Spiritual Awakening, Unlocking Spiritual Gifts, and Remembrance: Leaning Into Me

By Aliya Griffin

Leaning into Me

A Memoir-Meets-Guide for Spiritual Awakening, Unlocking Spiritual Gifts, and Remembrance

When everything fell apart, Aliya Griffin didn't realize she was being reborn.

Leaning Into Me is a breathtakingly honest spiritual memoir and guide for the awakening soul—one that peels back the veil between the seen and unseen. Through heartbreak, divine encounters, and profound moments of surrender, Aliya shares what it's really like to awaken to your psychic gifts, meet your Higher Self, and remember who you've always been.

With raw vulnerability and channeled insight, she invites you inside the in-between—the sacred space between who you were and who you are becoming. From the silence of her post-divorce unraveling to vivid past-life regressions, mediumship, and soul-to-soul readings, Leaning Into Me becomes both compass and mirror for anyone hearing the quiet call of their own awakening.

This isn't a manual. It's a remembering. A story of courage, surrender, and the miraculous beauty of becoming whole.

If you've ever felt too sensitive, too intuitive, or too "different," this book will remind you:

You're not broken. You're remembering.

You're not behind. You're right on time.

You are your own miracle. 

My awakening doesn't make me feel finished—it frees me. I'm free to play in the lightness of service instead of the weight of purpose. I'm free to create not because I must, but because I can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Twenty-One, LLC
• Release date: Jan 21, 2026
• ISBN: 9780990453857

Book preview

Introduction

Ididn’t always know I’d end up here, writing a book about reading Souls, talking to the dead, renegotiating soul contracts with Spirit Guides, or seeing visions of people caught up in energetic whirlwinds. Sure, I’d always felt things, known things, seen things. But for most of my life, I tucked those abilities away into the, I’m just being weird folder in my brain.

At some point, weird stopped being optional. It became the language of my soul. And the moment I stopped resisting that truth was the moment everything started to shift—sometimes beautifully, other times painfully, but always undeniably.

Why I Wrote This Book

Let me start with this, I wrote this book because I wish someone had written it for me and shoved it into my hands during the quiet unraveling that followed my awakening. I wish I had it to read during the parts of the awakening that no one talks about. The times when I didn’t feel magical or affirming and wasn’t sure if my Guides or Source were still listening to my cries.

That’s where I was when this book began—in the space in-between. In-between the aha and the integration. In-between the visions and the remembering. In-between the self I was and the Soul I was remembering.

This isn’t just a book about my spiritual gifts. It’s about what happens when you can’t un-know why you know and what you know. It’s about when your soul starts whispering truths that your mind doesn’t know how to hold. It’s about when you feel like you’re both waking up and falling apart at the same time.

This is the book I needed when I started to crack open. It’s the book I would’ve clutched to my chest after my first solo visit to the Akashic Records. It’s the book I would’ve read after the first time I’d read a volunteer client’s past trauma from a photo.

I wrote this book for the spiritual girlies and guys, the seekers, the skeptics who keep getting called to the woo-woo side of life, and for anyone who’s ever said, I see things and sometimes I know things, but I don’t know what to do about it. I wrote this book for those who are awakening to their spiritual gifts. I wrote this book for the people who’ve had their entire lives upended during a spiritual shift. I wrote this book for those of you who no longer fit into your old life, but your new life hasn’t loaded yet. I wrote this book for those who’ve seen the vibrant spiritual world, only to be returned back to the muted grays of the 3D one. And I wrote this, so you know that you’re not alone. I’ve been right where you are, too.

The Call You Can’t Ignore

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve heard it too, that quiet (or not so quiet) call in your heart-space or even in your gut that says, You’re meant for something more.

Maybe it started subtly. You first began noticing repeating numbers. You suddenly became engrossed in healing your past traumas. You started re-evaluating your relationships and because of that, cut people out of your life who no longer vibrated on your frequency. You learned to forgive those who needed forgiving. Your circle became smaller and smaller because you started seeing other people’s intentions toward you. Or maybe you were hit with a spiritual two-by-four (a Tower moment) that cracked your world wide open, such as a loss, a divorce, a relocation, or a rebirth.

I experienced all of that.

For me, there was a call that kept getting louder and louder until I could no longer ignore what was happening. I was awakening (which I hadn’t known at the time) and becoming something more.

My life had already shaken me to my core—problematic childhood, divorce, moving, identity unraveling. I’d taken everything in stride, thinking, I was just on a journey of self-discovery to find out who I really was. Little did I know, that while I was sitting in my room, watching a lit candle through tear filled eyes and whispering, Who am I? that I was standing at the threshold of a spiritual initiation. And as I asked and asked, I cracked and I cracked.

Here’s the thing. When it’s your time, you can’t unknow what you know. You can’t un-feel what you feel. The call doesn’t stop because you’re scared or not ready to pick it up. It’ll whisper, then knock, then huff and puff and blow your whole energetic house down until you answer it.

This book is me answering that call and giving you permission to answer yours.

Who This Is For (And Who It’s Not For)

This book is for the quietly gifted. The ones who always knew they were a little different. The people who have dreams that come true, emotions that aren’t theirs, and a strange love-hate relationship with crowded places. It’s for the empaths, the sensitives, the intuitive knowers, the soul-curious skeptics, the mediums in hiding, the channelers who aren’t quite sure, and the ones just trying to make sense of why they feel so much, all the time.

If you’ve ever thought, I don’t know what’s happening to me, but something is waking up, this book is for you.

If you’ve been secretly reading tarot or practicing telepathy with your cat or dog, this book is for you.

If you’ve already started giving readings or holding space for others but are struggling with the, What now?, this book is for you.

Who this book isn’t for: The spiritually performative. The gatekeepers. The people who think there’s only one right way to be psychic. The people who believe spiritual gifts should be reserved for a chosen few who, Have studied spirituality and have put in the work.

This book doesn’t promise perfection, enlightenment, or a gold star from Source. What it does promise is realness, revelations, and a beautiful mess as you step into the full range of your spiritual gifts.

How to Use This Book

I wrote and re-wrote many passages of this book. I wanted it to be clear for the reader. But guess what? I found that it’s really hard to explain a spiritual awakening because spiritual awakenings don’t just involve one part of a person’s life, but all. There were changes and transformations involving my material world and spiritual world, because let’s face it, an awakening isn’t an awakening if both aspects aren’t radically changed. But that alone isn’t why this journey is hard to explain. The hard part comes from how my awakening unfolds. My path was far from linear, and it often intersected in-between, around and even through material and the spiritual worlds.

This book is part memoir, part guide, part, Pull up a chair and let me tell you what happened during this wild-ass session I had last week.

You’ll find true stories from real sessions with my clients, transcripts, spiritual downloads, messages from Spirit Guides, visions I’ve had, and the energetic body experiences that come when I connect with people. I include these not as proof, but as portals. Let them spark something in you. Each chapter ends with journal prompts to help you align with your goals, path, self and journey. And although I mention, I don’t know how I know how to do this, I just do. throughout these pages, I’ve included (very loose) step-by-step guides to help you to learn (or strengthen) how to do what I do at the end of this book.

I’m not writing this book as a guide to see things my way or to even think like I think. I’m not even writing this book to show you, Dear Reader, the entirety of my spiritual awakening, because there’s no way to include everything I’ve gone through and everything that I’m still going through in one complete book. Ain’t no way. So many parts of me are awakening and so many parts of me are falling away. My inner child is being healed. Old wounds are being seen and tended to. How I view love, relationships and friendships are being re-worked. Everything is being twisted inside out.

For the purposes of this book, I’m focusing on one part of my awakening—the awakening of my spiritual gifts. Maybe one day I’ll dive into becoming unhuman or maybe what my inner healing looked like or maybe, just maybe my soul mate journey... Maybe one day.

This book is intended to be a big permission slip for you to be messy, chaotic, emotional, confused, scared, and confident. I’m sharing because seeing someone else’s spiritual awakening of their gifts might help to demystify your own. I’ll do my best to walk you through how I receive messages from photos, what it feels like to be in the presence of someone’s late loved one during a reading, how I learned to tell the difference between my anxiety and my client’s and how I know if I’m channeling a Spirit Guide or a Spirit.

If you’re curious, read with an open mind and without pressure. You don’t need to believe everything I say. You just need to pay attention to what resonates.

If you’re awakening, use this as a compass, a mirror, and a big, warm You’re not crazy hug from someone who’s walked the path ahead of you. Let my stories show you what’s possible.

If you’re already reading souls, think of this book as a love letter from one intuitive to another. A reminder that even though our gifts may look different, we’re in this together. You’re not alone, and you don’t have to do this work in silence or in suffering.

And if you’re somewhere in-between? Welcome. You belong here too.

There’s no test to pass or gate to unlock to be on this path. You’re on it because you’re on it. Trust that.

Labels

When we first begin to awaken to our gifts, it’s natural to want to name them. To understand them. To organize the unexplainable into something familiar. You may recognize yourself as an empath—someone who feels the emotions of others as your own. Or perhaps a clairvoyant, who receives images and visions through the inner eye. A clairaudient, who hears intuitive messages through sound or thought. A clairsentient, who senses energy through the body. A claircognizant, who simply knows without needing proof. There are mediums, who communicate with those who have crossed over, and channels, who bring through wisdom from higher consciousness. Each of these abilities is simply a language—another way Spirit speaks through you.

It’s perfectly acceptable, even healing, to name your gifts. Labels can help us make sense of what once felt confusing or isolating. They validate what the soul has always known but the mind struggled to believe. Claiming a label can be the first act of self-acceptance, especially if you’ve spent years hiding, dismissing, or minimizing your own magic. Sometimes, giving a name to what we feel helps us see that it was real all along.

But as your journey deepens, you may find that these labels no longer fit as neatly as they once did. Your gifts will grow, evolve, and intertwine. You might begin to realize that you are not just a clairvoyant or an empath or a medium—you are all of them, and MORE. Your connection to the unseen will stretch beyond categories and definitions, flowing as freely as the energy that created them.

Eventually, you may release the need to label your abilities altogether. Not because they aren’t real, but because they are too real—too vast, too multidimensional, too sacred to be contained by a single word. The label was never meant to limit you; it was meant to lead you home to the truth of who you are: the embodiment of Divine awareness itself.

Spiritual Journey vs. Spiritual Awakening vs. Spiritual Transformation

As we move forward, I think it’s important to distinguish between the three terms. When people first step onto a spiritual path, they often hear the terms spiritual journey, spiritual awakening and spiritual transformation used as if they mean the same thing. While the terms are deeply connected, they are not identical. Understanding the difference will help you orient yourself in your own process of growth.

Think of a spiritual journey as the path you walk. Sometimes smooth, sometimes winding, sometimes filled with detours. Every step, whether it feels like progress, pause, or setback, is part of your spiritual journey. It’s the process of living and growing. It’s an ongoing path of self-discovery, healing, and expansion. It’s the long arc of your soul’s unfolding across years, experiences, and sometimes even lifetimes. Your journey is made up of daily practices, lessons, synchronicities, and the choices you make as you learn to live more in alignment with your truth.

To put it simply, a spiritual journey is the journey that your soul takes as you grow spiritually. You’re on a spiritual journey from the moment you’re born to the moment you die. Your spiritual journey is about growth, evolving, learning. Which is why our souls reincarnated here. It’s the lifelong path of your soul.

A spiritual awakening, on the other hand, is a pivotal moment (or series of moments as you’ll read in this book) where you experience a profound shift in awareness. It’s when you suddenly see what was hidden before. Many describe it as waking up from the dream, where illusions fall away and a deeper sense of connection with Source, Spirit, or your Higher Self becomes undeniable.

Awakenings can arrive gently through meditation, intuition, or quiet realizations or dramatically, sparked by life-changing events (catalysts). They can feel disorienting at first, but they always serve to realign you with your soul’s truth.

While your journey is the larger story; awakenings are the chapters where the lights turn on, and everything looks different. You may experience more than one awakening along your path, each one taking you deeper into yourself and into the truth that has always been waiting beneath the noise. Deeper into remembrance of who you really are, why you came, and what your soul has always known. Deeper into alignment with Source and into the heartbeat of your own divinity. Deeper into surrender, where control softens and wisdom begins. Deeper into your sacred becoming, the unfolding of who you truly are. And as you go deeper, you begin to realize that the path you’re on is sacred.

Spiritual transformation is what happens when your awakening takes root and begins to reshape your life from the inside out. It’s the integration stage where insights from your awakening move beyond realization into embodiment. This is when old patterns fall away, relationships shift or dissolve, new practices, values, or callings emerge, and you begin living from a higher frequency and not just thinking about it.

Transformations aren’t a single moment, but an unfolding process. It’s the alchemical fire that refines you, burning away what no longer serves you so your true essence can shine more fully in your everyday life. And as a result of walking this path, you become transformed.

Awakening wakes you up. The journey keeps you moving. Transformation makes you new.

Final Word (for Now)

This book isn’t a How to be psychic manual in the traditional sense, because honestly, I don’t know how I do anything that I can do, I just do and I can because no one told me that I couldn’t do it. It’s a, This is what happened when I stopped pretending that I wasn’t, kind of book.

It’s about remembering the parts of myself that have always known who I am. It’s about owning my weird. It’s about letting go of what no longer fits so I can stretch into the shape of my soul.

I’m not here to convince you of anything. I’m just here to tell the truth, as it’s unfolded for me. If that truth lands in your heart and makes something stir, then I’ve done what I came here to do.

As you read through these pages, I don’t want you to get stuck on any particular timeline. Yours may be much different than mine—shorter or longer. I just want the reader to align with the message.

Take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, and keep coming home to yourself.

Your Higher Self has been waiting for you to remember who you are.

Let’s begin...

Section 1: The Journey and The Awakening

Chapter One

The Breakdown Before the Breakthrough

LEAVING BEHIND MARRIAGE, labels, and everything I thought I was

I didn’t go looking for this path. This path came looking for me.

I didn’t study the spiritual books, attend the retreats, or sign up for the workshops. I wasn’t browsing the spiritual section of the bookstore or meditating under the moon hoping for a revelation. I had a life. A plan. A perfectly structured, logical, human life. And yet, here Spirit came, cracking open everything I thought I knew with a force that was anything but subtle. There was no gentle awakening, no soft whisper pulling me in. My Guides didn’t ask politely. They showed up, grabbed the wheel, and said, Hold on tight. We’ve got a ride to finish. And suddenly, I was no longer on the path I’d paved for myself. I was being rerouted, realigned, and radically initiated. Not by choice, but by divine design.

No one tells you that spiritual awakenings often begin as heartbreak. Not the romantic kind, but the kind where your entire human identity starts to unravel and you can’t stop it, even if you wanted to.

For me, it started quietly. There was an ache, like a dull, persistent hum that something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, I just knew that everything I’d built and everything I’d given my time to, now left me hollow. The identity that I’d spent years carefully crafting was faltering. The pedestal that was my life, made up of all of my accomplishments (my marriage, my degrees, my great paying and successful career) was still standing and I was squarely on top, but I could feel the cracks forming in the foundation.

I’d spent the last two decades of my life being the glue. The wife. The mother. The planner. The dependable one. I was used to holding space for everyone else, keeping the peace, keeping it all together. I thought that was what strength looked like. I silenced myself by being agreeable, head down and not making waves. But somewhere along the way, I had gone missing inside my own life.

My days consisted of working, tending to kids, cleaning the house, taking kids here and there, writing sci-fi romance books and just plain busy. I’d been so tied up in appearances, accomplishments, accolades and titles, that I’d forgotten to live. There had been plenty of days where I stood in the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out who the person staring back at me was. I didn’t recognize myself, my body or my energy. And the worst part? In my mind’s eye, I saw myself in a deep dark hole, unable to climb out. I felt hopeless, forgotten, abandoned and alone. While at the same time, I was keeping up appearances that my life was swell, splendid and the dream.

That’s the thing about spiritual awakenings disguised as personal collapse. They don’t always announce themselves. They creep in. Subtle. Slow. They start as fatigue you can’t shake, as tears that come too easily, or as a quiet sense of dissatisfaction that whispers, This isn’t it. You try to ignore it. Medicate it. Organize it away. But it keeps pressing in, hollowing out everything you thought was solid, until the life you’ve built—so carefully, so deliberately—starts to feel like a costume that no longer fits.

On paper, my marriage looked fine. Two adults who’d dated off and on since high school. A large house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Three beautiful, smart and perfect children. Years of memories, compromises and commitment. I had built a good life for myself. My pedestal was almost perfect. And yet, something was missing. Not in a dramatic or scandalous way. Not in the way that makes for compelling gossip. But in a quiet, aching way. A way that only becomes unbearable because it goes unspoken for too long.

You see, I’d spent twenty years numbing who I really was, hiding from who I was supposed to be. Although I likened myself as being a little psychic, leaning into my gifts at that time was not welcomed by my husband—he grew up in a Christian household and anything otherworldly went against that grain—and as a result, not welcomed. So, I did what any woman would do in order to make peace in her marriage, I built an energetic lockbox and stuffed Me deep, deep, deep within it. But little did I know that I was too powerful to be contained in such a way and that eventually, I would break. And that break was impending.

As the pedestal that I’d built my life on was cracking, so was the energetic lockbox that I’d been stuffing Me into, causing bits and pieces of Me to leak out. At this time, I wasn’t used to the Me that was showing up in my everyday life as intuition, so I doubted it. I let my ego talk me out of everything I saw and felt.

And as the years pressed on, the cracks in my pedestal and lockbox widened, until finally, the costume that I’d zipped myself into no longer fit. And most importantly, I no longer wanted to wear that normal costume. It was hard, scary and all the things you could imagine when deciding to leave a twenty-year marriage. But I did. For the first time in a very long time, I chose not to continue to ignore who I was or who I wanted to be.

I’m not going to lie, if my hand hadn’t been forced, I might’ve stayed longer, let myself shrink and shrink, until there was nothing left of Me but a speck. But my hand was forced, and I was at a crossroads. I had to make a choice. Chose the familiar, the safe, what I’d known for the last twenty years, or I could choose something different. Something that I didn’t know the outcome of. Something unknown and unfamiliar.

I pressed through my fears and I chose the unfamiliar.

Deciding to end my marriage was probably one of the hardest things I’d ever done up to that point. I’d tied my self-worth to my marriage so strongly, that the two were firmly knotted together, tangled, gnarled. Who was I without a husband? Who was I if I wasn’t a wife? I was more upset that I couldn’t find the answer to those questions than I was about the actual failure of my marriage.

When the marriage finally ended, so did the version of me that had been built around it—a major part of my identity. That was the first of the many wrecking balls to hit the pedestal that I’d built for myself. That blow didn’t knock it down, but it sure as hell put major cracks in the structure. As you can imagine, this was a painful time in my life. I was being energetically turned about and torn apart spiritually and emotionally.

Deciding to leave my marriage was the first hard decision that I’d made that year. The second decision was to leave the area where I’d been born and raised. I was pushed intuitively to keep going, changing and evolving, and I knew I couldn’t do that while still tied to an identity that no longer served, aligned or applied to me. I had to move me and find Me. The real Me. The one now leaking from those energetic cracks. The one who wanted to wake up. The one who wanted to taste the world.

I chose me again. This time I chose to figure out who Aliya was, what she liked to do for fun, who she liked to spend time with, who her friends were, what her likes and dislikes were and what made her happy and fulfilled.

So, I left Michigan and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And guess what happened? Once all the noise stopped—the routines, the caretaking, the compromise—I was left in the silence with someone I didn’t fully recognize. Myself.

I wish I could say that I embraced the silence with grace and wisdom, but the truth is, I panicked. I did what most people do when their life collapses. I tried to rebuild it with the same outdated blueprint, warped wood, bad concrete and broken bricks from a previous life. Some days, I tried filling my life with busy schedules, new routines, dating apps I wasn’t ready for and self-help books I didn’t finish. Other days, I just cried. Not because anything was wrong, but because everything was different.

I missed the familiarity of the known, even if the known had been soul-numbing. I grieved a version of myself I’d outgrown, and I didn’t know what or who would replace her. So, I continued to distract myself by attempting to outrun the ache. But the ache wasn’t going anywhere.

When I stopped trying to outpace the ache, I realized that the ache wasn’t asking me to run. It was asking me to stop. To feel. To listen. And simply...to be. And that’s when my identity began to unravel even more.

I had exhaustion that sleep couldn’t touch. I was crying in my room for no apparent reason. There were many nights where I stared at the ceiling, haunted by questions I didn’t yet have answers to.

Who am I now?

What do I even want?

Is this all there is?

But even in those quiet moments by myself, I was awakening. I was awakening to emotions, thoughts and feelings. I was awakening to Me, which is the first part of this magical journey. It was during these moments of emotional upheaval where I realized that the hardest part of this new journey wasn’t the loss of my relationship or old life. It was realizing how much of myself I had abandoned to make that relationship and that life work. How long had I gone without asking myself what I needed? What I desired? Who I truly was, outside of service to others?

I’d spent so much of my life surviving, performing, achieving, trying to be good, kind, helpful, productive, and pleasing. I’d thought if I could just be enough, everything would be okay. But enough was a moving target, and I was always one sacrifice away from burnout.

It took the silence of my post-divorce life for me to see the truth—I didn’t know how to be with myself. Not really. I didn’t know how to rest without guilt. How to dream without shame. How to honor my needs without feeling selfish. How to have fun without being productive. How to be creative without assigning a monetary value to it. Somewhere along the way, I had conflated worthiness with usefulness. And without someone to care for or serve, I felt useless and therefore unworthy.

This is where the unraveling becomes sacred. Because once everything false falls away—once the distractions, the performances, and the survival mechanisms go quiet—you’re left with the raw truth of who you are underneath it all.

It started as a thought, What feels good to me? And I listened to the response. I didn’t try to make anything fit, because honestly, at this time, I didn’t know what was right or wrong. I just decided to do what felt good. I called it, leaning into happiness. If going out with friends felt good, I did it. If staying home and watching reruns on television felt good, I did it. I had spent so many years doing everything for everyone else, even when it didn’t feel good to me, that it felt like a long-awaited sigh to have someone finally honor and value my needs and my wants—even if that someone was me.

And you know what? As you’ll read in the following pages, the change in perspective didn’t happen all at once. There was no dramatic thunderclap of self-realization letting me know that I was finally on the upswing to returning to self. It was slow and innocuous. I started seeing a therapist. I began journaling, meditating and sitting in my discomfort rather than running from it. I gave myself permission to not have the answers. To explore. To ask the question that I didn’t have the answer for anyway.

Who am I?

That question became my anchor.

The deeper I went, the more I realized how much I had silenced my own inner knowing over the years. How many times I had talked myself out of intuitive nudges. How often I had made myself smaller so others could stay comfortable. But in the stillness, that inner knowing, the quiet voice I had learned to dismiss grew louder. I started to sense things. Feel things. Know things.

At first, I doubted myself. Was it wishful thinking? Delusion? Too much time alone?

But then came the beautiful visions. The synchronicities. The undeniable knowing. The whispers from Source. The intuitive hits that proved themselves right over and over again.

Years later and I’m finally realizing that I wasn’t unraveling. I was remembering.

That remembering didn’t always feel graceful. In fact, there were days it felt like I was falling apart. But somewhere deep inside, I knew I was falling into myself, not away from it.

That was the breakthrough I needed.

No longer was I the version of the woman who I’d curated over the years. I wasn’t the version who needed to be palatable. Emerging was the raw, intuitive, fiery, spiritual, knowing woman who had been buried under years of should(s) and service. She didn’t arrive with a plan. She arrived in pieces. Through art. Through music. Through dance. Through creation. Through stillness. Through breath. Through deep, primal remembering.

And as she emerged, everything changed.

I no longer crave approval. I crave truth.

I no longer fear solitude. I honor it.

I no longer silence my intuition. I trust it.

I no longer lower my head. I raise my chin.

I no longer make myself small. I flex my muscles.

Because the real me—the soul me—had no interest in playing small anymore. And this... this was the beginning of my becoming.

It didn’t look like clarity. It looked messy. And beneath the chaos, there was truth. And beneath the ache, there was a flicker of something ancient and alive.

Me.

I had been there all along. Waiting. Watching. Whispering through every breakdown, every dark night, every moment I thought I couldn’t possibly go on.

Leaving my marriage had been the first step. What followed was a stripping away of everything I thought I needed to be loved, to be safe, to be seen. The labels. The roles. The performative perfection. The good-girl conditioning. The self-abandonment disguised as loyalty.

But here’s the thing I want you to hear. That moment—that moment of not knowing—is where the real magic begins. The truth is, I was never the title. Never the role. Never the marriage. I was never just the woman who held it all together. I was always something more.

It took losing everything I’d thought I was, to begin discovering who I really am.

It was in the slow mornings, with coffee and no expectations, that I began listening to the voice within me. The one I’d silenced for years. It was in the solitary walks where I cried without knowing why. It was in therapy sessions where I said things I hadn’t even fully admitted to myself. It was in the tarot cards, the moonlight and in the sacred rituals I began making up on the spot.

It’s funny how we think of breakdowns as the end. But in truth, they’re just doorways. Doorways into deeper self-awareness. Into healing. Into truth. Into power.

Dear Reader, I’ll close this chapter with a powerful vision I had about my journey. There were two versions of me. One as I am now, grown and capable. The other was me but smaller and weaker, who I was before. I was walking ahead, but backwards, leading the way and watching out for the smaller me. I was her protector, striking down all threats before they could reach her. We reached a house with a screen door and suddenly, weaker me, was in front of me. She walked through the door with ease, strong and proud.

And as the screen door was closing behind her, I grabbed it, but it wouldn’t open enough for me to squeeze through. I tried and tried, but it wouldn’t budge. I wanted to go through that door so badly. I knew I needed to go through it. And as I looked through the screen door at