On healing, self-sovereignty, grief, curiosity, and becoming more fully yourself.

There is a quiet kind of violence in spending your life trying to become someone you were never meant to be. More agreeable. More productive. More beautiful. More healed. More spiritual. Less angry. Less complicated. Less needy. Less strange. Enough, but never too much.

More acceptable to your family. More desirable to a partner. Not too threatening to your peers. Shiny, but never outshining anyone. More successful by someone else’s definition. More evolved according to whatever version of enlightenment the algorithm is selling this week.

We are surrounded by instructions for becoming better. But I’ve started to wonder whether our obsession with improvement sometimes becomes another way of rejecting ourselves through the pursuit of purity.

What if the work isn’t becoming better? What if the work is becoming more fully ourselves? Not some pristine version of ourselves, untouched by trauma, grief, culture, relationships, mistakes, or loss. I’m not convinced such a person exists.

Perhaps the question isn’t how to return to who we were before life happened to us, but how to become more conscious participants in who we are becoming because of it.

What if purity was never the point? What if integration, rather than perfection, is where our power lies?

I mean learning to recognize the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hide, fear, or reject. The anger that once protected us. The fear that kept us vigilant. The tenderness we mistook for weakness. The ambition we learned to apologize for. Even the patterns that helped us survive but now make it difficult to live the way we want.

Not surrendering to every impulse or romanticizing every defense, but understanding where those parts came from, what they once accomplished, and whether they still serve the lives we’re trying to build. Honoring what helped us survive while developing more than coping mechanisms so we can finally thrive.

Meeting the shadow. Welcoming it into awareness. Taking back the reins—not to dominate every part of ourselves, but to stop allowing fear, conditioning, or the need for approval to make all our decisions.

I mean becoming someone capable of looking at everything she has inherited, survived, learned, loved, feared, believed, and outgrown—and consciously deciding what she wants to carry forward.

What happens when we allow grief and hope to walk hand in hand?

Not perfection. Not transcendence. Not arriving. What happens when we give the unfolding path as much attention as the desired destination? What happens when we step out of the imagined future and return to the present, one step at a time?

Becoming welcomes complexity and a multifaceted way of being. Becoming is the lifelong practice of returning to our center—not by erasing our contradictions, but by learning to hold them with greater awareness, flexibility, compassion, and accountability.

We Were Taught to Become Palatable

Most of us learn very early which versions of ourselves receive approval.

Children are extraordinary students of belonging. We learn which emotions make adults uncomfortable, which questions are welcomed and which ones threaten the room. Whether anger is permitted. Whether sadness earns tenderness or irritation. Whether disagreement feels dangerous. Whether achievement brings attention or usefulness brings affection.

Eventually, adaptation can begin to resemble identity. We become easy. Helpful. Successful. Funny. Quiet. Needed. Good. Spiritual. Independent. Whatever keeps us connected.

Psychologist Carl Rogers explored a similar process through his concept of conditions of worth: the expectations we internalize about what makes us acceptable or deserving of positive regard. Rogers proposed that when acceptance becomes conditional, people may begin evaluating their experiences according to external expectations rather than their own internal experiences, creating tension between their lived reality and self-concept (Rogers, 1959).

Of course, learning social expectations is not inherently harmful. Adaptation is one of the remarkable things human beings do. We learn to cooperate, compromise, regulate impulses, and participate in communities. Not every childhood adaptation originates in trauma, nor is being aware of how we affect others inherently harmful.

The problem comes when we can no longer tell the difference between who we are and who we learned to become in order to remain safe, loved, or included.

And sometimes, even healing becomes another performance. We replace good daughter with healed woman. Religious purity with spiritual purity. Productivity with optimization. Suppressing emotions with obsessively regulating them. Pleasing authority with pleasing therapists, partners, followers, teachers, gurus, or an imagined future version of ourselves who finally has everything figured out.

Different altar.

Same sacrifice.

And once again, the offering is ourselves.

Healing Is Not Purification

There is a version of healing culture that quietly promises that if you do enough work, eventually you will become emotionally immaculate. You won’t get triggered. You won’t feel jealous. You won’t choose the wrong person. You won’t grieve too long. You won’t become angry. You won’t repeat a pattern. You won’t need reassurance. You won’t make mistakes. And if you do, perhaps you simply haven’t healed enough yet.

The destination of being perfectly healed is a scam. It does not exist, and I don’t believe that is healing. I think that’s perfectionism wearing linen, accompanied by the ego’s desire for certainty to avoid pain. Healing doesn’t make us less human. It can give us greater capacity to remain with ourselves while being human.

Carl Jung’s concept of individuation offers one historical framework for thinking about this process. In Jungian analytical psychology, individuation involves developing a more integrated personality, including becoming conscious of aspects of ourselves that have been rejected, hidden, or left unexamined. Jung called one dimension of this psychological material the shadow (Jung, 1959).

His theories belong to a tradition of depth psychology and are not established empirical models of personality in the same way as contemporary, systematically tested psychological theories. Nevertheless, the shadow remains a compelling symbolic framework for examining the parts of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge. And importantly, the shadow isn’t necessarily composed only of our worst qualities.

Sometimes we exile our anger because we were taught that good people never get angry. Sometimes we exile ambition because wanting more feels selfish. Sometimes we hide tenderness because vulnerability once came at a cost. Sometimes we reject our capacity for selfishness so thoroughly that we can no longer recognize it in our behavior.

But recognizing something within ourselves is not the same as giving it permission to govern us.

Anger can reveal that something matters without justifying cruelty. Anger can be a messenger calling us toward justice.

Fear can alert us to danger without accurately describing every situation. Fear can be a messenger inviting us to practice courage.

Shame can reveal where we fear rejection, have internalized judgment, or perceive ourselves as having acted against our values without proving that we are fundamentally unworthy. Shame can invite self-compassion and, when we’ve genuinely caused harm, accountability.

Empathy can connect us to others without making us responsible for regulating their emotions. Empathy can be a messenger of belonging.

Contemporary psychology offers a complementary, more empirically studied concept: psychological flexibility. Central to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), psychological flexibility involves responding to internal experiences with openness and awareness while choosing behavior guided by personal values. Rather than requiring us to eliminate painful thoughts or emotions, it emphasizes changing how we relate to them. Research has identified psychological flexibility and related processes as mechanisms associated with therapeutic improvement (Macri & Rogge, 2024).

What does this mean? You can be self-aware and still react badly. You can understand your wounds and discover another one. You can recognize your attachment patterns and still feel terrified when somebody leaves. You can establish a boundary and cry afterward. Desire is information, not the decision-maker. We can remain open to our emotions and choose to be guided by our principles.

You can forgive someone and decide they no longer belong in your life. You can love someone and recognize that loving them does not make the relationship sustainable. You can understand why someone hurt you without deciding that understanding obligates you to continue being hurt. You can recognize someone’s potential as an invitation to observe, not an obligation to invest.

Growth doesn’t eliminate contradiction or complexity. The more I grow, the more space I have to hold multiple emotions at once—without assuming that the presence of one invalidates another.

It gives us more room to hold these contradictions—and more freedom in deciding what we do next.

Self-Sovereignty Is Not Self-Sufficiency

Becoming yourself does not mean needing nobody.

Humans are deeply social creatures. I think of us as part of the Earth's mycelial network, or as fascia connecting different parts of the body—a metaphor for the countless ways we are connected. We need affection, community, witness, support, reciprocity, and belonging. The idea that psychological maturity requires complete independence misunderstands how deeply our well-being depends on our relationships.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Autonomy refers to experiencing our actions as self-endorsed rather than merely controlled by external pressure. Competence involves feeling effective in our interactions with the world. Relatedness concerns our need for meaningful connection and belonging.

Notice that autonomy and relatedness are not opposites. We can experience genuine freedom while remaining deeply connected to others. Hyper-independence is not the answer, nor is codependence. Interdependence offers a healthier model of connection.

That is what interests me about self-sovereignty. It isn’t radical independence. It is the ability to remain in relationship with yourself while you are in relationship with other people. Love asks us to compromise sometimes. It asks us to listen, repair, apologize, change, give, receive, and occasionally inconvenience ourselves for someone we care about. But love should not require chronic self-erasure.

Empathy without boundaries can become self-abandonment. There is a difference between compromise and abandonment, generosity and depletion, accountability and self-punishment, empathy and hypervigilance, interdependence and dependency, being needed and being loved.

And there is a difference between centering ourselves within our own lives and expecting everyone else’s life to revolve around us. Selfishness asks other people to abandon themselves for us. Self-abandonment asks us to abandon ourselves for other people. Self-sovereignty asks neither.

The goal isn’t to become so fiercely independent that nobody can hurt you. That isn’t sovereignty. That’s another fortress of isolation our ego builds.

The work is learning to belong to yourself deeply enough that connection becomes something you can choose, rather than something you must preserve at any cost. Can we feel the difference between clinging to someone out of fear and freely choosing an aligned connection from desire? I’m not invalidating the former, but suggesting that the latter offers more room for reciprocity and harmony within our relationships.

Grief Is Part of Becoming

We often talk about transformation as though it is purely additive. Become stronger. Wiser. Confident. Successful. Whole. But becoming also involves losing, cutting cords, and releasing.

Sometimes becoming yourself means grieving the person you needed someone to be. A religion that once gave the universe structure. A friendship you thought would last forever. A family you wish could have understood you. A relationship that held real love but couldn’t become the home you needed. A career. A community. A body. An identity. A future you had already begun decorating in your imagination.

Grief scholarship recognizes that grief is not limited to bereavement. The concept of disenfranchised grief, developed by Kenneth Doka, describes grief that is not adequately recognized or socially supported. Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss further explores experiences in which loss remains unresolved or difficult to define, such as when someone is physically absent but psychologically present, or physically present but psychologically changed (Boss, 1999; Doka, 1989).

These frameworks help explain why some of our most profound transitions can involve mourning even when nobody has died. We can grieve a life we expected to live. We can grieve an identity that once protected us. We can grieve a relationship while still loving the person. We can even grieve the version of ourselves who believed certain things would last forever.

And sometimes healing itself creates grief. When you stop abandoning yourself, some relationships change. When you develop boundaries, some people prefer the version of you who didn’t have them. When you become less willing to perform an old role, the system built around that role may resist you. Attachments may fall away on their own, whether you were ready to let go or not.

That doesn’t automatically mean every boundary is healthy or every conflict proves you’ve evolved. Sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes other people have boundaries too. Sometimes we misunderstand. Often, conflict resolution is necessary.

Self-sovereignty requires enough humility to ask:

Am I protecting myself—or avoiding discomfort?

Am I honoring my needs—or expecting someone else to abandon theirs?

Am I responding to what is happening now—or to something that happened long ago?

Becoming requires both self-trust and self-examination. Without self-trust, we risk abandoning ourselves. Without self-examination, we can turn every impulse into righteousness. We need both.

Curiosity Is More Useful Than Certainty

Curiosity is one of the central values of Letters to Lilith.

I am interested in science and mythology. Psychology and folklore. The nervous system and ritual. Plants as biological organisms and plants as symbols. Tarot as a cultural object, creative language, spiritual practice, and mirror for the psyche.

I am interested in what humans can demonstrate. I am also interested in what humans have wondered about for thousands of years. Those interests do not require me to pretend they are the same kind of knowledge.

Something can be meaningful without being scientifically established. Something can be traditional without being historically ancient. Something can be psychologically useful without being supernatural. Something can be unexplained without proving whatever explanation we prefer. And science changing its understanding of something does not mean evidence is useless. It means inquiry is doing what inquiry is supposed to do.

Psychological flexibility offers another useful perspective here. Responding flexibly to our experiences can involve recognizing that thoughts are not necessarily facts and that uncertainty does not always require immediate resolution. What dies grows stiff, hardened, and inflexible. I sometimes wonder whether the mind can experience its own kind of stagnation when it becomes too rigid to grow.

There is also a broader intellectual virtue worth cultivating: epistemic humility, the recognition that our knowledge is limited and our beliefs may require revision. Humility doesn’t mean treating every claim as equally credible or refusing to reach conclusions. It means allowing the strength of our confidence to reflect the strength of our evidence.

I don’t want spirituality that requires me to surrender skepticism. I don’t want skepticism that requires me to surrender wonder. I want to remain curious enough to say: I know. I think. I believe. I wonder. I don’t know. Learning which one you actually mean is a kind of freedom.

Even Spirituality Can Become a Way to Avoid Uncertainty

Tarot. Astrology. Synchronicities. Dreams. Signs. Manifestation. These practices can create beautiful frameworks for reflection and meaning. They can also become another way of desperately trying to make uncertainty disappear. Pull another card. Ask another reader. Look for another sign. Interpret another coincidence. Search for evidence that agrees with what I want to believe.

Maybe if we ask the universe enough times, it will finally promise us that we won’t be rejected, abandoned, embarrassed, disappointed, or wrong. But no spiritual practice can make being alive entirely safe.

Psychology offers a useful concept here: intolerance of uncertainty, which refers to difficulty tolerating situations with unknown or unpredictable outcomes. Research has associated elevated intolerance of uncertainty with anxiety and worry, although it is not unique to any one diagnosis (Carleton, 2016). When uncertainty feels unbearable, seeking reassurance can provide temporary relief. But repeatedly seeking certainty may also maintain cycles of worry, especially when reassurance becomes the primary way we manage distress.

Spiritual practices aren’t inherently unhealthy, and finding comfort in ritual is not automatically avoidance. The more useful question may be whether a practice expands our capacity to live with uncertainty or becomes something we feel compelled to repeat until we obtain the answer we want. Sometimes we don’t know. Sometimes there is no hidden message telling us exactly what happens next.

Certainty, when it becomes conviction hardened beyond any tolerance for ambiguity, feels to me like an imbalanced form of knowing. A mind so rigid that it leaves little room for life to change it.

Spiritual maturity can include tolerating uncertainty and unanswered questions. Freedom comes from letting ritual accompany uncertainty rather than demanding that ritual eliminate it.

Maybe the oracle isn’t always supposed to tell us the future.

It may help us hear ourselves.

Within my spiritual understanding, free will remains part of how we co-create with the Divine. Even there, I return to the idea that meaningful connection requires participation rather than passive surrender.

Becoming Requires Discernment

There is another danger hiding inside the language of authenticity: “This is just who I am.” Becoming yourself does not mean treating every behavior, instinct, defense mechanism, or emotional reaction as sacred simply because it belongs to you. Some things deserve to be unlearned.

Trauma can teach us patterns that once protected us and later hurt ourselves or other people. Culture can hand us prejudices. Families can normalize dysfunction. Fear can disguise itself as intuition. Hypervigilance can masquerade as empathy. Avoidance can call itself peace. Control can call itself protection. Selfishness can borrow the language of boundaries. And self-abandonment can borrow the language of love. This is where I find the relationship between self-compassion and accountability especially important.

Psychologist Kristin Neff’s framework of self-compassion emphasizes self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness rather than harsh self-judgment (Neff, 2003). Self-compassion does not require pretending our behavior was harmless. Instead, it offers a way to recognize mistakes and suffering without reducing our entire identity to them. We can acknowledge our limitations without making them permanent excuses. We can recognize how an old survival strategy developed without assuming it remains appropriate. We can take responsibility for harm without deciding we are irredeemable.

The question isn’t simply: Is this part of me?

It is: Is this part of me aligned with the person I am choosing to become?

Self-acceptance and accountability are not enemies.

I can love myself enough to tell myself the truth.

There Is No Final Version of You

I used to think healing meant eventually reaching some stable version of myself. Finished. Secure. Certain. Unbothered. I don’t think that anymore. Life is always changing, and so are we.

Psychologists Dan McAdams and Kate McLean (2013) describe narrative identity as the evolving internalized story through which we make sense of our past and imagine our future. We don’t simply remember what happened to us. We interpret it. We connect events, assign meaning, identify turning points, and construct stories about who we are. And those stories can change.

An experience once understood as failure may later become part of a story about resilience. A relationship once viewed as proof of unworthiness may eventually be understood through the lens of incompatibility, unmet needs, or patterns we hadn’t yet learned to recognize. Of course, reframing an experience doesn’t mean we can rewrite reality. Nor does every painful event need to become a lesson or a blessing. Sometimes something terrible happened, and the most truthful story is that it was terrible.

But we may still have some agency in how that experience becomes part of our larger identity. There is no final version. There are seasons. Versions. Deaths and beginnings. Things we know until experience teaches us something larger. Things we outgrow. Things we return to years later and finally understand.

The person you become at twenty-five may save you. The person you become at thirty-five may need to dismantle her lovingly. Neither version was a mistake. A caterpillar isn’t an inferior butterfly. Autumn isn’t a failed spring.

The point isn’t to arrive at a permanent state of blooming.

The point is to remain alive to your own becoming, unraveling, and reawakening through life’s ongoing cycles of change.

Outside the Garden

Lilith has accumulated many identities across centuries of religious texts, folklore, occultism, feminist reinterpretation, and popular culture. I am less interested in pretending all of those traditions tell one neat historical story than I am in the question her modern symbolism leaves behind: What happens when a woman refuses a version of paradise that requires her submission?

Leaving the garden sounds romantic until you remember that outside the garden is wilderness. There is no map. No guarantee everyone will understand. No promise that choosing yourself will immediately feel empowering. No blueprint for living between cultures.

Sometimes choosing yourself feels like grief. Sometimes freedom feels lonely before it feels free. Sometimes the old cage feels safer simply because you know where everything is. And sometimes you will wonder whether you should go back. The devil you know.

Becoming asks us to tolerate that wilderness long enough to discover what grows there. But it also asks us to recognize that freedom is not merely the absence of external control. It involves developing the capacity to make choices with greater awareness of our values, responsibilities, relationships, and circumstances.

Not everyone has equal freedom to leave the gardens they inherited. Financial dependence, disability, discrimination, caregiving responsibilities, safety, and social structures can meaningfully constrain people’s choices.

Self-sovereignty should never become another standard by which we judge people for circumstances they cannot simply think their way out of. Sometimes becoming requires courage. Sometimes it requires resources. Often it requires both. The path of a revolutionary can be lonely, yet none of us should have to walk it entirely alone.

Wonder for the Work of Becoming

Letters to Lilith isn’t a map for becoming your highest self. I’m increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims to possess one. I talk about healing and shadow work, and yet I still repeat patterns, hurt people, and disappoint myself.

This place isn’t about erasing our humanity, but integrating it alongside kindred spirits. This is a field journal. A library. An apothecary. An observatory. An oracle. A screening room. An atelier. A time capsule. And, inevitably, an underworld. A place to examine what science can tell us, what history remembers, what folklore transforms, what art reveals, what ritual holds, what grief changes, and what our own lives keep teaching us.

There will be contradictions here. Questions without clean answers. Old beliefs revisited. Ideas that change as I learn more. That isn’t a flaw in the project. That is the project.

Because becoming isn’t the process of sculpting yourself into someone worthy of love. Performance belongs in the theater, not in auditioning for belonging. It isn’t about becoming prettier, calmer, wiser, more productive, more spiritual, or easier to hold—although some of those qualities may emerge as we pursue greater balance.

Becoming is learning to meet yourself with enough curiosity to discover what is yours. Enough discernment to release what isn’t. Enough accountability to change what causes harm. Enough courage to grieve what cannot come with you. Enough tenderness to remain open to other people. And enough self-trust to keep walking when there is no map.

You are allowed to change. You are allowed to contradict an earlier version of yourself. You are allowed to discover that something you once called home no longer fits. You are allowed to remain curious. You are allowed to say, “I don’t know.”

You are allowed to leave the garden.

You are allowed to grow wild.

This place is for those who left the garden, and those just beginning to peer through the gate.

Wonder for the work of becoming.

References

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Carleton, R. N. (2016). Into the unknown: A review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39, 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.02.007

Doka, K. J. (Ed.). (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Part 2). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Macri, J. A., & Rogge, R. D. (2024). Examining domains of psychological flexibility and inflexibility as treatment mechanisms in acceptance and commitment therapy: A comprehensive systematic and meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 110, Article 102432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102432

McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309032

Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships, as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science (Vol. 3, Formulations of the person and the social context, pp. 184–256). McGraw-Hill.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

A Note on AI & Editorial Integrity

AI is a second set of “eyes,” not an authority. The ideas, perspectives, interpretations, and creative direction expressed in Letters to Lilith are my own. I use artificial intelligence as a supporting editorial and research tool to organize ideas, proofread, refine grammar, support branding, and locate relevant data and scholarly sources. AI accommodates some executive dysfunction; It does not replace my independent thinking, clinical research, holistic health expertise, personal experiences, or creative judgment. I remain responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and final content of everything I publish.