Last October I had a couple of dark nights of the soul. I sat on the porch in the rain, listening to music that stirred the grief within me. It was a reckoning. I used to be sober and fell off the wagon. I was an egoic person with everything in my hands. And in a blink of an eye, it all came crashing down by my hand. What happened? How did I get here? So much angst and resentment filled my body and ate away at my soul for so long in spite of my achievements. It didn’t matter. Without God, I was nothing. And without inviting Him into my world on a daily basis and into everything I did, He was nothing. And if I’m an extension of God, a finger, a hair, a thought, then if He were nothing, then I was nothing. With all my angst and resentment towards things, places, and people that transmuted into bigger things, places, and people, everything I had meant nothing. My inflated ego wouldn’t allow me to concede that, because well, I was achieving. My inflated ego is like, “Hey keep looking at the greatness you’re doing, achieving, and becoming. Don’t peak behind the curtain.” The blinders were on. Slowly taking my will back on everything, piece by piece; shutting God out bit by bit, there was no way I could see the truth with it always at my back and me never turning around. The more I shut God out, cussed Him out on a daily basis, the more spiritually bankrupt I got. I worshipped the Morrigan, Cernunnos, The Dagda, and Brigid. None of them I cussed out on a daily basis. They were part of the envisioned world I created and worshipped through my ego. The God I cussed out was Loki and I think deep in my heart I was cussing out the Christian God. If I’m an extension of God, if God is within me, then the ruckus that caused the pain in my life couldn’t have been caused by me or the Gods I worship. Denial. If I deny looking at myself, I deny truth in my Gods allowing this to happen. Or if I did look at my Gods allowing this to happen, then it was victimhood I wore and shame I somehow fed without facing it. Even though I practiced the craft, meditated, and the like I still couldn’t make God’s world my own nor outrun my own darkness. I blamed God for everything when people were no long there to blame. And when I shut the light out at every turn and facet of myself because it’s not right or good enough, then Light I no longer stand in. “Not right, not good enough. Wrong,” – The way I perceived the world, to which my inflated ego, my entitled, self-righteous self kept me from seeing that it was in direct correlation to how I felt about myself. I would deny it for years. I was successful, I was working out all the time, getting in shape, had a man I was planning my life with, a coven and magickal community I was a part of, and a dream of travel nursing was in the works to come true. Unbeknownst to me was the goal-oriented standard I held for myself was hiding the perfectionistic cancer that permeated my soul. Not facing it. Not working a program to even begin to catch on to the truth. When I distort the truth, it is naturally muddled and eventually flat out ugly. Refusing to do the things that would heal me, because I just didn’t have time for that with all this great life I was building, it was just a matter of time till it would all boil over and I would need a fix to escape. I didn’t take time for my spiritual growth and development, at the time aka healing; but I did choose instant relief and gratification of acting out. I no longer had faith in God. I said and thought I did, but my behavior expressed otherwise. I ran to things that would make me feel better in the moment in flesh and then substance in predatory fashion rather than explore my pain and work through it by diving deeper into my shame and allowing vulnerability to lead me towards the light of empathy that would dissolve my demons. In order to do that I had to have faith that I lost. Without faith, loss of hope quickly follows. No inner peace, no real love there anymore no matter what I did, and the perception that God was to blame, what was the point of moving forward. I was far from suicidal. My inflated ego wouldn’t allow that. But I wasn’t far from picking up drugs again. And there I was, at the end of my rope. All light finally shut out and back into the darkness only Goddess would understand and grace me enough with the dark mirror that surrounded me the night I sat on my porch, listening to sad music and reflecting on how I was losing it all. Face to face with not nothing, for that would be numb. Worse than that. My own personal, spiritually bankrupt hell. Having an existential crisis that night, my whole perception of myself and the world was crashing down around me. I was junkie again. I was disconnected again. I was again destroying myself. And the only relief I had was the sobering feeling of how worthless I felt for causing it all. For years I didn’t authentically bring God into my daily life as I willed so much on my own, and I damned Him in the end for things not going my way. It seemed I was even so powerless to prevent my fall from grace. And as I am writing this I hear the words, “may he remain to pray.” See, in my own will, I was powerless. In my own self-centeredness, I’m powerless. I didn’t pray to God for anything than for my own selfish ends. I didn’t seek to understand, no to comfort, nor to love. It was all about me being understood, comforted, and loved. And again, with no effort put into understanding, comforting, or loving others, I then lost my spot in being understood, comforted, and loved. There is a saying in wicca that before the Big Bang, before the creation of Light, the Goddess was there, alone, and saw Her aloneness. She had so much love to give and share and She couldn’t bear for it to not be given or shared. She saw her reflection in the black abyss and said, “Let there be Light,” and the Universe was born. God was born. Man was born. But for that to happen she had to give of Herself. Split off from just being dark and go into the Light. She was worth it. She is worth it. And it is true because it is. They also say in recovery, “you cannot transmit something you haven’t got.” I lost myself in perfectionism so much, I ate up everything around me and unwittingly turned on myself. If I’m living in perfectionism, then I must not think I’m enough. And if I don’t think I’m enough as I am, then I won’t give anything away. And if I don’t give anything away, it won’t have any value for it isn’t shared with the world. It might as well be nothing. And there I was in that moment in front of the drugs. In that moment that “nothing” sucked in that escape from reality and kept on for several more months until the dark spell of addiction would turn my inner “nothing” outward and I was becoming nothing and losing everything. All that came to a head that night on the porch, in the rain, listening to sad music stir to articulate the truth that I felt but couldn’t fathom. Into the arms of the Goddess, I sat, crying my eyes out in total grief of myself till no more. I’ll never forget the words of my future husband regarding that depressing night. I told him it was therapeutic. What does he say? “Yes, but we cannot stay there.” And here I am. My value is in my efforts of giving to others and taking care of myself in order to do that. For if their value is only valued if shared, then value I must give them. And I can trust that I will not be without, for they are no more valuable than I. The love, the light, the esteem, the purpose, it cannot be bought or achieved. So….as it says in Ephesians 2:8-9 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not by works of men, so that no one can boast.” I remember as well that night, that I was being carried back into recovery. I didn’t want to come back in, but I was being reminded and re-awakened as to why recovery was the answer, and certain occurrences were transpiring that reflected my way back in wasn’t all by my own doing. I was sort of being tricked back in. Certain defects of character were being used against me to bring me back in. Deep down I didn’t want to relapse. Deep down I didn’t hate God. I just didn’t understand and He knew that. Despite my kicking, screaming, destruction in my wake, and damning God, She was still there to hold me and carry me to the Light till I was ready to walk in it again. If that isn’t testimony of being good enough, I don’t know what is. Let there be Light.