Meeting My Shadow Through Men Who Wouldn’t Stay
The harsh truths that are illuminated through unexpected teachers.
The way of the alchemist often involves a perspective that stretches far beyond your comfort.
To truly transmute energy, you have to get close enough to the source that you can transform it. But there’s a risk we don’t always talk about…
Sometimes the energy grabs hold of you, too, and transforms you instead.
To avoid that, you have to be so rooted in yourself that you’re not easily swayed by the deceptive tactics of something that knows it’s about to be asked to change.
And there’s no shortcut to that kind of grounded wisdom without first being willing to consider possibilities that require you to face some very undesirable truths about yourself.
As I always say, there is no healing without honesty. And that’s exactly why it’s so hard.
Pattern recognition has been one of the most valuable tools in my spiritual awakenings—even if it makes me a little neurotic sometimes. It’s a cosmic scavenger hunt and I’m always ready to play. And for a long time, my love life was the playground.
Ever since 2011, I’ve found myself in a revolving door of “not-ready” relationships. Situationships, as I used to call them on my dating blog The Problem With Dating.
It was a pattern that became impossible to ignore, especially after releasing my book Let That Shit Go: A Journey to Forgiveness, Healing & Understanding Love which conveniently highlighted a lot of these relationships back to back.
And while I always questioned my own role in these dynamics—so much so that a therapist once told me my biggest issue was self-blame—I also can’t deny how easy it was to mask the deeper work by pointing the finger outward at the long line of emotionally unavailable, non-committal men who would entertain me… but never choose me.
Even that language no longer resonates with me, but for the sake of painting the picture…
Have I dated some people who acted out of integrity with me? Yes, yes I have. More times than I’d like to acknowledge. Did they also help me look at some of the ways I also act out of integrity with myself? Why, yes. Yes they did.
Focusing on their behavior, their patterns, their lore was familiar. Comfortable. A distraction from having to look at my own, and instead let me continue cozying up to my well-polished and Oscar-winning role of “the victim,” “the hopeless romantic” and “the girl who always gets left.”
I was standing right next to the energy that needed to be transmuted—but I wasn’t ready to face it yet. So I looked everywhere else. At everybody else. And enjoyed the view from my cushy seat of self-righteousness.
But even that gets old after a while.
When I noticed my reactions started to feel scripted, I knew something was wrong. I wasn’t an active participant in my own life anymore. I was running on autopilot, and every day felt like Groundhog Day.
Was she going to see her shadow… or not?
Because I understand that reality works through reflection, I knew these men weren’t random. They weren’t bad luck or just a shitty streak. They were mirrors. Necessary ones.
So eventually, I had to ask myself the harder question… where is this energy living inside of me and what is it protecting?
When I was finally willing to face the shadow associated with non-commitment, I expected the answer to be emotional unavailability, because that’s often part of it, but for me, it wasn’t the whole story.
It was about choosing.
Scattered energy is distracted energy. And while I always understood that concept intellectually, I hadn’t realized how deeply I was practicing it in my own life.
Not just in my relationships. In my work. My creativity. My purpose.
Remember when I said that the sacral chakra holds our sexual, creative, and healing energy, and that sometimes we confuse what’s actually happening there when it gets activated?
These men were mirroring my own non-commitment to my creative path, but that ignition felt like a call to heal (or get physically enthralled, if you will) them rather than a call to create. Continuously choosing to focus on others, instead of my own responsibilities.
They wouldn’t settle down with me in the same way I wouldn’t settle down with the version of myself that was ready to move forward.
Instead, I kept floating in the liminal space between worlds. Dabbling here and there. Curious about everything. Fully investing in nothing. Always yearning. Always wanting. Never having or sustaining.
It was safe.
But that also created self-sabotage. False starts. Inconsistency. Minimal effort dressed up as exploration, much like the “relationships” I was constantly involved in.
My desire to entertain everything at once meant I never truly entertained anything deeply, and not only is depth important to me, but it’s required for longevity—the same way strong roots are required before a tree’s branches can expand.
I knew that I wanted expansion in whatever way that meant for me, but the illusion of options kept me away from taking root.
So I had to ask the next big question…
What is it about commitment that feels unsafe?
For me, the fear lived in unanswered questions.
What if I chose the wrong path? What if I ended up unhappy? What if I committed to something that wasn’t aligned?
When I was younger, I used to say the two scariest words in the English language were what if. I never wanted to live in that question. I wanted to find out. To explore. To try everything.
And I did.
I spent a lot of my life finding out. Turns out, I like a lot of things, and I’m pretty good at a lot of things, too.
But the real fear wasn’t choosing the wrong direction—it was not trusting myself enough to know I could turn around if I wanted to.
I didn’t trust that I could leave what wasn’t for me, because historically, I hadn’t.
Unfulfilling jobs, relationships, friendships, environments…
Over and over, I showed myself how willing I was to abandon what I wanted in order to preserve what I already had and guise it under “loyalty.” Certainty felt safer than truth.
But the Universe never lets me get away with things that easy, so life did what life always does.
It threw me into years of uncertainty, chaos, plot twists, and one tower moment after another. Not to punish me, but to teach me. (It still pissed me off though.)
Those years were giving me invaluable insight in the form of experiential evidence. They showed me that I can survive anything. That I can begin again. That I am allowed to change my mind. That I will never find peace in an environment I don’t belong in.
And if I can trust myself with endings, then maybe I can finally trust myself with committing to a rooted beginning and see what happens when I go all in.
Xo