How I Came to This Work

I was never initiated into a spiritual community.

No ayahuasca. No meditation retreats.

No teachers, no ceremonies — I've never even been to a drum circle.

I wasn’t part of any spiritual culture at all.

I was just a reclusive artist who loved nature and spent most of my time alone.

And although words like 'awakening' and 'dark night of the soul' were in my vocabulary,

I didn’t understand how literal they were.

At first, “awakening” just meant questioning the world.

Politics. Systems. Corruption. I kind of thought that was the whole thing.

I didn’t know it could turn inward and dismantle you.

Long before anything mystical happened, I was just someone who kept crashing.

Endless cycles of depression, burnout, and trying to heal old trauma.

I started studying myself because I didn’t have another option.

I journaled. Tracked patterns. Watched my own reactions. Tried to understand why my nervous system kept folding under weight other people seemed able to carry.

...For years.

Decades, honestly.

I didn’t know words like archetype or depth psychology yet.

But I was already doing the work — mapping my own shadowed psyche the slow, unglamorous way. By paying attention.

So when things finally broke open, I didn’t have a teacher or lineage to interpret it for me.

I had observation skills, and notebooks. And a lot of lived data.

Later, I found the language.

Some of it helped.

Some of it made things worse.

For a while, I was both: a destabilized person looking for answers in unsafe places, and briefly, an overconfident creator repeating the same certainty I had just swallowed.

Humbling, in hindsight.

Everything I write now comes from the process as a whole.

I didn’t inherit a framework;

I built one.

I crossed first; t

he vocabulary came later.

If you’re new here — I’m Monica.

I make art and write about the psychology of inner change.

Welcome.