Sometimes You Have to Go Through a Little Hell

Everybody wants the light. Nobody wants to talk about what it costs to get there.

I used to think healing looked like an upward line, a little better every day until you wake up fixed. Nobody tells you it doesn’t work that way. Nobody tells you that before the light comes back, you go through hell first, and hell doesn’t care that you have a business to run, kids, and a family watching you fall apart. I’m there right now. Not performing it for content. Actually there.

Let me be clear about something, because I don’t want you to hear this wrong. My body has been in this exact dark place before. This time, my mind is somewhere different. Just because I say I’m in the dark doesn’t mean I’m in a bad place. Sometimes the dark isn’t the enemy. Sometimes it’s just where the next version of you gets built, out of sight, before she’s ready to be seen.

Here’s the part I don’t usually say out loud. Some days I don’t want to be a mom or a wife. I said it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise on a page where I’ve spent this whole site telling other people not to sugarcoat theirs.

I need you to hear what I’m not saying too. I’m not leaving. My own trauma won’t let me abandon anyone the way I was abandoned, and even if it would, I wouldn’t let myself. I love my kids with everything I have. But loving them and being completely maxed out at the same time are not opposites. They live in the same body, on the same day, sometimes in the same hour.

Because somebody has to be the brain. Somebody has to remember the appointment, the permission slip, whose shoes don’t fit anymore, what day trash goes out. Somebody has to run the operations of an entire household on top of being its heart. Most days that somebody is me, on top of running a business, on top of just trying to stay sane while I do it.

The chore list piles up. The activities pile up. The laundry, the dishes, they pile up too, and it all stacks itself right on my shoulders until I can feel the actual weight of it. My body gets heavy. Fatigue sets in so deep it’s already in my bones before I notice it arrived. And the list doesn’t care. It just waits for me to pick it back up anyway.

There are pieces of me that kept me surviving for a long time. The hypervigilance. The refusal to ask for help because asking felt like proof I couldn’t handle it. I don’t need those pieces the same way anymore. But I won’t call that darkness wasted. It wasn’t. It kept me alive long enough to become who I am right now, writing this, still standing, still here.

This isn’t new for me, either. As a Scorpio, death and rebirth have always been part of my story, long before I had language for it. In astrology, Scorpio is ruled by Pluto, the planet of the underworld and transformation, and its truest symbol isn’t the scorpion at all, it’s the phoenix, the one that has to burn all the way down before it can rise. I didn’t choose that pattern. I just kept living it, over and over, until I finally recognized it for what it was.

Honestly, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve died and come back. I couldn’t tell you the number if you asked me to. What I can tell you is this: every single time, the version of me that rises is better than the one that fell. Stronger. Clearer. More herself. So if this is death again, fine. I know what comes after.

What’s in the dark will come to light. I believe that, because I’ve watched it happen in my own life more times than I can count. But I’m done pretending the walk through the dark is optional, or fast, or graceful. It’s not. It’s just necessary.

So for now, I rest. I take care of this body that’s been carrying everyone and everything. And I let myself prepare to shine again, instead of forcing it before I’m ready.

If the dark you’re in feels like more than you can carry alone, please reach out, to a therapist, a doctor, or someone you trust. You don’t have to walk through it by yourself.