The Cord You Actually Need to Cut
The version of you that survived the worst of it never stopped making the decisions.
There was a time in my life when I was so broke that I honestly didn’t know if I would survive it. I had never felt that kind of darkness before. I was lost, had no answers, and felt completely alone, and my thoughts were destroying me. There were nights I didn’t want to live anymore because I couldn’t see an end to any of it, and it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced.
Then I would get a few days of seeing light. On those days, I’d make a plan or try something different to bring in money, and sometimes it worked, though it was never consistent enough to survive on. So the good days became their own cruelty, because they’d show me I was capable and then take it back, and I’d go under again. That went on for months.
When I Ran Out Of Ways To Do It Alone
Eventually, I hit my breaking point and was forced to move back home, which, aside from the struggle, was a hard call to make because it meant coming to terms with the fact that I could no longer do this on my own. And if I’m honest with you, I hadn’t been able to do it on my own for a while before I admitted it. I swallowed my pride, accepted my family’s help, and they bought me a plane ticket.
I thought I’d be there three months. Get in, work on my money, and get out. I stayed for over a year.
If you’re in a place like I was, I want you to know that when you’re feeling that low, it’s not because you lack the right attitude, gratitude, or mindset. Once you’re in the hole, you cannot see daylight, and from that position it’s not possible to believe there’s a day coming when this is over. I made plans on my good days because those were the only days I could see anything at all. If that’s where you are right now, please tell someone today.
The Plan I Couldn’t Do
I went home to lock in and heal my money wounds, but I couldn’t do any of it. My nervous system was shot. I’d try to start simple tasks, but I just couldn’t begin, no matter how much I wanted to. I’d stare at something that should take 20 minutes and end up sitting there for hours, unable to do anything.
It was during that time that I found out the extent of my neurodivergence. I’d suspected something for years. I had friends with diagnoses, I would read things that sounded like me, and I figured I was somewhere on the spectrum but barely. What I learned that year was that I’d been masking my entire adult life, which had been doing damage all along, and I had just spent years running a business by myself with no support. That’s what took me out – years of carrying a load that was never going to be sustainable for the way my brain actually works, and I had no idea that’s what I was doing.
Once it came apart, I couldn’t put it back together. The masking stopped working, and I’ve never been able to go back. At the time, it felt like losing the only professional skill I had.
It wasn’t just burnout. This is what happens when you’re neurodivergent and force yourself through things that come easily to everyone else, without knowing that’s what you’re doing. You push past your limit because you don’t know it’s a limit. You think you’re just not trying hard enough. So you try harder, and you keep trying harder, and eventually your body stops negotiating and makes the decision for you. Mine did more than stop. Forcing it for so long woke something in me physically that I am still managing. My health had to come first. There was an order of operations, and I didn’t get to pick it.
What I Found When I Went Looking
I started Dark Feminine Codes during that time. My business had been burning me out and bringing in nothing, so I stopped working entirely. But I’d spent years working every single day, pouring everything into my business, trying to find the thing that would finally break me out of the famine I was in. Going from that to nothing wasn’t something I could do cold turkey. So I gave myself a new hobby. There was no pressure, and I got to be excited about something for the first time in a long time. I could also show up however I wanted because there was no identity attached to it, unlike with my other business.
Eventually, my health began to recover, and once it did, I finally had the room to do what I’d come home for. I was working through Existential Kink at the time, doing the practices in the book, and it sent me back through everything I believed about money. I went looking for the beliefs in my subconscious about what money is, what it does, who’s allowed to have it, what happens when you want too much of it, and what it said about me for having none. Every question I asked took me further back than I expected. What I found underneath those questions had nothing to do with money.
Being broke meant I had been abandoned. It meant God had looked at me and found me unworthy, and this was what I deserved, or that I was supposed to struggle to prove something, to earn my worthiness or my way back into the world and into being loved. Some days I was being punished. Some days I was being tested. Either way, the conclusion was the same: I wasn’t good enough, and this was the evidence. That’s what I had identified with. It wasn’t about being broke, but being the woman God left behind. And I wanted out so badly it was making me sick, but I still couldn’t move, because you cannot walk away from something you’re tethered to.
Carl Jung would have called this a complex – a knot in the unconscious that forms around a wound and then takes on a life of its own. It lives in the shadow, and anything you won’t look at keeps operating in the background whether you know it or not. Mine ran everything. It was in every decision I made about money, and I couldn’t see any of it.
The rest is for paid subscribers. Behind this paywall is a nine-day cord-cutting ritual to sever the tether to the identity you’ve outgrown. I explain what that identity is, why it’s still running your decisions, walk you through the ritual, and tell you what changed for me on the other side. Subscribe for a new ritual every Friday.