Hello, Darkness, My Old…

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which (s)he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain
Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash

The authenticity gap reopened so slowly that I didn’t even notice it happening. Like the proverbial amphibian in hot water, I found myself suddenly, rather radically, and quite surprisingly out of alignment, my inner landscape colored with darkness and sorrow as my outward-facing self-expression radiated the joyful aliveness of new — at-long-last-true — love. The longer I tried to straddle the growing divide between my inner emotional experience and the blissed-out state I presented to the world and to my partner, the more discomfort nibbled away at my insides, and the more I denied that dis-ease when the loving, concerned inquiries came.

I had finally met “the one”, my forever love, and I knew it in every cell of my being from the earliest moments of our journey from me to we. When our hearts connected, I was 15+ years in on a deep dive to do the inner work my mother was tragically unable to do. To discover and integrate the existential truths, core wounds, and shadows within, soul work that her suicide in 2008 inspired and that I believed readied me for a relationship like this. I was certain I could be with whatever arose on the path forward — that I could hold what needed holding and witness what needed witnessing. What I didn’t consider was that I might not be ready to reciprocally share the darker emotions and inconvenient truths that surfaced within me as our love fest progressed and my…