I find it difficult to write this post. I feel all the anxiety and fear screaming at me not to. But I also know, deeper down, that this is what I need to do to continue healing, and that the fear is just a signpost pointing in the right direction.
This all started during a weekend of tremendous swings: intense physical pressure, tears of release, moments of new clarity, and an expanded sense of self and sovereignty.
I write this as I’m still integrating it and what it means to me. But that’s at the core of it all: we have the power to write our own stories. No one can tell me what my experiences mean to me other than me. More and more, I recognize this is not just some psychological trick of the mind. This is a power inherent to us all.
This knowing has been gently knocking at my door for some time now. But I have to pick a place to start, so I’ll start with a dream that kicked off the entire weekend.
The Trash Compactor
I was doing security work in a scrapyard, and there was a giant trash compactor. Not just any trash compactor though. This one was operated by a river of water. Two of us fell into the trash compactor and survived. When they were rescued, they were alive but had gone mad. They kept writing ones and twos on everything as they were brought back to the office.
It felt like they were writing the ones and twos to leave reminders for themselves.
Then I became one of the workers, and the manager of the scrapyard approached me. He offered me $39,000 as a payoff. I rejected his offer.
I then found myself at a construction site. The bridge going over the river that ran the trash compactor was being rebuilt. I stood in the middle of the construction as debris, sparks, and tools fell everywhere.
I gently walked through as time around me seemed to accelerate. I didn’t fear anything hitting me though. Things would fall right next to me or directly at me, but somehow, at the last minute, they would move just enough to miss.
I realized I had nothing to fear.
This realization (that there was nothing to fear) has been a recurring theme over the last few weeks. It’s a pattern that keeps emerging in my dreams and lived experiences, as if the universe is trying to teach me something fundamental about the nature of fear itself and what lies beyond it. Fear is the Gateway
The Tower
I can’t help but see the parallels between my own lived experience and the Trash Compactor Dream. 2007 was the last time a Full Moon landed on my Solar Return, and now here I am again: 2026, and a Full Moon lands on my Solar Return.
2007 was a major turning point in my life. I’d been fired from a sewer cleaning job after working there since high school. I started working as a security guard in a scrapyard. We lived meagerly in a trailer park, struggling for everything, it felt like.
Eventually, we moved into a duplex apartment with a friend living next door. A few years later, I found my wife having sex with that friend, and my world collapsed.
I had been feeling the crushing weight of responsibility: children to provide for. My wife and I felt different. There was a distancing I tried to ignore.
I would work tirelessly day and night to finish coding a game, coming up with a business plan or some new trading strategy. I told myself I needed to do this work because I wasn’t going to be a security guard forever. I had to find a way to better support my family.
Looking back though, I think it was a way of escaping the responsibility I felt. It felt overwhelming.
I knew something was going on with my wife. There was a voice in the back of my head telling me exactly what it was. I couldn’t believe it though. “She would never do such a thing to me,” I thought.
But I knew.
Then one night while I was sitting at the dinner table working on some new project, I heard a noise.
It grabbed my attention, and I heard it again. My heart sank. I knew what I was hearing, but I had to know for sure.
I ran around the house and, like a peeping tom, peered into the window. I could see it all. I slammed my hand on the window and heard her yell “Fuck.”
I ran inside to confront them, enraged. I threw a knife through a window: a desperate act of self-control, I think, to keep myself from doing something worse. I don’t know what was said or what happened after that. It’s a blank spot in my memory, a void where nothing sits.
That moment, that single moment, would go on to define the next 15 years of my life.
I recall those first few weeks. I would just sit, staring out at the world. The weather was cold and dreary, and a slow rain trickled through the open door. I sat there smoking cigarette after cigarette, pack after pack. The smell of mildew from the wet floor mingled with the cigarette smoke.
Every day seemed to bring the same weather, and my life became the darkest pit I’ve ever known.
I sat for more nights than I can count, trying to understand what had happened. Why did this occur? What did I do to cause this?
I didn’t know about Tarot symbolism then, but looking back, this was my Tower moment. The Tower Card: A Mirror for Self-Discovery
I had entered the trash compactor of life with all the turbulent emotions of a surging river ripping everything apart.
The compactor turned again and again. The sounds from next door didn’t stop, like the raven’s call of “nevermore.”
The Compactor
For years after the betrayal, I did all the things one might do. I was angry. We fought. I tried to understand. We went through cycles of “fixing things,” only to watch it all fall apart again.
More and more, she started living next door, leaving me alone in our side of the house with only the kids. Eventually, the kids started spending more time next door too, and we got them rooms in the basement there.
I was all alone now, it felt.
She wanted to be with the neighbor while still being with me. She didn’t want to choose. Despite the betrayal, I still loved her and didn’t want to let go.
She decided that she was polyamorous and said she always truly had been. It didn’t feel like me, but I loved her and decided I would go along with it. I told her I just wanted to continue being part of her life.
I decided to rewrite my relationship to sexuality, even though it felt contrary to who I was. To my surprise, it worked, but with consequences I could never have imagined.
As time went on, I became increasingly obsessed with sex. It consumed my thoughts.
I conjured a version of myself that relished the idea of my wife sleeping around, while I still ultimately got to have her. This energy built and built. At first, she enjoyed it. But eventually, I think it started to scare her.
More and more, she didn’t want to have sex. I was confused and frustrated. I’d made this change in myself all for her, and now she wanted to pull away? Then she said the words that would echo in my mind for years to come.
“Sleeping with you is like sleeping with a wild beast. It’s just animalistic, and not in a good way.”
If I recall correctly, that was also the last time we ever slept together.
I began to journal and meditate as a way to clear my head. The Power of Journaling: Listening to Your Inner Voice. I didn’t know it then, but journaling would turn about to be immensely more powerful than I ever thought it could be.
I asked myself questions: Why did I feel the way I did? Why did I react to circumstances the way I did?
I saw monsters lurking in the shadows. I had dreams of demons, dark places, drowning in water, the dead rising.
I had moments of depression. I gained weight. I neglected journaling and meditation repeatedly.
Among the monsters I found inside myself was the largest one of all: a Beast of sexual desire that I described as a succubus, an overwhelming sexual urge. I struggled with pornography and fought it the only way I knew how, through sheer willpower and repression. I failed again and again.
The tower had fallen. I had nowhere to hide. I felt surrounded.
The Alchemical Shift
Yet when a tower falls, there is empty space. There is debris, yes, but in that debris and ashes, new life can begin to grow. With attention and nurturing care, a wonderful forest can grow in its place.
I started journaling with consistency. I watched myself and asked questions.
Soon I had a massive stack of pages. My journals became my source of truth, my bible.
I could see that hatred was consuming me: hatred I harbored toward my former friend, neighbor, and now my wife’s lover. It was all over my journals, almost daily.
One day I woke up and made the conscious decision to forgive him. I chose to release that anger and sent a text message. I don’t fully recall what I wrote.
I think it was along the lines of me apologizing for the way I’d acted toward him, and acknowledging that I was being consumed by hatred. It was time to let it go. I clearly remember ending with “I don’t know what this means, or what happens next.”
This didn’t come easily, and it didn’t change overnight. But the healing had begun, and the forest was beginning to grow.
I started to relate to what had happened in a completely different way. Instead of seeing it as something that happened tome, I started to feel like it was somehow part of an agreement on some level. I began to see the gifts it had brought me.
Without that extremely intense experience, I would have stayed completely unaware of myself. That moment (my wife) had become my alchemical crucible. She is a Scorpio Sun, and I started thinking of her as my personal Scorpio, bringing the intensity I needed to be on the path I am on now: a path to a truer, freer, and sovereign self.
Another key moment was discovering that I had taught myself to restrain emotion. I had an experience where it felt like literal dark hands reached up, grabbed a sad emotion as I started to feel it, and pulled it back down into an abyss.
I had to learn how to feel emotions all over again. This was a long and hard process that’s still ongoing. Emotions: Driving Force of Creation
Emotions began to fuel a new creative imperative in me: a creativity that further fueled my healing and later helped me recognize the deeper pattern that had been unfolding across the entire year. Monthly Letter – January 2026: A Creative Spark
I learned so much about myself and started making peace with different parts of myself, integrating them in a more harmonious way. I also felt I’d won my battle with the beast of sexual desire. I felt triumphant.
Yet in this new forest growing around me, shadows still lurked in the dark parts of the woods.
Feeding the Serpent
In the deepest abandoned parts of the woods, there was an abandoned factory: a place of power, now derelict. I explored this place in a dream and found inside a terrible giant of immense power, restrained by chains and weights.
This dream consumed me for weeks. Slowly I began to understand: the giant beast was my libido, my sexual drive, my life force. I’d chained it away through repression and will, but will alone couldn’t hold it back forever.
During this time, I had another dream, one that would manifest in a real-life meeting with someone who helped me see this repression for what it was. I followed an impulse that seemed strange, yet it led me to what needed healing next. Impulsive Living – Friend or Foe?
For days, weeks, and months I pored through journal entries, did active imagination sessions with my inner world Active Imagination Part 2 of 2: Active Imagination & Aphantasia, meditated, and reviewed more dreams.
Then one night alone, as I prepared for another active imagination session, I decided to let my imagination run wild: to let the beast out of its chains. The outcome of the session terrified me, but it shone a light on something.
I suddenly realized the story I had been telling myself about this energy for years had created the beast. I only had one script, and it was dark and terrible. All I had to do was rewrite it.
My thoughts began to shift. The terrible beast I’d feared became an inner divine mistress living inside me, one that needed to be loved, cherished, and respected.
As my thoughts changed, so did my dreams, and the fear began to lessen. Again, I thought I was done, and time moved on.
But there was still more work to do, and another dream waiting.
I found myself in that chaotic situation again with my wife and others, but this time I got up and said, “I don’t need to be part of this energy any longer.” I walked away and left everything behind except for some snakes in cages. They were wilted and had not been fed in a long time. They were ravenous.
This time my divine mistress (that sexual desire, that former beast) came as serpents.
I sat with the dream the entire day, and I began to understand more. This power needs to be fed. It needs more than the love and respect due to a divine mistress; it needs fuel. But it’s up to me what to fuel it with. I’d stripped away the fuel of the old script, left it with respect but no nourishment.
I’m beginning to understand it’s up to me what to fuel the snakes with, whatever beautiful story I assign them. It’s up to me, and no one can tell me what that is but me.
The next night’s dream left me with nothing but a typewriter. The dictator of this dream world had stripped me of everything else. After taking it all, he asked, “Are you awake now?” I replied, “That’s for me to decide, and only me.”
Sovereignty
Then another dream propelled things forward. A dream where I faced a choice between Life and Death. Again, I remembered those guiding words: Fear is the Gateway. I chose Death. Honoring the Shadows, Facing the Sun
I found I had been stuck looking backward, never turning around to look forward. It was time to move into a new way of being.
I did a small, simple cord-cutting ceremony, not to expel my wife from my life, but to cut the ties of our old relationship and allow a new one, whatever form that might take, to develop.
A couple of months later, I was at dinner with her when words came out of my mouth that essentially acknowledged us as no longer together. I don’t know where they came from, but they were kind, and she might not have even picked up on them.
As I walked back to the truck and got in, the words replayed in my mind and tears started to well up. I let them flow and felt a release of something old, tired, and ready to move on.
The River Flows in You
The last few days I’ve been practicing Yiruma’s River Flows in You on the piano. A piece about water, about flow, about the river that ran through that trash compactor in my dream.
For the first time in my life, I was moved to tears by music as I played. The ones and twos the mad workers wrote everywhere: they were leaving reminders to themselves. This music is mine. My marker left in reality.
I am the man in that construction site. Things can fall all around me, but I have nothing to fear. I get to decide what the story means. No outer authority can tell me otherwise; only I can.
Perhaps the deepest trauma arises when we live inside a story that isn’t aligned with who we truly are.
I’m in the room with the typewriter now, ready to write new stories, and I’m only just beginning…
River Flows In You
Song by Yiruma
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