Something I have struggled with all my life, but especially since my awakening six years ago, is not fitting in anywhere.  As a child, I had few friends, being unknowingly neurodivergent and highly intelligent and therefore, lacking in social skills.  Teachers loved me, earning me the unwanted epithet “teacher’s pet”, further ostracizing me.  Growing up in a household that in no way resembled a normal home did not help this situation, as it meant I couldn’t talk about my parents or home.

The first time I fit in anywhere was in my early 20s.  I had stumbled onto a large community of diverse pagans that held twice-yearly campouts in the Texas Hill Country, and I began attending.  I met my husband there in 1995.  These campouts became much-anticipated outlets of energy that could not be expressed at any other time or in any other place.  They were TAZs: Temporary Autonomous Zones into which one could enter and completely leave behind the so-called “real world”.

Around the same time, I also stumbled into an occult group focused on ceremonial magic based in freemasonry, and they were very open and accepting of life’s misfits.  I found myself in a group of highly eclectic and very interesting people, all of whom were friendly and welcoming of me.  I would remain associated with this group of people for a very long time, and am still friends with some of them.

However, the winds of life scattered us over the years, weakening the bonds of our social community.  This was exacerbated by the changing culture and economics of our city, which made it difficult for many of the people I had once considered part of my circle to afford living there.  I had just had a baby, and at a time when having friends and support was critical, I found myself with almost no support whatsoever and surrounded by people I could tell did not approve of me.  Once again, I didn’t fit in.

Such has been the state of my life since my child was born in 2003.  I had my friends, but I mostly only interacted with them on Facebook, which is very superficial in nature.  Most of them also did not have children.  The increasing pressures of their modern lives coupled with my parenting life meant that no one had time for in-person interaction anymore.  I felt very lonely and adrift much of the time.

Then I had my awakening six years ago, which was interpreted as a manic episode by most people around me, which means they now see me through that lens.  There is now a very large and very important part of my life that I can share with virtually no one, because they won’t understand it and may even fear it, thinking it insane.  I should be able to find a place for myself within the pagan community where I live.  I am speaking the same language of the Goddess and hearing the same Voices of the land as they are.  And yet, once again, I find myself not fitting in despite my best efforts and intentions.

I wish I had the words to convey what it feels like to feel as though you are holding beautiful treasure in your hands, but when you try to show it to people, they see something frightening if they see anything at all.  In the absence of an Earthly place to fit in, I find myself seeking the company of the un-Earthly.  Of goddesses, ancestors, and angels.

I think the difference between myself and many other pagans is that my traumatic life means that I have walked in the company of a Dark Goddess my whole life, and necessarily so.  Her Darkness did not make her evil, but it gave her knowledge of the shadowy realms of existence where I was living and therefore made her the ideal spiritual companion.  She Knew the lessons that can only be learned by hardship, and that is not the way of Goddesses of Light and Love.

Where I am now, most of the people walk with the Goddess of Light and Love, and I am happy She is there for them.  But She does not resonate with me.  The light, caressing drumming that speaks to these people does not stir my soul.  My Dark Goddess responds to deep, throbbing drums that make the Earth Herself tremble with ecstasy.  She misses those old campouts when the drumming began at Sundown and rose like thunder with the lighting of the bonfire, then crescendoed again and again throughout the night until the drummers and dancers retired from exhaustion just before Sunrise.  When I returned home from these campouts and laid down in bed, I would hear the drums in my ears as I fell asleep.

I am not judging those who walk in the Light, and in fact I am rather envious of them.  It must be nice to be so light of heart and soul that one’s feet do not drag through the Underworld as one walks.  It’s just lonely sometimes, the Path of the Dark Goddess.  Most of us on this Path walk it alone and seldom find an Earthly companion who is also walking it.  I’m lucky in that I married someone also following the Dark Goddess: in fact, he’s the one who finally told me her name.

Still, since my awakening six years ago, my perceptions of and relationship with the Dark Goddess have changed, and I find myself in a unique position that even my husband has trouble understanding sometimes.  I feel as though I have unique insights into various things, but I am reticent to share them with others for the most part.  I take these insights very seriously, while I feel they are merely intellectual exercises to others.  They haven’t had the same actual realizations I have, and so they cannot relate to me.  There’s a difference between conceptualizing something and actually experiencing it.

Occasionally, though, I do encounter people who seem open to my experiences and insights.  I’m very grateful for them and am trying to train myself to focus on their presence in my life rather than on the people who cannot relate to me.  I am also training myself not to assume I won’t be understood, as well as to be more cautious about with whom I share Myself so as to avoid unnecessary rejection.  I am also aware that part of my perceived isolation may, in fact, be at least partially self-induced as an artifact of my natural tendency to engage in defensive self-protection.  That is, I will pre-emptively cut off potential connections to avoid the pain of rejection.

So from one perspective, I’m responsible for my own distance from others.  But I come by it naturally and shouldn’t judge myself for it.  It’s a psychic mechanism borne out of years of externally imposed isolation and rejection by others.  It’s difficult for me to remember and focus on the few times that I was accepted and leave myself open to that possibility when I meet new people.  However, I must honestly ask myself if the issue is that others won’t let me fit in, or I won’t allow myself to fit in?

Truthfully and historically, it has varied from situation to situation.  There have been many times, particularly throughout childhood, when I was most definitely excluded and isolated by others, having been judged unworthy of their company because I was too smart, or too weird, or too poor.  The same thing happened when my own child was born and I found myself excluded from the community of mothers for much the same reasons.

Now I am in my 50s, living in an entirely new place culturally-speaking, and openly yet cautiously engaging with a spiritual community that, so far, seems fairly accepting.  It is not as eclectic as the pagans I spent my time with in my 20s, but the spirit of the community is similar.  People have been very open and friendly, although I know for a fact that the congregation is still prone to political social dynamics, like any group of human beings.

In the midst of this, I am partway through the individuation process of (re)discovering my True Self.  As such, I am still changing and transforming away from who I used to be into a New Self that I do not yet entirely know.  This makes it difficult to present myself in social situations because, frankly, I don’t always know which Me will be presenting themselves.  I am a work in progress, and I don’t know what I look like to others.  I live in constant fear that too much of my Old Self is showing, a person I do not hold in high regard.

I also cannot ignore the purely physical aspect of my mental health in the form of a chemical imbalance that makes me fearful and anxious bordering on paranoid.  It makes me think people don’t like me when that’s not true.  This part of me is constantly being proven wrong, yet it assiduously clings to its belief that everyone hates me.  By the same token, there were periods of my life when this was actually true, so it’s hard to argue with it.  The human self-preservation mechanism is extremely strong, even if it’s based in an illusion.

The further along I get in the individuation process, the less I care what others think of me and the less I need external validation for my own intuitions, insights, and instinct.  This is good, because the healthier I get mentally, the more danger I’m in of having conflicts with people who are still stuck in unhealthy mental patterns.  I’m already experiencing this sometimes when I encounter someone who isn’t used to being told “no” or having people maintain strong boundaries around them.

Even though I recognize I’m not the problem in such situations, I still try to be the ‘bigger person’ as it were and not be reactive if at all possible, although I fail occasionally.  It’s not a skill that comes naturally to me.  I have three planets in Scorpio, I’ve had to temper the tendency to sting fast and hard, often before asking questions.  I try to be compassionate instead and recognize where a person is without judging them, something else I sometimes fail at.

Maybe I’m not supposed to truly “fit in” just yet because I’m not done becoming my New Self.  Perhaps there are still too many bits of my Old Self to shed before enough of my New Self has been revealed.  I know there are times when I feel different from day to day, always changing.  It gets exhausting, and is even sometimes rather painful.  Like being in a crucible.  I endure the process because I enjoy the alchemy of turning mental lead into gold and purifying myself.

In the meantime, I continue cultivating my relationship with my Dark Goddess.  She is an amalgam of different archetypes, and as such is rather complicated, not unlike myself.  I didn’t actually know she had been my constant companion until I awakened six years ago, at which point she made Her presence fully known.  At first I thought she was angry with me, because she was livid, but later it became clear that she was livid on my behalf.

It is also now clear that it has been Her presence, along with the spiritual presence of Others, that has allowed me to live this long without being taken out by any number of horrid life tragedies that, statistically speaking, I should have suffered from.  I credit Her presence with meeting a kind man to whom I would get married, instead of someone abusive as my past would likely have dictated.  I once considered myself cursed because of the various things I have had to endure, and perhaps I was.  But if so, I was also clearly given a counteractive blessing to make sure I did endure.

With Her assistance, since awakening, I have become a person who “walks between the worlds”, always with one foot in this world and one foot in the Other, navigating The Spaces In Between.  It’s an odd place to live sometimes, and I’m still getting the balance right.  Occasionally I lean too far to one side or the other and lose the connection to either the Otherworld or this one, and both situations have their drawbacks.

I’m trying to tell myself that the best way to find my True community is to keep working on cultivating my authentic self.  Compatible individuals will be drawn to whoever this person is that I’m becoming, people who will understand and accept me as I am.  They may be already and I’m just not seeing it through the lens of my general social distrust of others.  I do have a measure of appreciation and acceptance, I’m just not used to it, so I do distrust it.

I hope this is something my Dark Goddess can help me with.  I know she can help me find something that Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls la luz del abismo: the light of the abyss.  The place in the yin-yang where yin black dives into a point of light and emerges into the white yang half.  This does not mean She will leave my side.  She will always be there when yang turns to yin again, as it always does, and is with me even in yang, transformed herself into a being of Light, if only temporarily.