The dark doesn’t whisper. It claims.

With tears falling down my face, I screamed I cannot take this anymore. My body shook uncontrollably. My heart was pounding through my chest. My stomach was twisting itself inside out.

I was on the floor of my bedroom. A bedroom that used to be our bedroom, now only filled with the remnants of who he was. The pillow that still smelt like him. The mattress we bought together. The doona we used to fight over. Memories were everywhere of what was.

After twelve months, the pain was somehow even worse. I did not want to feel like this anymore. I could not function with my whole body locked in grief and my mind trapped in the past. I wanted to end it all right there on that floor.

Then a voice, an idea, came from nowhere and told me to look something up. That single action stopped me cold and rerouted everything.

That voice was me.

And from then on, it was the only one I heard.

The Fractures

Every version created what came after

Violation Impact Collapse Depletion Stagnation Grief Confinement

It was only when I sat down with a pen and a piece of paper that I could start pulling apart my life. I looked at what happened, what I learned, what choices I made and how I felt. What could I have done differently. What did I wish had changed.

It was through that process that I realised each version I had been was someone who was surviving the moments I had lived through, and that the experiences and the beliefs I was holding were showing up all around me. Experiences that were painful or uncomfortable were not destined to be just that. They were meant to be lived and then eventually reflected upon.

Each version expanded into the next. A series of such powerful experiences that only a life filled with meaning could evolve from them. Without every single one of these moments, I would not be able to be where I am now.

Our lives do not give us meaning. We are the ones who give meaning to them. And based on where our beliefs are, that is how our world will be reflected toward us.

The seven distinct versions of myself are written inside my memoir.

The Myth

It was always inevitable.

I wrote the memoir first. Reading it all back at once gave me the courage.

I searched myself until there was nothing left to uncover. What I was left with was a set of pieces, some of them mine and some of them handed to me by other people.

To keep just those, I had to build my own myth. A story that belonged to no one else. Free of the collective ideas about what a life is supposed to be, and free of the boundaries the world draws around what a story is allowed to be.

Look at life as one whole thing. Everything, everywhere, all at once. We are just living in parts of it, seeing our reflection in ourselves and in others.

My myth starts where that universe cracked open. Two powerful forces representing the masculine and the feminine that hold our existence in shape. Torn apart by forces unknown. Ananke and Aion. The goddess and god of inevitability and time.

Ananke is the representation of the dark goddess, mythical and known. Aion is the futuristic, alien like, all knowing and unseen. Their separation cracked existence into being. It formed the human and the way that we exist in this reality.

The angst of them both etched into our human DNA, deep into our bone structure, using our ribs as the vessels. Twelve foundations that I created, drawn out of my own life through the writing of my memoir, looking at the experiences and how each one shaped me.

Each side standing as a fracture or as a cohesive idea, giving way for the duality and polarity of our existence. Urging us to move toward the holding of them both through the convergence of our understanding.

Sitting at the heart. The centre of the human. We live by moving between the two sides and settling inside the place where we can hold them both, full coherence and acceptance of all sides without one taking power over the other.

...before you were a self, you were a tremor in the dark. a fractured breath caught between aion and ananke. captured in time, bound by inevitability...

That is my mythology. Mine, shrouded in nothing but me. I return to it, use it, break it apart, or sit above it and look down. It is how I make sense of all of it.

Every one of us can build our own.