It’s another Saturday night in my vampire lair, aka my bedroom, and I have a confession to make.

I’ve developed an oddly concerning attraction to Sauron. Yes. Sauron.

Because the more I thought about why the fuck I suddenly find this man so compelling, the more I realized. It’s not the armor. It’s not the Eye. It’s not even the whole Dark Lord thing. Well… maybe. I do think that sounds kind of hot. But mostly?It’s his fucking commitment. This man wanted ONE thing. One Ring. One agenda. One obsession. World fucking domination. That was it. No identity crisis. No backup plan. No fucking committee meeting. Just one giant armored motherfucker absolutely committed to ruling Middle-earth. I know. Stay with me.

Because today I woke up with one thought in my head, One Ring to rule them all. That’s it.

Before my tea. Before anything. One Ring to rule them all. And because I’m neurodivergent, at first I was like, okay bitch, maybe this is just today’s weird catch phrase. But I kept saying it. All. Fucking. Day.

So naturally, I watched all three Lord of the Rings movies. And somewhere in the middle of this, I stopped and thought. Why the fuck am I so fascinated by Sauron right now?

Because I’ve learned something about myself. When my body becomes fascinated by something, I pay attention. Call it my body. My subconscious. My soul. My spirit. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. Something is asking me to look.

And when I followed this one down the tunnel, I realized. Sauron is power stripped of the need to be liked. And holy shittttttttt. That grabbed me by the fucking titties. Because think about this man.Sauron does not explain himself to death. He doesn’t audition for authority. He doesn’t ask whether he’s too intimidating. He doesn’t need applause from the fucking crowd to continue his quest. His presence is established before he even enters the fucking room.

And that’s the crazy part. Sauron spends very little time physically interacting with the main characters. Half the fucking time, all you see is a giant Eye sitting on top of a tower. Yet everything bends around him. You feel him through the landscape. Through other characters’ fear. Through the Ring. Through the Eye. Through armies moving toward Mordor.

This motherfucker barely has to physically enter the story for you to know.

Sauron is fucking here.

That is impact without constant fucking performance. And THAT is the shit that has me locked the fuck down right now. Sit down, bitch. Take notes. Because apparently we’re going somewhere.

A couple months ago, I said something almost jokingly, not really. My goal is to become the most haunting presence on the internet. But the more I sit with this, the more I realize that shit was already telling me where I was going. I don’t want my work to become more informative. I want it to become more haunting. I want someone to read three sentences and know. That bitch is Mishell. Before they see my name. Before they see my face. Before they click the profile. They fucking know.

And the funniest part? For the majority of my business, I was basically Gandalf, don’t laugh. The wise one. The teacher. The one with the information. The one explaining. The one showing you the way. And let me tell you, being Gandalf got me the claps. But that motherfucker wasn’t getting me all the money I’m here for. Because apparently I don’t just have the wisdom of Gandalf.

I have the ambitions of fucking Sauron. I’m here for world domination and a fuck ton of money. There. I said it.

And maybe that’s why my villain fascination keeps getting darker. First it was Maleficent. Then Hela. Miranda Priestly. And among many others. And now apparently we have arrived in fucking Mordor. Sometimes even I’m like. Bitch, perhaps we have gone too deep. Maybe we should turn around. Unfortunately, we cannot. So fuck it. Let’s keep going.

Because Sauron is different. He barely gives you emotional accessibility at all. He represents something much more concentrated, Will. This man is locked the fuck in. And I think I’m realizing that I’ve moved beyond. I give myself permission to be too much. And I’m moving toward. I don’t actually require permission, bitch. That’s different.

So while I was sitting there watching this giant flaming Eye terrorize Middle-earth, I asked myself. What does the part of me that likes Sauron recognize in him that the socially acceptable version of me was taught to reject?

And my answer came immediately. Dominance. Power. Being feared instead of requiring myself to be universally adored. Having an agenda. Wanting something enormous and not immediately shrinking the desire into something more spiritually acceptable. Being fucking locked in. And before somebody gets concerned. No. I’m not saying I want to enslave Middle-earth. Not currently.

Sauron’s literal business model is domination through enslavement and destruction. We’re going to make a few adjustments to that strategy. But underneath the destructiveness is something psychologically fascinating, concentrated desire.

There isn’t a fucking committee meeting happening inside this man. He’s not sitting in Mordor thinking. Will they understand me? Will the Orcs think I’m too much? Should I soften this? What if they don’t like me? Maybe I should change the plan because nobody reacted. No, bitch.

One Ring to rule them all.

Moving on.

And this is where the whole thing started exposing me. Because maybe when I say I want world domination, what I’m actually admitting is.

I’m willing to tell the truth about the obscene size of what I want without immediately making myself humble about it.

I want fucking power. I want money. I want influence. I want my work everywhere. I want to be unforgettable. I want people obsessed with what I create. I want to fucking win, bitch. And yes. There is even a part of me that wants to be feared. Not because I need people beneath me. Not because I want to hurt anybody. But because I am becoming less interested in making sure nobody is intimidated by my power.

People already tell me I’m intimidating. Maybe the work isn’t making myself less intimidating. Maybe it’s becoming so self-possessed that I no longer organize myself around preventing other people from experiencing me that way.

And THAT is where this gets interesting. Because domination has a shadow. Unintegrated domination says. I need obedience to feel powerful. I need you smaller so I can feel bigger. I need control because I cannot tolerate your autonomy. I need your submission to prove my authority. That’s not power. That’s power that still depends on somebody else.

But integrated domination? That shit feels completely different. I know what I want. I can take up enormous amounts of space. I can lead. I can compete. I can pursue money, power and influence. I can set the fucking agenda. I can tolerate being intimidating. I can want to win. And I don’t have to violate another person’s agency to prove that I am powerful. My power doesn’t require your submission to sustain itself. That, to me, is self-possession.

So no. I don’t think you integrate Sauron by becoming a fucking tyrant. You integrate the life force underneath the archetype without adopting the destruction. The will. The ambition. The dominance. The appetite. The refusal to divide yourself into seventeen different directions because you’re terrified the one thing you actually want won’t work.

Which brings me back to the fucking Ring. Because somewhere during this ridiculous psychological excavation, I realized. The Ring is almost the perfect metaphor for the philosophy I’ve built my entire offer around. One offer. One obsession. One agenda. One fucking Ring.

Meanwhile, some of you have one quiet week in your business and suddenly you’re renaming your offer, changing the price, rewriting the promise, creating another masterclass, questioning your niche, changing your content strategy, and wondering what the fuck you should sell next.

Sauron would be fucking disgusted with you. I would know. I used to do that shit too. And unfortunately… so am I.

Because your problem probably isn’t that your offer needs to change. Your problem is that you keep requiring your audience to immediately validate your decision before you’re willing to stand behind it.

Nobody buys this week? Maybe the offer is wrong.

Instagram doesn’t clap? Maybe the message needs to change.

People aren’t responding fast enough? Maybe you need to create something new.

No, bitch. One Ring to rule them all.

And that’s when I realized how fucking perfectly this explains what I built RUTHLESS around. Six weeks. One offer. Your voice. Your obsession. And the capacity to stay with the fucking thing long enough for it to become known.

Because maybe your money isn’t hiding inside another strategy. Maybe your money is sitting inside the level of commitment you haven’t been willing to give one fucking thing yet. The focus.The obsession. The agenda. The belief. The willingness to want what you want so fucking badly that silence doesn’t redirect you, rejection doesn’t dismantle you, and somebody else’s opinion doesn’t get a seat at the fucking table.

Concentrated desire. That’s where your fucking money is.

Not scattered across seventeen ideas. Not waiting inside the next offer you haven’t created yet. Not hiding behind another reinvention of yourself. It’s in your ability to decide. This is what I want. This is what I’m building. This is what I’m selling.
And I’m staying the fuck here.

One Ring to rule them all, bitch.

And if you’re reading this thinking, fuck, she’s talking to me, Gooooood.

RUTHLESS is your Mordor.

Six weeks of taking the offer you already have, the opinions you actually think, the shadows you’ve been trying to make socially acceptable, the desires you’ve been pretending aren’t that fucking big and turning all of it into a voice people recognize, remember, obsess over, and fucking buy from.

Not by becoming louder. Not by performing harder. Not by creating more. By becoming so fucking concentrated in what you want, what you stand for, and what you’re here to sell that your presence starts doing some of the work before you even enter the room.

Sauron would approve. Probably. I don’t know. The man isn’t exactly available for testimonials.

Enter RUTHLESS.

Come get your fucking Ring.

And somehow, once again, I have taken you through approximately three psychological tunnels, dragged you across Middle-earth, introduced you to my increasingly concerning attraction to a giant armored Dark Lord, uncovered my domination shadow, turned Sauron into a business mentor, and somehow… we made it back alive. Barely.

If you stayed with me through this entire fucking journey, congratulations. You have officially survived Mordor with me. Now go drink some water. I watched nine hours of Lord of the Rings today and apparently came back with a business philosophy.

Saturday well spent.

Until Next Time,

Mishell

I’m sitting here on a Friday night, drinking my chai tea, absorbing the silence of the night, and thinking about something I haven’t been able to unsee lately.

Recently, I’ve been connecting with so many entrepreneurs, mainly in the coaching and healing space. And time and time again, I keep coming across the same fucking pattern. These aren’t beginners. These are people who have put in the work. And let me tell you, YEARS of fucking work. $100K into their businesses. Thousands and thousands of dollars into themselves. They know the language. They’ve done the inner child work. They understand nervous system regulation. They’ve journaled, manifested, integrated. They’ve probably integrated so much shit up their ass that surely, by now, they should have graduated from being human.

Right?

Absolutely fucking not.

Because every time I would bring up something they might be avoiding seeing, I started noticing something fascinating:

The more sophisticated the person becomes, the more sophisticated their avoidance can become too.

Oh, it doesn’t disappear. It just gets a fucking MBA. Your avoidance starts quoting nervous system theory back to you. Your fear gets really good at using therapeutic language. Your control puts on a beige linen outfit and calls herself “discernment.” At this point, all I can picture is Miranda Priestly slowly lowering her sunglasses at you because, darling, changing the outfit didn’t change the fucking pattern.

And I think there comes a point in personal development where some people unconsciously start believing “Surely I’ve done enough work that these things shouldn’t happen to me anymore.” As if there’s some spiritual graduation ceremony where somebody hands you a little gold star and says:

Congratulations, bitch. You are no longer human. (HAHAHHAHAHAH)

Unfortunately, Hogwarts has declined your application bitch.

And I don’t believe development works like that anyway. I don’t see life as this straight little staircase where you integrate something, move upward, integrate something else, move upward, and eventually arrive at enlightenment wearing white linen with absolutely no triggers. I see it more like going downward. A spiral. Deeper and deeper into yourself.

And the more I do this work, the more I realize. So much of shadow integration is actually capacity building. Because when most people hear “shadow integration,” they imagine something like:

Okay.

I found my too intense shadow. My money-hungry shadow. My god complex shadow.

My jealous shadow. My weird shadow. My self awareness shadow. My authenticity shadow.

I journaled about her. I cried. I accepted her. She’s integrated.

Woohoo.

Check the fucking clipboard.

☑ TOO MUCH
☑ GREEDY
☑ ARROGANT
☑ HUMAN CONDITION SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED

Sounds a little too fucking simple, doesn’t it?

Because if it were that simple, we’d all be fucking Gucci.

We’re not.

And recently I started creating a series on Instagram around something I deeply believe. THE VERSION OF YOU YOU HIDE IS THE VERSION OF YOU THAT GETS FUCKING PAID. Because so much of my work is taking shadow and turning it into self-possession.

And let me take you on a little dip inside my brain here. The way I see shadow integration, it’s not necessarily getting rid of the shadow. It’s increasing your capacity to remain in relationship with that part of yourself without exiling it, obeying it, performing against it, shrinking because of it, or desperately trying to get rid of the discomfort it creates. And that’s a completely different fucking game. Because every time you desire something bigger from life. More money, more intimacy, more visibility, more power, more recognition, more responsibility—life hands you a bigger arena. And suddenly the shadow you thought you’d “integrated” has new fucking material to work with.

Take money for example.

At $5K months, your money-hungry shadow might whisper:

“Am I really allowed to want more than this?”

At $20K months:

“Fuck. Can I hold the visibility, expectations, responsibility, criticism and the possibility of losing all of this?”

At $50K months:

“Who the fuck am I if I’m no longer the woman struggling to make it work? What relationships change? Who doesn’t understand me anymore? What does having this much now require me to tolerate?”

And at $100K months?

Maybe it’s an entirely different expression of the same underlying material.

Because more money increases the stakes. Visibility. Responsibility. Uncertainty. Power. Choice. Potential loss. Other people’s bullshit projections. And the discrepancy between who you’ve known yourself to be and who your life is now requiring you to become. Whatever hasn’t been metabolized around those things suddenly has a much bigger stage to perform on. And all I can picture is Bellatrix Lestrange realizing someone left the microphone unattended. Because more power didn’t create the chaos, sweet cheeks. It just gave what was already there a much bigger room to perform in.

And this is why I don’t believe the shadow necessarily disappears when it becomes integrated. Your relationship to it changes. You can feel envy without needing to shame yourself or sabotage the thing you actually desire. You can feel greed and desire without immediately turning yourself into a morally superior nun who “doesn’t care about money.” You can feel arrogance without shrinking yourself to prove you’re humble. You can experience disappointment without changing your entire fucking offer three days later because nobody bought. You can experience fear around money without making fear the CEO of your business. THAT is capacity.

Capacity isn’t, “I never get activated anymore.” It isn’t, “Fear is an illusion.” It isn’t, “I’m fearless.”

Girllllllllllll. Please.

Now I’m picturing Harley Quinn sitting across from you, baseball bat over her shoulder, chewing her gum like, “And you think I’m delusional?”

Capacity is “I can feel more without requiring myself to disappear. More fear can move through me. More desire. More disappointment. More power. More visibility. More uncertainty. More criticism. More pleasure. More fucking money. And none of it requires me to abandon myself.” That’s why money, shadow work, and capacity building fit so fucking beautifully together in my world.

Because money doesn’t necessarily create your shit. Money exposes the next place you don’t yet have capacity for what you’ve asked for. Relationships do the same thing. But that’s another Friday-night chai-tea dissertation. Because every expansion gives your shadow new material. You don’t graduate from being human because you integrated something at one level. The context changes. The stakes change. Your identity changes. And the shadow expresses itself differently.

Every new level introduces you to a new fucking devil.

Very Lord of the Rings. Except unfortunately Gandalf isn’t showing up to handle your nervous system for you. You shall, in fact, have to fucking pass.

And if I had one of those little teacher boards in front of me right now, I’d draw it like this,

SHADOW → INTEGRATION → CAPACITY → EXPANSION → NEW EXPOSURE OF SHADOW → DEEPER INTEGRATION → GREATER CAPACITY

And around and around we fucking go bitch.

Not upward. Deeper into hell. A spiral. This is why inside my work we move through.

EXPOSE → RECLAIM → EXPAND → POSSESS.

Because self-possession isn’t permanent immunity from activation, sometimes I low key wish lol. But it’s increasing your ability to stay connected to yourself when activation arrives. And here’s where this becomes really fucking interesting for your business. Take your too-intense shadow as well.

At $5K, she might be deleting the sentence that feels too sharp before she publishes.

At $20K, she might have built an audience through her intensity and suddenly start sanding herself down because now there’s something to lose.

At $50K, the question becomes, “Can I let myself be consequential? Can I make decisions people dislike? Can I lead without constantly monitoring whether everyone approves of how I lead?”

At $100K, maybe it’s, “Can I tolerate the magnitude of my own presence without reducing myself to make other people comfortable?”

Same woman. Bigger arena. Different capacity. Or take the arrogant shadow.

At $5K, “Who the fuck do you think you are to say you’re exceptional at this?” So you qualify everything. Overexplain. Undercharge. Wait for testimonials to say the thing you already fucking know.

At $20K, you’ve accumulated evidence that bitch you’re good. Now you have to resist performing humility every five fucking minutes so nobody thinks you’ve gotten “too big for yourself.”

At $50K, arrogance starts touching self-authorization. “Can you trust your perception when somebody else disagrees? Can you make the fucking decision without polling six mentors, three friends, your Instagram audience, your mother, Mercury retrograde, and a deck of tarot cards?” Can you say, I trust my judgment.

And at $100K, the integration becomes even more sophisticated. Can you hold, “I’m exceptionally fucking good at what I do. AND, I can still be wrong.”

Because integration isn’t, I’m better than everybody. That’s not self-possession. That’s your shadow wearing a fucking crown. Self-possession is, I don’t need anybody beneath me in order to know how powerful I am.

And THIS, this right fucking here—is why your shadows belong in your work. Not because I want you trauma-dumping on Instagram. Not because every uncomfortable emotion needs to become a carousel. And definitely not because I want another educational post titled: “5 Ways To Integrate Your Shadow ✨” Please don’t make me come over there. Your shadows contain perception. Your envy tells you something about desire. Your arrogance tells you something about the authority you’re withholding. Your intensity tells you something about the amount of yourself you’ve learned to regulate for other people’s comfort. Your greed tells you something about your relationship with wanting. Your jealousy. Your control. Your rage. Your too-muchness. Your lived fucking experience. When you’ve actually stayed with those things long enough to know what they’re showing you, they give you something AI, a content template, and the other fifteen coaches teaching your methodology cannot manufacture for you:

YOUR FUCKING PERCEPTION.

And perception is what makes your voice unmistakable.

This is exactly why I created RUTHLESS. Six weeks of taking your bold-as-fuck opinions, shadows, standards, desires, lived experience, and the shit you see that everybody else is too afraid to fucking say and turning it into content that creates recognition, obsession, and demand for the offer you already have.

We’re not giving you another costume. We’re removing the fucking costume. The teacher. The good girl. The perfectly healed coach. The professional one. The humble one. The “valuable content” machine. Because I don’t need you to become more interesting. I need you to stop removing the most interesting fucking parts of you before you hit publish.

Bring me the intensity. Bring me the arrogance. Bring me the desire. Bring me the thing you’re convinced you’re supposed to have transcended by now.

Come inside RUTHLESS. Sit next to me.

Let me show you what happens when the parts you’ve spent years integrating finally get to fucking create.

ENTER RUTHLESS

The room is open.

If you’ve read this far, I’m genuinely delighted you survived the field trip through my fucking mind.MI know I took you through approximately seventeen tunnels, three psychological underworlds, a few questionable metaphors, and somehow we all made it back alive.

Thank you for coming with me.

Until next time, my love.

And remember, one does not simply walk into Mordor without integrating her fucking shadows first.

So, I recently committed to writing one Substack letter a week. Well, that has been my intention for at least the past two weeks. And if you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, I used to post a little bit more on here than I do now. And it’s not because I dislike writing… I mean, I love writing. This became my diary, in a way, before people started following. This was just a place where I allowed myself to be really fucking honest.

So here I am, lying in my bed (my vampire coven) hearing the sound of an airplane and the beauty of the silence at night. I don’t know. There’s something about writing at night, when the world is quiet and there’s silence, where I can hear me. Feel me.

And as I’ve taken a breath, I’ve been playing around with this thought that has been in my brain all day. Now, you’re probably going to laugh, but the correlation between what I’m about to drop and where I’m taking this is pretty accurate, okay?

So what came up today in my genius brain was:

You create like your mom is watching you and ready to spank you.

And as I heard that in my brain, I started to laugh.

And maybe that’s what I’m really writing about tonight: how much of our creativity gets strangled by the fear that someone is watching, judging, and waiting to punish us for telling the truth.

Because when you really let that sink in for a second, you start to realize how you express yourself, how you show up online, how you show up in your business, and how you write is curated through what I call good-girl conditioning.

In a way, it’s limited. Contained.

You say all the right things. You sound all put together. You care about making it perfect so, in the end, you can get your little gold star, maybe your mommy’s kiss on the forehead. Because God forbid you actually told the truth. God forbid you actually had opinions. God forbid you threw some sassy, dark humor into the middle of your expression.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always resonated with Shrek. I low-key resonated. When the first movie came out, I was about… I was in sixth grade. And there’s a phrase that stood out to me:

Damn. That shit, even when I say it as I’m writing this, hits.

So, I’ve recently been reading the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And the more I started to deep-dive into this, the more it all kind of clicked. My pull toward villains. Mythology. Art.

And as creators (as we all are) we don’t really dive deeply into the darker aspects of ourselves. Our shadow. Or how much creative energy exists when we actually reclaim these parts of ourselves. When we actually integrate them. And obviously, people think the benefits are just in your creative arts—when it comes to writing, content creation, or whatever the fuck and how you utilize them. You know? And the byproduct of that is more money in some cases.

But it doesn’t just stop there. You’re able to build the relationships you actually want. The deeper intimacy that I think we all want as human beings. That level of honesty. That level of truth. And as I’ve said time and time again—and I will never, ever, ever get rid of this saying:

Your success is determined by the level of truth you’re willing to hold.

In a world full of AI generation, and in a world full of people relying on strategy, we have disconnected so much from ourselves that we can barely hear the truth within us.

So let me confess here for a min, this is going to sound cringe, maybe, but I never really considered myself a good writer. And maybe I still don’t—as exposing as that is.

For a long time, I think I thought there was something wrong because, like, I don’t really think of writing in a proper way, okay? You know, in the school system, they teach you punctuation, and everything has to be a certain way.

But I write how I think and how I feel, without so much properness, as I laugh out loud. I’m able to put words to the things we feel. To the ways someone might be going through something. And I can so precisely spot it.

And that’s where I came to realize:

The work that exposes you is the work they can’t stop feeling.

That’s when your art becomes powerful. When you really stop hiding inside of it. And that’s how much our own self-development, our own ability to confront the self and expose all these parts through our art, our lives, and our businesses—matters.

And I’m just sitting here. Once again, just me, the crickets outside, and really feeling the warmth and support of my bed right now. And honestly, random as it may be, the best investment I ever made was buying a Purple mattress.

But here I am. I don’t even know how long this is or where I was taking you, really. I just really wanted to write something honest. Something true and even messy. Because that’s the only way I know how.

And to have the courage to write something that goes against everything else that is imposed—or proposed, lol I don’t know which one, onto you by society.

But also, in a way, in this stillness, as my life is expanding faster than I can catch up, to be quite honest with you, in this big mixture, this concoction of grief and joy and excitement and nervousness and fear and peace…

There I am. Or maybe, here I am. Writing. And you’re reading this on whatever side of the world you’re on right now.

If you’re still reading this, thank you. And if this kind of writing is something you feel yourself through, write it in the comments. If not, that’s okay. But I would love to hear from you because it matters to me.

And maybe that’s why this letter belongs here, messy and unfinished. Because this is the work of Untamed—not learning how to express yourself more perfectly, but meeting the parts of you that perfection taught you to hide.

And as I take a deep breath and curl inward with my little fuzzy Halloween blanket, I just want to invite you to my free 90-minute masterclass, where I’ll go deeper into helping you, not through more preaching or teaching moments, but through a practice. Through an experience. An experience where you can connect to all these parts of yourself that you were told were too much, too cringe, too arrogant, too weird—and expose them.

So that, from that place, you can show up everywhere in your life unapologetically as you. I would love to see your beautiful face. Maybe put a face to the person reading this. And it’s totally free.

But if you’ve read this far, I’m happy that I got to invite you.

COME GET UNTAMED

Anyway, until next time.

I’m going to bed now.

Sending you love,

Mishell

So somewhere between the popcorn, my kids fighting over different candies, and me trying to multitask by passing everything down the row, the movie exposed the entire reason so many brilliant women are still operating with only half of their power.

You see throughout the movie, Peter Parker is trying to suppress what’s happening inside of him, his grief, his loneliness, his anger, and this dangerous, darker part of him that keeps surfacing at the worst possible moments. He is afraid that if he allows it to exist, it might take over. It might hurt someone. It might turn him into someone he no longer recognizes. So he does what so many of us do when we don’t know how to hold what we feel, he stays busy. He takes on more responsibility. He keeps trying to save the day while barely sleeping, suffering from migraines, and desperately trying to contain what is happening inside his own body.

But no matter how hard he tries to control it, this new identity keeps forcing its way out. It destroys his home. It spills onto the people around him. It causes him to hurt people, even though hurting others goes against everything he fucking believes himself to be. To Peter, this becomes proof that there is something wrong with him. Something dark. Something dangerous. Something that needs to be contained before anybody else sees it. But Peter wasn’t becoming a monster. He was meeting a part of himself he had never learned how to hold.

And in a way, that is shadow work. Carl Jung described the shadow as the parts of ourselves we reject, suppress, and exile because they threaten the identity we learned was acceptable. The anger you buried because good women are conditioned to be forgiving. The hunger you silenced because wanting more made you look greedy. The arrogance you disowned because you were taught to be humble. The intensity you edited because other people called you “too much”. The jealousy you judged because spiritually evolved women are supposed to be grateful. The sexuality you disconnected from because being desired never felt completely safe and because God forbid anyone judge you for enjoying your own body.

The shadow isn’t inherently bad. It is simply whatever you decided you were no longer allowed to be. And when you suppress that energy, it does not disappear. It fucking mutates. It begins making decisions from underneath your awareness. So your unclaimed anger becomes resentment. Your unclaimed desire becomes comparison. Your unclaimed ambition becomes jealousy. Your unclaimed authority becomes control. Your unclaimed sensitivity becomes hypervigilance. Your unclaimed need for support becomes bitterness toward everyone who didn’t magically know you needed help.

And that part you refuse to claim will always find another way to speak. It will speak through your relationships, your business, and sometimes even your body. For example through the twenty takes you record because you’re terrified your intensity will escape before you can make it palatable. The price you lower because the part of you who knows she deserves more feels arrogant. The man you keep trying to change because admitting you want more would force you to confront how long you have abandoned that desire. The content you copy because trusting your own voice would require risking being misunderstood or worse disliked, cancelled.

You call it self-sabotage. But often, it is an exiled part of you forcing its way back into the room like throw-up in the back seat when you were five. Messy AF, impossible to ignore, and always coming out at the most inconvenient fucking time. LOL.

And as I sat reclined in my chair, munching on popcorn, I watched Peter discover his new organic webs and become completely disgusted by them. The texture. The quantity. The mess they created. He didn’t understand how to control them because he had never had a relationship with this part of himself before. It was unfamiliar.

And honestly that is what meeting your shadow feels like at first. Your anger feels dangerous. Your desire feels embarrassing. Your superiority feels cruel. Your hunger feels excessive. Your intensity feels impossible to contain. Not because those parts are necessarily evil, but because you shoved them into the back of your psyche like leftovers you forgot about in the fridge. Then you opened the container six months later and thought, what the fuck is that? Of course it looks terrifying. You were supposed to process it not leave it sitting there until it started growing shit.

Integration doesn’t mean letting every impulse run your life. It means becoming intimate enough with your full identity that those parts no longer have to hijack you to be acknowledged. Your anger becomes discernment. Your jealousy reveals desire. Your arrogance becomes the capacity to hold a standard without negotiating it. Your sensitivity becomes precision. Your intensity becomes devotion. Your hunger becomes direction. Your darkness becomes power with consciousness behind it. Because the woman who performs goodness and hides behind morality and virtuousness while secretly fucking despising herself is not fucking whole. That woman is at war with herself every single day.

Let that shit sink in for a second.

And someone who never allows herself to feel rage is not necessarily peaceful. Someone who denies wanting power is not necessarily humble. Someone who has exiled every inconvenient part of herself every inconvenient part of her humanity is not self-possessed. She is split. She is divided.

The goal of shadow work isn’t to become darker. It is to become more HONEST. It is to stop allowing the parts of you that disturb other people to become responsible for your destruction. It is knowing exactly what lives inside of you so it no longer has to make a mess of your life just to get your attention.

As I continued watching the film, now more than halfway through the bag of Raisinets I bought, Peter tried so desperately to control it, contain it, and push it down that he created something to alter his own DNA. But the more he suppressed it, the more violently it leaked out and the less access he had to his actual power.

Now tell me that shit doesn’t sound familiar.

The best part of the film aside from the popcorn I was eating and my Raisinets comes when Peter is confronted with a choice.

Who are you going to be?

Peter Parker or Spider-Man?

And he answers:

BOTH!

Not one or the other. Not the soft, ordinary man or the powerful, bad ass hero.

Both. And when he stops dividing himself, his power amplifies. That’s the fucking work.

Low-key, that scene gave me chills throughout my entire body. And I think so many people felt goosebumps in that moment because something inside of them recognized it. Their body recognized what it had been craving an end to the division. An end to the belief that they must choose which parts of themselves deserve to exist.

Those chills were the signal.

And honestly, it was a badass scene to me, okay. Because this work isn’t about becoming a better version of yourself. It isn’t about killing your ego, transcending your humanity, or regulating yourself into someone who is never angry, messy, disappointed, jealous, selfish, or inconvenient. It is about ending the internal war within you.

Now there was another moment that stayed with me. Throughout the movie, Peter keeps replaying a memory of himself sitting at the edge of his bed, talking to Aunt May. She tells him something most of us desperately need to learn and something I’ve had to learn within myself:

You cannot do this alone.

But throughout the movie, Peter keeps trying.

He isolates himself. He carries everything silently. He convinces himself that being powerful means needing no one. But the isolation doesn’t make him stronger. It limits him. So I will take this moment to call you out, some of you have integrated “I can handle it” so far up your ass and so deeply into your identity that receiving support feels more threatening than continuing to struggle alone. You have become the woman everybody needs, but you have no idea how to let anyone in and hold you. You have mistaken hyper-independence for self-possession. And they are not the same, my friend.

Self-possession means you belong to yourself. It does not mean you have to build, grieve, expand, and become her by yourself. Honestly, your next level may not require more discipline. It may require allowing yourself to be witnessed, challenged, supported, and held while you become the woman capable of holding what she says she wants. Peter didn’t need someone to rescue him. He needed to stop abandoning himself through isolation.

And if you’re reading this, maybe you do too. So I want to leave you with this question:

Where in your life are you still splitting yourself in two?

Where are you still choosing between the hero and the monster? Your softness and your power? Your love and your standards? Your humanity and your hunger?

Because The Return is not where I save you. It is where you stop believing you have to become her alone. It is where you stop building your life with only half of your power.

Because the woman creating a category of one business, making fuck you money, and receiving the kind of love that can actually meet her will not get there by amputating half of herself.

She gets there by becoming unavailable for self-exile.

By deciding:

I am not choosing between my softness and ruthlessness.

I am not choosing between my love and my standards.

I am not choosing between my humanity and my hunger.

I am both.

And I am finally powerful enough to hold all of me.

Apply To The Return

Until Next Time,

Mishell

I’m sitting here waiting for my hair dye to process, looking out the window, watching the leaves move in the wind, thinking about a phrase I’ve heard a thousand times.

Your new life will cost you your old one.

It sounds beautiful when people say it. Almost poetic. Nobody really talks about what it feels like while you’re actually living it.

After letting go of my relationship. After making life-changing decisions because of that relationship, and everything that came with it. After letting go of versions of myself, beliefs I once carried like they were truth, expectations, fantasies... and still letting go, if I’m honest. This season has become very quiet. And I think that’s the part people misunderstand. They mistake quiet for nothing happening. They mistake stillness for stagnation. But what if this is the part where everything is happening?What if this is the season where life gently closes the door behind you, takes away the map, and walks you into a forest you’ve never seen before?

At first, you think you’re lost. Then, little by little, you realize forests were never designed to show you the entire path. They teach you something much more valuable. They teach you to trust your next step. And maybe that’s what this season has been asking of me. Not to prove myself. Not to hustle harder. Not to become louder. Not even to figure everything out.

Just... Trust myself.

And let me tell you. That is disorienting as fuck. But I been on this rodeo before many times before but this one feels deeper. Because when you’ve spent years looking outside yourself for confirmation whether that’s through relationships, business, social media, achievement, being needed, being productive, being chosen silence at first almost feels offensive. It feels like something is wrong. Like you’ve been forgotten. Like life stopped moving. But it didn’t. You just stopped using noise to measure whether you were alive.

And since I been here before the silence and aloneness doesn’t scare me as much but still is uncomfortable. So lately I’ve asked myself more questions these past few weeks than most people have ever asked me. Mostly because somewhere along the way, I became my own best friend. Not the kind of friend that lies and tells me everything will be okay while helping me avoid truth. The kind that sits beside me and asks harder questions with compassion and curiosity.

What kind of relationship do you actually want with yourself? What kind of relationship do you want with your business? What kind of love do you want to experience? Who are you becoming when nobody is watching? Who are you when your phone stops lighting up? Who are you when the algorithm goes quiet? Who are you when the world isn’t constantly reflecting back the version of yourself you’ve become attached to?

And let me tell you, those questions don’t come with immediate answers. They come with space. And space has a funny way of making everything you’ve been avoiding walk into the room.

When you become a self-possessed woman, you stop outsourcing your loneliness. You don’t immediately download a dating app. You don’t entertain conversations simply because someone desires you. You don’t reach for another distraction because the ache showed up. You stay. You let yourself miss. You let yourself grieve. You let yourself long. You let yourself cry. Not because you’re trying to heal faster. Not because you’re trying to become a better person. But because you’re finally allowing yourself to experience your own life without immediately trying to escape it.

And in that, I’ve realized something. Every time I stay instead of abandoning myself... Every time I keep my own word...Every time I say no to something that no longer belongs to the woman I’m becoming...Every time I let discomfort exist without making it mean I need to fix it...I’m building trust. Not loud trust. Not the kind that announces itself. Quiet trust. The kind that accumulates in invisible moments until one day you wake up and realize... “Fuck, I actually believe myself now.”

Sometimes it feels less like becoming someone new and more like walking through an old, abandoned haunted house. Every room has been locked for years. Some of them still hold ghosts, demons. Old fears. Old identities. Old stories about who I had to be in order to be loved. And every day I open another door. Not to fight what’s inside. And definitely not to get rid of it. Just to sit there long enough that it no longer scares me. Maybe healing isn’t exorcising your ghosts and demons. Maybe it’s learning they were never trying to haunt you. Maybe they were just waiting for you to come home.

Lately, there is so much stillness. My business has gotten quieter. My phone has gotten quieter. Life has gotten quieter. There are moments where nobody checks in. Moments where the notifications don’t come. Moments where nothing outside of me confirms that I’m moving in the right direction. And strangely enough...Those have become some of the richest moments of my life. Because in that silence...

I can finally hear myself.

Not the version of me trying to perform. Not the version trying to be impressive.

Just...Me.

I’ve also realized something else. I don’t want to build a business that requires me to constantly abandon myself in order to sustain it. I don’t want success if it costs me my mornings. My children. My body. My peace. I don’t want to spend my life babysitting content, chasing output, convincing myself that more equals safer. I want rhythm. I want spaciousness. I want to create because I’m alive. Not because I’m afraid. So maybe this season isn’t slowing me down. Maybe it’s reorganizing me. Maybe life isn’t withholding what I’ve been asking for. Maybe it’s quietly introducing me to the woman who can actually hold it. Because every new season asks something different of us. This one hasn’t asked me to know more. It’s asked me to practice. To practice staying longer, deeper. To practice trusting. To practice becoming. Not through grand declarations. Through ordinary Tuesdays. Through keeping my own word. Through making decisions without immediate proof. Through waking up every morning, opening my eyes, and whispering the same sentence before my feet even touch the floor.

Show me how good my life gets to be.

And every once in a while, something small happens. A beam of sunlight slips through the trees. The wind moves the leaves. A song starts playing at exactly the right moment. Today it was Belief by Gavin DeGraw. I laughed because life has this strange way of winking at you when you’ve stopped demanding certainty from it. As the music filled the room, I felt tears run down my face. Not because something was wrong. Because nothing was wrong. I wasn’t trying to stop myself from crying. I wasn’t trying to analyze it. I wasn’t trying to fix it. I was just... there. Feeling. Breathing. Alive. There is grief here. There is joy here. There is loneliness here. There is peace here. I’ve learned they don’t cancel each other out. They simply take turns speaking.

So maybe I’ll leave you with the same questions I’ve been living inside of.

What if stillness isn’t stagnation? What if this season isn’t punishing you? What if it isn’t asking you to know more? What if it’s inviting you to practice being the woman you’ve been waiting to become?

Not when the proof arrives. Now. One ordinary day at a time.

If that speaks to something inside of you, if you’re done trying to become someone else and you’re ready to embody the woman you already know you’re capable of being that’s the work we do inside The Return.

Not by chasing another version of yourself. By becoming deeply rooted in the one that’s been there all along.

ENTER THE RETURN

Until next time,

Mishell

Today, that return looked surprisingly simple. I felt this impulse to watch Casper. Growing up, I remember watching the cartoon more than the movie, but something in me wanted to revisit the 1995 version. It didn’t feel like nostalgia. It felt like something deeper calling my attention. I think we move through life without being nearly curious enough about why certain songs, movies, places, or seasons suddenly pull at us. We dismiss them as memories when they’re often invitations. Showing us something about ourselves that we’re finally ready to see and finally feel.

So I made myself some chai tea with a bit of honey and oat cream, wrapped myself in cozy soft beige blanket, laid down in bed, and pressed play. As I felt the weight of my body sinking into the mattress, tears quietly began rolling down my face, as the pressure in my chest got heavier and heavier by the minute. And in staying with my own ache, I realized Casper isn’t really about ghosts. At its core, it’s about wanting to be known without people running away. I think that’s why I identify so deeply with Casper. He doesn’t simply want a friend. When you really look at him, you see the innocence of someone who simply longs to belong. He’s not trying to manipulate anyone into staying. He isn’t performing. He isn’t trying to become someone else so he’ll be loved. He simply wants someone who can see him without fear.

And to be honest maybe that’s what I’ve been longing for too. Have you ever felt like your inner world is much deeper than many people are willing to enter?

People often love my perception. They love how deeply I can see into them because it makes them feel understood. They appreciate my insight, my wisdom, my ability to put language to things they’ve never been able to articulate themselves. Until my perception begins touching the parts of them they’d rather avoid. Then something shifts. It’s almost as if they’re saying, “Mishell I like that you see me... just not that deeply.” That became one of the defining dynamics in my last relationship.

Many people enjoy being understood until understanding requires accountability and responsibility. Once your honesty begins illuminating what someone has spent years avoiding, they pull away. They become defensive, sometimes abusive. They reinterpret honesty as criticism and project their shame and guilt back onto you. After enough repetitions of that experience, you don’t just feel unseen. You feel emotionally unmet. Even when you’ve learned to meet yourself with tenderness. Even when you’ve learned how to stay. That’s what this season has been revealing to me. The thing that allows relationships to last isn’t chemistry. It’s safety. It’s the emotional capacity to sustain intimacy without collapsing under it.

Over the last several months, through this heartbreak and a loss I’ve been meeting myself again and again. Through quiet mornings. Through music. Through orienting when I’m overwhelmed. Through crying without trying to fix myself. Through speaking to myself with compassion instead of criticism. Through holding boundaries even when it fucking hurts. Through slowing down instead of forcing myself to keep producing like a machine. Every single one of those moments has quietly been teaching my nervous system something new.

This...

This is what care feels like. Because tenderness isn’t the absence of passion. It’s the presence of safety.

You see when someone is genuinely tender with you, your nervous system receives hundreds of subtle cues all at once. Not only through their words, but through their gaze. Their tone of voice. Their pace. Their touch. The way they reach for your hand because they notice you’re anxious before you’ve said anything. The way they slow down instead of speeding up during conflict. The way they’re trying to understand your face instead of preparing their defense. Your body begins receiving a completely different message. “I don’t have to defend myself'.” “I don’t have to earn this moment.” “I don’t have to perform.” “I matter.” And something remarkable begins happening physiologically. Your breathing deepens. Your muscles soften. Your body slowly stops scanning for the next misunderstanding, the next rupture, the next abandonment. It exhales.

For most of my life, I confused love with intensity. Because when you grow up around emotional inconsistency, your nervous system naturally associates the highs and lows with love. The chemistry. The uncertainty. The emotional roller coaster. I’m not saying intensity is inherently unsafe. But healing changes your taste. You begin finding yourself drawn toward something that once almost felt... boring. Maybe it was never boring. Maybe it was simply the absence of chronic activation.

Lately, I don’t find myself asking, Does this person make my heart race? I find myself asking something entirely different. Can my body rest in their presence?

My last relationship answered that question long before my mind did. My body always knew. And because I’ve spent months practicing staying with myself instead of abandoning myself, something has quietly changed inside me. My baseline has changed. That’s why these movies affect me differently now. After Casper, I found myself watching The Little Vampire.

Different story. Same longing. A lonely little boy finally finding companionship. Finally finding someone to play with. As I watched, another wave of grief arrived. Not because of romance. Because I realized I never really had that growing up. I didn’t have the experience of finding my best friend and running outside to play until the streetlights came on. I spent a lot of my childhood alone, making little homes out of scraps in my backyard, creating entire worlds inside my imagination. Watching that little boy finally find someone who delighted in his company stirred something I hadn’t fully met before. Maybe this season isn’t only asking me to become my own deepest companion. Maybe it’s asking me to learn how to play again. To let joy become something I generate instead of something I wait to receive. Because maybe I really am the source.

After taking a nap, I woke up and simply stared outside my window at the trees and more tears came down my face. Like the waves of grief waking me up after a deep sleep. And suddenly I felt the urge to watch Just Like Heaven.

That’s when I realized in a funny way all three movies had been telling the exact same emotional story. Not one centered around grand passion. Not one centered around dramatic chemistry. Every single one was built on presence. Curiosity. Patience. Protection. The relationships developed because the characters paid attention to one another. They became emotionally attached long before anything physical could happen.

For someone like me, someone whose entire nervous system has begun craving attunement more than intensity, that kind of connection opens something profound. It doesn’t just feel beautiful. It feels like massive grief. Because it reminds me of what I’ve always longed for. And what has so often felt inconsistent throughout my life. Today, I realize my definition of love is changing at a physiological level. It’s no longer about chasing chemistry. It’s about recognizing tenderness. And strangely enough, tenderness isn’t something I’m waiting for another person to introduce me to anymore. It’s something I’ve practiced with myself enough that my own body now recognizes it as home.

So as I sit here writing these words, after the tears settled and the silence returned, one scene from Casper stayed with me. The scene where he looks at Kat and quietly asks, “Can I keep you?” That line has lived inside my head for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t really about romance. It was about being chosen. Softly. Sincerely. Without games. Without performance. Without earning it. He looked at her as though she mattered. Maybe that’s why it still makes so many of us cry. Because underneath the ghost story was a fantasy almost every little girl carried. Not simply to be loved. But to have someone stay. And as I sit here with another cup of chai and the scene replaying in my head, another question quietly emerged inside me. Maybe this season isn’t asking for someone to say Can you I keep you? Maybe it’s asking me...

Can I keep you? Can I keep the parts of myself I abandoned for years? The tender parts. The playful parts. The lonely little girl who spent afternoons building tiny homes in the backyard. The woman behind the coach. Independent, resilient, brave woman. Because most people know the version of me that’s insightful, emotionally available, capable of holding others. Very few know the human being underneath all of that. The woman who still longs for companionship. Who still wants someone whose presence allows her body to exhale. Who knows how to hold herself, yet still deeply desires to be met. Self-love has never erased my longing for connection. It has simply changed the kind of connection I’m willing to wait for.

So I’m ending this letter without a lesson. No tidy conclusion. Just an observation. This season isn’t asking me to rush toward what’s next. It’s asking me to stay. To let grief do exactly what grief was designed to do. To make room. Because maybe feeling all of this isn’t evidence that something is wrong. Maybe it’s simply the cost of becoming someone capable of receiving the very thing she’s been asking life for all along.

So now I leave you with a question.

What movies quietly reveal something about you?

Not because of the story. But because somewhere inside them, you found a forgotten piece of yourself waiting to be seen.

Until Next Time,

Mishell

There comes a moment in life when everything changes in the span of a single decision. One conversation. One phone call. One truth you can no longer unsee. And suddenly the life you were building toward no longer exists. Not because you stopped wanting it. But because reality asked you to stop pretending it was still there. It feels like being a child again, building a fort out of blankets, pillows, chairs gathering every scrap you could find with so much excitement. You imagined the nights you’d spend inside it. The stories you’d tell. The safety it would become. You poured your imagination, love, devotion into something you believed would hold. And then... It collapses. You stand there staring at it on the floor in disbelief. Because moments ago it wasn’t just a pile of blankets. It was your future. It was where your hope lived. It was everything you had quietly whispered to yourself would finally be enough.

Heartbreak feels like that. Not because you’re grieving what was. But because you’re grieving everything you believed it was going to become. As the days pass, you stop arguing with reality. You stop trying to negotiate with what already happened. You stop replaying the conversations, searching for the version where things worked out differently. And eventually... You’re left with the silence. The four walls around your room become louder than they’ve ever been. There is nowhere left to run. Nowhere left to distract yourself. So you walk toward the mirror. Your eyes are swollen. Your shoulders curl inward. Your chest aches with a heaviness you can’t seem to explain. You look at your reflection through tears... and realize the only person standing there is you. No one is coming to wipe the tears from your face. No one is coming to convince you that you’ll be okay. No one is coming to rescue you from this moment.

Just you.

And for a while... that realization feels unbearable. Because every part of you wants someone else to walk through the door and tell you this wasn’t how your story was supposed to end. But maybe this isn’t the end. Maybe this is the moment your life quietly begins returning to you. Because when every fantasy falls apart... when every version of your future collapses...when there is nothing left to cling to...you are finally left with the one relationship that has been waiting for your attention all along.

The one with yourself.

Not the version of you who is trying to be chosen. Not the version desperately trying to make the fort stand back up. Just you. Standing in the rubble. Learning that maybe home was never something you were building with another person. Maybe home was always something you were learning to become.

So now that everything fell apart when there is nowhere left to go but toward yourself. Not the version of yourself you show the world. The one waiting in the mirror. This time, you don’t look away. You don’t reach for another distraction. You don’t bargain with reality. You don’t rush to replace what was lost.

You confront yourself. The shame. The guilt. The grief. The anger. The rage. The disappointment. The longing. You let every feeling have a seat at the table. Every few days another wave arrives, as if grief itself has become the weather. Some days it barely touches your ankles. Other days it crashes over your head. But this time you don’t fight the ocean. You ride the wave instead of trying to outrun it. You let it touch you without letting it become you. And somehow, even in the middle of the storm, you still laugh. You still notice the warmth of the sun. You still hear a song that makes your heart come alive. You still whisper to yourself, “Everything is working out for me.” Not because the pain is gone. But because hope and grief were never opposites. They have always been capable of existing in the same body. Why wouldn’t your heart hurt? You poured your love into something. You imagined a future. You built a home inside your mind. Of course its collapse echoes through your chest. Maybe grief is simply love that no longer has somewhere obvious to go.

Or maybe... it was never meant to disappear. Maybe it was always meant to return home.

So you sit on the floor of your shower. Your knees pulled into your chest. The water runs over your skin while the room stays quiet except for its rhythm. You close your eyes. And there she is. The woman you’ve always carried inside of you. You see the family you’ve dreamed of. Children running through a home filled with light. Laughter echoing down long hallways. A partner who looks at you with such presence that words become unnecessary. A single glance that says, “I see all of you and I can hold space for all your tenderness.” You see yourself standing on stages. Not because you needed attention. Because your voice finally found the people it was always meant to reach. You watch strangers become braver because you chose to tell the truth. You see your work becoming a movement. Not because you forced it. Because one day you finally believed in it before everyone else did.

And then...the tears come again. Who are you...when no one is validating your existence? Who are you when your work isn’t receiving the recognition you hoped for?Who are you when the person you imagined spending your life with cannot meet you where you stand? Who are you when you are no longer being chosen? Who are you when your bank account refuses to reflect the brilliance you know lives inside of you?

The water continues to fall. The room stays silent. Your chest aches with a grief so deep it almost feels ancient. And in that silence... something else appears. No, not certainty. Not even answers.

Just presence.

You realize... you’re the one who stayed. You’re the one who remained when the relationship ended. When the dreams collapsed. When the world stopped reflecting back everything you wanted to believe about yourself. You stayed. You didn’t try to outrun the grief. You didn’t make your longing wrong. You didn’t shame yourself for still hoping. You let all of it exist. Because love doesn’t become less sacred simply because it wasn’t returned in the way you hoped.

You don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe, for the first time in your life, you’re truly lost. Or maybe... you’re finally home. Maybe you’ve spent so much of your life searching for belonging in other people that you’ve forgotten there are still rooms inside yourself you’ve never entered. Rooms waiting for your attention. Your tenderness. Your company. Your love. So you wander through your own little home. Opening doors you’ve kept locked for years. Sitting beside the parts of yourself that have waited patiently for you to come back. And yes... sometimes it still feels lonely. Because no amount of self-love removes the deeply human desire to be witnessed. To be chosen. To be loved with the same devotion you’ve learned to offer yourself.

I still believe that kind of love exists. A love where two people continue choosing each other. Where conflict doesn’t become abandonment. Where distance is followed by accountability, curiosity, compassion and repair. Where reaching back for one another isn’t an exception...it’s devotion. I still believe in that. And believing in it no longer requires me to abandon myself waiting for it.

So I ask you. Are you really lost? Or have you simply returned? Can you let grief exist without trying to solve it? Can you let yourself long for something beautiful without making your longing a problem? Can you believe that everything is working out for you...even while your heart is breaking? Can you trust that life still has the capacity to surprise you? Can you let life show you just how beautiful it can become...and how quickly everything can change? Can hope and heartbreak live in the same body?

I think they can. That’s why I let her grieve. Not because I want her to stay there. But because grief is what love looks like when it has nowhere left to perform. And if I stay with her long enough...love always finds its way back home.

Until Next Time,

Mishell

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I recently finished the last episode of One Tree Hill. The screen faded to black, and a quote from the show repeatedly replays in my mind. And as Gavin DeGraw’s Belief began to play, something in me became very still. The house was quiet. But not the kind of quiet that feels empty or lonely, but the kind of silence that arrives after something ends. The kind of silence that doesn’t demand anything from you. It simply sits beside you and waits. And maybe that’s why the quote landed the way it did. “It’s funny how our past frames us, how the person we used to be never lets loose of the person we are. Past failures and disappointments, even victories, take hold of us. They haunt us like ghosts or visit us like old friends.”

As the music played and the credits rolled, I realized I wasn’t thinking about the show anymore. I was thinking about all the versions of myself that still live inside me. The woman who was rejected. The woman who was abandoned. The woman who spent years believing she had to earn love. The woman who built something beautiful. The woman who lost things she thought she would have forever. The woman who succeeded. The woman who failed. The woman who survived. It’s funny how we think we’re standing fully in the present when most of the time we’re experiencing the present through layers of memory, meaning, and identity.

The person who was rejected still whispers when we risk being seen. The person who was hurt still scans for danger long after the threat has disappeared. The person who once succeeded still expects herself to perform at that level forever. And sometimes the ghosts aren’t even failures. Sometimes they’re victories. Sometimes we’re not afraid of failing again, we’re afraid we’ll never become that version of ourselves again. We look back at a former season of our lives the way we look at old photographs, wondering where she went, wondering why we can’t get back there, wondering if we somehow lost whatever magic seemed to exist then. But sitting there in the darkness, listening to that song, I realized the ghosts and the old friends aren’t actually the problem. The problem is when we mistake them for who we are now.

The past is always trying to recruit the present into repeating its story. It wants to convince us that because something happened before, it will happen again. That because we were someone once, we must remain them forever. But growth isn’t erasing the person you used to be. It’s learning how to sit with every version of yourself without letting any of them take over. It’s letting the wounded one speak without handing her the wheel. It’s honoring the successful one without demanding you become her again. It’s making room for the grieving one, the hopeful one, the fearful one, the one who still believes in miracles, and recognizing that they all belong here.

Because the truth is, the person you were gets a vote. She always will. But she doesn’t get the final say. That belongs to the person sitting here today, reading this letter.

The one breathing through uncertainty.

The one carrying both grief and hope in the same chest.

The one standing at the edge of a chapter she cannot yet see clearly.

The one choosing, despite all of it, to stay with herself.

Until Next Time

Mishell

It has taken me four years to find my voice. And honestly? It’s been a very messy fucking journey. People always start these stories with some polished breakthrough moment. Like, “this is how I found myself.” Clean. Inspiring. Digestible. But the truth is, I found my voice through frustration. Through rage. Through grief. Through getting so exhausted of hearing myself repeat the same lies over and over again while pretending I was healing.

So it all started with therapy, like most people. Then somatic work. Breathwork. Meditation. Reiki. Nervous system regulation. Shadow work. Every fucking thing out there. I consumed so much fucking information, trying anything to “fix” myself (as if I was some broken person) to understand myself, heal myself. And for a while, I really thought healing meant getting rid of parts of me and becoming this perfect person so the world can accept, so i can finally belong and be worth of love, and the life I dreamed of having. Which is honestly what most people do, they obsess on fixing themselves and the underlying driver of this is shame so they stay in this hamster wheel of constant fixing and more information while not able to change and breakout of certain patterns or their lives actually changing. But anyways lets hold off on that subject for a bit.

To be honest finding my voice felt less like becoming and more like peeling layers off myself. Like Shrek saying people are like onions. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Because when you’re 30 years old, a mother, divorced, business owner rebuilding your life from absolute fucking scratch, and you realize you never actually had a voice of your own… that realization fucks with you and cracks something open inside of you.

Now that I think about it , I don’t even think I had a personality. Not a real one at least. Most of my life was adapting. Copying others. Performing. Becoming who I needed to become so other people could feel comfortable around me. So my parents could be proud of me. So relationships could survive. So I could feel chosen. Safe. Wanted. I was really, really good at disappearing inside other people, if there was a trophy for that act I would have won it. And when you do that long enough, authenticity doesn’t feel natural. It feels dangerous.

The Obsession With The Villains

Last year, something shifted in me. Instead of trying to get rid of the parts of myself I judged, I became obsessively curious about them. And one day, I started binge watching movies. The Joker. Maleficent. The Devil Wears Prada. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. Thor Ragnarok. Queen of the Damned. Horror movies. Vampire movies. Anything dark, intense, chaotic, powerful. At the same time, I was listening to alternative rock, metal, early 2000s music, hip hop, all the music I secretly loved but never fully let myself embody. And I noticed something that honestly scared me. I was obsessed with the villains. Not because they were evil. Because they were free. The Joker. Hela. Miranda Priestly. Bellatrix Lestrange. Vampires. Every single one of them carried traits I had spent my entire fucking life suppressing. Boldness. Hunger. Power. Intensity. Desire. Confidence. Conviction. Emotional expression. Self-devotion. The refusal to ask permission before taking up space.

And when I really sat with myself repeatedly and asked, “Why do I love these characters so much?” I realized something devastating. Those were the parts of me I was terrified to become. Especially growing up as the black sheep of the family. Especially as a woman. Especially as a mother. Especially as someone who spent years believing that being loved meant staying digestible.

The Silence After Divorce

One of the biggest sacrifices of this journey was losing almost everything. Not just my marriage. Everything! I started over with literally no money in my bank account. Debt piling up after the divorce. Bills unpaid. Two kids. Raising them almost entirely alone while the father disappeared and built another life somewhere else. And then there was the silence. Three years of silence. Three years of rebuilding myself while nobody clapped for me. Three years of sitting in the storm wondering if any of this was actually leading somewhere or was I just a crazy delusional woman having a mid life crisis. And for the first time in my life, I stayed. That was new for me. Because before this, I never really committed to anything. Not truly. Yes, I finished high school. Went to college. Did all the “right” things. But if I’m being honest, most of it was for my parents. For approval. For validation. For the feeling that maybe if I achieved enough, someone would finally tell me I was enough.

But devotion to myself? I had never experienced that before. I was the kind of person that started things and never finished them. And this journey forced me to sit with myself long enough to realize how much of my life was built around avoiding myself, abandoning myself specially when it cost me approval , belonging, love.

Creating Content While Feeling Fake

When I started speaking online, shit it felt horrible. Messy. My stomach would turn before recording videos. My chest would tighten. The words would come out too fast or too slow. Sometimes I would completely jumble my sentences and forget what I was even trying to say. I felt awkward. Too emotional. Too intense. Too much. And honestly, most of the time it felt like I was performing. Like this version of me couldn’t possibly be real. But what people don’t understand is when you’ve spent your whole life suppressing parts of yourself, authenticity initially feels fake. Not because it is fake. Because it’s unfamiliar. Specially when your nervous system has spent years associating those traits with danger.

So every time I spoke boldly, every time I expressed rage, bold opinions, truth, offers , every time stopped softening my words, my body reacted like I was doing something wrong, like I was going to be burned at the stake like a witch. But I kept every messy part in the videos. I didn’t edit out the trembling. I didn’t edit out the imperfect words. I kept posting. Over and over and over and over again. And eventually something started happening.

Repetition Becoming Embodiment

At first, expression felt performative. Then repetition started turning it into embodiment. And I think this is the part people miss when they talk about authenticity. They think authenticity should feel natural immediately. But when you were conditioned into invisibility, your truth will initially feel foreign in your own body. So repetition matters. Not because you’re faking confidence. But because you’re desensitizing yourself to being seen. Every video. Every post. Every moment of silence after expressing something real. Every projection. Every misunderstanding. Every moment where nobody validated me and I still chose to stay with myself. That repetition , the rep, slowly built capacity inside my body.

Until eventually the boldness stopped feeling like an act. Because it wasn’t an act. It was me. I am naturally intense. Bold. Unhinged. Fearless. Passionate. Deeply expressive. Hungry. Emotional. Loud. Devoted. Opinionated. But grief came with that realization too, like a flood , with ache burning my chest and agonazing pain in my throat and jaw. Because the more I found my real voice, the more I realized how much of myself I abandoned to survive.

Your Truth Becomes Enough

At some point, something changes. You stop creating to be chosen. You stop obsessing over virality. You stop checking if people understand you correctly. You stop shaping your art around whether it will be approved of. Because when you create from what’s actually alive inside of you, your truth becomes enough. And that’s when your words start carrying coherence. Not because they’re polished. Not because they’re strategic. Not because they’re perfect. But because your body is no longer fighting your expression. Your nervous system. Your voice. Your art. Your truth. Your desires. Your rage. Your grief. They stop pulling against each other. And people can feel that.

Speaking From Inside The Moment, Not Above It

At some point, you stop performing emotional intelligence while your body is starving for expression. You stop speaking from above your experience and start speaking from inside of it. And that changes everything. Because now your words carry your body inside them. Now there’s no separation between what you say and what you actually are. And people feel that immediately. That’s why some words land flat while others penetrate people. One is performance. The other is embodiment. And honestly? I think that’s what finding my voice really was. Not becoming someone new. But finally becoming safe enough to stop abandoning myself in real time.

The Identity You're Still Protecting

So to bring this back to what I was talking about earlier, I’ve been thinking about something lately from watching people who come across my newsletters, my Instagram, my TikTok, clients, conversations, women I admire, women I observe. And once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. The women who are in loving relationships, the ones whose partners genuinely adore them, the ones who experience deep intimacy instead of constantly managing other people’s emotions, the women who seem to create lives that feel expansive, pleasurable, alive, the women whose businesses seem to have this gravitational pull around them, whose launches fill faster, whose content gets screenshotted, whose audiences seem to make decisions instead of endlessly contemplating their existence, are almost never the women with the most information. Because if information was the thing, if awareness was the thing we all needed, we’d all be millionaires by now. We’d all be healed. We’d all have beautiful relationships and perfect nervous systems and perfectly regulated lives. We live in a time where there is enough free information on the internet to build twenty businesses before breakfast and probably heal every attachment wound you’ve ever had. And yet people still hire mentors. People still invest five grand, ten grand, twenty-five grand. People still throw down a credit card fully aware they could probably find the information somewhere else.

And the more I’ve sat with that, the more I’ve realized nobody is actually paying for information. They’re paying for interruption. They’re paying for transformation. They’re paying for someone willing to look directly at the identity that’s keeping them stuck and say, “Hey, I know you’ve built your whole life around protecting this thing, but it’s costing you more than it’s giving you.” Because if we’re being honest, that’s what most people are actually paying for. Not support. Not strategy. Not accountability. Certainly not another PDF, another framework, another nervous system practice, another healing modality, another blueprint. They’re paying for someone powerful enough to stop agreeing with the version of themselves they’ve already outgrown.

And honestly, I think that’s where this whole conversation about finding my voice comes full circle. Because finding my voice was never really about content. Content was just where I could see it. The videos were just where I could watch it happen in real time. Finding my voice changed my relationships. It changed what I tolerated. It changed what I was willing to ask for. It changed the conversations I was willing to have. It changed my business. It changed my parenting. It changed my leadership. It changed what I would no longer negotiate away. Because the moment you stop abandoning yourself, everything else has to change too. Not because you’re trying to become some empowered version of yourself, but because there’s no longer a gap between what you know and how you’re living.

Most people’s relationships aren’t struggling because they’re hard to love or incapable of intimacy. Most people’s content isn’t ineffective because they’re bad writers or bad creators. Most businesses aren’t stuck because they need another strategy. Most people are still protecting identities. Their own identities. Their partner’s identities. Their audience’s identities. Because the second you become more committed to keeping everyone comfortable than helping them confront themselves, everything starts getting softer. Your relationships get softer because you stop saying the thing that actually needs to be said. Your content gets softer because you’re writing for approval instead of truth. Your offers get softer because you’re terrified someone might misunderstand you. Your leadership gets softer because you’re more concerned with being liked than respected. Then eventually you find yourself wondering why nobody is moving, why nobody is changing, why nobody is making decisions, why people keep consuming everything you’re creating while somehow remaining exactly where they were six months ago.

That’s why I laugh a little (yes, even as I write this) whenever people ask me for the perfect polarizing post, the perfect somatic practice, the perfect words to say to a partner, the perfect strategy. As if there’s some magical arrangement of words that suddenly makes people wake up and change their lives. There isn’t. The words aren’t what activate people. The self-confrontation behind the words does. Anybody can write a polarizing post. Anybody can borrow someone else’s opinions, sprinkle in a few f-bombs, and call it leadership. Anybody can spend years in therapy, attend retreats, read every book, binge every podcast, screenshot every piece of content that resonates, save every post and call it growth. But people can feel the difference. They can feel when someone is performing power. And they can feel when someone has actually earned it. One feels desperate. The other feels true.

And truth is strange because it follows people home. It shows up while they’re driving. While they’re walking the dog. While they’re folding laundry. While they’re brushing their teeth. While they’re lying in bed pretending not to think about the thing they’re absolutely thinking about. Truth lingers. Truth creates tension. Truth keeps pulling at something inside of you until eventually you can’t unknow it anymore. Because every real truth eventually asks for a decision. You either continue protecting the identity that’s keeping you stuck, or you finally let it die.

The Point Of No Return

And if I’m being honest, I think that’s what people are really searching for. The thing that finally breaks the spell. The identity. The story. The pattern. The excuse. The illusion. Whatever you want to call it. And the people most capable of doing that are rarely the heroes everyone expects. They’re usually the women who’ve already dragged themselves through their own bullshit. The women who’ve already met the parts of themselves they’d rather not admit existed. The women who’ve confronted their need for approval, certainty, perfection, validation, permission, belonging, and all the other things that quietly keep brilliant women playing smaller than they know they’re capable of. Because once you’ve done that work, something changes. Your content stops sounding like content. Your offers stop sounding like offers. Your marketing stops feeling like persuasion. Your relationships stop feeling like negotiations. You stop trying to get people to choose you and start choosing yourself. You stop overexplaining. You stop shape-shifting. You stop performing. And people feel that. Not because you’re louder. Not because you’re more confident. Not because you found the perfect strategy. But because there’s finally congruence between the woman speaking and the woman living. And that’s a point of no return.

So if you’ve been wondering why you’re consuming all the content, reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts, collecting all the awareness, nodding your head every time something resonates while somehow your life keeps looking remarkably similar, maybe the question isn’t what else you need to learn.

Maybe the question is what identity you’re still protecting.

Because that’s the work we do inside The Initiation.

Not becoming someone else.

Not fixing yourself.

Not collecting more awareness.

But learning how to stay connected to yourself when truth creates tension. Through visibility. Through intimacy. Through uncertainty. Through desire. Through leadership. Through being fully seen. Because finding your voice isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning. And once you find it, you don’t just change your words. You change your entire life.

Spots inside The Initiation are limited.

ENTER THE INITIATION

Until Next Time

Mishell

Do you ever find yourself in a season where you can’t see very far ahead?

Not because you haven’t done the work, not because you haven’t reflected enough, healed enough, journaled enough, or tried hard enough, but because the path itself has disappeared into fog. The kind of fog that settles low across a landscape thick and quiet and softens the edges of everything familiar. The kind where you know the road is still beneath your feet, but you can only see a few steps ahead. There are moments in life when the next chapter hasn’t arrived, but the previous one no longer fits. Life places you in a strange in-between, the space between holding on and letting go, certainty and uncertainty, connection and distance, grief and acceptance, longing and peace. A liminal space where certainty dissolves and all that remains is the invitation to stay. Not to force answers. Not to rush ahead. Not to obsess over the future. Just stay. Stay with yourself long enough to hear what has been whispering beneath all the noise. And if I’m honest, I think these spaces are some of the hardest places to be because there is nothing to do there. No action plan. No guarantee. No proof that everything is working out. Just you standing in the unknown while every part of you wants to run toward certainty.

I’ve been in that space lately. Walking through days that feel both ordinary and sacred at the same time. Days where nothing appears to be changing on the surface, yet underneath I can feel entire landscapes rearranging themselves. Like the earth shifting beneath the ocean floor. Invisible. Silent. Powerful. And in the absence of certainty, something unexpected started happening. I found myself reaching for the same songs over and over again. Songs I couldn’t fully explain. Songs that seemed to carry an emotional texture my body recognized before my mind did. I would press play and suddenly it felt as though a hidden doorway inside me opened. Not a memory exactly. Something deeper than that. A hallway leading back to parts of myself I hadn’t visited in years. Parts that had been quietly waiting beneath adulthood, responsibility, survival, achievement, heartbreak, healing, and all the identities I learned to wear in order to move through the world.

The strange thing wasn’t that I remembered her. The strange thing was that I could feel her. The teenage version of me. The woman in her early twenties. Not as a photograph in my mind. Not as a story I could tell. But as a living experience moving through my body. I could feel the loneliness she carried. The longing. The confusion. The ache of wanting to belong somewhere while not fully knowing who she was. I could feel what it was like to move through life carrying entire oceans inside of you without having the language to describe them. And every now and then tears would quietly fall down my face, even as I write this. Not because something was wrong. Not because I was necessarily sad. But because something was being remembered. Something true was finally being touched. It felt less like grief and more like recognition. Like meeting someone you haven’t seen in years and immediately knowing them without needing a single word.

I wonder if that’s part of what these in-between seasons are for. Maybe when life becomes quiet enough, when the future refuses to reveal itself and there is nowhere left to run, we finally begin to hear the voices that survival drowned out. The dreamer. The artist. The hopeful one. The tender one. The rebellious one. The version of you who still believed in magic before the world taught you to protect yourself. The version of you who had dreams before practicality took over. The version of you who felt things deeply before life convinced you that sensitivity was something to hide. Maybe these spaces aren’t asking us to figure out what’s next. Maybe they’re asking us to gather the pieces of ourselves we left behind along the way. To sit beside them. To listen. To remember.

Because what I’ve realized is that when the fog rolls in and I can no longer see what’s ahead, music becomes a bridge. Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved alternative rock from the early 2000s. It’s more than nostalgia. It’s a memory spell. A portal back to the parts of myself that never actually left. Not through analyzing. Not through fixing. Not through understanding everything. But through simply feeling. Through allowing a song to unlock something words cannot reach. Through letting melodies guide me into rooms inside myself that have been closed for years. And every time I follow that thread, I find another forgotten piece waiting there. Not lost. Not broken. Just buried beneath years of becoming who I thought I needed to be.

Maybe that’s the gift hidden inside the fog. Not clarity. Not answers. Not certainty. But remembrance. Because when everything else disappears, when the plans disappear, when certainty disappears, when the future remains hidden beyond the horizon, you discover something unexpected. You are not alone inside yourself. The parts of you that loved, hoped, dreamed, imagined, created, and believed never actually left. They have been there all along, patiently waiting for you to return. And maybe that is why music feels so sacred to me. Because music never asks me to explain. It never asks me to know where I’m going. It never asks me to make sense of what cannot yet be understood. It simply takes my hand and walks me back to myself. One song at a time.

And if you’ve read this far, let me leave you with a question. Who exists beneath the version of you that learned to be strong? Beneath the one who became responsible, dependable, resilient, and capable. Beneath the one who learned how to carry everything alone because she believed she had no other choice. Beneath the one who learned to survive. Who was she before all of that? Not the version of you who knows all the healing language. Not the version of you who learned how to cope. Not the version of you who became who she needed to become in order to make it through. I mean the version underneath. The one still waiting quietly beneath the layers. If this moment in your life was a scene in a film, what would the camera capture? Would it find you standing at the edge of a shoreline covered in morning fog, unable to see what lies beyond the horizon? Would it find you sitting by a window while a familiar song plays through the speakers, remembering something you can’t quite put into words? Would it find you moving through a season that makes no logical sense and yet somehow feels sacred all the same? And if there were a narrator speaking over that scene, what would they say? Maybe they would remind you that not all seasons are meant to be solved. Some are meant to be lived. Some are meant to be felt. Some are meant to slow you down long enough to hear the voices you’ve been separated from for years. The dreamer. The artist. The hopeful one. The tender one. The version of you who still believes there is more to this life than surviving it.

I often imagine a raven in moments like these. Not as an omen, but as a witness. Perched quietly on a branch just beyond the fog, watching without urgency, never demanding answers, never revealing the entire path ahead. The raven seems to understand something most of us spend our lives resisting: wisdom rarely arrives as certainty. It arrives as presence. As the willingness to remain with yourself when every part of you wants to escape the discomfort of not knowing. It arrives through staying long enough to hear what has been buried beneath years of achievement, heartbreak, responsibility, self-protection, and survival. Maybe that is the real gift hidden inside these liminal spaces. Not clarity. Not answers. Not a clear view of the future. But the opportunity to sit beside yourself long enough to remember who has been walking with you all along. The parts of you that were never lost, only covered. The parts that still carry wonder, curiosity, tenderness, and hope. The parts patiently waiting for you to return. And maybe that is all this season is asking of you. Not to know. Not to force. Not to become. Simply to remember. To let the music become the bridge between who you were and who you are now. To allow yourself to be found by the parts of you that never truly left. One song. One breath. One small return to yourself at a time.

Until Next time,

Mishell

Who are you without the achievements? Like really. Who are you when nothing external is constantly confirming your worth? Can you still trust yourself before the money comes in, before the 6 figure business, before the metrics rise and you go viral, before the relationship softens or you magically have the “perfect partner”, before the proof, before the applause, before the world points at you and says, “See? You matter now.” Because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and honestly, I think that’s the real fear underneath almost everything. Not failure or even visibility. But being fully seen before your life looks “successful enough” to justify taking up space.

And that’s fucking terrifying because then you would have to face the brutal truth that your worth cannot only exist when it’s being witnessed. There’s nowhere left to hide after that.

Yesterday I rewatched John Tucker Must Die for probably the hundredth time and it hit me all over again why I’ve always been emotionally attached to movies like that. The weird girl. The overlooked girl. The loser. The invisible girl finally taking up space. Lizzie McGuire. Mia Thermopolis. Every early 2000s girl in movies who felt internally enormous but somehow externally forgettable. And people laugh when I say that because they think invisibility is physical. “You? Invisible? You’re hot.” As if beauty has anything to do with existential belonging. As if being looked at is the same thing as feeling seen. That’s not what I mean when I say invisible. I mean the kind of invisible that happens when you grow up learning that love, connection, safety, belonging, all of that shit, feels conditional. You learn very early that being yourself is dangerous. So you become hyper-aware. Hyper-vigilant. Funny. Pleasant. Smart. Charismatic. Easy to digest. Emotionally attuned to everyone else before yourself. You shapeshift. And after a while, you don’t even know what your real voice sounds like anymore because every version of you has been filtered through survival first.

I think that’s why the lyric from Why Not by Hilary Duff made me start crying in the middle of my kitchen like a mentally unstable divorced mother inside an early 2000s coming-of-age movie. “You always dress in yellow when you wanna dress in gold.” That line wrecked me. Because that has been my entire life. Not aesthetically. Existentially. Watering myself down before anyone else could reject me first. Making myself more digestible. More acceptable. More earned. I spent years trying to become someone worth listening to instead of realizing I already was. And honestly, I think survival became my identity for a long time, especially as a single mother. Nobody talks enough about the shame underneath survival mode. The shame of constantly feeling behind. The shame of looking around at your life wondering why resting feels so fucking unsafe. The shame of secretly believing that if you only slow down for two seconds, your entire life might collapse like a Jenga tower held together by caffeine, hyper-vigilance, and nervous system problems.

So you become “the resilient one.” The strong one. The reliable one. The one who keeps going. The one who figures it out and has all the answers. Meanwhile your body is in the corner begging you to stop before it physically files a complaint against you. And the hardest part is that eventually achievement stops being something you enjoy and quietly becomes your identity. You start measuring your worth through endurance. Through productivity. Through how much you have, how much money you make? how many credentials you have? Did you graduate? Do you own your dream home and dream car? Through how much pain you can survive without collapsing publicly. And then silence becomes unbearable. Someone doesn’t text back and suddenly your chest tightens. Money doesn’t come in when you thought it would and now your entire body spirals into fear. Your offer doesn’t sell immediately and suddenly you’re questioning your purpose, your visibility, your worth, your entire existence like a Victorian woman dying dramatically near a window. And the wild part is that most people think they’re “processing” in those moments. But really, they’re abandoning themselves. Because uncertainty forces you into contact with yourself and most people cannot tolerate that space for very long. It’s like self confrontation must be avoided like the plague.

So the nervous system reaches for anything. Overthinking. Refreshing bank accounts. Checking who viewed the story. Obsessing. Controlling. Catastrophizing. Creating meaning out of silence because silence feels emotionally unsafe. Not because you’re broken, but because if your nervous system learned that love disappears, safety disappears, connection disappears, then uncertainty feels like danger. So the body braces before life even happens. You expect disappointment before joy ever arrives. You prepare for abandonment before intimacy deepens. You anticipate failure before anything has even unfolded because surviving became safer than relaxing. And eventually you stop asking yourself, “What do I want, what is it that I really desire?” And you only ask, “What do I need to do to survive this week?” But survival is not the same thing as living.

And I think that’s the shift I’ve been going through lately. Not becoming more impressive. Not becoming more healed. Not becoming some polished woman floating above human emotions giving advice from a luxury penthouse while pretending she has transcended suffering. I’m talking about something far less glamorous. Staying. Learning how to stay with myself when uncertainty appears instead of immediately abandoning myself trying to escape it. Learning how to stay present when life gets really fucking quiet, when money fluctuates, when visibility increases, when someone pulls away, when there isn’t immediate proof that I’m okay. Because maybe silence was never punishment. Maybe silence was just space. Space to finally hear yourself underneath your survival identity. And maybe healing is not learning how to avoid discomfort forever. Maybe healing is learning how to stay long enough inside uncertainty without turning it into evidence that something is wrong with you.

That’s the work I care about now. Not perfection. Not performance. Not appearing healed. Staying. That’s what The Initiation actually is. Learning how to stop abandoning yourself every single time life doesn’t immediately validate your existence. Because confidence, magnetism is not built through constant success. It’s built through self-loyalty. Through staying with yourself under pressure over and over and over again. And honestly, thats what changes everything in your life, not because life got easy but because you built more capacity inside your body to let life touch you without self abandoning.

ENTER THE INITIATION

Until Next Time

Mishell

For the longest time, I thought my voice had no meaning. That the way I wrote, the way I spoke, the way I expressed myself wasn’t valuable enough. Why the fuck would people listen to me? That’s what I thought at least. And low key, that shit came from not believing I was enough. But through repeated moments of frustration, anger, grief and never really wanting to look in the fucking mirror and risk being my actual self, you start realizing how much of yourself you hide.

And I knew something without a shadow of a doubt I was here to build a fucking movement. I’m a fucking leader, bitch, and I was not acting like it. Because I was still waiting to be picked. Still trying to sound acceptable. Still trying to be digestible. Still trying to fit inside what the wellness and spiritual industry would consider “safe”, “ladylike”, “polished”, “professional”. Meanwhile, everything that actually made me powerful was the exact shit I was trying to suppress. My bold opinions. My intensity. My directness. My anger. My black sheep energy. My ability to say the thing people feel but avoid saying out loud.

And the moment I started doubling down on the parts of me the world said disqualified me from leading, everything changed. Of course, not overnight. And definitely, not because the metrics suddenly exploded or people instantly started buying. Honestly, for a whileeeeee, I was met with silence. But I kept fucking speaking anyway. And after repeating that consistently, something started happening. My words got cleaner. More precise. More felt. More certain. And people can feel that. Not because you suddenly mastered persuasion or learned better marketing psychology, but because your nervous system stopped hesitating inside your own truth. A lot of people naturally think to themselves, “Why would anyone pick me out of all people?” So they spend years trying to convince the world. Nurturing people in the DMs. Overexplaining. Doing thirty-minute discovery calls trying to prove their worth. Flooding their content with knowledge hoping someone finally validates them. And most of the time, none of that shit works. Because people don’t move from your performance. They move from your self-possession.

Today someone commented on one of my carousels and said, “This feels targeted.” And I responded, “That’s precision and intention.” Then she said, “Which honestly and wholeheartedly I fuck with. This post had me diving into the topics of self-disclosure and developing secure attachment. Thank you.” And then she said something that unexpectedly hit me. She told me I should post my Cash App or Venmo so people could leave tips because, “You never know what helps. I personally support love and thank you donations.” And instantly, a part of me reacted internally. Do high-level women do that? As if receiving support was somehow beneath me. And I had to sit with that because why did I believe receiving reciprocity was weak? Why did I associate support with lack?

And honestly, what would actually be beneath me is abandoning myself through pride.

There’s a difference between “Please save me” and “I allow reciprocity when my work genuinely moves people.” Because she wasn’t responding to desperation. She was responding to impact. The fact that my work made someone stop scrolling long enough to reflect on self-disclosure and secure attachment means the carousel fucking landed. It did exactly what it was created to do. Disrupt the nervous system enough for someone to introspect instead of unconsciously consume. And that level of impact didn’t come from strategy alone. It came from repetition. Identity work. Capacity work. Grief. Truth-telling. Being willing to stay visible while nobody clapped yet. Because eventually, when you stop trying to be picked, your voice starts penetrating people. And that changes everything. Because the only way to lead an orchestra is to turn your back on the crowd and trust what you hear before anyone else does.

And in that spiral, in that self-confrontation I had with myself, I noticed something. A part of me equates receiving direct support with being less powerful because in a way, my nervous system associated power with self-sufficiency, hyper-independence, and never needing anyone. So I had to challenge that fucking thought. Really see myself in the mirror. And I came to realize something, high-level women don’t reject reciprocity. They reject self-abandonment. Because there are artists, writers, creators, musicians, spiritual teachers, independent creators making millions through direct support models because people genuinely want to contribute to work that changes them. And honestly, she brought something to light inside of me. Where else am I not allowing myself to receive? Because what she was really saying was, “This affected me. I would contribute.”

And the irony in all of this is that the women who are deeply embodied in receiving are usually the ones who allow support without making it mean weakness, dependency, or loss of authority. That’s a deep fucking layer of capacity. And it got mirrored back to me in my own comment section. So from that, I created the link in my bio “If my words move you, support the fucking movement.”

And then I asked myself another question. A question I think most people never really ask themselves, why does my work land?

And honestly, that question itself became reassurance. Proof that maybe I was rebellious enough to lead the way I was always supposed to. Because a lot of people in the wellness and spiritual space teach around the wound after they’ve fully metabolized it, packaged it, intellectualized it, made it socially acceptable. So their content sounds polished, but there’s no edge. No pulse inside of it. It lands flat. Emotionally finished. And I used to say all the time, “Speak to me like I’m a fucking human being.” Meanwhile, I was doing the exact same shit in my own work.

Then I decided to do the opposite.

My work often feels like I’m inside the tension with you and refusing to look away. And that creates immediacy because people can feel when someone is speaking from inside of it. People can also feel when someone is speaking from performance, superiority, detachment, rehearsed healing language, or some distant expert identity versus someone speaking from lived embodiment in real fucking time. And to be honest, I don’t know any other way to create. Everything I make comes from my own journey, what I’m confronting, what I’m discovering inside myself, what I’m catching in real time. Maybe that sounds messy. Maybe raw. Maybe too exposed. But it’s the only way I know how to create.

And I think my audience especially responds because I don’t pretend to be above being human. I let people see the contradictions, the conflict, the grief, the anger, the projections, the hypervigilance, the self-confrontation, the moments where I catch myself abandoning myself without protecting my image, while still holding responsibility and depth at the same time. And that shit is rare now. Because some people stay inside the wound and drown in it. Others escape the wound intellectually and become emotionally unreachable. But my strongest work tends to happen when I speak from the bridge my humanness and my awareness simultaneously. Not, “I have transcended all of this.” More like, “I can see the mechanism while I’m still inside of it.”

And that’s why people feel seen instead of lectured.

Because my words create tension. I’m no longer speaking like some distant clinician observing people from emotional safety. My words feel close enough to expose the exact moment someone abandons themselves. And that feels intimate for people. Confronting as fuck. Relieving. Activating. But at least is memorable and undeniable.

So if you are still reading this, maybe people were never waiting for you to sound perfect. Maybe they were waiting to feel you. And maybe the moment your voice becomes undeniable is the moment you stop abandoning yourself inside your own expression.

That’s The Initiation.

ENTER THE INITIATION

Until next time,

Mishell

And one of those movies for me has always been Edward Scissorhands.

I think I first loved it as a child without fully understanding why. I just knew it hurt me in this strange beautiful way. Like something inside me recognized him before I had language for myself. And now being 32, neurodivergent, and deeply inside this work of somatics, symbolism, music, capacity building, nervous system healing, and all the weird hidden emotional places humans carry… I watch it completely differently now.

I don’t watch movies the way I used to anymore. I feel them in my body now.

And honestly, I think some films are less “movies” and more mirrors for parts of ourselves we haven’t fully touched yet. Edward feels like one of those mirrors.

Because this movie hits deeply for people who feel emotionally intense, misunderstood, hyper-aware, too sensitive for the world, too much for the rooms they enter, too different to fully relax into belonging. Especially neurodivergent people. There is something about Edward that feels less like a character and more like the physical embodiment of sensitivity trapped inside a world that experiences sensitivity as dangerous.

Even his design feels symbolic. The black clothing. The straps. The buckles. The leather. Black absorbs. Black hides. Black protects. Black creates distance. His entire outfit feels like armor for someone who never learned how to safely belong anywhere. He looks like grief and creativity and repression and longing all existing in the same body at once. Even the tightness of the outfit feels important to me now. Like someone being held together instead of relaxed into themselves.

And his eyes…

God.

His eyes always looked exhausted to me. Not physically exhausted. Emotionally exhausted. Like someone who has spent his entire life in hypervigilance. Someone who watches more than participates. Someone constantly scanning the room trying not to hurt anyone while simultaneously starving for closeness. And I think that’s why so many people feel seen by him.

Then there’s the messy black hair. Untamed. Chaotic. Alive. Emotionally uncontained. He looks almost animalistic compared to the artificial perfection of the pastel suburban world around him. Everyone in the town is polished, rehearsed, performative, socially conditioned. But Edward looks raw. Like the unconscious walking directly into a world obsessed with appearances.

And then… the scissorhands.

The fucking scissorhands.

I honestly think that’s one of the saddest metaphors I’ve ever seen in a film because Edward wants intimacy so badly… but his touch can wound.

That’s the tragedy.

He is so gentle internally but dangerous externally. Not because he’s evil. Not because he wants to hurt anyone. But because nobody ever taught him how to exist safely inside closeness.

Even writing that makes my chest tighten, and tears fall down my face.

Because I think a lot of people secretly carry that fear

“What if my intensity hurts people?”
“What if I’m too much to safely love?”
“What if closeness always ends in injury?”

And the cuts on his face destroy me too because they symbolize something deeper than self-harm to me now. He wounds himself simply trying to participate in life. Even reaching toward connection injures him. That’s what hurts.

The scars are accidental wounds from someone trying to touch beauty, intimacy, normalcy, affection, belonging. The very thing he longs for cuts him in the process.

And then he enters suburbia… this hyper-artificial “normal” world where everything is pastel and performative and image-conscious. Everyone LOOKS safe there. Everyone looks civilized. But emotionally they are far crueler than Edward ever was.

That contrast matters so much.

Edward looks monstrous externally but internally he is deeply gentle. The town looks normal externally but internally becomes judgmental, manipulative, fearful, predatory. And honestly… that feels painfully accurate to the world sometimes. Especially when you’re neurodivergent. Sometimes it feels like the people who struggle most with social performance are actually the most emotionally sincere people in the room.

Edward barely speaks throughout the film and I think that’s important too. He feels more like sensation than language. And I can painfully relate to that. Even writing this now feels like I am pulling something out of my chest with my bare hands trying to translate a feeling that was never meant to fit neatly into words. I feel tightness in my throat. Pressure in my chest. Pure fucking grief. Like my body understands something my mouth still struggles to explain.

He communicates through presence, gaze, movement, nervous system energy, art, silence. Not polished social performance. Not perfectly timed responses. Not socially acceptable emotional packaging.

And as a neurodivergent woman… I understand that feeling deeply.

Sometimes the internal experience is so fucking massive it feels almost inhuman trying to contain it inside language. Sometimes I feel everything all at once. Every shift in tone. Every expression. Every tension in a room. Every unspoken emotion sitting underneath someone’s words. And yet when it’s time to express myself back… it’s like everything jams together at once. The feeling arrives faster than the translation.

And I think that’s why Edward hurts me so much.

Because he doesn’t feel emotionally empty to me.
He feels emotionally overcrowded.

Like someone who feels too much and has nowhere safe to put it.

And then there’s the part that honestly hurts me the most now as an adult.

Edward knowingly allows himself to be used. He understands people are exploiting him. He understands he’s being manipulated. But connection matters more to him than self-protection because for the first time in his life, he feels human through being loved.

That realization made me uncomfortable because I’ve had to face that tendency inside myself too. Sometimes deeply lonely people tolerate being misunderstood, objectified, used, abused, reshaped, projected onto… just to stay close to warmth for a little longer.

And then the ending…God, the ending.

I think the ending emotionally destroys people because Edward’s final act is love through self-exile.

“I love you enough not to destroy your life by asking you to live in my world.”

So he retreats back into isolation. And the tragic part is that his isolation is not proof he’s incapable of love. It’s almost the opposite. He loves so deeply that he removes himself. The castle itself feels symbolic too now. The unconscious. Exile. Solitude. Imagination. The hidden self. The shadow self separated from society. He returns to the place where he can exist without constantly wounding or being wounded. And the snow…The snow is probably the part that haunts me the most now. Edward creates ice sculptures alone in the castle and the ice shavings become snow falling over the town. Meaning even in exile… his inner world still touches people. His love still reaches her. Quietly. Indirectly. Without possession.

And honestly I think this is why certain films stay with us for years. Because the body recognizes truth through symbolism long before the mind fully understands it. Which brings me to something I’ve been realizing more and more through my own work.

I don’t think movies are just entertainment. I think some films function almost like dream material for the nervous system. Most people watch movies cognitively. Plot. Distraction. Entertainment. Emotional release. But films like Edward Scissorhands feel archetypal, sensory, emotionally symbolic, visually exaggerated, body-based. The nervous system responds to symbols before logic. That’s why certain scenes or sounds or facial expressions or music or textures can bypass intellectual defenses completely and activate grief, longing, shame, tenderness, exile, desire, fear, loneliness. And that’s where movies can become somatically integrative instead of just emotionally cathartic. Because crying alone is not integration. People cry all the time and still leave unchanged.

Integration happens when the body safely contacts emotion… stays with it… and allows something unfinished to move, reorganize, or soften without immediately escaping it. The movie becomes a portal instead of just a stimulus. And this is actually how I use films, music, movement, and symbolism inside my own life and inside my containers. Not as entertainment. As nervous system mirrors.

And honestly… I think this is where the film stops being just a movie and starts becoming a mirror for your relationship with yourself. Because the real question isn’t
“Do you relate to Edward?” The real question is “What happens inside your body when you do?”

Do you stay with yourself when the grief rises?
When the loneliness rises?
When the fear of being “too much” rises?
When the urge to disconnect, numb out, scroll, intellectualize, or leave yourself appears?

Because self-loyalty is not just staying with yourself when things feel beautiful. It’s staying when your nervous system wants to run. It’s staying present with the parts of yourself that feel exiled, misunderstood, emotionally overcrowded, ashamed, too intense, too needy, too sensitive, too human.

And I think that’s the deeper invitation hidden underneath films like Edward Scissorhands. Not just emotional release. But learning how to remain with yourself under pressure without abandoning what you feel.

So below, I want to show you exactly how I use films, music, symbolism, and nervous system work as portals instead of escape. As a way to expand my capacity to stay with myself instead of abandoning what I feel.

As a way to meet yourself more honestly. Try this practice let the body confess the truth…

Read more

Let me confess a truth most people never really say out loud. Maybe because it feels too paradoxical. Too raw. Too exposing. Especially if you’re someone whose work revolves around healing, coaching, serving people by transforming people’s life. There’s this silent pressure to always sound grounded, grateful, fulfilled, you know the performance of looking like you got your shit together. Like once you’ve “done the work,” you should somehow transcend loneliness. But honestly? I don’t think that’s true anymore.

For as long as I can remember, I carried this illusion around love, maybe from all the fairy tales and romantic movies I watched. That once I met “the one,” something inside me would finally settle. Once I had real love, real support, real partnership, I would finally feel safe enough to rest. Like the ache would magically disappear. Like being deeply chosen would remove this underlying emptiness I’ve carried for years. And life has a brutal way of confronting the fantasies we quietly build our identities around.

Because now? I have an incredible partner who chooses me daily. I have two beautiful healthy children. I have a business I fucking love. And still… sometimes this feeling creeps in out of nowhere. Loneliness. Grief. A strange emptiness that doesn’t even fully make sense to my rational mind. And I think this is the part nobody talks about because people immediately make it mean something is wrong. Wrong with the relationship. Wrong with themselves. Wrong with their life. But sometimes nothing is wrong at all.

Most people don’t stay long enough to realize that though. Because social media loves to feed you bullshit that you need to “fix” yourself and every tool out there has now become a form of avoidance. So the moment loneliness appears, they rush to escape it. They intellectualize it. Bypass it with gratitude. “I have so much to be grateful for, why do I feel this way?” They immediately start listing blessings like they’re trying to convince themselves out of being human. Or they try to solve the feeling like it’s a puzzle. Maybe I need more healing. More success. More purpose. More intimacy. More attention. More clarity. More transformation. Anything except actually sitting there long enough to feel the loneliness underneath existence itself.

And lately, I’ve been listening to songs that mirror exactly what I’ve been feeling. Songs filled with this devastating realization that says “I built the life. I gathered the pieces. I got the relationship. And there’s still a room inside me that echoes.” That realization can break people if they don’t understand what they’re touching. Because most people panic there. They blame the relationship. Create drama. Chase another goal. Start overworking. Scroll more. Numb themselves. Obsess over becoming “better.” Try to force certainty. Try to fill the silence immediately. Because stillness confronts you with something terrifying. The truth, another human being was never supposed to carry the responsibility of completing your existence.

And honestly? That truth fucking hurts. It’s painful maturity. Because younger versions of us survived through attachment to arrival. “When I finally find love, then I’ll feel safe.” “When I’m finally chosen, then I can rest.” “When I finally have my person, maybe this emptiness leaves.” But life eventually confronts you with something deeper if you allow yourself to really be fucking honest. And for me. Love is real. Connection is real. Support is real. And there is still a fundamental aloneness to being human.

Not in a hopeless way. Not in a depressing way. Just… true.

And weirdly, the moment you stop demanding loneliness disappear, it stops feeling like abandonment. And it becomes SPACE. Space to hear yourself. Space to meet yourself. Space to exist without constantly trying to fill every quiet moment with stimulation, validation, achievement, attention, or noise. It’s uncomfortable as hell though. Vulnerable. Confusing to the rational mind. Almost like life pauses you for a second (that second feels like forever though) and asks “Who are you when there’s nothing left to chase?”

I honestly think a lot of relationships quietly suffer because people cannot tolerate this truth. Some people expect their partner to anesthetize existential grief. So the moment loneliness surfaces, they assume: “We lost connection.” “You changed.” “This relationship isn’t enough.” Or they never say anything at all because they’re terrified of sounding ungrateful, crazy, dramatic, broken. So instead they silently self-abandon trying to escape the feeling.

But loneliness itself is not the wound.

The resistance to feeling it is what creates suffering.

Because the moment discomfort appears, most people immediately leave themselves. They reach for validation. Overconsume. Overwork. Attach to fantasy. Force intimacy. Stay constantly stimulated. Obsess over being chosen. Not because they’re weak or needy, but because stillness forces them to confront their own existence without distraction.

And maybe this is why my energy feels different lately. Less chasing. Less illusion (thank god). Less fantasy that another person, achievement, success, healing modality, or milestone will permanently remove the ache of being human. Just… presence. Just allowing myself to feel loneliness without immediately making it mean I am unloved.

And that changes everything.

Because maybe loneliness was never something to fix.

Maybe it was something to feel.

Maybe the real shift happens when your relationship to loneliness becomes: “I can feel this, and it doesn’t mean something is wrong with me.”

And honestly, maybe that’s enough.

Maybe healing is not becoming someone who never feels loneliness again.

Maybe healing is simply learning how to stay with yourself when it appears.

Until next time,

Mishell

Most woman are hiding the exact part of them that would make them wealthy. They think their power is in perfection, in performing a version of themselves thats approved by the world. The parts they think disqualify them from leading… are the exact parts they refuse to lead with. The direct part. The intense part. The “too much,” “bitchy,” wild part. So instead of leading with it, they bury it. Under healing. Under strategy. Under “value.” Be soft. Be validating. Be digestible. Teach more. Prove more. Explain more. And now your entire business is built on shitty rules that were never yours in the first place.

So what do you do? You jump from strategy to strategy, hook to hook, framework to framework, calling it growth. But really, you’ve just found a socially acceptable way to hide. You’ve learned how to perform power in a way that keeps you liked, keeps you safe, keeps you untouched but never fully seen.

Since you love being such a comfortable liar, here is something no one is telling you. You don’t have a messaging or visibility problem. You’re just scared to be seductive. And not the version of seduction you’ve been sold be likable, soft, pretty, palatable kind. That’s entry-level seduction. That’s basic bitch marketing. Yes, it attracts attention. But it doesn’t hold power.

Real seduction disrupts. Not loudly. Not performatively. But at the level of identity. It’s the kind of disruption that stops someone mid-scroll, mid-thought, mid-pattern and makes them feel some much fucking tension, they can’t immediately resolve. Most of you were taught that seduction looks like softening your words, being likable, creating desire through pleasure, proving how much you know. And now your content is full of information but empty of you. You rather sound like every one else than risk standing in your own originality. No one is going to take you seriously because you are being fake as fuck. There is no edge, no risk, no truth that actually lands in the body and costs you something . Just more fucking noise dressed up as value.

The seduction I had to learn came from radical honesty. From realizing I was watering myself down so fucking much because I was afraid of being disliked, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of being seen in my full intensity. And the moment I stopped negotiating that, everything changed.

Real seduction does three things, and it does them at once. It exposes what people are avoiding, not gently, but precisely. You don’t circle the truth. You name the exact moment they abandon themselves. That’s why it hits. Because it’s not generic. It’s surgical. It also creates so much tension in the body that creates a magnetic pull. Seduction isn’t mental, it’s somatic. When someone reads your words and feels their throat tighten…it’s not just a sensation. It’s every moment they swallowed what they actually wanted to say. Every time the truth rose up clear, sharp, ready to be spoken
and instead, they pushed that shit back down. It’s that lump sitting right at the base of the throat, like something is stuck there, like a scream that never made it out, like words pacing back and forth behind a closed door, waiting for permission that never came. It feels like suffocation but quiet. Like trying to breathe through something that won’t move. And then it creeps into the jaw. That subtle clenching. That pressure that builds from holding back, from biting down on what shouldn’t be said, from keeping it together, staying composed, staying fucking “good.” The kind of tension that makes your face feel still, but underneath it, everything is bracing. And then the chest. It heats up. Not gently, suddenly. Like something has been ignited under the surface. A burn that spreads across the ribs, pressing outward, like your body is trying to expand past the version of you that’s been containing it. It’s the feeling right before you say something that might change everything. Right before you risk being seen. Right before you disappoint someone. It’s intensity without release. Energy with nowhere to go. And then the drop. The stomach. That sudden fall. Like missing a step in the dark. Like your body realizes something before your mind can catch up. It’s the moment you recognize the truth…and with it comes the risk. The terrifying cost. The knowing that if you follow it, you don’t get to go back to who you were before. That’s seduction. Not because it’s pretty. But because it pulls someone out of their head
and drops them straight into their body. Into sensation. Into memory. Into truth they’ve been fucking avoiding.

And then there’s the part most people avoid, it withholds resolution. You don’t rush to explain. You don’t soothe. You don’t make it comfortable. Most of you lose your power right here. You over-explain. You try to be understood. You become the one who always has the answer, the fucking hero. And instead of being pulled in, people feel overwhelmed. They’re drowning in information that never actually moves them. Power is not in explaining more. Power is in leaving them inside the tension. That’s why the villain is undeniable because of dangerously honest they are, they don’t need the approval of that world , they stand in behind convicted in their truth. Because tension creates desire. And desire is what moves people.

This is why your content doesn’t convert. Not because it’s bad, but because your strategic good girl is running your business , even after doing so much “healing work” she it’s keeping it safe. Because you leave right before it becomes too real. Too sharp. Too honest. Too disruptive. You exit at the exact moment where your truth would actually land.

I don’t seduce by being desirable. I seduce by being unavoidable. By saying the thing you’ve been circling for months. By naming the fucking lies you keep telling yourself. By cutting through the story you’ve been hiding behind. That’s why my work lands. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s felt. Because it doesn’t let you stay where you are.

And this is the part most of you don’t want to hear, money doesn’t come from better strategy. It comes from your willingness to be fully seen. To stop negotiating your truth the moment it might cost you approval. Every level of expansion will ask you the same thing will you stay with yourself, or will you abandon yourself to be accepted?

Because self-worth isn’t built by thinking differently. It’s built through evidence of self-loyalty under pressure. Again and again. In the moments where it would be easier to soften, to explain, to disappear.

That’s the work.

If you’re done hiding behind strategy and ready to learn how to stay when it actually costs you.

Enter The Initiation

xo Mishell

Let me shatter the delusion you been quietly clinging onto, even if you don’t want to admit it. Healthy relationships are not conflict-free. If yours looks that way, you’re either avoiding or you haven’t gone deep enough yet. And I know that might trigger something in you, because for the longest time I was the one being labeled “problematic”, too intense, too confrontational, too much. I carried so much fucking shame around that, like there was something fundamentally wrong with me that needed to be softened, fixed, controlled, made more digestible so I could finally be loved the “right” way. But the more I sat with that part of me, the one that refuses to look away, the one that feels everything, the one that can’t pretend—I realized something that completely flipped everything I thought I knew about love. That part of me? The one I tried to silence? It’s the exact thing that deepened my relationship.

Because I don’t avoid confrontation. I don’t pretend things are fine when they’re not. When there’s a gap between what’s said and what’s done, or my needs and I feel that subtle shift, that tension, that misalignment—my body doesn’t gently whisper to me, it fucking screams. And I don’t name it to control him or to be right or to fix anything. I name it because I refuse to abandon myself just to keep the peace. And that sounds simple when you read it, but in the moment? It takes a shit ton of capacity. Because when that moment hits, your body isn’t calm and collected, your chest tightens, your stomach drops, your throat starts closing, your heart starts racing, and suddenly you’re standing at the edge of something that feels like it could cost you connection. And that’s the moment most of you don’t stay.

You split. You leave yourself before anything even happens. Some of you go quiet, you see everything, you feel everything, you know, but you freeze. This is what I call the Frozen Woman Epidemic: women who see everything, feel everything… and say nothing. You tell yourself you’re being patient, that you’re choosing your battles, that you’re being understanding, emotionally intelligent, regulated. But if we’re being honest, you’re negotiating with what you already know. You feel the misalignment in your body and instead of honoring it, you override it. You swallow it. You make yourself smaller, easier, more agreeable, more “lovable.” And it doesn’t feel like a big betrayal in the moment, it feels like survival but slowly, subtly, you start leaving yourself.

And the consequences don’t show up all at once. That would be too obvious. It creeps in. You start laughing at things that don’t feel funny. You say “it’s fine” when your body is literally tightening. You stop expressing your needs because it feels easier than risking tension. And over time, that shit builds in your body. Resentment starts sitting in your chest like pressure you can’t release. Your body starts to feel dull, numb, disconnected. You lose attraction not just to them, but to your own life. Everything looks fine on the outside, but inside it feels empty as fuck, like you’re moving through something that doesn’t actually feel like yours. You’re in the relationship, but you’re not in it. You’re surviving it. And that quiet self-abandonment? That’s what’s actually killing intimacy, not the lack of communication you keep trying to fix.

And then there’s the other side, the women who do speak, but it comes out sharp, reactive, loaded. You say it because you can’t hold it anymore, because the pressure in your body builds and builds until it spills out as criticism, as “you always,” as “you never,” as something that feels more like an attack than truth. And then you walk away thinking the problem is how you communicated, like you just need better words, better timing, better delivery. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that you don’t have the capacity to stay with what’s alive in your body long enough to let it land as truth instead of reaction. Because the real work isn’t about whether you speak up or stay quiet, it’s about where you’re speaking from.

Can you actually stay in your body when the activation hits? When the heat rises, when your chest tightens, when your thoughts start spiraling and your nervous system is lit the fuck up? Can you sit there without immediately shutting down or exploding? Can you pause and feel what’s underneath it instead of rushing to fix it, explain it, or dump it onto your partner so you can get relief? Because that moment the one right before you speak—is where capacity is built. Not in the words you say, but in your ability to stay with yourself long enough to say them without abandoning yourself in the process.

And then you go to your partner, not perfectly regulated, not “healed,” not with some polished script but grounded enough that you don’t disappear mid-sentence. You say the truth clean and direct, without over-explaining it so they understand you, without softening it so they don’t leave, without shrinking it so it’s easier to receive. And here’s the part most people don’t want to face, you are not responsible for how they respond. You can be clear, self-led, grounded, and they can still get triggered, defensive, or shut down. And your work is to stay inside that pressure. To not collapse the moment the energy shifts. To not start justifying, explaining, negotiating your truth so it’s easier for them to handle. To not abandon yourself just because tension entered the room.

Because that’s the moment most women betray themselves. You start strong, you feel the shift, and then boom…you shrink. You dilute. You make it softer, smaller, more palatable. You adjust yourself in real time to maintain connection. And then you sit there wondering why nothing changes, why you feel unseen, why the same patterns keep repeating. It’s not because you’re too much. It’s because you’re not staying.

Your “too muchness” is devotion to truth over comfort. It’s the part of you that refuses to live in half-truths, surface-level connection, and fake peace. And yes, living like that risks connection. But you’re not risking love, you’re risking the version of love that requires you to stay quiet. And that version was already cockblocking real intimacy before you ever spoke up.

Real relationships have a rhythm, expansion and contraction, over and over again. And every time you go deeper, two parts of you rise at the same time, the part that craves intimacy, closeness, being fully seen, and the part that says “stay the fuck away,” the protective part, the one that’s scared. Most people think they have to pick one, lean into intimacy and abandon themselves to keep it, or cling to protection and call it boundaries while avoiding connection. But both are escape. Both are ways you leave before it gets real. The work is holding both at the same time, without trying to fix either one, without shaming either one, without performing like you’ve got it all together.

Because if you were perfectly secure all the time, you wouldn’t grow. You need the activation. You need the discomfort. You need the moment where both parts are loud as fuck and you don’t abandon either one. That’s what builds trust, not pretending you’re okay, not performing regulation, but staying when your body wants to run, shut down, or over-explain. So be honest with yourself, when that moment hits, which one do you choose? Do you collapse into closeness and lose yourself to keep the relationship, or do you pull away and protect yourself from being seen? Because if you can’t hold both, you don’t have the capacity yet.

And no amount of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, communication tools, or healing language is going to fix that, because you’re trying to use tools in moments you don’t even have the capacity to stay in. So no, you don’t have a communication problem. You have a capacity problem. You don’t lack awareness. You lack the ability to stay with yourself when it actually matters, when your chest tightens, when your voice starts shaking, when it feels like telling the truth might cost you the relationship. You’re already negotiating. You’re already softening. You’re already leaving. And then you wonder why nothing changes.

If you could hold it, you already would have. Which means this isn’t about learning more, it’s about building the capacity to stay when everything in you wants to run, shut down, or fix it. That’s the work. That’s The Initiation.

ENTER THE INITIATION

or keep telling yourself it’s “complicated” while you abandon yourself in real time.

Until Next Time,

Mishell

Let’s stop pretending you don’t know what the problem is. The majority of your problems are self-abandonment. And I don’t mean that in a surface-level, “take accountability” kind of way. I mean there’s a pattern running underneath everything you keep calling a problem, and it’s the version of you that keeps leaving yourself in real time. You call it burnout, you call it confusion, you call it misalignment, but you’re not burned out from doing too much. You’re burned out from performing a version of yourself just to be tolerated. Especially if you’re someone who shares online—content creators, artists, healers, coaches, writers, you think the exhaustion is coming from how much you’re doing, but it’s not. It’s coming from the constant managing, editing, softening, shaping yourself into something that won’t get rejected. And the part of you that you think you healed? It didn’t go anywhere. It just got smarter, more convincing, harder to catch, more strategic in how it performs.

You can see this pattern everywhere if you actually look. People talk about the loneliness epidemic in men, but that’s not the root. The root is suppression. Somewhere along the line, men were taught that parts of them weren’t acceptable, so they cut those parts off, and what’s left is a socially acceptable version of themselves that they now believe is who they are. Same pattern, different mask. And then you hear the advice that sounds right on the surface “just be authentic,” “just be real” but no one tells you that authenticity without intention is still performance. It’s not expression, it’s leaking power. You’re not leading anything, you’re just releasing whatever you feel and hoping it lands somewhere. So you come online, you share your drama, you open up, you tell the truth, but there’s no direction, no decision behind it, no clarity on what this is meant to do, and because of that, it goes nowhere. Your words land soft. It changes nothing.

Let me be precise about what I mean when I say intention, because people confuse this all the time with a call to action. Intention isn’t “DM me” or “join this.” Intention is why this is being said right now and what it’s meant to activate in the person reading it. When I create, I’m not thinking “let me be authentic.” I’m thinking let me corner you into seeing where you’re fucking lying to yourself. That’s direction. That’s why it hits. Not because it’s raw, but because it’s directed. Sometimes my intention is to expose self-abandonment, sometimes it’s to create a decision, sometimes it’s to destabilize your identity, sometimes it’s to make staying the only option. When you create from that place, the call to action becomes inevitable. It’s not forced, it’s not tacked on, it’s just the next step for someone who actually felt what you said.

Without that, what most people are doing is venting. Oversharing. Calling it honesty. Calling it authenticity. But really it’s your inner good girl getting strategic, performing the version of you that gets approval while still looking raw. People consume it, they relate, they nod, they say “I needed this” and nothing changes. That’s performance. And this is where it goes deeper than just content, because this is a nervous system problem. When there’s no intention behind what you’re expressing, your system stays open. So you hit post, but internally nothing is complete, so your body keeps scanning, did anyone like it? who saw it? how many comments did it get? did it go viral?did they like it ? was that okay ? am I safe? That constant checking isn’t random insecurity. It’s your system trying to close something that was never defined. And to be honest is the hesitation people feel wether they are conscious or not, they feel your desperation and need of approval.

But the moment you decide this is what this is for, you close the loop before you even share it. Now your body knows why this exists, what it’s meant to do, where it’s going, and suddenly there’s nothing to chase. And your body exhales , you feel calm. Because your expression is no longer audience-led, it’s self-led. You’re not waiting for someone to tell you it mattered, for the algorithm to kiss you on the fucking forehead, you already decided it did. And that’s the part most people don’t want to admit. When there’s no intention, you need the reaction to tell you if it was valuable, you need the validation of the world to tell you that you are powerful. When there is intention, the reaction becomes data, not emotional proof. That’s why you can finally say I can let go of it. That’s real power, because now you’re not creating to be held, you’re creating from a place where you are already internally held.

But let’s go further, because intention alone doesn’t change your life. Capacity does. And capacity isn’t built in the intention itself, it’s built in what happens after you set it. Because setting intention is easy. Staying with it is where most people break. The moment you decide this is why I’m saying this, you remove all escape routes. No more softening it after you post, no more over-explaining in the comments, no more checking for approval to recalibrate, no more tweaking yourself mid-expression. Now you have something to stay inside of, and that intention becomes a container. And this is exactly where people collapse. You set the intention, you feel the exposure, and then you start negotiating. That negotiation is the pattern. That’s where you leave yourself.

So capacity isn’t having clarity. Capacity is not moving off your truth even when your body wants to, even when it costs you approval. That’s the rep. That’s the work. That’s the difference between someone who expresses and someone who actually leads. And I’ll say this bluntly, fuck it. I’m so fucking tired of watching people lie to themselves, saying they need more credentials, more strategy, better hooks, more consistency, when the real problem is that you don’t stay with yourself long enough to tell the truth without reaching for approval, so you rather fucking bitch and complain that the problem is outside of you, rather than stay with the shitty discomfort you keep avoiding.

And this brings me to another lie people tell themselves. You’re not drained by people. You’re drained by self-abandonment. You’re drained by the version of you that’s constantly monitoring, editing, shape-shifting just to be accepted. That’s what you keep calling burnout, but it’s not burnout, it’s the fatigue of performance. And one of the biggest lies people learned to tell themselves is “I’m just shy” or “I’m just not a people person.” That’s not who you are, that’s an identity built around protection. At some point masking stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like your personality, but it’s not your personality, it’s what you learned to do when disapproval felt unsafe.

So instead of telling the truth, you manage perception, you optimize for approval, you perform something digestible, and then you wonder why nothing fucking lands, why nothing moves, why you feel exhausted. The drain isn’t coming from your life. It’s coming from the moment you leave yourself to keep the shitty performance alive.

And this is exactly the work inside The Initiation. Not more strategy, not more scripts, not more ways to be understood, but learning how to stay. Stay when your voice tightens, stay when you’re misunderstood, stay when telling the truth feels like it might cost you connection. Because if you could’ve done that alone, you would have done it by now. So if you’re done performing awareness and you’re ready to actually build the capacity to hold your truth.

enter the initiation

Or don’t. But stop pretending you don’t know where you’re leaving yourself. You do. And it’s costing you everything.

Until next time,

Mishell

Let me drag you to fucking hell,

there’s a moment, and it doesn’t arrive gently, it doesn’t knock, it doesn’t ask if you’re ready—it just fucking takes you. One second you’re there, in something that should feel like joy, like celebration, like connection, and in the next your body betrays everything you’ve been trying to hold together. Truth doesn’t come as a thought, it doesn’t come as something you can organize or explain, it comes as a surge, like fire ripping through your chest, like your stomach dropping so fast it feels like something inside you just collapsed, like your jaw tightening because there’s too much you’ve been holding back and it’s all pressing at once. and in that split second, you realize you can’t pretend through this one. you can’t soften it, you can’t smile it away, you can’t make it digestible so someone else stays comfortable. Your body is louder than your conditioning now, louder than the part of you that learned how to be chosen, and it’s screaming something you’ve been avoiding for a long time.

And right there—you see it. The exact moment. The one where you would have abandoned yourself. the one where you would’ve said “it’s fine,” where you would’ve swallowed it, where you would’ve reorganized your truth just enough to keep the connection intact, to not disappoint, to not disrupt, to not risk losing love. You see it so clearly it almost makes you sick because you’ve done it before. So many times so cleanly that no one ever knew. You became so good at it they called it patience, they called it understanding, they called it emotional maturity, they called it love but underneath all of that—there was always something you didn’t let yourself feel. Rage sitting quietly in your body. Grief waiting for you to turn toward it. A part of you that never agreed to the silence but learned how to live inside it anyway.

And this time… you don’t follow the script. This time you stop, you pull back, you ask for space, not in a polished, self-aware, “i’m regulating” kind of way, but because something inside you refuses to betray itself again. And it doesn’t look graceful it doesn’t look like the version of you people are used to. It looks messy, it looks abrupt, it looks like chaos. But it’s not chaos—it’s the first honest response your body has given in a long time, it’s rage finally doing its job. Not to ruin anything, not to push people away, but to deliver a truth that’s been building underneath every “i’m okay” “I’ll be patient” you’ve ever said when you weren’t.

The smile of the polished good girl you learned to wear to hide dispair. They called it patience, understanding, nurturing , care while pain was hidden with no trace. You weren’t always able to see it like this, you learned how to be easy to be with. You learned how to make people comfortable. You learned how to shape yourself into something that wouldn’t create friction, something that wouldn’t feel like “too much.” you learned how to speak in soft tones even when your body was screaming something else, how to stay composed, how to stay regulated, how to stay “safe.” You learned how to hide the wound so well that even you started believing it wasn’t there anymore. The self-aware version of you, the one that knows how to communicate, the one that understands emotions, the one that can hold space—that version became a performance so polished it turned into a cage. A beautiful one, one that looked like growth, one that looked like healing. But it was still a place where parts of you were not allowed to exist, where rage and grief stayed trapped unseen, untouched beneath your skin.

And once again the dark returns not slowly, not gently, but fast and undeniable. It speaks your name in a way you can’t ignore this time. Not to destroy you, but to claim the one untamed, the part of you that never agreed to disappear. And now you’re in it. descending. Not in one dramatic moment, but hour by hour, day by day, being pulled deeper into something that feels like it’s undoing you. And the truth is—you don’t fear the dark, you never did. What you fear is what it shows you about yourself. Because it doesn’t create anything new, it just reveals everything you’ve been hiding. Every time you softened your truth to stay chosen. Every time you chose connection over self-loyalty. Every time you told yourself it was easier this way. It all lives in your body, it all waits. And now it’s coming back, not all at once, but in waves that don’t let you rest.

Now it’s just agony. You feel it physically before you can even name it. Your stomach drops without warning. your chest feels tight, like there’s pressure you can’t release. your jaw aches from everything unsaid. Your body goes hot, then cold, then numb, then everything again. Your head feels heavy, like you can’t even think straight, like there’s no escape from it, not even in sleep. You don’t want to get out of bed, you don’t want to eat, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to explain. And underneath all of it—there’s this quiet, brutal knowing. “I gave so much. I wasn’t met the same way. i’m alone in this. this hurts more than i expected.” And there’s nothing you can do to make it not true. There’s no reframing it. There’s no spiritual bypass that makes this clean. This is what it feels like when the illusion breaks and you actually let yourself feel the impact of it.

And still—the pull is there, to go back, to fix it, to explain yourself better, to chase, to make it make sense so you don’t have to sit in this level of pain. The part of you that learned how to survive through self-abandonment is loud here, it’s convincing, it tells you this is too much, that you don’t have to feel all of it, that you can just go back to what worked before. But you don’t. You don’t follow her this time. And that’s what makes this so unbearable. Because now there’s nowhere to go. No escape. No performance to hide inside. Just your body, your truth, and everything you’ve been holding finally moving through you.

And this is where something unexpected meets you, not softness, not calm, not the kind of regulation you were taught to perform but something heavier, louder, more honest. METAL. It meets your rage exactly where it is. It doesn’t ask you to tone it down, it doesn’t ask you to make it make sense, it doesn’t ask you to be palatable, it lets you feel it fully. It cracks you open, pushes you further into the intensity instead of pulling you out of it. It gives your body somewhere to put everything it’s been holding without shutting it down. There’s no shame there. No “this is too much.” No “you need to calm down.” Just permission. permission to feel rage, permission to collapse, permission to not make it pretty. And in that, something starts to move. Not in a clean, linear way, but in a real way. Your body finally releasing what it hasn’t been allowed to.

This isn’t one moment. This is days of it. Waves that come and go, but never fully leave. Choosing again and again not to abandon yourself when it would be easier to. Letting something die inside you—the version of you that kept everything intact by disappearing. Grieving what wasn’t met, what wasn’t held, what you hoped would be different. and instead of numbing it, instead of pretending you’re okay, instead of going back to who you were—you stay. You let it shape you, not into something softer, not into something easier to be with, but into someone who doesn’t leave herself anymore.

This is the descent, and the truth is—it’s not the dark that changes you. It’s the decision to stay in it without betraying yourself again.

If you felt this, not understood it, not agreed with it but felt your body react before your mind could clean it up… That tightness, that drop, that exact moment you knew.

That’s the moment, not later, not when it’s convenient, not when you’ve thought it through. Right there.

The one you override, the one you soften, the one you abandon in real time
while telling yourself you’re “handling it.” That moment is costing you everything.

The Edge doesn’t fix you, it corners you there, in your body, in that exact second before you perform your way out of it so you either stay or watch yourself leave again.

Stay this time. Enter the Edge

Metal breaks me open. I come back louder,

Xo Mishell

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve written anything here consistently that actually felt like mine . Not because I didn’t have things to say but because I’ve been stretched in ways that don’t translate cleanly into language. The kind of stretching that lives in your chest, in your throat, in the quiet moments where you feel something rising but you don’t touch it yet. And instead of forcing myself to produce like a machine, I made a decision that felt small but wasn’t, I shut down the noise. I stopped reaching for other people’s words to help me find mine. I anchored into what is actually alive in me, not what sounds good, not what performs well, not what I know will land, but what is here. Right now. Unpolished. Uncertain. Messy. Mine.

And what surfaced almost immediately was uncomfortable as hell. My relationship with my own expression. The subtle, sneaky ways I still don’t fully trust it. The part of me that, for most of my life, learned how to mask, how to shape-shift, how to read a room and become exactly what would be accepted in it. Being neurodivergent taught me how to survive through adaptation. And now here I am, leading a brand that stands on not abandoning yourself and still catching the micro-moments where I do exactly that. Not in obvious ways. Not in the loud, self-betraying ways I used to. But in the refined, intelligent, almost invisible ways. The elevated good girl. The one who sounds like me, but isn’t fully me.

She shows up when I hesitate before posting something raw. When I feel my truth in my body, but reach for someone else’s articulation to say it “better.” When I start tweaking my words just enough to be understood, just enough to be received, just enough to not be misinterpreted. She shows up when I feel the urge to be consistent instead of honest. When I feel the pull to create something because I should, instead of because I can’t not. And the hardest part to admit she shows up when I would borrow power. When I would read something that hits, and instead of letting it move through me, distort me, break me, expand me, I rush to translate it. I take it before it becomes mine. And I share it like it is.

And I’ve done this more times than I want to admit. Word for word sometimes. Because there was a part of me that just wanted to desperately be seen. That didn’t trust that what I naturally see, what I naturally feel, what I naturally know, is enough. And there’s grief in that, grief in the typing of these words as tears fall down my face, my chest warms up and pressure rises, and this unbearable ache in my throat. You know the type of ache that sits low in your body when you realize how long you’ve been disconnected from your own creation. How since you were a little girl, there was this quiet belief running underneath everything it’s not good enough… it’s not really yours… someone else can say it better. And you don’t even question it, you just build your entire way of expressing around it.

But something is shifts when you stay long inside your truth, your confession. And I can feel it in the smallest, most ordinary moments. The urge to go on social media, to consume, to check what other people are saying and instead, I stop. Not perfectly. Not every time. But enough. Enough to notice the impulse in my body before I act on it. Enough to create space between feeling something and immediately reaching for external validation or language. And in that space… something starts to happen. My voice gets louder. Not louder in volume, but clearer. More distinct. More mine.

Because here’s the truth I’m sitting with right now, there’s nothing wrong with inspiration. But when you’re brutally honest with yourself, you know the exact moment where something stops being inspiration and starts being extraction. You feel it. It’s the moment something resonates and instead of letting it land, you rush to express it. You skip the digestion. You skip the embodiment. You skip the part where it actually changes you. And so what comes out isn’t false but it isn’t fully yours either. It hasn’t been metabolized. It hasn’t been lived through your body long enough to carry your language, your texture, your distortion.

And the real edge isn’t just “stop copying.” That’s surface level. The real edge is slowing down enough to let something become yours before you speak. Letting it sit in your body. Letting it move through your grief, your shame, your resistance, your memories, your own way of seeing the world until when it comes out, it could only have come from you. That takes time. That takes restraint. That takes trust. And that is exactly what terrifies the part of you that just wants to be seen now. FEELING THE SHIT YOU BEEN AVOIDING.

Because originality isn’t clean. It’s not optimized. It’s not always understood. And I think for me that’s the deepest fear. Not being disliked. Being misunderstood. Saying something that feels so true in my body, and having it land wrong. Or not land at all. And realizing I can’t control that. That my job isn’t to make sure I’m received correctly it’s to make sure I didn’t abandon myself in the process of expressing.

And this is where it gets real. Because no matter how much work you’ve done, how self-aware you are, how devoted you are to your healing, if you’re honest, you will find the good girl again. Not the obvious one. The evolved one. The intelligent one. The one that knows your language, your brand, your standards and still finds a way to soften you at the exact moment your full expression is required. She doesn’t go away. She refines herself. She meets you at every level of expansion. And if you’re not paying attention, she will write your content for you.

So this, right here is me paying attention. This is me choosing to sit in the shitty discomfort of not knowing if this is “good.” Not knowing how this will land. Not cleaning it up into something more digestible, not reaching for someone else’s voice to validate mine. Just letting it be messy. Letting it be incomplete. Letting it be alive as is.

Because I’m starting to understand something that I don’t think you can learn any other way, the reason my strongest work hits isn’t because it’s perfect it’s because I couldn’t run from what I was feeling when I created it. There was no escape. No performance. No distance. Just me, in it. And that’s what makes it real. That’s what makes it land. Not the structure. Not the strategy. The honesty that came from staying with the emotion long enough for it to shape the words.

And maybe that’s the work. Not becoming more original,but staying long enough with what’s true in you… until it speaks in a way that no one else could.

Xo

Mishell

I don’t think I’ve ever said this in a way that actually lands, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the song Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie. Not in a casual way. My body literally responds to it. Like something in me wakes up that I don’t access in normal life, in conversation, in being the version of me that knows how to be understood. And I used to think it was just aesthetic horror, goth, dark feminine, whatever, but it’s not that. It’s recognition. Because that song doesn’t feel good in a clean, healed, integrated way. It feels like something unapologetic is crawling out of you. Something that doesn’t give a fuck if it’s too much. Something that isn’t asking to be chosen. Something that already knows it won’t be and because of that, it’s free. That’s the part most of you are terrified of. Not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t negotiate.

And this is where it hit me. Most women are still being run by their inner good girl—but not the obvious one. Not the people-pleasing, overly nice version you already know you’ve outgrown. I’m talking about the evolved one. The one that learned how to be self-aware, articulate, emotionally intelligent… and still quietly edits herself in every moment that actually matters. She’s refined now. She doesn’t silence you completely. She just softens the edge. Filters out the truth. Adds context so it lands better. Says it in a way that keeps connection intact. And you call that growth. But it’s not, it’s just a more intelligent form of self-abandonment.

Because watch what happens when it actually costs you something. When you’re about to say the thing that would change the entire dynamic. When you’re about to be seen in a way you can’t control. When you’re about to hold more money, more attention, more intimacy than your current identity can handle. Your body tightens. Your throat closes. Something in you goes, “wait… maybe not like that.” And you listen every fucking time. That’s the moment, not later, not after—right there. That micro-flinch is where you abandon yourself. And then you go back and call it timing, or alignment, or “I just need to process more.” No biitch you just didn’t have the capacity to stay.

That’s the real ceiling. Not your strategy. Not your content. Not your intelligence. Your capacity to hold intensity without editing yourself in real time. And this is why that “living dead girl” energy matters not because you’re supposed to become her, but because she shows you a part of you that already exists. The part that doesn’t need to be understood to exist. The part that doesn’t soften to be loved. The part that’s not organizing her life around being liked. And yeah, it’s raw. It’s not healed. It’s not pretty. It’s not the version you’d introduce at a networking event. But pretending it’s not there is exactly why you keep shrinking when it matters.

I felt the same thing watching The Joker. People think he’s powerful because he’s chaotic. He’s not. He’s powerful because he stopped asking, “am I acceptable?” That’s it. That’s the whole shift. And that’s why it feels dangerous. Not the violence, the absence of needing permission.

And if you’re honest, this is why the “villain” in business makes more money than you. Not because she’s better, but because she’s not negotiating with the same fears. She’s not sitting there wondering how this will be perceived. She’s not softening her message so people stay comfortable. She’s not rewriting the truth ten different ways before she posts it. She says it and she moves.

Meanwhile, you’re over here feeling everything, knowing everything, being deeply self-aware—and still editing yourself before anyone else gets the chance to reject you. You cancel yourself first. And then you wonder why nothing is converting. Because the version of you that gets paid? She already crossed that line. She already said the thing. She already decided she’s okay being misunderstood. She already stopped making every move about how she’ll be received.

And here’s the part most of you don’t want to hear. You already see the moment you abandon yourself. You’re not blind. You feel it in your body every time the hesitation, the tightening, the urge to pull back, reword, soften, delay. You catch it. And then you still choose safety. That’s the moment you can’t do alone. Because in real time, you won’t move fast enough. You’ll justify it. You’ll turn it into awareness again. You’ll convince yourself you’re “processing.”

That’s why I created The Initiation. It’s not here to teach you something new. It’s here to trap you in that exact moment, the one where you start to disappear and not let you fucking look away. So you can finally feel what it actually takes to stay. Not conceptually. Not intellectually. In your body, where it matters.

You already know where you abandon yourself. The question is, are you going to keep watching it happen, or are you finally ready to stay?

enter the initiation

Xo Mishell