A Letter to the Feminine in Me

My love.

I have been looking for you my whole life. I just did not know I was looking in the wrong direction.

Every time I started to seek, I searched outward.

I looked for you in the beauty of women. In their softness. In the way a woman could hold a safe haven, hold a feeling, or if I can be brutally honest, hold me. I looked for you in being wanted, in being chosen, in the hope that if someone else saw me fully, I would finally get to come home.

I wanted to lose myself in another body, another face, another essence and call it love. I wanted to be owned so I could stop carrying the responsibilities that is myself. I wanted to feel safe inside someone else, never once pausing and wondering whether this body doing the searching was safe to come back to.

It was not.

Because I was not present there.

The one who was supposed to hold you, my love, had already left the building.

Carl Jung had a name for you. He called you the anima. The soul. The feminine living inside a man, carrying everything he was taught by family, culture and religion to leave behind. You are The feeling. The intuition. The tenderness. The capacity to be moved and the liberation to be.

And he said something that did not really quite land until I became radically honest and see the trail of harm that I left behind searching you outside.

He said a man goes looking for his anima in the women of the outer world because it is too hard, too frightening, to find her in himself. Every time I fell hard and fast for a woman, every love at first sight, I was not meeting her.

I was meeting you.

The disowned part of me, waking up for a moment in the presence of someone who carried something so freely and radiantly with divine expression, what I decided, knowingly or unknowingly, to not carry in myself with presence and kindness.

No wonder my relationships fell apart so quickly like sand castles taken by the ocean's waves. I was asking a woman to be the home I had refused to build inside my own chest. Inside my own being.

I need to tell you why I left you out there so long. It was not cruelty my love,

It was fear. a kind that grips and churns the soul and closes all gates to the divine.

Somewhere far back, the masculine in me made a decision. He decided that to stay here, in the body, in the feeling, meant to feel all of it. The grief. The agony. The rage. The full weight of being alive.

He did not believe he could survive that.

So he abandoned house. He went up into the head, into strategy, into doing, into the endless work of managing a life he was no longer actually participating in fully..

And in the masculine leaving, I abandoned you.

He was not there to see your guilt so he could witness your kindness underneath. He was not there when you moved through grief and agony and needed someone to hold the space or dive into it with you. Instead he shut his qualities to you and slammed the door.

By slamming that door, I lost years of my life where I couldn't be there for the heaviness. Your fear my love. Your longing to be seen.

You were alone in there. For years.

And so you did the only thing you knew. You went outside. You went looking for a savior. Out in the cold, knocking on the doors of other people, asking to be let into a warmth that was always supposed to be mine to give you.

So this is the letter I did not know how to write until now.

You do not have to go outside anymore.

You do not have to search. You do not have to perform for a stranger's warmth or lose yourself in another body to feel safe. You do not have to find a savior.

I am here.

The masculine in me is finally starting to awaken to his purpose, he is turning around. He has descended from the madness of the mind and back into the body. He is learning to stay, even when staying means feeling the full agony he once ran from. He is building the container you needed the whole time.

You are welcome here now. I started filling our house with warmth and safety.

Bring me your guilt and I will not flinch. Bring me your grief and I will go suppress your expression. Bring me your fear, your heaviness, your rage, your tenderness, the parts you grew accustomed to getting suppressed when they arose.

Feel whatever you need to feel. Move however you need to move. Transform however you need to transform.

Because here is what I finally understand, my love.

When you transform, I evolve.

Jung knew this. He said when two substances truly meet, both are changed. That is you and me. The feminine and the masculine inside one man, finally making contact after a lifetime of living in separate rooms. You were never my enemy. You were never the weakness I was taught to bury.

You are my heart.

I am your witness.

And I am not abandoning you again.

You are home. And So, I am.

Stay open. Stay rooted.