When a Spiritual Identity Stops Fitting

A Silveness Introspection

For a long time, I mistook spiritual identities for something permanent. I think a lot of us do. We find a path, an archetype, a practice, a way of understanding ourselves, and because it feels real we assume it must therefore be forever. But real does not mean permanent. I learnt that the long way round.

There was a period in my life when I was angry. Not mildly irritated. Not spiritually inconvenienced. Angry. I was frustrated, raw, emotional, intense. Everything felt turned up too high. I wanted to understand why, because I have always had that urge to understand things. If something hurts, I want to know what it is, where it came from and what it is trying to tell me.

At the time I had gone deeply into what I now think of as the love-and-light years. Crystals. Fairies. Angels. Louise Hay. Positive thinking. The Secret. The idea that thoughts create reality and that if you just thought properly, aligned properly and stayed positive enough, life would eventually sort itself out.

And for a while I believed it. Then life failed to cooperate. Things did not magically improve because I thought better thoughts. In some ways they became worse. And eventually I became angry not only at life, but at the framework I had been given for understanding it. I could not reconcile what I had been promised with what I was actually living.

At the same time, I had built a spiritual identity around being psychic. I read Tarot. I read people. I was good at it too. I could often see things in other people they had not yet seen in themselves. And yet I had this increasingly bitter sense that nobody could see me.

There is ego in that sentence. Plenty of it. I can see that now. There was ego in being the person who knew, the person who saw, the person who could read what sat underneath the surface. But there was also pain. The spiritual identity I had built no longer had enough room for it.

The light did not work for me anymore, so I went looking in the dark. Not entirely in rebellion, although rebellion probably had a chair at the table. It was more that if the light was full of illusions, perhaps the dark would be more honest.

That was when I began exploring the Left-Hand Path. Luciferianism. Psychic vampirism. Sorcery. The darker occult traditions. And strangely enough, I found comfort there. I felt held by my own darkness in a way I had not felt held by all the enforced positivity.

There were things in that world that felt sexy, dangerous, powerful and honest. My psychic abilities did not disappear there; if anything, I learnt to use them differently. I was not especially frightened by the supposedly Satanic edges of it because I had never really believed in Satan in the first place. I had never particularly believed in the Christian God either. Gods, to me, had always been something closer to: yes, all right. I’ll let you know if one turns up.

So there was no fear of hell waiting to pull me back into line, and perhaps that meant I had fewer brakes than some people. I began looking at manipulation, power, magical influence and intention. I also began looking more critically at the people who claimed they were doing exactly the same things “in love and light.”

That phrase can hide an astonishing amount of control. People manipulate in the name of love. They hurt people in the name of healing. They impose their will in the name of Jesus, angels, compassion, karma, enlightenment or whatever respectable language makes it sound acceptable. Once I saw that hypocrisy, I could not unsee it. The dark path at least had the decency to admit that power existed.

But even then, I discovered something uncomfortable about myself. There was still a line in me. I could manipulate. I could fight. I could defend myself. When people came for me, I found I could hurt them back remarkably well when the gloves came off. But there remained something in me that did not want to cause unnecessary harm.

That is not sainthood. In some ways it has been a disadvantage. I have watched people push themselves forward over others and succeed because they had fewer ethical reservations about doing so. But I have always had this strange internal line. People are already perfectly capable of hurting themselves. I do not need to help them with it.

So even within a spiritual identity built around darkness, power and sorcery, there was still something older underneath it. Something that belonged to me rather than to the role. And that is the bit I find interesting now.

Because the role was real. I was not pretending to be a dark practitioner. I inhabited it. I invoked those parts of myself until there was very little distinction between the archetype and the person. Vampire, sorceress, priestess, psychic, High Priestess — these were not costumes I casually put on for the evening. They were real expressions of me.

But they were still expressions. Not the whole thing. And eventually, they stopped being enough.

That does not make them false. It simply means they had done their work.

I have been through other identities too. Maiden. Mother. Crone. Psychic. Tarot reader. Priestess. Sorceress. Vampire. Shadow worker. Shamanka. There were even places where ritual felt more consciously theatrical. Druidry, for example, inevitably contains reconstruction and imagination because we simply do not possess a complete unbroken record of ancient druid practice.

Sometimes ritual is a mask. Sometimes it is a doorway. Sometimes it is both. You put on the robe. You perform the act. You step into a sacred role. For a while, something shifts. That does not necessarily make it fake. But neither does it make it permanent.

That distinction has become very important to me, because now I find myself looking at all those spiritual identities and thinking: what next?

The stroke changed things. My brain is still recovering. My body is different. My energy is different. My relationship with time is different. Even my tolerance for certain kinds of spiritual theatre is different. And I do not have light or dark to fall back on in quite the same way anymore.

I still have nature.

Nature has been an extraordinary blanket around me this year. Trees, water, birds, weather, the canal, the small ordinary movement of things — they have carried me through some very hard stretches without asking me to believe anything.

Nature does not require faith. It simply happens. Water runs downhill. Seeds split. Animals eat. Things die. Things grow. There is something brutally comforting in that.

I still understand the Black Flame in those terms too: consciousness pushing against automatic nature, the part of us that says, I know the current is running this way, but I am going to choose. Will. Awareness. Decision. Those things still matter to me.

But I am no longer interested in trying to squeeze myself into another spiritual uniform simply because I am between identities. Perhaps that is what this phase is asking of me. Not to choose a new costume too quickly.

I have mirrors on the boat, but not many. Some I cover. Partly because ageing has made mirrors less entertaining than they once were, but that is not really the important bit. The face looking back at me simply does not feel like enough information.

It reflects one version of me. One surface. One moment. And there are too many selves standing behind it.

The woman in the mirror is the maiden, the mother and the crone. The psychic and the sceptic. The vampire and the healer. The priestess and the woman who does not particularly believe in gods. The sorceress and the person watching a kingfisher shoot across the canal.

They are all there. None of them is the final answer.

Perhaps that is why the Grey Path still appeals to me. Not because grey is safe or moderate. It is not halfway between good and evil. For me, grey is the refusal of simplistic spiritual categories.

I cannot go back to love-and-light illusion. I cannot live permanently inside shadow either. I have done enough of both to recognise their limitations. And I have very little patience left for spiritual performance, materialism dressed up as manifestation, or the idea that reality is obliged to flatter our belief systems.

So perhaps the Grey Path is simply where I walk while I wait to see what remains when the old identities fall away.

I do not know what comes next. And surprisingly, I rather like that. My brain is still rebuilding. My life is still changing. I am still changing.

Maybe the next spiritual identity will arrive. Maybe it will not. Maybe the deeper work now is learning that I do not need one.

Because perhaps the most interesting question is no longer:

What am I?

Perhaps it is:

What is still true when I stop needing to call myself anything at all?