Wear Yourself

The Threshold of 40

Last year, when I turned 39, it didn’t feel like a real birthday. Instead I felt that I had been energetically summoned to some existential arena, where I would begin my Jedi training for the threshold that was Turning 40™.

After all, I had just signed up for my first rites of passage. I knew moving towards that ritual epicenter that there would be a before and an after.

I sensed I was being prepared, but for what, exactly, would remain a mystery for many months. There is a much longer story here, one that I have been trying to write all year while failing magnificently to give it language. If there is one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s that I can’t see the full story while still inside of it. I have only just exited that stretch, having officially crossed the threshold of 40 on March 10th, 2026.

But the short truth of that long walk is that after many years of assuming I didn’t have one, that perhaps I had reached a nice plateau in my healing journey and got to float for a bit, I fell face first off my mountain and into the void that was my motherwound.

My friends, the motherwound bites back.

Back in February of 2025, hardly a month in, a dear sister offered me a birthday astrology reading. In that session she casually referred to the next 11 months as a LIGHTNING-TOWER-DEATH CARD passage.

To my chagrin, she wasn’t wrong.

Against my will – and I fought wildly – I was stripped down once again to the studs by supernatural forces. Major faultlines of my inner foundations were laid bare, only for me to realize that my motherwound had somehow bled out everywhere. Unbeknownst to me, I had been orbiting a black hole at the center of my own galaxy, one that I could not see inside until I surrendered fully.

But now that I was swallowed up, seismic shockwaves started rippling through the field of my whole life on a regular basis, agitating my terrain and uprooting anything built on shaky legs. Outbursts of revelation were common, only to be followed by what I would call high-intensity disturbances. Core relationships sustained multiple exorcisms. One of my best friends got to meet my monster. My mentor and I went through a massive rupture and haven’t spoken since.

Insane rains came and went.

I wish I could say that I faced it all like some kind of sexy Xena warrior priestess and indeed, there have been times in my life when I have been mowed down with some semblance of dignity. But the truth is that last year brought me to my fucking knees. It was beyond humbling.

Of the many strange and deranged things that happened, one of the darkest traumas of my early life was dredged up from where I had buried it 25 years ago. The memory followed me around like a haunted puppy; a parallel storyline I couldn’t shake that illuminated unsettling similarities between my past and current situation. I was forced to look at the ways in which my own deflected suffering had become suffocating.

In fact, my own words fled me. I couldn’t write a thing.

Maybe the reason I found it hard to summon the muse was that I didn’t have many pretty adjectives to decorate what happened – which, in many respects, felt like a form of ongoing public humiliation. I had so many cosmic spankings that after awhile I just ‘pulled up my pants’ and kept walking. My face-down-ass-up-for-god-era, I joked to friends, only I wasn’t laughing. The cherry on top of my gallows year was my hair being taken from me in a butcher’s chair without my consent. My scalping. It’s better to lay this all bare on the offering block. The truth is: I felt grotesque and ugly and deeply exposed, like a disfigured mannequin in a brightly lit store window.

One of my elders finally gave me a present: the right words to describe what was happening.

I got blackened.

This is what happens when you sit in the fire of your own awakening.

You burn.

I burned out loud for months.
I burned hard and hot and messy.
I burned like a molotov cocktail.

I was summoned into a public arena I couldn’t leave in order to have my own medicine work upon me. I didn’t get an exit because underneath all the things I thought were trying to destroy my life was an invisible, ruthless prayer.

MAKE ME READY FOR MY DESTINY.

I burned until my vision cleared.

And what I saw in the charred ashes of my annihilation astonished me. I have never had a death wish, never entertained the idea of suicide even in my darkest night, but I began to see that a part of me had been skating on the surface of my life. I was suspended in a liminal state of walking dissociation, preferring my psychic bardo over the 3D reality that had shattered me one too many times.

As I summoned the courage to peer into my most primal terror, a deeper thread surfaced.

I had been suppressing one of my ancestral gifts. I thought my words had left me, but perhaps I wasn’t taking them seriously. I started to see that much of the violence I had endured involved my own complicit muting.

And behind that – the suppressed screams and keening of the women in my line. The ones who had also been silenced.

I started to connect the dots of their stories and where it mirrored my own.
The madwomen. The regal women. The women with the thunder mouths.
My Nana who choked to death when there was a doctor in the house.
The Métis women known in the white man’s records only as Savage.

I burned until I could turn and face our collective pain.

What else can you do when faced with the horror of what should have never been done? I honestly don’t know.

Which is why I beat my drum.

I beat my drum for the women who were immolated by their visions.
I beat my drum for the women who were abandoned by their loser husbands.
I beat my drum for the women who had borne the agony of infidelity.
I beat my drum for the women who were stripped of their dignity.
I beat my drum for the women who were not protected.
I beat my drum for the women who were abused and neglected.

But most of all I beat my drum for all the tiny, terrible deaths I had sustained while living.

For the first time, I intentionally brought my burning into the circle of ceremony to be witnessed. I used this space to speak into the thread of memory that yoked me to the agony and ecstasy of my female ancestors; to give the poison within a mouth. A way out.

Finally, I allowed myself to be seen in the ugly thing that had happened when I was fourteen.

And as this ancient, vast rage roared through my body it unlocked the energetic safeguard that had quieted me. From my dark wellspring erupted a primordial oracle beyond anything I’ve ever known.

The Voice called me home.

•

I understand now why midlife crises are a thing.

There is an energetic checkpoint that comes for us all; an opportunity to review the first half of one’s life and make an informed choice: Is this coming with me?

But maybe more importantly: Am I fully with me?

Having finally entered my 40th year, I can see how this passage showed me all the places where younger parts of me were lost or buried. Where I was seething with bitter resentment at the fact that I hadn’t been protected. Where I was not centering or honoring the gifts I had inherited. Where I was still operating under outdated beliefs and illusions. Where I had given my power to someone who was abusing it.

I had no idea that I was still so fragmented.

And yet, a bigger part of me did. My higher self orchestrated a soul retrieval at a scale so immense and magnificent that it took a whole year to dismember my defenses and take effect. I bow to the venom in my heart that forced me to find the antidote. I bow to my grandmothers, who taught me how to actually walk with what I’ve received and why it was for me.

Great storms have moved through my life because I AM A LIGHTNING WOMAN and I summon my power from all dimensions.

But mostly, I bow to the spirit of great grandfather fire, who came for me and clarified me. The burning called me home to my body so I could fully inhabit my own sacred dream.

This threshold required all of me.

A friend once said that sometimes you get to cash all your birthday coupons in, and given the intensity of the walk home to myself I suspected that I would need my whole community to meet me at the finish line.

The process of initiation is both brutal and life-giving. But in order for that recalibration process to be fully integrated into the nervous system and hardwired in, the initiate needs to be welcomed home with the recognition that they walk with essential medicine: the gift of having transformed the poison within.

There’s a reason we honor veterans returning from the war – they have sacrificed a part of themselves, seen or unseen, for the continued goodness of the whole. There is always a cost – something must be thrown on the offering block.

After going through the gristmill of my battleground, it felt wholly appropriate to gift myself an outrageous birthday ceremony. I invited my people to join me at a good friend’s farm where we gathered around an enormous bonfire. I asked them to share reflections of my humanness, my goodness, my divinity, and my medicine. As someone who has done many difficult sojourns out into the cosmic wilderness, this act of sacred witness sealed the cracks in my weathered spirit with shining golden love.

For an entire year, I was actively torn apart. Like Osiris, my parts were scattered to the winds. I had to be reassembled and resurrected in order to enter the next chapter of my life. In a symbolic gesture that felt ordained by my spirits, the gifts I received from my chosen family were an anointing: a way of bringing into view the formidable woman I am and the one I have become.

One gift in particular blew my mind: a white linen robe traditionally worn by babalawos, high priests and Ifá oracles in the Yoruba religion. Thrifted by a dear sister, the Nigerian brand, Moshood, has a tagline that eloquently summarizes my heroine’s tale:

Wear yourself.

And so I will.