Stop Waiting for the 'Sign'

Unpopular opinion: Spiritual awakenings don't look good on Instagram.

Nobody can truly initiate you but life itself. And if you're already walking through the fire, you've already begun.

There's a moment when you realize that life doesn't need to hand you a license to begin. No one has to grant you permission. You don't need anyone's validation to move forward, heal or start fresh. It's a quiet kind of 'fuck off' against the need to prove yourself to others, to wait for the world to give you the go-ahead.

But guess what: life isn't waiting for you to get it right. It's asking, Are you willing to show up anyway?

I remember thinking I had to wait for a big, official sign, some kind of ceremony or ritual to tell me I was ready to heal from a beautifully-bow-tied fucked-up childhood. I thought the healing would come in a tidy package, with instructions and a clear end date. I thought I had to earn my right to belong in life — to myself, to the world. But it turns out the real initiation was happening all along.

It was in every day of choosing to live life, in every struggle, and in those moments when it would've been easier to just walk away.

For a long time, I worked hard to deserve peace, to earn a sense of 'family.' But I've learned that lesson the hard way more times than I care to admit: life doesn't give a fuck. It gives you what you want when you're ready to listen. Even if that means you get it wrapped in uncertainty, with a few "holy shit, this is better than I imagined" and a whole lot of "fuck, this was WAY harder than I expected."

Self-initiation isn't glamorous. It's not like the movies or the Instagram feeds. It's totally showing up even when you don't know what's next… even when it's uncomfortable. It demands radical honesty with yourself. There's no certificate, no checklist to mark off. It's the quiet, daily decision to keep choosing life even when the path is hidden.

Because real initiation doesn't come from anyone else, it's given by life itself.

By your own lived experience. By those moments when you show up, even when every part of you is screaming to throw in the towel. It's the times you get back up AGAIN when the fear's telling you to stay in the passenger seat and just go along for the ride. But you keep pushing forward, knowing deep down that you've got everything inside you to make it through EVEN if it looks a hot mess.

Mine happened in the woods. Not off-grid, but close enough that the porch light didn't mean much once the fog rolled in. Close enough to feel the forest breathe on me and feel the pulse of the trees. Living here, I learned something that saved my life: You don't have to have it all together to find your place in this world.

To give myself some credit, I was raised on church songs and secondhand stories. Thursdays were for choir practice. Saturdays, for youth choir. Sundays, from sunup to sundown. We'd sit through Sunday school, then the main service, sometimes staying for another one after that. Maybe a potluck. Maybe a parking lot fight. I wore my Sunday shoes thin on that church carpet.

I thought spiritual belonging was something you had to assemble and complete. If I sang the songs loud enough, shook the right hands, and sat up straight in the pew, maybe then I'd feel it. Maybe then I wouldn't hate my life, and I could finally be saved from myself.

But it never really stuck. For a long time, I didn't realize it wasn't about accumulating belongingness at all as much as it was about remembering it was within me all along.

Out here, the fog doesn't just cover the gravel drive and empty streets. It softens the sharp edges of old doubts and outdated stories, too.

We (well… me) chase belongingness like it's somewhere far away when the truth is, it's been stitched into our humanity all along: older, deeper than anything we were ever told to be.

This post is for you if you've ever felt the pull to the land EVEN IF you didn't grow up surrounded by it. If you've ever loved the earth as if it's a home, you remember in your soul, even though you can't quite explain why. If you've ever wondered if you're allowed to be part of something ancient, something more something older than your bank account balance, the internet, or your family history. Maybe you've spent years trying to patch yourself up, thinking you needed to be more healed before you could truly feel yourself.

Sis: You were never broken. The doorway to healing you're looking for isn't out there, outside of yourself. It's inside you.

You don't need permission to step through it. You just have to trust yourself enough to walk. You have to remember.

If you've ever lived near the Puget Sound, you know the place I'm talking about.

Not quite rural, not quite suburban — somewhere in-between. Suburb-ish. Backwood-adjacent. You could skateboard past a herd of deer grazing on the playground and still make it to Taco Bell before dark. Chicken coops, gravel roads, rusted trampolines in yards, a lived-in RV parked half-abandoned by the bend of a winding road… Probably still pays rent in ghosts. And now, where I live, with dead trees and mountain spirits, that don't care what you call them. But they remember YOU.

I used to think you had to be born into it. Into magic. Into knowing. That you needed an elder to hand you a candle, teach you how to talk to the wind, or how to read the leaves, the bones, the moon.

Reality check: life initiated me long before I ever realized what was happening.

I remember it clear… the first real storm of my adult life living at the foot of the mountains. The kind of storm that pulls the power out of your hands and says: "Sit down. You're not in charge here."

literally.

We were stocked: generator ready, canned food lined up, the kids already in pajamas in the living room. But I still wasn't ready. There was something else I wasn't prepared for — that deep inner shift where life asks, "Will you surrender?"

The storm was brewing before I even knew how to prepare for it.

I saw it coming but back then, storms still meant one thing to me: fear. That was the pattern. Storm = panic. Storm = something bad is about to happen.

I was six the first time I really felt thunder, not just heard it. I remember the rattle in my chest. I remember grandpa visiting, more for us kids than for my mom, that strange comfort of being protected without understanding what was happening.

What I didn't realize until 6-month ago me was: I had already embodied the storm pattern. Every storm, every gray sky, every flicker of wind that shook the windows, I didn't just expect it to get bad. I braced for it. I became it. I thought strength meant surviving the storm. But in that cyclone of a storm, I learned that true strength is not in fighting against it. It's in standing with it, even when the wind is howling.

The mountain wasn't asking me to fight the storm. It was teaching me how to witness it.

And so, I lived a long time believing storms were something to survive, never realizing they were something to listen to.

That night, I realized something I hadn't been willing to name: I had spent years thinking survival was about fighting the storm. And being "strong enough" to push through. But the mountain — the Granny Healer spirit in her fog and feral tenderness showed me something different:

That night, the one where the power went out for six days. That was the first time I truly witnessed the storm instead of becoming it. I prepped the house. Did dinner, baths, laundry. Dragged the air mattress to the living room. One baby on each hip and parent, candles glowing low, nature radio humming through the dark.

For years, every time chaos hit: a job loss, a heartbreak, a flat tire on a backroad. I would tense up, dig in my heels, and brace like I could outrun it. But I couldn't outrun what was meant to teach me.

Somewhere along the way, I started believing that every difficult moment was my fault. If things went wrong, it was karma coming to collect. I assumed if I just worked harder, prayed religiously, or overprepared, I could avoid the storms like I could earn a safe, calm life.

Girl: storms don't come to punish you. They come because it's time for change.

Time for something to break, to breathe, to shift. You don't need to fight for control, just be present with it, trust yourself and the process're equipped to handle it. EVEN when you don't have all the answers. You already have everything inside you to meet life, just as you are.

​​You don't need a mystical lineage, a bloodline of witches, or a stack of certifications to understand this truth. The wisdom is already there within you.

The storm doesn't ask for credentials. It asks: Are you here? Are you present?

When life starts to initiate you, there's no clear path. No neat and tidy exact answers, you're already on the journey. The dark might take everything, and the storm might rip through what's left, but there's a steady place inside you that somehow knows this is not the end. It's messy, it's loud, the food's weird, and you're more tired than you knew a body could be. But that's the initiation of life.

Initiation is brutal. Transformation is the reward. It’s who you become after. It drags you into yourself. It burns away who you’re not.

You don't have to have it all figured out; you just have to keep trusting that the storm is shaping you, not breaking you. This is how you begin to feel, truly feel, alive in life, no matter how rough the winds may blow.

It wasn't supposed to be easy or painless; it was meant to open you to the uncharted magic of your own life. You earn the light by living through the dark—no shortcuts. Survive it, and you’ll never be the same.