The Fall: From Mr. Big to the Goddess

When the personal becomes political becomes spiritual

November 9th, 2016.

I woke up to the news that Donald Trump had won the presidency.

I was in my first year of a Women's Spirituality Master's program, dutifully writing academic papers about gender theory while the world burned around me.

But that morning, something shifted.

How could I sit in a classroom analyzing patriarchy in the abstract when misogyny had just won the highest office in the land?

I dropped out.

I couldn't write another paper when there was real work to be done. I went back to my domestic violence education work with renewed urgency. Women needed practical tools, not theoretical frameworks. I needed to get better at reaching them.

So when a feminist marketing expert who'd been praising my Facebook posts about domestic violence invited me into her mastermind, I said yes immediately.

I was ecstatic.

Here was someone who understood how to use marketing to serve women's liberation, who'd written brilliant critiques of the performative wellness culture that was making me sick. I'd been struggling to get my work out there, convinced that what was holding me back were the shady marketing tactics I'd been learning. Kelly offered something different - marketing with integrity.

I had visions of sisterhood. Strategic collaboration. Brilliant feminists working together to dismantle patriarchy through better messaging. Finally, I thought, I could reach more women without compromising my soul.

Except it wasn't what I thought.

The Sisterhood That Wasn't

The women in the mastermind Facebook group fought constantly.

Not about strategy or vision, but about pronouns and privilege hierarchies. About who was centered and who was marginalized. About whether focusing on women as a class was exclusionary.

I watched brilliant women tear each other apart over language while millions of women worldwide lived under the threat of male violence. I saw more energy spent policing each other's words than dismantling the systems that oppressed us all.

This wasn't the sisterhood I'd imagined.

This wasn't the feminism I'd signed up for.

I felt heartbroken and confused. If this was what feminist spaces looked like, what was I even fighting for?

Back to School, Back to the Source

I had to understand what was happening. Why was the movement that was supposed to liberate women spending so much time fighting itself?

I went back to the Women's program with a different mission. Not to write papers, but to find answers. I needed to understand patriarchy, a word I'd been using without really knowing what it meant.

My first class back, a scholar named Max Dashu came to present her research on goddess cultures and the historical suppression of the sacred feminine.

I sat there politely, internally rolling my eyes. What did ancient goddesses have to do with domestic violence today? How was this relevant to the women I was trying to help? I was here for the hard facts about oppression, not mystical theories about divine femininity.

I had no idea that Max would later become one of my biggest sheroes.

The Personal Reckoning

At the beginning of this research phase, I spent eight weeks in Brazil with my parents.

The first few days, I had a realization that shattered everything I thought I understood about domestic violence: watching my mother wasn't just seeing an individual woman trapped in harmful patterns. It was seeing how deeply political this all was. How intergenerational. How systemic.

I'd been working as a community educator for a domestic violence agency in San Francisco, trained in individualistic approaches, helping one woman at a time heal, leave, rebuild. But here I was, studying Gerda Lerner's Creation of Patriarchy while watching my own mother still walking on eggshells, still strategizing to avoid conflicts, and suddenly I could see the massive machinery behind it all.

This wasn't just academic anymore.

It was generational.

It was systemic.

It was in my very cells, and in the cells of every woman I knew.

The institutions. The history. The power and money keeping these patterns alive across generations. My mother wasn't just making individual choices–she was swimming in the same patriarchal waters we all were, waters that had been filling up for thousands of years.

I understood that she was born and raised in a generation that didn't even have a vocabulary for what was happening to women, but more than that, I began to see how I was a fish in those same waters.

How deeply I'd internalized misogyny myself.

How much I'd learned to hate myself and other women.

How men's voices carried more authority in my head than my own.

How I'd been taught to compete with other women instead of seeing them as allies.

How I'd dismissed my own intuition in favor of "rational" male experts.

How I'd been performing for the male gaze my entire life without even realizing it.

Layer after layer of conditioning I'd never questioned. The grief was overwhelming, not just for my mother, but for myself, for all the women who'd been taught to betray their own knowing.

The scope of it all brought me to my knees. What could I possibly do against something this vast, this embedded, this complex? I felt so insignificant, so hopeless.

Into the Dark Womb

I dove into feminist theory with the intensity of someone trying to solve a mystery. And in many ways, I was. One book led to another, one theorist to the next. I began with a fundamental question: how did male dominance originate? Had it always existed?

Then I met Gerda Lerner, and her words in The Creation of Patriarchy shattered everything I thought I knew. But it was Adrienne Rich who made it visceral: 'The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.'

Suddenly, my own disconnection from my body wasn't just personal trauma–it was political strategy.

bell hooks showed me how to weave radical black feminism with spiritual beliefs grounded in love. Audre Lorde's poetic emphasis on community and embodied power made my heart sing. Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking insight that gender isn't an identity but a social construct and, most importantly, a hierarchy, was revolutionary. Riane Eisler revealed how history consistently promoted the link between sex and violence, advocating for partnership instead of domination. Silvia Federici situated witch hunts and rape at the center of women's subjugation. Maria Mies showed me the parallels between women's position and colonized peoples.

Each book cracked something open.

Each theorist became a teacher I hadn't known I needed.

But I needed to go deeper.

If this were truly systemic, I needed to understand the architecture.

How does a system this vast sustain itself? Who benefits? How does the money flow? I drew on everything I'd learned in my undergraduate program in Political Economy. For a year and a half, I followed every thread. I traced the connections–pharmaceutical companies profiting from women's disconnection from our natural cycles, the prison industrial complex that criminalizes poverty (which disproportionately affects women), the economic structures that keep women financially dependent and therefore trapped. I read policy papers until my eyes burned. I mapped corporate boards and funding streams. I studied how neoliberalism had privatized what were once collective responsibilities, forcing women back into unpaid care work while calling it "choice."

The scope was staggering.

This wasn't just about individual abusive men, though they were part of it.

This was about entire economic systems built on women's subjugation and exploitation.

About institutions designed to extract our labor, our bodies, our life force, and then convince us we were the problem.

My exploration felt like sinking into a dark womb. For months, I couldn't think about anything else. I went full hermit mode. I needed to understand the truth. The deeper I went, the more grief I felt. Not just for myself, but for my motherline. For generations of women who'd lived and died without ever knowing their own history. I felt like I was staring into an abyss. Every answer led to ten more questions. Every solution revealed five more layers of entrenched power. The more I understood, the more hopeless I became. How do you combat something this deeply ingrained? This profitable? This upheld by every major institution in society?

I remember the exact moment I fell to my knees. Literally.

I was sitting on my bedroom floor, surrounded by printouts and highlighted books, and it hit me: this was a spiritual war. The forces arrayed against women's liberation weren't just economic or political–they were ancient, primal, designed to sever us from our own power at the deepest level.

I couldn't think my way out of this.

I needed something bigger than analysis.

I needed to remember what they were trying to make us forget.

The Goddess Finds You

The goddesses have their mysterious ways. You can't rush them. You can't tell them how to do things. They have their own timing and pace.

As I researched women's oppression, I'd been focused purely on intellectual analysis. The historical facts. The economic systems. The legal frameworks. I was still dismissing anything that seemed too 'woo' or spiritual.

But slowly, through theoretical and experiential classes like Embodied Healing Traditions, Medicine Melodies, and Sacred Dances, something began to shift. Books like The Myth of the Goddess and When Women Were Drummers started chipping away at my rigidity, my resistance.

I began dropping from my head into my heart, into my body. And with that dropping came waves of grief, not just for myself, but for my motherline. For generations of women who'd been severed from their sacred essence.

Through somatic healing work, I started reconnecting with my body, something I'd been dissociated from since childhood. I even experienced an emotional pregnancy and finally healed from an abortion from a decade before.

The same systems that had economically and legally oppressed women had also severed us from our bodies, our sexuality, and our connection to the sacred. Reclaiming the goddess wasn't separate from dismantling patriarchy. It *was* dismantling patriarchy.

Coming Full Circle

I began to understand what Max Dashu had been discussing in that first class.

The suppression of goddess cultures wasn't ancient history. It was the foundation of everything I'd been studying. You can't understand patriarchy without understanding what it replaced.

The sacred feminine wasn't mystical fluff. It was a direct threat to systems of domination.

And women's disconnection from our bodies, our intuition, our life force—this wasn't just collateral damage. It was the whole point.

I began to see that my domestic violence work and my spiritual path weren't separate journeys. They were the same journey.

Both were about helping women remember who they were before the world told them they were nothing.

The Real Fall

This is why I call it "the fall."

Not because I fell from grace, but because I fell from illusion.

I fell from the belief that individual empowerment could solve systemic oppression.

I fell from the idea that feminism was just about equal rights within patriarchal systems.

I fell from thinking that healing could happen through the mind alone, without reclaiming the body and soul.

The fall cracked me open.

It broke apart my neat categories and forced me to see the bigger picture.

Personal was political. Political was spiritual. And spiritual was revolutionary.

What Rose from the Ashes

I stopped chasing men entirely and the never-ending scrolling through dating apps. Not just because I was so deep in this investigation that nothing else mattered, though that was part of it. But because I finally understood what I'd been chasing. I'd read Dee Graham's Loving to Survive and recognized the Stockholm syndrome patterns in my own relationships. The way I'd learned to find safety by aligning with male power, even when it diminished me.

But it went deeper than individual psychology.

I began to see how romantic love itself had been weaponized against women throughout history.

Simone de Beauvoir's words hit like lightning: women are defined as the "Other," and romantic love traps us in this subordinate position, diverting us from pursuing our own freedom and self-definition. Shulamith Firestone called romantic love the "pivot of oppression" –a holocaust that privatizes women's experiences and exploits our emotional labor. bell hooks showed me that what patriarchal culture calls "love" renders us "unaware, powerless and out of control"– justifying controlling and even abusive behaviors while convincing us it's romance.

Mr. Big turned out to be a stand-in for something much older: a system that taught me to chase power instead of embody it.

The fairy tales, the Disney movies, the rom-coms–they weren't just entertainment. They were training. Teaching women that our worth was tied to finding a male partner, that we should sacrifice our individuality, that completion came through romantic union.

I saw how I'd been performing this script my entire adult life.

How I'd made myself smaller to fit into relationships.

How I'd prioritized men's needs over my own dreams.

How I'd measured my value by my ability to attract and keep male attention.

The "love" I'd been chasing wasn't love at all.

It was a political project designed to keep women in our place.

I'd found something bigger than romantic validation. I'd found my calling. Not to fit into existing feminist frameworks, but to weave together all the threads that had been artificially separated: the personal healing work, the political analysis, the spiritual reclamation. This was why those early liberal feminist spaces had felt so wrong. It was feminism without the feminine. Politics without the sacred. Liberation that left out the soul.

I needed all of it. We all need all of it.

And ironically, once I stopped looking for love and started following my truth, love found me anyway.

But that wasn’t the end.

It was only the beginning.

The next chapter wasn’t a rise.

It was a reckoning.

A liminal pause between descent and return.

A place where the old no longer fit, and the new hadn’t fully arrived.

It was time to re-enter the world. But now, changed.

Next Up:

🌗 In Between Worlds

On threshold years, the haunting quiet after awakening,

and what happens when you’re no longer who you were,

but not yet who you’re becoming.