The Rupture
What compliance has been costing us.
Sometime earlier this year, sitting beside a golden sand beach with crystal clear water lapping at the shore, sipping on my new favourite drink - Mezcal and tonic - a gorgeous red-headed woman was telling me how she ended up alone and screaming into the jungle for 6 months in Mexico instead of walking down the aisle to marry her long-term partner.
I had mentioned the work I do and that I was writing a book on Divine Darkness ( I love seeing peoples reactions to that), and after initially visibly recoiling, she later lent in to tell me her experience with the dark feminine.
Consciously ostracising herself from “civilisation”, in the beauty of solitude, she gave herself a container to release all her pent up emotions. She let her rage run free and release itself from her body. She danced feverishly as if under a spell, cried violently and without apology. She allowed her vessel to fully empty itself of all that it had painstakingly stored over the years of her performing femininity - grateful that her soul awakening had rescued her from the golden cage that she was very nearly about to be trapped in.
Her clarity moment of - wait a min, who the fuck AM I?? What do I want? If it is supposed to be this - why do I feel like I’m taking a long walk off a short plank? (ok, she might not have said the last bit, but that was the gist).
She allowed herself to meet and reclaim the “forbidden” side of her feminine. The exiled parts that she had pretended didn’t exist, keeping their pleas of release at bay behind a heavily locked door.
She realised just how much she was given up to perform a persona that was stealing her power from her.
Her experience wasn’t chaos for the sake of chaos. It was an identity refusing to be carried any further.
Feminine rage is often the first honest response to an identity that has outlived its truth.
What precedes the rage? Rewarded disappearance. The slow silencing of instinct, desire, and dissent in order to remain chosen, safe, or successful.
Throughout 2025, I had more conversations than ever about identity death, self-betrayal, and feminine rage. All new client conversations began with these topics.
Women questioning the life they’ve been told to want because it doesn’t align with their actual wants, and so they assume something is wrong with them, not the system.
Or women who did all the things; the kids, marriage, career, and have been left wondering who they are in amongst all of this life living.
The hard part of it all, is that clarity doesn’t come first. Disorientation does. Confusion and an emptiness that can feel like depression does. There comes a point where the old self just can’t be maintained anymore.
2020 marked the beginning of my own identity death.
I recognise this terrain because I’ve walked it myself; I had a gorgeous warehouse apartment with a jungle full of plants, two adorable cats and a partner of almost 10 years that I loved dearly. I was an in-demand stylist, working on exciting briefs for brands like Adidas and Captain Morgan and yet…I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that had been slowly taking root for the last couple of years. The quiet cavern that was forming in my soul, rumbled its echo louder as I questioned if this was it? This is just life now - forever?
Enter the rupture.
I had built my whole identity on being a stylist, but my soul was starting to call me back to myself. I couldn’t not hear the ever-present and yet very faint whisper as I busied myself with my life. A quiet yearning.
Yes, this is great, pretty damn fabulous even, but this is not your end.
Then the world abruptly halted and I took that as my sign. If I no longer wanted to perform a self I no longer aligned with, then I have to get real - with myself first and foremost.
I have spent the last 5 years in the underworld - a void that was my de-conditioning space. Dissolving a self that I spent years building. Questioning Why, but knowing that this was my souls path that I had to trust and tread.
And now, with the collectives 9 year cycle coming to its end, I am witnessing more women in this rupture/identity death phase.
Most women panic here and rush to rebuild too fast. Afraid of what it means to sit in the darkness for too long.
But this is where we understand what rage is asking us to stop being.
It’s not:
a personality flaw
something to manage away
something to express endlessly
It’s information.
And for many women, it appears when:
they “did everything right”
built the life they were meant to want
became the version that was rewarded
and still feel something is off
That “off-ness” is the rupture.
Self-erasure isn’t always dramatic, in fact, it’s often subtle. It looks like competence, adaptability, being “easy” while you silence your needs, instincts and rage.
We curate a version of self that works until our body revolts when it can’t take anymore lies.
The rupture signals & tools for clarity:
