Sitting With Yourself — Is Dark...

I sat down to write about “How to Sit with Yourself.” After several hours of research, trying to piece together what others had written on the subject, I realized I couldn’t do it. The articles I found felt hollow and surface-level. They seemed designed to help people rationalize their behavior, gloss over patterns, and move on without addressing root causes. I kept finding the same frameworks — sit with your emotions, practice self-compassion, work toward acceptance. All useful, but none of them touched what I’d actually encountered when I was forced to sit with myself.

So once again, I found a gap. And I couldn’t structure it into steps or a clean narrative because what I’d discovered was messy and dark. So this piece is an exploration of what you find when you sit with yourself in that darkness, when you realize the suffering you face is self-induced. Because there is a point, that once you’ve done the inner work, you’ve resolved what you thought was the past and started to move forward, you will eventually find yourself here.

It was April 2017: my best friend sat across from me at my kitchen table. She looked at me and said the words that would break something open. “Macala, I am afraid of you. You’re so angry.” She put her head down as she said it, cowering slightly, bracing for my reaction the way she’d been doing for years.

This was someone I loved, someone who ran my company for me. And she was managing my moods like a threat. That was my fault, though I didn’t fully understand it yet.That year, I had made more money than most people make in a lifetime. I was burned out, angry, irrational, and nothing made me happy despite the success.