Part III: The Spiral When Self-Awareness Turns Dark

The mirror did its job.

And then came the spiral.

This is the part we don’t talk about enough—the moment after awareness arrives, when clarity doesn’t feel empowering yet. When truth doesn’t feel liberating. When instead of motivation, what rises first is grief.

Because once you see clearly, you also see what you can’t undo.

Time that has passed.
Moments that won’t return.
Versions of yourself that never fully arrived.

For me, the thoughts came fast and without mercy. Your kids are older. Time moved on. You should have done more. You knew better. You waited too long. It felt like standing in the aftermath of a life I should have lived differently, replaying scenes with the cruel advantage of hindsight.

There was a heaviness to it. A quiet despair that whispered, You messed this up. You disappointed people. You missed your moment.

As dramatic as it sounds, that was the emotional reality. Not logical. Not objective. But real.

This is where self-awareness can turn against us if we don’t understand what’s happening. Because the mind, once awakened, doesn’t always lead with compassion. Sometimes it leads with punishment—confusing clarity with condemnation.

I wasn’t actually seeing the truth.

I was seeing grief.

Grief for time lost.
Grief for unrealized potential.
Grief for the version of me that could have existed sooner.

And grief has a way of distorting perspective. It collapses time into a single narrative: It’s too late.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand—this spiral is not failure. It’s a threshold.

When awareness first lands, it often triggers the ego’s last defense: despair. Because despair keeps us frozen. It convinces us that change is pointless, that effort won’t matter, that growth is no longer available.

That voice isn’t wisdom.

It’s fear wearing the mask of realism.

I had to sit with that. Not fight it. Not bypass it with positivity. Just sit long enough to recognize it for what it was—a symptom of awakening, not evidence of defeat.

Self-awareness doesn’t immediately feel like light. Sometimes it feels like standing in a dark room after the lights have been turned on too fast. Disorienting. Exposing. Uncomfortable.

But the darkness wasn’t the truth.

It was the residue of old patterns dissolving.

This was the moment where I could either collapse inward—believing the story that everything was already ruined—or pause long enough to question the premise itself.

And that pause is where everything began to shift.

In the next part of this series, I’ll share the reframe that changed the entire narrative—the moment I realized time wasn’t my enemy, and that growth doesn’t move linearly at all.

Because what comes after the spiral isn’t shame.

It’s expansion.