My 2019 Self Thought She Was Becoming a Spiritual Leader
Seven years later, I see a woman searching for permission to trust her own voice.
Watching this Know Thyself Video feels like opening a time capsule someone buried inside my own chest. She keeps saying she’s becoming a spiritual leader.
I smiled when I heard it.
Not because it was wrong.
Because I finally understand what she was trying to say.
Back then I thought leadership meant having answers.
Now I think leadership begins the moment someone is willing to narrate their own becoming while it’s still unfinished.
That woman in the video was terrified. You can hear it every time her voice cracks. Every time she apologizes for being sensitive. Every time she says she isn’t explaining herself very well. Every time she worries people will think she’s strange….
I wanted to reach through the screen and tell her something.
“You’re not choking because you’re wrong…
You’re choking because you’re standing at the border between the person everyone expects you to be...
and the person you’re finally allowing yourself to become.”
The part that struck me most wasn’t the astrology, numerology, High Priestess, ESP, the Clair senses or even the idea of being mystical.
It was one sentence.
“I’ve been cloaking my journaling process under the idea of science.”
I needed permission. Science felt acceptable. Reflection felt acceptable. Psychology felt acceptable.
But spirituality?
That word carried too many ghosts.
Growing up, religion wasn’t simply religion.
It carried authority.
Control.
Fear.
The feeling that someone else always knew more about my life than I did.
So every time I got close to words like God, Lord or spiritual, my nervous system slammed on the brakes before my mind even had a chance to decide what I believed.
In the video I call it “the colonization of religion.”
Today I might use different language.
I’d probably call it conditioning. Trauma. Borrowed meaning.
But I still recognize exactly what I meant.
I wasn’t rejecting mystery.
I was rejecting ownership of mystery.
What surprises me most isn’t what has changed.
It’s what hasn’t.
In the video I describe myself as someone with “morbid curiosity.”
That phrase makes me laugh now. Not because it’s inaccurate. Because I finally understand what I meant. I have always been willing to crawl into difficult places. Not because I enjoy suffering. Because I cannot stand pretending wounds don’t exist.
Most people see a scar and quickly change the subject.
I’ve always wanted to kneel beside it and ask,
“What happened here?”
Not to relive it. To understand it. To free it.
That instinct has shaped nearly everything I’ve created.
The Quantum MeMoir… The spheres, observations and Mind Maps.
The endless questions…
People sometimes mistake this for dwelling in darkness. But I’ve never been interested in living in the wound. I’ve been interested in learning its architecture.
There is a difference.
This younger version of me kept saying she wanted to refine her signature.
That sentence stopped me. Because I think I’ve been doing exactly that ever since. Not refining my brand. Not refining my image…
Refining the unmistakable fingerprint of how I move through the world.
Every book.
Every journal page.
Every conversation.
Every strange metaphor.
Every rabbit hole.
Every breakdown.
Every insight.
Every ordinary Tuesday that somehow became a philosophy lesson.
They’re all part of the same signature.
Not polished.
Recognizably… Me.
The biggest surprise of all?
I don’t think I became who I thought I was becoming. I became something quieter. Less interested in convincing. More interested in witnessing. Less interested in being followed. More interested in helping people notice themselves.
That’s an important distinction.
I don’t want disciples.
I wish to cultivate observers…
People willing to become students of their own lives.
Maybe that’s what I meant by “spiritual leader” all along. Not someone standing above others. Someone willing to walk into the forest first, leave markers on the trees, and write back from the journey.
Looking back, I don’t see someone who was wrong. I see someone translating an experience with the only vocabulary she had available.
Seven years later, I’ve learned new words.
Trauma.
Neurobiology.
Pattern recognition.
Narrative identity.
Environmental influence.
But those newer words don’t replace the older ones…
They simply illuminate different sides of the same rabbit hole. The hole was never astrology. Or psychology. Or spirituality. The rabbit hole has always been one question.
Who am I beneath everything I inherited?
That question is still worth asking.
It’s just that now I trust myself enough to answer it in my own language. Maybe that’s what growing older really is.
Not collecting better answers…
Finding the courage to stop borrowing someone else’s way of life for your own experience.
Your Muse,
Molly MissUnderstood
aka
MaLee Muse