Taking My Energy Back

I woke up this morning thinking about closing doors.

There is an astrological thread running underneath this that I find fascinating, especially in relation to something I wrote around the Scorpio Full Moon earlier this year and the Venus retrograde cycle we are now approaching. I will write about that separately for those who enjoy speaking that language. This contemplation stands on its own.

Earlier this year, I wrote that something had opened a door within me that could no longer be closed. It began a much larger inquiry into where my life force actually goes. Where am I investing? What am I feeding through my attention and participation? What am I still in agreement with simply because I have never consciously withdrawn my agreement?

At the time I was looking at the deeper structures underneath my life: inherited ways of relating, family systems, roles I had unconsciously continued to perform, collective structures and egregores I participated in because some part of me had once agreed to belong to them. I started questioning allegiances I had never consciously chosen and withdrawing my participation from realities that no longer reflected what I knew to be true.

That door could not be closed because once I had seen these things, I could not unsee them. I had to walk through what had opened.

Months later, I seem to have arrived somewhere beautifully ordinary. I am looking at my actual life. At online communities I barely participate in, groups I once wanted to belong to, relationships that are no longer moving, and connections where I already know that something has reached the end of its natural movement. The doors are still open even though nothing in me is walking through them anymore.

Suddenly the great question of life force has become very practical. Leave the group. Have the conversation. Say goodbye. Close the door.

I am realizing that withdrawing my energy cannot remain an internal declaration. My physical life eventually has to catch up with what I already know. There is a difference between knowing something is finished and allowing it to finish. I don’t want to burn bridges simply to prove that I have left, but neither do I want to quietly disappear from everything and call that letting go. Completion asks for an actual movement in the world. Letting go has hands. It presses the button, speaks the words, leaves the room and closes the door.

Underneath all of this I have found another layer: belonging.

I can see how many doors I have kept open because being connected to many places created an illusion that I belonged to many places. I am invited here. I am part of this. These people want me. I could return there. There was comfort in having all those invisible threads running outward, especially when I had not yet completely accepted how solitary I actually am.

This became very clear when I was invited into a circle of women. The invitation touched a genuine longing in me because I have deeply wanted connection with women. Being welcomed into an entire circle felt beautiful. Then I entered and discovered that almost nothing in me naturally wanted to move further into the space.

What arose was shame. Finally I am invited, and now I don’t even want it.

That showed me how easily a real longing can attach itself to something that cannot fulfil it. My longing for connection was real. My longing for belonging was real. That did not make this particular place mine. I do not have to belong to everything that welcomes me.

I had also made belonging into something I imagined I would eventually receive from outside myself. Somewhere there would be the right community, the right relationship, the right people, and I would finally step through the right door and feel: Here. Now I belong.

Something entirely different has been growing instead. My roots are sinking into a belonging no one can invite me into and no one can exclude me from. I belong to life, to the Earth beneath my feet, to God, to this enormous breathing reality I was never separate from in the first place. This belonging feels more tangible to me now than membership in any group ever has.

It also changes what I ask from human connection. No person needs to give me a home. No community needs to prove that there is a place for me in existence. The few relationships that truly belong in my life can meet me on ground that is already there. Belonging is no longer the prize at the end of finding the right people. It is the ground beneath the meeting.

And I actually don’t want to belong to very many things. I don’t want endless connections. I want a few places where life moves naturally and a few people with whom I don’t have to constantly translate myself or work hard to manufacture a depth that isn’t naturally there. I needed all those open doors when I believed that an empty room meant I had nowhere to belong. I don’t believe that anymore.

Earlier this year, while releasing those old agreements, I wrote: “The void no longer terrifies me. It is the place where new life can finally emerge.”

Apparently life has decided to ask whether I meant it.

Because closing doors creates empty space, and I am beginning to see how much energy is required simply to keep the possibility of flow alive. This morning I saw my life as a house full of electrical sockets, cords running everywhere toward old relationships, communities, conversations, identities and possibilities. Very little electricity may be moving through some of them, but they are still plugged in.

I want my sockets back.

Not because I know what should be plugged into them next. I want some of them empty.

Emptiness is capacity. It is the Great Mother, the vast sea of possibility, the womb of creation that contains everything because it is empty enough to receive what has not yet taken form. The womb knows the difference between emptiness and absence.

Yesterday I went swimming and found myself singing, All my dreams are coming true. It wasn’t an affirmation or an attempt to convince myself of anything. It simply felt true.

If I trust that, I don’t need to hoard possibilities. I don’t need to keep relationships half-alive because I don’t know who is coming next, or remain attached to communities because an older version of me desperately wanted somewhere to belong. I can stop filling every empty space just to reassure myself that life has not forgotten me.

The door that opened earlier this year opened because there was something I needed to enter and see. I walked into the agreements, inherited roles, old allegiances, longing to belong and invisible investments of my own life force. I could not close that door because I had not yet walked through it.

Now I am standing somewhere else. What began as an inner declaration is becoming an earthly act. I am withdrawing my investment from what has completed its movement, unplugging the cords and closing the doors that have already closed inside me.

This time I am not rushing to open another one.

I want to leave the room empty long enough to discover what emptiness actually contains.

The door opened so I could enter the work. Now I can close it behind me and keep walking.