The Rite of Collapse (Part Two of What the Desert Held)

How I let the pain speak—and what it taught me

Dear you, holding it all together until you can’t,

This is the part where the story breaks open. Where I let you in on what almost took me out—and what I chose instead.

If Part One cracked the surface, this is the part where I descend into the marrow of things. Into grief, lineage, mothering, rage. Into the weight I carried for decades. Into the ache of loving a child you cannot fix. And the unthinkable edge that took me to.

This is a story about survival. But more than that, it’s about a holy reckoning. The kind that burns everything down and leaves you staring at the ashes, whispering, “Now what?”

If you’ve ever carried more than your share...
If you’ve ever loved someone you can’t save...
If you’ve ever been tired of being strong...

This part is for you.

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The Ministry of Holding It All Together

I was always the translator. The fixer. The one who held the fragile pieces together with duct tape and divine hope. I learned to read a room like scripture—before I could name a single one of my own needs.

In my family, the wreckage from mental illness and addiction never cleared. Not really. It just changed form—new names, same ache. A pressure system that never lifted. Year after year of bracing, hoping, praying. Waiting for someone to either come home sober, sane… or at all.

Somewhere in that waiting, I took the job nobody offered: Olympic-level emotional baggage carrier. No medals, of course—just migraines, and a shoulder that still flinches when the door slams.

No one asked me to carry it outright. But someone had to. And I was someone. That’s the thing with trauma roles—you don’t always audition, you just get cast. You learn your lines by heart, and soon enough, the part becomes you. These patterns don’t vanish. They trail you room to room, follow you into sleep. Eventually, you start calling it love.

The serpent inside had been coiled too long, soaked in sorrow that didn’t start with me but had taken root in my bones. The venom entered slowly—through every lie I swallowed, every apology I offered for someone else’s violence, every time I believed I was the problem. I built houses out of other people’s harm and tried to decorate them like they were livable.

The poison threaded through my nervous system—not enough to kill, just enough to keep me tired. Low-grade suffering and functional collapse. The kind of pain that lets you smile, teach a workshop on coming home to your body, while quietly forgetting you haven’t been in yours for weeks.

That’s how venom works. It cuts the wires. Scrambles the signals. Eventually, you forget what your own voice sounds like.

I’d made it this far without fully falling apart. I was a master of endurance. But my son’s mental health crisis—the one no miracle had touched—brought me to the edge.

The Moment of Reckoning

They say the grief of losing a child—whether to death, addiction, or mental illness—is the kind that never leaves you. I was caught in the loop of hope and despair–the waking nightmare of maybe and almost. My heart had torn in places I didn’t know existed.

By 2024, I was in a full-blown reckoning. Because nothing—nothing—I was doing was working. Not the analyzing. Not the research. Not the self-blame, the mother-blame, the lineage autopsy. Not the spirals of magical thinking I’d used like a favorite blanket, threadbare and still dragging behind me.

I had studied the hell out of every possible outcome. Built entire rescue maps in my mind. I’d consulted psychics, therapists, psychiatrists galore, energy workers, trauma experts, plant medicine shamans, NAMI, and yes—Jesus, Mary, Quan Yin, and the ghost of Carl Jung.

And still—no one could promise this would end well if I kept going like this.

So this is what she brought me here for.

Not to purge it. That was the old way—fix it, outrun it, sage it into silence.
No. I was here to let it speak.

To listen.
To bleed it holy.

That’s when I heard her. The Serpent in me. The goddess of my own marrow:

“It’s time, Joy. You’ve come to the crossroads. You can keep serving the past—the ache, the legacy of never-ending pain—and let that become your life’s altar. Or you can choose the flame still burning inside you.

You choose, baby girl. Nobody else can. And nobody gets to judge this one.”

And yeah, I judged myself. Hard. Not just the self-blame spiral—the “Where did I go wrong?” late-night mental inquests. Not just the desperate replays of every parenting decision I ever made, searching for the one that cracked the dam. I was zooming way out with this judgment– like– what right did I have to be this wrecked over my little life when there were bombs dropping, civil rights disappearing, forests on fire? But that’s the lie, isn’t it? That we’re supposed to hold our grief up to the scale of the news cycle. As if only global tragedies deserve ritual. As if the ache of one woman’s lost dreams isn’t part of the same unraveling.

But the truth is: I was standing in a fire I could no longer contain. And the venom had reached my throat. I had two temptations: Give up my life entirely, or give it all to saving his. Either way, I disappeared.

No one really knew how sad I was- how desperate my desire of quietly dying was. I kept creating, leading, producing. But inside, I was unraveling. I was tired. Of bargaining with fate. Of collapsing into bottomless grief. I needed a way out.

So I gave myself something radical: a pass.

To fall apart.
To not be okay.
To even—if it came to it—choose not to stay.

I had to give myself this gift..only I could do that.

I entered the quiet space inside myself. The one I had avoided. I felt how empty I was.

I listened to my rock bottom, the one that nothing satisfied, nothing soothed. The place where I had no hunger. No goals. No more hope. I hated the fact that I didn’t want anything..except the impossible: To keep nursing what had already died, and somehow bring it back to life.

And then I whispered out loud—not a prayer, more like a protest: “If I give you this pain... it’s all I have left of what I love. So what then, dammit?”

There was no answer. Just silence.

Exhaustion hit and I didn’t care what came next—I just wanted the torture of my own emptiness to end.

The Rite of Collapse

And then I felt the heat of the red rock, holding me. My body softened and something shifted. She was there. Her voice, steady and low:

“Breathe. Let it burn through. Let this death be born, so you can stop clinging to it.”

So I did. I made the choice…

I let go into the letting go.

This was my rite.
My own solo altar.
The reason I came.

I breathed into a soundless sobbing, an empty opening into something beyond my pain.I let go of the what-ifs. The unspeakables. The illusions of control.

And then…oh God…

I seized, I tried to stop it. But it was too late. I was in it. The truth was crowning.

I don’t think I can do this.
I don’t think I can let go.
I don’t think I can let him go.

Take me instead. Take me, dammit. I’ll do whatever it takes—just give him back his soul, his heart, his mind. My beautiful boy..oh God… unbreak his brain.

A few deep breaths, more truth spilled out:

I can’t live with the pain of not being able to fix either my son’s pain.
Of not being able to save either one of them…
Of not knowing what harm may come.

I was splitting open.
They have to go their own way now.
Life has to take it from here.
We are diverging.

And then it stretched—beyond bloodline, beyond womb:
Even with all my prayers.
Even with boots on the ground.
I can’t fix this fucked up world either. I feel powerless. I feel useless.

The contraction peaked. I trembled. And then I sighed:

“I am so fucking done.”

The serpent inside me—uncoiled herself and said:

Let it die clean.
Let it go.

I released the twisted weight inside me. The desert received my offering like she’d been waiting for it. And she had been.

Then I felt it—a pulse. Something new. Not loud. Not wild. But steady and strong…

Holy fire.

It rose through me—not like a blaze, but a prayer that already knew its way.
It wasn’t dramatic.
It was clean.
A slow-burning purification.

What the Desert Knows

I rested on her ancient mantel– and became a witness to myself—quiet and unflinching—and I saw the way loss had shaped me. It had carved through me, over time. I saw a life that kept shifting beneath my feet, never letting me root.

And then I had to know–

I asked the land, the silence, the wide sky…whatever might still be listening….

What now?

What could possibly live inside me now? I’ve failed in so many ways. What could grow in me—when I can’t feel a single damn thing that resembles life?

This earth, shaped by time, had to know. These red rocks, holding secrets in their sandstone curves. They had survived epochs of destruction, endured ruin and disregard—yet they remained.

Majestic and whole.

They knew how to yield when needed without disappearing, how to shift without losing themselves–how to begin again. They knew how to reflect something still beautiful after so much destruction and change.

I wanted that old, bone-deep feminine wisdom to seep into me—not just conceptually, but cellularly.
Into my skin.
My muscles.
My marrow.

I wanted her to teach me how to love something—anything—again …without the fear of it hollowing me out.

I wanted to recover some endangered tenderness inside me: some kind of awe.

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This piece is Part Two of What the Desert Held—my memoir-in-motion. If it stirred something in you, if you saw your own ache reflected in mine, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. You can subscribe for free to receive each new chapter as it unfolds—or become a paid subscriber to support this work and gain access to deeper community offerings coming soon.