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When Growth Feels Like Grief: Illness, Journaling, and the Gothic Soul’s Path to Transformation
- Alice
- May 7
- 5 min read
How journaling, dreaming, and symbolic discomfort guide us through the liminal path of creative transformation
When Becoming Hurts: On Growth, Grief, and the Gothic Soul
There are seasons when growth doesn’t feel like blossoming; it feels like burning. As the world hurries ahead, demanding visibility, speed, and productivity, some of us are quietly shedding skins, navigating illness, caregiving, and carrying the creative weight of living symbolically. In these liminal spaces — between collapse and reinvention, silence and expression — we don't only find discomfort, but meaning. This is where the Gothic lives. And for me, April meant a descent into that very tension: between the Terrible Mother and the Good Mother, between grief and blooming, between my body’s limits and my soul’s pull to write.
Begin your own descent into symbolic healing:
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April was the month of blossoms in many ways: my garden was amazing, mainly with my cherry tree taking over. But also because I continued connecting with like-minded people locally and worldwide, and started expanding the experience towards new discoveries and possible collaborations. I even met my Norwegian coach, mentor and good friend Cecilie L. Hjortland, with whom I experienced a cacao ceremony full of messages, synchronicities and realisations carried out by the hands of Montse Moreno.
But in life, things don't always go in a straight line, and I keep finding myself burning with the demands of a society that doesn't make much room for a 50-year-old woman trying to reinvent herself in a space not very well known but highly hypnotising, and who's suspicious of being neurodivergent with high cognitive abilities. Not everybody around me approves, and not everybody understands. But they are not trapped in a body with Lyme disease, a probable intestinal dysbiosis and a brain that never shuts up.
As someone who walks the path of symbolic life, journaling, dreaming, and exploring Gothic archetypes have become my way of healing through illness and transformation, I should be used to discomfort by now. But no one tells you that growth can feel just like grief. In fact, grief is often the gateway to growth and authenticity, only fully comes through when one stops listening to criticism and learns not to make their own other people's discomforts.
The Gothic Tension of Creation: Writing, Dreams, and the Inner Descent
Where the Muse Meets the Monster: The Creative Cost of Gothic Self-Discovery
In Jungian terms, we might say I’ve been in the grip of the Terrible Mother, the dark face of the feminine that doesn’t just nourish, but demands sacrifice. She tears down the old. She devours what’s outdated. She doesn’t ask for approval. And yet she’s part of every meaningful act of creativity.
Creating for me is like breathing or nourishing my body. In the same way I can't stop dreaming at night, I can't stop writing or expressing myself artistically during the day. Those ways of expression allow me to make room for my creativity, but they are also therapeutic strategies when the world feels too much for me, or when the emotions of my life experiences suffocate me in a silent cry. I love writing personal and critical essays, even if I don't get paid for them. Communication is my curse, and learning a foreign language wasn't only meant for me as a way to earn my living as an English teacher, but as a way to anchor and connect with the world and to broaden my neural pathways. It is when I create new projects that something in me always has to die. It’s painful. It’s exhausting. It’s not a business plan: it’s a personal myth being lived out, one piece at a time.
Somehow, this is why the Gothic is my happy place to show my discomfort and also the place where all my inner figures dance in my psyche, telling me past stories of a cosmic life. Aren't we all star seeds at the end of the day? Think about it.
Want to explore your personal myth, too? Begin your descent with my free 6-Day Gothic journal — a gentle, symbolic path into your own story.
A Slower Path to Self-Discovery Through Symbolic Journaling and Liminality
Living Symbolically in a Fast World: Illness, Slowness, and the Gothic Way
I’ve always felt out of step with the rhythm and demands of life. Ever since I was a child, I was knocked down and walked all over by my class colleagues while the kindergarten teacher looked impassively at the scene. Since then, I've felt that the world was a beautiful but also a dangerous place full of monsters in disguise. Maybe that's why I would devour horror films with my mum over the weekends. Somehow, the digital world reminds me of the beginnings of my life. While some try to immobilise the weaker ones by suffocating them, I try to write meaning. Reflection. Soul... and this is inspirational to many of my readers.
That means I don’t show up daily with quick thoughts or trending topics. I send one newsletter a month, on purpose, because this work is dense. It’s meant to be sat with. Re-read. Integrated. I even get people working for months with my free guides and videos. The rabbit hole is deep, and I've learnt to embrace my horror fairy tale myth. It's in my name.
However, the truth behind that quiet rhythm is that I live with low energies due to my auto-depressed immune system, trying to look after my family -I am a carer of my husband and have two young sons at home-, while building something big with also limited time, and often, with a deep sense of not being seen in the way that I offer visibility to others. And yet… I keep going. Because every time someone replies to a post, or shares a dream, or says “this helped me feel less alone,” I know I’m not just producing; I’m participating in a symbolic, creative lineage of soul-work.
If You’re in the In-Between Too…
Blooming Underground: Embracing the Liminal and the Gothic Soul
Your descent is your initiation.
If you’re tired of noise, if you’re also caught between a world that demands speed and a soul that asks for stillness, I hope this reminds you that you’re not broken. You’re blooming underground. You just have to keep listening to your dreams and writing them down as soon as you wake up in the morning, paying attention to your reactions to certain film scenes, songs and art in general, mainly if you feel caught in the eeriness of liminal spaces because there's where you'll find the Gothic, or where the Gothic will find you.
Think that you are not caught there for no reason. What are the synchronicities showing you? Are you connecting with that inner child who loved singing, dancing, drawing, and daydreaming?
Since I have been studying the archetype of the Great Mother, I have come to realise that she tells us about balance, she teaches us about the importance of the tension between her two forces. That is when she burns what no longer serves that we can make room for what matters.
When writing your dreams or your thoughts, you're not just writing an article, sharing your opinion or journaling. You are remembering. You're not just analysing Gothic novels, or finding connections with your own life and amplifying the meaning of your research with your life experience. You’re reclaiming the parts of ourselves buried in the dark. You’re not just grieving. You're initiating.
With each descent, something new begins.
So I want to close this article with an invitation for you to start exploring your life story and see where all the breadcrumbs lead you to. I'd love to know what you find on the way.
Until the next descent,
Stay Gothic, my friend,
Alice
Would you like to know more about your Gothic uniqueness? Download my free 6-Day guided journal for self-discovery.
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