Grieving the Maiden (Part 1)

The Spiritual Death and Grieving of the Maiden No One Talks About

Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts. If you’re struggling, you’re not alone. If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, please seek help now. In the U.S., call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you’re outside the U.S., please contact your local emergency number or a trusted crisis resource.

When the world first called me “mother,” a part of me quietly unraveled. Not the love part, because that came fiercely and made my motherhood actually real—but the other part of me, the one I had hid inside of for years. I didn’t have language for it. Only a heaviness. Only the sense that someone I used to be was slipping into shadow while I was supposed to be glowing.

Feeling so raw and alone, the idea of therapy felt like being skinned alive, and I didn't think I could bear it.

How I really felt: tired, overwhelmed, lost, alone

The person the world pressures us to show

While I didn't call it postpartum depression at the time, it all started when intrusive thoughts began visiting like a storm I couldn’t predict. I felt ashamed for even having them, saying to myself, "Now I have the life I worked for. Why do I feel like this? " At the doctor's office, I hid behind the right answers on checkup surveys. Feeling so raw and alone, the idea of therapy felt like being skinned alive, and I didn’t think I could bear it. So I survived—day by day—moving from task to task, staying just busy enough to get to bedtime.

It was lonely. Eventually, I told my husband the truth, translating the untranslatable: I’m here with you, but I feel like I’m falling into another world. He knew it wasn’t drama; the best I could describe it was by calling it disorientation. I was watching myself parent from far away, desperate to grab the wheel of my own mind and failing. It became very dark inside my mind. One sleepless night, suddenly I could bear nothing else to the point where I forced myself to sign up for online therapy. Type. Click. Submit. Save me, please.

Therapy didn’t fix me overnight. But it did put some ground under my feet. It softened the shame and helped me change my inner expectations, especially the way I spoke to myself. Most of all, it taught me to mother myself; to mother the mother with me. It was no longer an option to neglect the woman (myself) who was caring for everyone else.

And it was only then that I began to see how long I had rejected myself-as-mother, how fiercely I clung to the maiden even as motherhood asked me to become someone new.

Later, I saw a short video that reframed what I’d lived: during big life passages, we undergo not just physical change but spiritual change—and because the mind needs something concrete to make sense of the invisible, it will mistakenly translate the concept of that transformation as spiritual death into thoughts about literal death. Realizing this terrible mind trick unlocked something for me. It didn’t excuse the darkness, but it gave it meaning: perhaps those thoughts were my mind’s clumsy way of saying, An old self is dying so a new self can live.

Slowly, with therapy, awareness, and healing, the void quieted. I began to honor what was happening inside me: I threw a spectacular inner funeral for the maiden and a built a blessing alter for the mother, metaphorically. Today I still get overwhelmed, but I don’t fall into darkness. I plan, I ask for help, I keep going.

I’m not saying this is everyone’s story. I am saying that if any of it sounds familiar, you are not broken—you are becoming. And if you need a sign to begin therapy, let this be it. Even if your hand shakes when you click “submit.”

Next in the series → Grieving the Maiden (Part 2): A Loss of Identity