The Sovereignty of the Shiver: Surviving the Social Guillotine and the Silence of the Sacred

The first thing you lose isn’t your mind. It’s the hiss.

In 2015, the hiss was the sound of a milk steamer in a Philadelphia coffee shop—psssssst-shhhhhh—an aggressive, metallic sound that seemed to shred the air between me and Sarah. I was leaning across a marble tabletop that felt too cold, trying to explain the unexplainable. I was trying to tell her that I had looked behind the curtain of the world and found that the news was a movie, the government was a stage-play, and that I—and she, and the guy sneezing in the corner—were citizens of a galaxy so vast it made our city feel like a dust mote.

"I have this knowing," I said, my voice trembling with the weight of the download and fear of the white-coats institutionalizing me. “We have extended Family in the stars. Infinitely more of them than us. We aren't alone, Sarah. I’m a part of that. I’m not just ... this."

Just a few weeks into what could only be labeled as some kind of spiritual awakening, a yawning off of lifetimes of dreaming, I felt like I was remembering things most humans have forgotten: ancient truths, hidden secrets, knowledge that the sleeping population of humans agreed to forget upon incarnation in this lifetime so that we could play the game and take it seriously. Until we can’t anymore because meditation, introspection, and spiritual inquiry dust off our third eye. 

Or something like that. I don’t know. I mean I do know because this new knowing—or claircognizance—had recently activated in me. I knew things about my clients’ pasts without them telling me. I knew when people were lying to me even if I didn’t always trust my intuition, either because I didn’t want to or because I simply doubted myself.

Clink. Sarah’s spoon hit her saucer like a gavel.

"Okay, we need to stop," she said. Her eyes weren't looking at me; they were looking for an exit. “This conversation is giving me anxiety. Can we talk about your business? Or the move? Anything else."

She looked at me as if I had five heads. That was the first "shiver." Not of the body, but of the social fabric. To stay "sane" for Sarah, I had to become a ghost in my own skin. I had to learn the art of the Small Self—the character who nods at the news and pretends the play is real. I didn't know then that I was beginning a ten-year hike into a desert that would eventually claim every version of me I had ever known.

Two Deaths

They call it the Dark Night of the Soul, but that sounds too poetic, like a charcoal drawing. The reality is more like a demolition site.

The first night in 2015 saw the death of the performer aspect of my identity. I was a woman who lived for the stage of life—funny, expressive, rooted in the grit of Philadelphia for seventeen years. Then, the lights came on. My heart blew open so wide it felt like a raw wound. I became clairsentient overnight. I would walk through certain neighborhoods and feel the rage of 1920 or the sorrow of 1968 vibrating in the bricks. I cried until I was nearly dehydrated. My body, unable to handle the sudden galactic voltage, collapsed into autoimmune disorders and eventually Stage 4 Lyme disease.

But back then, I discovered an anesthetic: nature. I moved to the country and fell in love with the spirit of the land. I could lie by a creek—babble, gush, trickle—and feel the pulse of the Divine holding me. I was broke and sick, but I was blissy. I was a self-proclaimed awakened warrior.

But by 2025, the warrior persona was dead, too.

The Social Guillotine

Between 2016 and 2024, the Matrix didn't just feel like a movie; it felt like a trap. The air in Pennsylvania grew thick with a new kind of static—the sound of people I loved sharpening their tongues.

Clack-clack-clack. The sound of keys hitting a laptop as friends "un-followed" and "de-friended" each other over political shadows.

I watched people who called themselves Progressives—people who, like me, had spent their lives rooting for the underdog—transform into agents of vitriol. Their "Love" was a gated community; you were only allowed in if you repeated the script with the exact right inflection. Because I saw the "Stupid Play" for what it was, I couldn't join the chorus of hatred.

I wanted nothing to do with it, so I did something bizarre. I tested the cage. I wanted to see if their compassion was real or conditional. "What if I told you I was voting for him?" I asked. I wasn't actually voting—I had realized that the United States’ Red vs. Blue was just two hands on the same puppet—but I needed to know if our friendship had a soul beyond the script.

The silence that followed was a vacuum. Then came the labels: Racist. Homophobe. Bigot.

The words hit like stones. For forty-five years, my heart had been a wide-open door. But in the theater of 2020, if you didn't hate the "correct” people, you became the monster. I realized that no amount of nonviolent communication would reach them. I withdrew my energy to focus on creating a New Earth by bettering myself and making offerings to Mother Earth, but the cost of being silent in all of that noise was higher than I knew.

The Nausea of the Sacred

By early 2025, I reached Absolute Zero. The bliss was gone. The “knowing” had turned into a blackout, symptoms of another dark night.

I sat by a creek again, but this time, the water didn’t speak. It was just cold. I was fifty years old, my adrenals were becoming a pile of ash, and my house was eating itself. 

Drip. Drip. Drip. That was the sound of the pipes leaking behind the drywall where the black mold grew. Skitter-scritch. That was the sound of the mice in the walls.

I had built a private practice where I was the compassionate healer. But outside those sessions I was starving. I was starving for a peer to hold space for me without trying to "school" me in why I had attracted such harsh circumstances, that I needed to change my thoughts and raise my vibration, or that I had to simply say, “This isn’t mine” and send the struggle on its way. Another, untrained in the profession, tried to do therapy on me, unsolicited. One said it was all just an illusion. The most creative critique? “You live on a dark portal, and there are entities in your home.” When I told my mentor of ten years I was collapsing, she told me I was "playing victim." She wanted the warrior to keep marching. But the warrior was shivering on the floor.

Suddenly, even the spiritual world felt like a psy-op. I’d turn on a video about "manifesting" and feel a surge of nausea. It felt silly. It felt like people in a dollhouse talking about rearranging plastic furniture while the real house was on fire. My claircognizance went offline. I was a Galactic Citizen who had lost her radio. The universe took my business, my health, and my spiritual high and threw them into the fire.

The Great Heartbreak

By Autumn and into Winter of 2025, what was left was grief.

It is a profound, tectonic heartbreak. It’s the realization that everything I once stood upon has turned to vapor. People talk about "letting go" as if it’s a graceful choice. It’s not. It’s a violent stripping.

Whirrr. The sound of the space heater in my room.

Thud. The sound of me falling back into bed at 7pm because the weight of the void is too heavy to carry.

I slept to escape the ache. Sometimes, I went to bed early just to reach the safe harbor of unconsciousness where the Stupid Play can't reach me. Sleep is the only place where I don't have to be sovereign or powerful.

The Silent Beauty

The only thing that still feels real is the land. Even though the lights are out and I can no longer hear the spirits or the Family beyond, the beauty of nature remains. It is a silent beauty that doesn’t ask me to raise my vibration. It doesn’t call me a victim.

I walk shivering through the woods in Southeastern Pennsylvania and see the stark, bare branches. They aren't "doing" anything. They are just standing in the cold, surviving the winter. I am through with being an expert. That role was just another pedestal to keep me from being seen.

I am writing this grit and grime, because I am tired of maps that skip the quicksand. I don't know where this leads. I don't have a plan. I just have this moment, this bed, and the silent trees. Maybe the New Earth isn't a place we build. Maybe it’s just what’s left of us when we finally stop trying to perform or to fix the old one.

For now, the heartbreak is my honest truth. I will sleep through it. I will write it. And I will trust that even in the silence, the Family is watching with the quiet respect one gives to a soul who has finally learned to stand alone.