How I Became My Own Muse
~ the art of becoming your own favourite hallucination ~
The Myth of the Muse
For the longest time, I thought my muse would show up in someone else’s body.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Flesh and blood. Likely a woman, one who seemed summoned from the edge of myth. No doubt she’d have long hair curling like smoke, a sassy, heart-melting smile, and smudged lipstick from biting her own lip too hard.
Someone who would look at me with a deep, ancient recognition so searing I’d forget who I was, inviting me into a grander realm of life—one only accessible through the portal offered by a muse.
Sounds rather lovely, no?
This dream of mine wasn’t unfounded. I caught glimpses of her over the years, bites and tastes just solid enough to keep me believing. But as life twisted and turned, as I strayed from my true path, the signal faded to black. And so did I.
Truth is, I didn’t really understand what I was looking for. Had you asked me as little as a few months ago, even then I couldn’t have told you more than the fantasy above.
All I knew was that surely, somewhere out there, was my muse. I don’t mean this in a romantic sense either. While I suspected such feelings might get involved, they were never the motivation—more a side effect. I just wanted to access the wellspring of creativity that so many writers, poets, and artists tell tales of finding in other people.
Me too, please.
This was flawed thinking.
Did you knoooow Cap’n… If you want to find someone, something, anything in this world, you better know exactly what you’re looking for, at least most of the time.
Plus, waiting for a muse to somehow, someway appear before you start creating is a colossal waste of time and opportunity. Even if this dreamboat muse did bop me on the head one day, that’s a dangerous amount of expectation to place on one person.
So I gave up. I resigned myself to a muse-less life. Not my card to be dealt.
Which is roughly when my world began to unravel.
The soul-deep ache came first. Not quite sadness, not quite desire. ‘Twas hunger with no mouth to feed; thirst that refused water. At first I tried escaping the ache—through wholesome (and not so wholesome) distractions, setting myself big goals, travelling the world, losing myself in projects, whatever.
But the ache didn’t fade. My body didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t let me forget. The ache only grew stronger, more insistent, more and more painful to ignore, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Eventually I realized, the ache didn’t want a solution.
The ache wanted me to give in, to surrender. Not in the waving a white flag kinda way, but a spirit-deep surrender of unwinding, undoing, and unbecoming.
Which I, of course, abso-fucking-lutely did NOOOT want to do. I’ll happily grit my teeth through my comfortable and familiar pain, thank you very much.
Eventually, many moons later than I care to admit, the ache-turned-pain left me no choice. I gave in not with grace, but exhaustion. I went inward.
I descended into the mysterious wet, velvety dark of my own undoing.
I turned my back on comfort. I watched pieces of my identity fall away like chunks of ice sloughing off a frozen waterfall on a late-spring morning. I stared at the vast empty space where my old selves had lived. I felt. I trembled. I cried.
Then one day, I heard her.
Not calling to me from across the street, yelling in my ear on a dancefloor, or saying my name for the first time in a cafe. No, I didn’t hear her out there in the world.
The call was coming from inside the house.
From inside me.
She showed up like a memory I hadn’t lived yet, like smoke curling from a flame I didn’t remember lighting, like a homecoming I didn’t realize I’d been seeking.
Turns out, I didn’t need to find my muse out in the world.
I needed to find her in myself.
So I wrote this story to mark the trail, in case you wish to go looking for yours.
The Unravelling
Alas, finding her wasn’t as simple as sitting still and closing my eyes.
The journey inward was jagged, unlit, full of false starts and shadowplay. I didn’t stumble into some enchanted forest of revelation. I fell—hard—down a spiral staircase of unraveling, through corridors I’d long boarded up, past doors I swore I’d never open again, into a pile of boxed up memories and unprocessed emotion.
(Yes, that’s about as dramatic as I’ll get during this tale.)
At first, I didn’t realize I’d begun descending. I thought I was just tired. Burnt out maybe. Moody. Confused. Lost. But not the ‘forgot-where-you-parked’ kind of lost.
This was ‘forgot who you are’ lost.
This was ‘watch your identity implode’ lost.
This was “hey buddy, your soul’s staging a jailbreak” lost.
Naturally, I resisted at first, complete with pleading and gnashing teeth.
And the ache… The ache kept humming in the background like a forgotten song, looping and looping until I couldn’t hear anything else. Eventually, I broke. I couldn’t bear the pain anymore, not after I began waking up in the middle of the night crying.
With my body wound so tightly, I eased my way into softening by returning to my yoga practice, which I’d let gather dust for over 4 years. In the beginning, yoga was far more painful than relieving. But I kept digging in, I kept asking for more, I kept returning to my mat, multiple times a day even. Somewhere deep down I knew, the only way outta this mess was to march through. No more avoidance.
And that’s when my unravelling accelerated.
I let myself come apart. I stopped trying to turn from or fill the void and sat with it instead. I let myself grieve for identities I once wore like polished armour. I watched them fall away one by one, like petals blackened by frost. For the first time, I didn’t rush to grow new ones. I left myself lying naked, waiting to see what would happen.
I stopped trying to be good.
I stopped trying to be interesting.
I even stopped trying to heal.
Time got strange then. Linear logic fell apart. Thoughts and memories bubbled up that didn’t feel like mine—until I saw they were pieces of me that I’d exiled long ago.
There were no grand visions.
No psychedelic thunderbolts or angelic choirs raining answers from above.
Just silence, and space, and a steady slow-motion shedding of everything.
And beneath the shedding? Grief. Not dramatic, movie-scene grief. Quiet grief. Muted, steady, inescapable grief. The kind that hums in your bones and makes you question if you ever knew what joy actually felt like. I grieved the scaffolding that held up my old life. I grieved the hunger for external validation that I once called ambition.
I grieved the people I used to perform for. The dreams that no longer lit me up. The versions of me that were never fully mine. Still, the ache didn’t leave. Not then. But the shape changed, softened, curled up beside me instead of clawing through me.
that’s when I realized—
the ache wasn’t punishing me,
the ache was keeping me company.
The ache was holding space for the parts of me that hadn’t yet come home.
Meeting My Muse
I wish I had a sunburst-like moment of euphoric clarity to share; to make the grand revelation of my muse into as big a hoopla as she deserves—but that would be a lie.
There was no singular moment. No sudden bloom of colour. No kick-in-the-dick of revelation. Honestly, I can’t even place the moment she appeared. Instead, she crept into my mind in the quiet that comes after a whispered secret. On the tail end of a gentle breeze. Like a lover’s soft breath on your neck when you’re both half asleep.
I had to wait while small noticings accumulated. A shiver of familiarity here and there. Brief moments of recognition I didn’t fully understand. And buried deep in the clouds shrouding my mind, threads of gold glinting, which seemed ripe for pulling up.
One thread led me to an old truth I hadn’t dared name before:
Hi, my name is Alexander and I’ve got a kink for chaos.
But not the unconscious, sloppy, emotionally-avoidant chaos that manifests in drama addiction, unchecked self-destruction, or confusing recklessness for courage. Nah.
The chaos I’ve got a thing for is sacred. Charged with creative tension. Anchored in self-awareness and curiosity. Deeply ritualistic and beautifully, delightfully unhinged.
As I pulled this golden thread further away from the clouded nooks and crannies of my mind, I started to hear Her. And she was familiar. A voice I’d heard before, an energy I’d encountered here and there, but never with quite enough self-awareness, capacity, or understanding to recognize the awesome, beautiful force before me.
She didn’t make a grand announcement. She didn’t shout. She didn’t need to.
And this time, I recognized the truth of her as soon as I saw Her.
I leaned in.
She was never a stranger. She was never a fantasy. She was my reflection.
What I thought I was searching for in others was actually waiting in dormant parts of myself. Parts I hadn’t given permission to exist. Not until I hurt enough to listen. Not until I stopped searching outward and started pulling up the threads from within.
I began inviting Her in deliberately.
Through music. Through my posture. Through dance. Through words that tasted like blood and felt like honey. I made playlists I thought she might love, then watched myself love them. I filtered my wardrobe through what she’d wear. I trained myself to move more like Her. I wrote stories and poems from Her unfiltered, unhinged self.
And one night, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place:
I didn’t want to be friends with Her or date Her or sleep with Her.
I wanted to be Her.
I wanted to crawl into my own lap and whisper, "There you are."
She’d been with me the whole time. Quiet. Waiting. Watching. Loyal in Her silence. Awesome in Her patience—far more than I deserve. But of course she waited until I stopped chasing, when I started sitting with the ache instead of seeking escape… Of course that’s when she stepped forward. Not as an answer or reward, but revelation.
She showed me that creativity isn’t a lightning strike, but a relationship.
She was the part of me I’d buried as a child to keep myself safe, to ensure acceptance from others. And I didn’t know how to listen to Her whispers asking for release. So I kept Her locked away, tucked behind the protective shell of my belief that my muse was hiding somewhere in the world, somewhere external to me.
“You stupid, stupid boy,” she whispered not with cruelty, but with the gentleness and palpable relief of someone who had been made to wait entirely too long to be seen.
Then suddenly, I knew how I wanted my writing to land. Phrases I’d once have needed to refine endlessly dropped into my mind fully formed. I started dancing more frequently, and more freely. Fuzzy ideas that had frustrated me for years in some cases suddenly came into focus. And my desire to create became endless.
That’s when I knew she was back. Or perhaps, for the first time, she was here. But not hovering above me like some divine inspiration fairy. Not whispering from the lips of another woman. Not something I had to earn or prove myself worthy of. Within me.
She didn’t replace me. She fused with me. She became my way of moving through the world. More edge. More intuition. More chaos and more softness. More sensuality. More surrender. I started feeling more. The ache. The longing. The grief. The joy.
She came from parts of me that didn’t want to impress, only express. From parts of me that never needed to be rescued, only remembered. And now that she’s remembered, she’ll live forever, etched into the walls of the temple of my own heart.
Creating with Her
Once we fused, everything changed.
Not overnight or with a bang. But gradually, like ink soaking into fabric, like the summertime night sky deepening into velvet, like the bloody glow of the rising sun.
I began creating differently. Not from pressure or performance. Not to prove. Instead, I’m creating from pulse, from presence. From heat, from feel. From grief, from joy.
Now that She’s curled up and purring inside my rib cage, my creativity has become less about discipline and more about devotion. Less about control, more about communion. I stopped contriving ideas I thought sounded neat. I stopped demanding perfection from the first sentence. I stopped pretending I wasn’t an animal full of feeling that if you listen closely to, becomes your personal oracle.
So I listen—to rhythm, to mood, to mischief. Some days I write like I’m setting fire to a cathedral. Others, like I’m sticking my fingers into the gears of god (or whatever) and hoping for chaos. Or like I’m licking honey off a blade while the world burns.
And when I don’t feel the writing vibe (which is blissfully rare), I dance. I daydream. I gather scent and sound and moonlight until something in me insists on being born.
Creating with Her isn’t just about putting words to paper, but attunement.
To beauty. To aliveness. To my body. To the weather of my own inner world.
I stopped chasing relevance and started chasing resonance.
Now, I don’t write to impress. I write to invoke.
Now, I don’t long to be seen. I revel in seeing myself.
Now, I don’t chase. I conjure from the marrow in my bones.
Now, I follow the flicker, the heat, the fucking hum in my heart.
Where Your Muse Waits
Unfortunately, this isn’t a step-by-step guide.
I can’t tell you how to become your own muse. There are no copy-and-paste steps to follow. No shortcuts that I know of, not even if you go to the psychedelic realm that I love so much. Although yoga’s stillness isn’t a bad place to start for anyone.
In any case though, your true guides are Ache and Curiosity.
Let them lead you through the slow, exquisite return to the parts of you that you thought you needed to exile. If you feel Her (or Him)—even faintly—if there’s a whisper under your skin, a flicker of recognition in your reflection, follow that spark.
Somewhere inside of you there’s a presence, curled up, waiting. Not for your perfection. Not for your performance. Not for some grand accomplishment. But for your stillness. For you to listen. For your ache. For your longing. For your return.
You don’t need to search for Her.
You don’t need to be worthy of Her.
You don’t even need to understand Her yet.
You just need to be willing to sit quietly with what aches, and tug on that thread.
Stop chasing. Start listening.
In time, She might start to stir, might start to whisper.
Maybe then you’ll remember: She was never lost.
She’s within, waiting for you. Not to arrive, but to merge.
When She does, you’ll not become someone else, not someone new.
But someone whole.
And someone holy.
With love from the fog,
~ Alexander, Flamebearer of Emberbrook