How Did I Get Here?
I didn’t mean to find this place.
Energetic metamorphosis and integration wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card. I wasn’t questing for enlightenment. I certainly wasn’t hunting for divine masculinity.
I was on a different mission: To travel back in time and tend to a heartbreak I never let myself feel, process, or accept had even happened at all.
In doing so, I hoped to not only soothe my heart and make peace with my past, but heal from my following relationship too—one I entered bruised and left beaten.
(Not physically! Mentally and spiritually. For reasons beyond the relationship too.)
As I shovelled the soil, cracked the bones, and dug into the marrow of my old heartbreak, I stumbled into the most wonderful transformation of my life (so far!)
Here Lies the Good Soldier
For most of my life, my interpretation of masculinity was:
Performance as identity: “I am what I achieve.”
Control as safety: “Never let the chaos show.”
Stoicism as pride: “Don’t flinch, don’t weep.”
Productivity as worth: “Stillness is laziness.”
Usefulness over uniqueness: “Be valuable, not vulnerable.”
This is the world most boys are inducted into. The masculinity of containment rather than expression. A masculinity forged in pressure and expectation. Plus, I grew up in hockey locker rooms, an environment where you’re steeped in these noxious beliefs.
I never stood a chance against Traditional Masculinity.
(The distorted, wounded version of Traditional Masculinity is what you may have seen referred to as Toxic Masculinity—characterized by misogyny, emotional suppression, homophobia, dominance through fear, entitlement, violence.)
I lived in the Traditional Masculine for a long, long time. Most of my life.
As I got older, I began having to fight harder and harder to be the Good Soldier. He didn’t rise so easily anymore. His once-fabled consistency slowly crumbled. The uniform morphed into a straitjacket. He was tired of putting on the mask.
I didn’t know it yet, but my version of masculinity was long past expiry.
The Good Soldier was dead, but not yet buried.
The Divine Feminine Came First
While the Good Soldier slowly composted, I leaned into my growing affinity for the feminine. I began building myself a new energetic home and orientation in Her world in fits and starts, bits and pieces, through choices made over a matter of years.
I let my hair grow long and gloriously curly. I started wearing more soft, bright, and pastel colours. I got the nose piercings I’d always wanted. I started buying women’s sweaters (although that’s more because most men’s have so much more sleeve length than I need, while women's stop right at my wrists—perfection.) I let myself soften.
Which all felt like steps in the right direction, but still, I didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel aligned. I didn’t feel happy again or any closer to the vague, nebulous point of being “better.” I even began asking BIG questions about my gender and sexual orientation.
I didn’t feel not heterosexual, but my pull towards feminine expression—and how good surrendering to that pull felt—made for some really confusing feelings.
Until one day in May, amongst all this unwinding, my full, holy, sacred She arrived.
She came quietly, but dressed in neon purple and blue, covered in glitter, splattered with paint. And good grief Charlie Brown, never before have I felt so alive, so at home in my own skin, so at peace with who I am, what I like, and what I want.
She began changing everything.
The Divine Masculine Came Second
As I began getting to know the essence of my Divine Feminine, I found more and more Doors of Self to explore. Behind those doors, I found new parts of myself.
As I began getting to know and integrate those new parts, I changed. And the breakthroughs began pouring, like a dam letting all the pent-up water out.
One of those breakthroughs entered quietly through a side door. I never saw or heard anything, but I felt the atmosphere change. A presence now existed where there’d been none before. Solid. Dense. Not the Good Soldier. Not that brittle shell.
This was something different. Something deeper.
I began noticing Him.
At first, I didn’t recognize this new presence as masculine anything. He didn’t burst onto the scene with a battle cry. He carried no clipboard or silly checklist. He wasn’t wearing a custom-tailored suit. There was just a steady, solid humming presence.
So I explored. I poked and prodded the presence. I asked the moon for advice.
Eventually, I realized who and what I was dealing with.
Divine Masculinity, and he rewired me for:
Presence: “Without presence, the world will pass me by.”
Mirroring: “I’ll become what and who I want to attract.”
Devotion: “I’m fuelled by love and reverence, not habit or duty.”
Stillness: “Stillness allows me to parse signal from static.”
Intuition: “If I listen to my body, I receive the answers I seek.”
He didn’t come to dominate or perform.
He could care less about winning or control.
He’s not here to suppress pain or sadness.
He won’t stand for stifling authenticity.
He’s not afraid of softness or truth or help.
Instead, he’s here to hold, to witness, to protect.
So I’ve let Him. By letting more of my inner world out. By moving differently. By entering rooms with more confidence, more mischief in my eye. By speaking slower. By holding eye contact longer. By acting from what feels right, honest, and true to me.
He didn’t ask me to don armour and man the walls, or harden like Metapod.
He didn’t ask me to cut my hair and remove my piercings, or stop wearing lavender.
(This would have been our first fight. He wouldn’t stand a chance.)
Instead, He asked me to rise. To honour my roots: my beliefs, my values, my desires, my truths. He asked me to proudly claim the skin and space I stand in, preferably with an air of defiance, a big ‘ol grin, and a glass of cherry lemonade in one hand.
So I did.
I smiled at the Good Soldier turning to compost, let him lie, and I began anew.
And Divine Feminine? She’s thrilled with this development. She’s singing, dancing, writing, and setting off fireworks of glitter and neon paint. She’s exploring the psychedelic realm and communing with the Universe. What a grand ‘ol time.
Which is changing everything. My body is lighter, my energy brighter. My mind is calmer, my heart grows open, and my spirit is more and more free by the day.
And holy fuck,
I needed that.
Wholeness isn’t a Crown
The hardest part may be finished, but the work has only begun.
Now that He’s here, He steadies my breath when Her chaos roars.
He digs my feet into the ground when Her wind howls. He holds silence and space while She runs amok. He holds the fire while She plays without fear.
He is anchor, guide, and scaffold.
Now She can smear lipstick on my plants and paint poems on my walls without fear of being lost in the madness. She can break the silence by blasting drum’n’bass or singing without worrying about being too much. She can explore behind the veil without any trepidation or nervousness of what She might find.
Together, She and He are a wonderful team.
The world around me hasn’t changed.
But how I meet the world sure has, and is still.
This harmony I’ve found, between glitter and grit, softness and spine, stillness and storm, feels like the hottest, tastiest, most dangerous, truth I’ve ever lived.
With love from the fog,
~ Alexander, Creator of Emberbrook
Rebis🙂