Who is she?

When I’m asked how I became a companion, I often find myself in a breathless gush about the strange and mysterious confluences of Summer 2019.  

For a year, my daily routine consisted of waking up at five to rush to the train and barrel my little body into the loop to attend an excruciating, rigorous, yet highly rewarding psychoanalysis. My life was uniquely outfitted to accommodate an inflammatory experience. I was working as a university librarian, and the quiet, dawdling environment and well-mannered colleagues provided a soft landing pad for the insane project of waking up at an ungodly hour every day to go lie on a couch and regurgitate and remetabolize my unconscious materials and childhood traumas to the largely silent yet deeply, deeply kind man sat behind me.

I fucking loved it, tears and transference and slog and all, but then again, I’m an intense person. Those born into fire often find themselves attempting a commensurate experience of redress, be it through a compulsive repetition of awfulness in another form or through choosing to face it head-on. Like for like, as they say. 

No doubt, the relationship between analyst and analysand takes a curious form. And I can’t emphasize enough, it is fundamentally about the relationship. A therapeutic alliance must be earned so that what emerges in the intersubjective space can be safely alchemized. In my experience, the meat and potatoes of analysis was about finding the capacity to surrender fully into feeling my ugliest feelings and learning that I could trust I would be accepted and held (by the couch, which functions as proxy for the analyst’s arms as proxy for the mother’s arms as proxy eventually for my own, self-reliant arms). This is the realm of dreams and symbols and totemic transformation. And while you can’t be reparented, with courage, effort, patience, humility, and a good-enough therapist, you can certainly fill in some of the gaps.

I had been in different kinds of therapy for a few years before, but it was analysis that enabled me to lay down my armor and begin to live in a way that was more true to myself. Throughout this process, change happened slowly at first, but exponentially, and it was as if the J-curve eventually gave way to a quantum leap. I was suddenly this new person, with self-worth and confidence. I was magnanimous with myself and others, I was attractive, I was finding equanimity and gentleness with myself. I was getting buff in the gym. I was in self-actualization training wheels. I wasn’t perfect and never will be, but I was finally aligned with the part of me that wanted more for myself and believed that good things were possible.


And with that came the knowing that I had something to offer. I began to embrace and lean into myself - my intuition, my curiosity, my sensitivity, my fearlessness, my resilience, my capacity to connect deeply and rapidly with others, my sensuality, my intelligence, my gentleness, my strength. I am a survivor, I am a warrior, but I am also a lover. What happened to me, miraculously, did not close my heart, and it gave me the ability to conceive of the human experience on broader terms. I felt connected to my purpose as a seeker of intimacy, truth, authentic experiences, and the depths of human emotion. 

During this time I also encountered the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of gnostic texts found in an jar in Egypt by some teenagers in the 1940’s. Inside this collection is a text called “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” To us contemporaries, it reads like poetry, but it’s actually an aretaology, a form of ancient prose that serves as a sacred account of a deity. The narrative “I” of the text simultaneously enchants the reader while she manifests herself into existence in a hypnotic series of paradoxes. She is the goddess that came before god, the totality, the womb of creation, the everything and the nothing, the dark birthplace and endplace. When I read it, I had a spiritual experience of unity with the feminine power and I felt myself to be a vessel of something larger. It felt like the truest thing, and I knew that I must pursue a life in union and in service to this force. She has at times been called Ishtar, and at times Inanna, the Sumerian appellation for the goddess of love, war, and temple companionship. She is the reason and the name, and my experiences continue to flow from her.

While I have since terminated that formal analysis, the commitment to self-analysis and spiritual devotion never ends. I’m devoted to rigorous self-inquiry and the other side of its coin: rigorous self-love. Several life experiences brought to my knees. And because of that, I was given the gift of transformation. I have deep reverence for the human capacity not only to harm, but to transform and to embody unifying love. It’s been my experience that the quality of our relationship with ourselves determines our relationship with others. I believe that we are all more similar than different, and it is my calling to make space for intimacy and mutual self-discovery to unfold. I have been honored to witness and invest in truly beautiful and soul nourishing connections in this world, and I adore the ease and freedom of carving out intentional safe harbors for our tenderest longings. The boundaries that contain, sustain.

These experiences, among others too numerous to recount, led me to becoming Dove, an amalgam of my being that is both very much me and very much more than me. She is a presence and a facilitator of human connection and pleasure. She invites us to come together, go beyond ourselves, and co-create a shameless realm of wild-hearted exploration. 

Within a few weeks of becoming Dove, I put my notice in at the library. I loved this too much, and wanted to be able to experience more. I haven’t looked back.

xx,

N