Sitting With Yourself — Is Dark...
What You Confront When Actually Learn to Sit With Yourself In The Dark
I sat down to write about “How to Sit with Yourself.” After several hours of research, trying to piece together what others had written on the subject, I realized I couldn’t do it. The articles I found felt hollow and surface-level. They seemed designed to help people rationalize their behavior, gloss over patterns, and move on without addressing root causes. I kept finding the same frameworks — sit with your emotions, practice self-compassion, work toward acceptance. All useful, but none of them touched what I’d actually encountered when I was forced to sit with myself.
So once again, I found a gap. And I couldn’t structure it into steps or a clean narrative because what I’d discovered was messy and dark. So this piece is an exploration of what you find when you sit with yourself in that darkness, when you realize the suffering you face is self-induced. Because there is a point, that once you’ve done the inner work, you’ve resolved what you thought was the past and started to move forward, you will eventually find yourself here.
It was April 2017: my best friend sat across from me at my kitchen table. She looked at me and said the words that would break something open. “Macala, I am afraid of you. You’re so angry.” She put her head down as she said it, cowering slightly, bracing for my reaction the way she’d been doing for years.
This was someone I loved, someone who ran my company for me. And she was managing my moods like a threat. That was my fault, though I didn’t fully understand it yet.That year, I had made more money than most people make in a lifetime. I was burned out, angry, irrational, and nothing made me happy despite the success.
At the same time, everyone told I was at the top of my game professionally. In the background, I treated my staff like servants and focused solely on work. I thought the problem was external — the city, the environment, the people around me — so I left Los Angeles and moved to Northern California.
For years I wandered through new cities and routines, even buying a house to gut and rebuild. As if rebuilding walls would somehow rebuild me. Then COVID hit and my work dried up almost completely. I was forced to sit in my house with nowhere to go but inward. Here’s what I found:
When there’s nothing left to distract you, everything that isn’t working becomes unavoidable. And if you’re willing to look honestly, you start seeing your own hand in it. I saw patterns I’d built, choices I’d made, walls I’d constructed around myself. The recognition felt like standing in a house I didn’t remember building.
I looked for guidance because I needed something to make sense of what I was facing. Zen offered meditation practices but stopped short of my actual question: What do you do when you realize you’re the architect of your own suffering?
I continued to search for answers. Self-help sold transformation but skipped over the part where you sit with who you’ve been. Psychology gave me frameworks for understanding emotions but couldn’t touch the specific horror I was beginning to see. So I walked into the darkness of my own making without a map.
The Bitter Recognition
What I found wasn’t what any of those traditions had prepared me for. The first thing that emerged wasn’t clarity or peace — it was the sharp, uncomfortable recognition of my own complicity. The moment I realized I was complicit in my own life didn’t feel like insight, it felt like betrayal. What I’m describing is the recognition that even my suffering had my fingerprints on it — not because I was broken or deserved it, but because of specific choices I’d made and avoided.
That recognition is bitter because you can’t go back to innocence once you see it. The hardest part wasn’t admitting I’d made mistakes, since mistakes you can learn from and grow beyond. The hardest part was realizing I’d built entire systems of behavior that I thought were necessary — that the anger was protective, that it kept me effective and safe.
When I actually sat still and looked at my own patterns without flinching, the story I’d been telling myself shattered. I discovered my motivations were murkier than I’d thought, that my reasons were lies I’d told myself. The person I believed I was when making those choices didn’t quite exist the way I remembered. This realization opened into territory I hadn’t anticipated — a place where responsibility itself became unstable.
The Stranger Who Built This Life
Here’s what nobody tells you about sitting with yourself when you reach that place:
You discover you don’t actually know the person who built your life.
When you realize you’re complicit, at least you can point to the choices and say “I did that,” but when you realize you don’t fully understand WHY you made those choices, when you can’t trust your own story about yourself, you’re sitting with a stranger:
A stranger who shares your body and your memories.
A stranger whose fears and desires you’re only now beginning to see.
A stranger who built your life while you were busy believing you understood what you were doing.
I made my best friend afraid of me for years, she stayed with me because she loved me that much. I can give you the explanations — the perfectionism, the survival patterns, the unprocessed trauma — but those explanations don’t fully account for it. They’re accurate enough to sound true but incomplete enough to remain mysterious. Sitting with yourself means building tolerance for that mystery, for recognizing:
I did this, and I don’t have a good enough reason why, and I might do it again because I still don’t fully know what drives me.
Most people will do almost anything to escape that specific discomfort. We’ll blame others, blame circumstances, blame our past. We’ll spiral into self-hatred or leap into frantic change. Anything but sit with the simple, terrible truth:
I chose this and I can’t unchoose it, and I don’t entirely understand the person who made that choice.
Once you arrive at that recognition — that you’re sitting with a stranger whose choices you inherit but don’t fully understand — you face another layer of difficulty. The usual frameworks for self-forgiveness and grace start to collapse under the weight of that not-knowing.
What Grace Actually Costs
Everyone talks about self-compassion, extending grace to yourself, forgiving yourself for past mistakes. But that language assumes you understand what you did and why, and now you’re choosing to be kind about it. It assumes a clarity that didn’t exist yet when I was sitting with the stranger who’d built my life.
The realization didn’t come once — it came in waves over months and years. Each time I thought I’d faced it, I discovered another layer of my own participation I hadn’t wanted to see. The emotions weren’t sequential either; they were simultaneous and contradictory. Rage and grief and shame and relief all at once, tangled together in ways that resisted untangling.
“Extend grace to yourself” — this is where most self-help and mindfulness frameworks collapsed into spiritual bypassing for me. Because real grace in this context wasn’t warm or gentle. The grace that mattered was colder and more honest, the words it spoke within me were:
I did this, I was scared and confused and I made choices that hurt me and hurt others. I’m capable of doing this again, and I’m staying anyway.
That wasn’t loving-kindness in the Buddhist sense. It was something harder — choosing to remain in relationship with myself after seeing what I was capable of creating. It was commitment despite knowledge, not comfort despite pain.
I still haven’t fully unpacked all that anger. Some of it I simply let go of, not because I understood it, but because I chose not to live in it anymore. Some of it still surfaces and I have to catch it, recognize it, and choose differently in real time. And no, it’s not healing, but it is building the capacity to stay conscious of myself even when I don’t like what I see. That capacity—that’s what sitting with yourself actually demands.
Learning to Sit With Yourself
Today, sitting with myself isn’t meditation or an exercise I do for twenty minutes a day. Sitting with myself is developing tolerance for profound discomfort without moving to fix it. It means staying present while I realize I had more choices than I told myself I had, that I avoided possibilities that terrified me, that my current pain is downstream from old fears I can’t go back and address differently.
I don’t run from that awareness or reframe it into growth or learning. I let it be exactly as uncomfortable as it is, which goes against every instinct I have. The darkness in this work isn’t punishment or self-flagellation: It’s the end of innocence about myself, discovering that I’m more complicated, more contradictory, more cowardly, and more capable than my story allowed.
What sitting with myself actually requires isn’t about feeling better, it’s about seeing clearly, even when what I see implicates me. That clarity comes from developing the specific capacity to remain conscious while my story about myself breaks down, while I realize I don’t know myself as well as I thought, while I recognize my own hand in my suffering and can’t look away.
Yes, this is something stranger and more difficult — the ongoing practice of choosing to stay aware of the role my thoughts and actions play in my life, even when it’s uncomfortable, without trying to resolve myself into something simpler. And that practice changes you, though not in the ways you expect.
What Remains Afterwards
There is no endpoint to this. No moment when you’ve fully sat with yourself and can move on, complete. What changes is your ability to tolerate your own company, to recognize when old patterns are trying to reassert themselves, to catch yourself building new cages even as you’re still processing the old ones.
I learned to sit with the stranger who built my life — not to understand her completely, since that might not be possible, but to remain in relationship with her anyway. I learned to accept that any single story about myself will always be incomplete. The grace isn’t warm, the clarity isn’t comfortable, and the sitting isn’t peaceful, but I stay anyway. And slowly, through that staying, she is no longer a stranger, because she’s someone I’ve become.