The Things I Would Choose If Nobody Ever Saw Them.

“Written during the days leading into a Gemini New Moon closely aligned with my natal North Node, a period that coincided with a profound sense of completion and inner reorientation.”

The Things I Would Choose If Nobody Ever Saw Them

On Rubedo, Freedom, and the Day the Question Finally Changed

“The moment I stopped confusing freedom with achievement and realised that freedom is the ability to choose a life that reflects your essence rather than your résumé.”

There is a moment that arrives after enough loss, enough grief, enough searching and enough honest self-examination, where the question changes. Not the answer. The question.

For years, I thought I was searching for answers. I searched through spirituality, healing, astrology, horses, design, writing, service, community, purpose and self-development. I searched through books, teachers, conversations, and silence. I searched through success and failure, rebuilding, and loss. The assumption beneath all of it was simple: there must be something I am not seeing, something I have not yet understood, one final piece that will make the picture make sense. And so I kept looking.

What I did not realise was that life had stopped asking me to find answers years ago. Life was asking me to become honest. Not spiritually honest. Not psychologically honest. Existentially honest. Honest enough to stop asking what I should want and begin asking what I actually want. Those are very different questions.

Yesterday I woke up wanting to throw my crystals into a waterfall. That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. It felt strangely ordinary. Returning them to the earth. Not selling them, not donating them, not giving them away. Offering them back to where they truly came from. Having no desire to hoard or hold onto them physically. Understanding I carry the wisdom of it all in my heart, in my soul, in my being.

For more than twenty-five years, I have collected crystals. Some are beautiful. Some are rare. Some are valuable. Many travelled through multiple chapters of my life. And yesterday I looked at them and felt something I wasn’t expecting. Weight. Not financial weight. Psychological weight. The weight of identities I had outgrown, of stories that had already completed themselves, of carrying things simply because I had carried them for a long time.

At first, I thought the crystals were the issue. Then I realised they weren’t. They were simply the first thread. Because once I started pulling on it, everything else appeared. The singing bowls. The tarot cards. The rugs. The furniture. The saddle. The website. The business. The identities. Every object seemed to be asking the same question: why are you still carrying me?

That question became increasingly uncomfortable because the honest answer wasn’t love. The honest answer was fear. Fear that I might need it one day. Fear that I might not be able to replace it. Fear that life might never improve enough to afford replacing it. Fear that the future version of me would be poorer than the present one. Fear, in other words, dressed as practicality. And once I saw that, I could not unsee it.

Then a question appeared that I had never genuinely asked before. If my financial concerns disappeared tomorrow, what would I actually take with me? Not what is valuable. Not what would be expensive to replace. Not what might come in handy. What would I choose?

The distinction changed everything. Because I suddenly realised that many of the things I had been carrying were not things I genuinely loved. They were things I was afraid to lose. One is chosen. The other is defended. One comes from affection. The other comes from scarcity. And embedded quietly beneath all of it was an assumption I hadn’t known was structural: what if life never gets better than this? What if I never have the means to replace these things? What if this is as good as it gets?

That assumption had shaped almost every decision without my awareness. And seeing it revealed something even deeper. If the life I genuinely wanted arrived tomorrow, I would choose differently. Not because my tastes have improved. Not because the objects are wrong. Because I am different, the woman who bought some of those things no longer exists. I appreciate her. I honour her. I understand why she chose what she chose. But I am not her anymore.

Perhaps the most surprising realisation emerged when I followed that thread to its conclusion. If my life genuinely reflected who I am now, I would probably delete my website. That sentence startled me, because for years I believed visibility was necessary. Necessary for work, for opportunity, for survival, for relevance. But when I imagined the life I genuinely wanted, the website disappeared immediately. Not because I reject my work or my gifts or wish to hide. Quite the opposite.

I no longer need to be seen as anything. The woman who can design is still here. The woman who understands horses is still here. The woman who reads charts is still here. The woman who writes is still here. The woman who sees patterns and possibilities is still here. Nothing has been lost. What has disappeared is the need to organise my life around proving those gifts exist. I no longer want to maintain a public identity that requires constant positioning, explaining, marketing, branding or packaging. I no longer want to perform visibility. If someone genuinely wanted to work with me, I would rather my name arrived through conversation, through trust, through one person quietly saying to another: you should speak with her. There is something profoundly human about that, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, not because I want to disappear, but because I no longer need to be found by everyone and only by the people genuinely meant to find me.

What surprised me most was realising that none of this felt like withdrawal. I am not turning away from life. I am turning toward it, toward conversations that matter more than audiences, toward friendship that matters more than networking, toward craftsmanship that matters more than branding, toward a horse I know by name rather than a reputation built around horses, toward a home I love rather than a life that looks impressive from the outside, toward work chosen because it interests me rather than because it scales. For years, I thought freedom meant having more options. Now I think freedom means having fewer obligations to become someone other than yourself. Not smaller, but truer.

The more honestly I sat with this, the more clearly another truth emerged. The world teaches us that gifts should become businesses, passions should become brands, skills should become identities, interests should become platforms. Everything must scale. Everything must be leveraged. But what if that isn’t true? What if a gift can simply remain a gift? What if a talent does not need an audience to be real? What if value exists whether or not it is monetised?

Those questions have been quietly dismantling me. And perhaps that is why Carl Jung’s description of Rubedo landed so deeply when I encountered it.

Jung borrowed the language of medieval alchemy not because he believed anyone was literally turning lead into gold, but because he recognised that the alchemists had stumbled onto a symbolic map of psychological transformation centuries before modern psychology had words for it. They described a process with distinct stages. The first is Nigredo, the blackening, the genuine collapse of what is false, the dissolution of the inherited self. The second is Albedo, the whitening, the long unwitnessed work of sorting through what remains after the fire, holding each piece of yourself up to the light and asking: is this actually mine? Did I choose this, or did I inherit it? The third is Rubedo, the reddening, the return of colour after the long burning. Jung considered it the rarest achievement in all of human psychological development. Not the arrival of a new self, but the return of life once the false selves have finally exhausted themselves.

For years, I thought Rubedo meant the next chapter arriving. Now I understand it differently. Perhaps it means becoming the person capable of recognising the next chapter when it comes. Because perhaps life could not rebuild while I was still trying to build from identities that no longer belonged to me. Perhaps friendships fell away because they belonged to an older self. How could life introduce new friendships before I understood the woman those friendships would be meeting? How could a new community arrive before I understood whether I even wanted community in the way I once imagined it? How could a new career emerge while I was still disentangling myself from the belief that every gift needed to become a profession? Perhaps what looked like emptiness was not emptiness at all. Perhaps it was incubation. Not because life was withholding something from me, but because I was still discovering the person for whom that future would eventually be built.

Perhaps certain careers and communities disappeared because they belonged to an older self. Perhaps the long silence was not punishment. Perhaps it was preparation. Because how do you build a life around your true nature before you understand what that nature actually is? Anything created before that knowing is repetition, an extension of an unfinished story, a continuation of an identity that has not yet completed itself. My journey was never about repetition. It was about completion. Completion of grief. Completion of striving. Completion of proving. Completion of the hungry ghost that spent most of my life whispering: show them, prove it, become something, build something, monetise something, be somebody.

Perhaps that was the final ghost. Not failure, not loss, not grief, but the belief that my life needed to become something visible in order to be real. The belief that worth had to be demonstrated, that gifts had to become businesses, that meaning had to become identity, that a life not witnessed somehow counted for less than a life performed. I spent years trying to prove that I was capable, valuable, intelligent, gifted, worthy of belonging. Even when I succeeded, the hunger remained, because no amount of becoming can satisfy a hunger built upon the belief that you are not already enough. What if I already am? What if the lesson was never to become more? What if the lesson was discovering what remained when all the becoming finally stopped?

The life I want is not a poor life. That has been one of the most important things for me to admit, because for a long time I unconsciously treated simplicity as though it required sacrifice, as though choosing essence meant accepting less. But that is not what I am describing. The life I want is abundant, beautiful, comfortable, and spacious. I want a home I love because I love it. Land I care for. A horse I know by name. Art that moves me. Books that nourish me. Conversations with genuine depth and friendship with real substance. Time to write and think and walk and notice. Time to be present with the people I love. Time to help when I genuinely feel called. Time to live. Not as symbols of success, not as evidence that I have made it, not as proof of anything, but simply because they belong to the life that feels true. There is a profound difference between wealth as performance and wealth as freedom. One asks to be seen. The other simply allows you to live. None of those things requires an audience. None require a brand, a platform, or a performance. They require only enough space to belong to themselves.

And perhaps that is what finally changed. Not the circumstances. Not the astrology. Not the future. The question. Because after all these years, I am no longer asking what is wrong with this picture. I am asking: what would I choose if nobody ever saw them?

Hidden inside that question was another. Who am I when there is nobody left to impress?

For the first time in a very long time, I think I know. And perhaps that knowing is the threshold itself. Not the arrival. Not the reward. Not the next chapter announced with trumpets. Just the quiet recognition that the woman standing here today would not choose the same life she chose before. And maybe that is exactly why the old life had to end. Not so that I could become someone else, but so that I could finally choose what belongs to me. Not from fear. Not from scarcity. Not from performance. But from love.

And perhaps that is what the alchemists meant by the reddening. Not the arrival of a new life. The return of your own.

Delahrose Roobie Myer

A scribe, listening to the field. A little lantern in the shadows.

Author of Fatima’s Alchemy