Welcome Home

In this episode, we enter the soft, messy, ever-changing place of becoming—this is me coming home to myself in real time. This is an unscripted, vulnerable stream of thought on authenticity, emotional fluidity, embodiment, and the process of learning how to feel. Let’s explore the ways we’re often taught to hide, repress, or perform ourselves into safety—and what it means to begin shedding those layers.

We’ll talk about the fear that comes up when we let ourselves be seen, the complexity of discerning between intuition and trauma responses, and the tenderness of learning how to meet all of our emotions—especially the ones that feel inconvenient or overwhelming. This is an invitation (for you and for me) to soften, to stay curious, and to practice the radical art of not abandoning ourselves.

If you’re navigating your own return to self, I hope this feels like a small recognition along the way.

Welcome home. 💕

Thanks for listening to Rainbow After Dark! If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future ones. If something resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts—feel free to leave a comment on YouTube or connect with me on IG @RainbowAfterDark (I don’t use it much, but I exist!).

This podcast is a space for reflection and exploration—it is not a substitute for professional advice. Please take care of yourself and seek support as needed.

More ways to connect coming soon—stay tuned, and thanks for being here.

Transcript

Hello, hello.

If you don’t know, I’m Rainbow, and you’re listening to Rainbow After Dark.

I would like to invite you to be here, to be present with me, and to remind you that right now you don’t need to fix or figure anything out. And this is a space of exploration, and I may very well be saying that more for myself than anyone else—and I also always just have the hope that perhaps there’s a chance that what I say could help somebody else out there. 

So if you’re here, if you’re joining me—welcome. 

I’d like to invite you into this space.

I’m doing things a little differently today than I have in past episodes; I admit I feel a bit nervous about doing this. In past episodes I have worked a lot from a script and that really helped me know exactly what I wanted to say and, you know, I would adlib a bit here and there and add things that felt right, but for the most part I had a lot of my words already written out. I knew very specifically what I wanted to say and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, however, I also know that because of what I want to talk about in today’s episode it feels right for me to be open about that and to also admit and acknowledge that I feel nervous.

This entire process of making the podcast has been kind of scary for me because even though I don’t really have much of an audience—at least right now—I’m still putting myself out there in a way where I can be seen by people. Maybe not visually so much, because you’re hearing my voice, but I feel like you know what I mean.

And what I want to talk about today is rediscovering authenticity and reclaiming self.

Self-reclamation.

So what does that mean?

What does it mean to reclaim ourselves, right?

‘Cause in some aspect, aren’t we always ourselves?

Even if we’re acting out of survival mechanisms, there’s a degree of self that’s always existing and always present, and yet it’s almost like… we’re just different versions and so what is authenticity?

What is true for us?

How do we reclaim something like being ourselves?

It feels like a really abstract concept when you really get down to it—especially when you start taking into account various frameworks, especially psychologically, biologically, spiritually, philosophically… 

One of the things that has been challenging for me to grapple with in this regard has been how everything, in essence, especially if you are someone who ascribes to the idea of non-duality and oneness, the idea that we are all one, we are all interconnected, everything is everything kind of situation—like, isn’t everything self?

And so, anything you’re doing is technically self.

Anything you’re being is technically self, right?

And so in that way it becomes—it feels very—especially abstract for us to consider self-reclamation, and what that could mean, and how we go about it.

I feel like we often hear the advice “just be yourself”, “just be you”, “just be yourself”, which isn’t… I have complicated feelings about this.

It’s not—it’s always well meaning. You know? When somebody tells you to “just be yourself” I feel like this is something that is well meaning as a general rule, right? It’s the acknowledgement that we ideally should be able to be our authentic selves, whoever that is, and be loved and accepted for it, right?

That the understanding—that if somebody doesn’t like us—if say, if we are rejected and being authentic, then, you know, we are able to discern that “oh, well, that’s just not somebody for me”, “those people weren’t meant for me”, right? And if you’re being inauthentic it’s a lot more complicated to filter that, and at the same time, most of us are really deeply conditioned—I think all of us are deeply conditioned to varying degrees—some people I think are more susceptible to conditioning than others. And also what’s interesting, too, is that you can be conditioned in a way that is actually, like, in alignment with your authenticity, but it’s still conditioning. And that’s a whole-that’s a whole thing. And it takes a lot of unraveling and a lot of examining the layers in order to discern, oh, is this-is this conditioned? Is this authentic?

What’s the difference?

What have I had to do in order to survive?

Who have I had to become to survive?

What is beneath that? What is through that?

What is natural to me?

What feels coherent to me as a person?

Because most of us are kind of like bundles of survival strategies, right? I feel like humans are extremely sensitive. If you listened to my last episode I feel like I was extremely clear about this: we are soft, squishy, sensitive things.

We are-we are emotional creatures.

And to distance ourselves from that is like, exemplary of inauthenticity, right?

A lot of us develop intellectualizing and being super logical as a defense mechanism, as a survival strategy. And I can understand why people do this and I also know that humans are not objective. You-we are-we are incapable of pure objectivity. And so if you think that you’re not emotional, if you think that you are, you know, if you’re purely objective then… I say this not in a way to shame you because that’s not-that’s never my goal, plus I feel like shame really is an inside job. We shouldn’t be shaming other people. This is just information. But I feel like the people who think that they’re the most objective are probably some of the least objective, right? Becase we are very subjective creatures. We are-it’s almost like we’re more purely subjective and intersubjective than we are objective. Because our entire reality is shaped by our experiences and our perception of our experiences and the way that we feel, the way that our nervous system feels, right?

Unraveling what it means to be our authentic self is a complicated process and it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of compassion and even courage to be able to do that, and I also understand that not everyone has the capacity or the resources or the support to be able to do that. Because it’s also really important to acknowledge that in order to be authentic—truly authentic—we have to have some degree of safety, right? Which is-it feels weird for me to say that, as someone who has never really experienced safety. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt safe in my life. I am learning very much how to feel safe with myself and that’s been a very long and ongoing process, and I’m doing my best to learn how to be safe in relationship with and to others, which is really scary for me. And I feel like, in some ways, it’s sad because so many of us are so shaped by what we—our survival strategies—who we’ve had to become and adapt to being in order to survive, in order to continue living in this world that we have, this world that we have designed. And I often feel like even though the world we exist in is designed by humans, it’s not designed for humans. It’s pure irony.

And I feel like a lot of the time we are so deeply—these survival strategies are so deeply embedded and so deeply ingrained in us that we don’t actually know who we are beneath them—we think those things are us. And we haven’t had the space or the support or the resources to really explore the idea that that might not be true. 

We become who we need to be in order to survive and we don’t know who we could become in order to thrive, you know? Who we could be if we were able to thrive and I feel like that’s—it’s kind of a tragedy because we are robbed of our own magic and nobody else gets to experience the magic that is us either, right?

I would love to live in a world where that’s not true, you know, where we’re not all constantly striving to survive, but that we are actually allowed the space and that we are all resourced enough and supported enough that we can truly thrive and we can truly flourish beyond the frameworks that we have currently set out. The current societal expectations. Especially in the western world.

You know, I can’t speak to experiences of what it’s like to exist as a person in other countries, other cultures, other than my own. I know the way it is here is absolutely not conducive to me, and probably a lot of other people, really being who is most natural and vibrant, you know? The most vibrant, alive version of ourselves.

I know for me I developed a pattern of fawning, of people pleasing—I have a tendency toward perfectionism and ironically, I also kind of, like, inversely had a tendency to be kind of a little bit rebellious—a bit counter culture, alternative, that kind of thing. It was like I was stuck in the space between what other people expected of me and needed of me and rejection of that because it felt incorrect. And neither of them—neither of those expressions of me were fully honest. Which, you know… in some ways it was. It was honest to where I was at, right? It was honest to my present experience—to the experience I was having at the time and the things I was going through even if it was inauthentic. Which sounds contradictory and at the same time I don’t think it is. 

I feel like we are—humans are complex, right? 

And I feel like we are able to both have an honest expression, and I feel like in some ways, any way that we express ourselves is, to a certain degree, honest to our present circumstances. But that doesn’t mean that it’s actually authentic because it’s likely dysfunctional—entangled in, you know, emotional enmeshment and trauma bonding. Family roles. Whatever other people needed from us—what they needed us to be, or what we needed to be in order to survive, in order to be accepted, in order to feel like we could simulate love and care from the people who were supposed to care about us.

And I feel like coming back around a bit to the whole “just be yourself” think, it almost feels—especially if you’re somebody who, like me, has not really felt like you were really fully able to step into your wholeness and your authenticity because you were so stuck in a survival state, it almost feels like shame. You know?

And there is a part of me that does feel ashamed that I wasn’t able to fully express myself as who I—who I am. 

It’s so complicated to say this because wasn’t that who I was?

It was a mask in a way. But it was who I had to be in order to survive and the way that we operate, the way that our human minds and bodies will cultivate these circumstantial patterns and behaviors so that we can survive, so that we can continue forward, it’s honestly… it’s brilliant.

These are very intelligent adaptations that we take on, because if you’re still here, you know, if you’re here and you’re listening to this, obviously it’s done a good enough job that it has kept you alive, right?

But are you happy?

Are-do you feel fulfilled?

Do you feel like you’re able to be the person that you want to be?

not somebody who’s “good” or “right” or acceptable by societal standards, not somebody that other people deem valuable, or who they need, but who feels good to you.

I think I heard someone once say, you know, you’re “favorite version of yourself”, right?

And untangling that—exploring how these adaptations limit us—it’s a lot, right? 

And it’s not an easy thing, and it’s not like—I feel like it’s a challenging path to choose and that’s not to say that there aren’t resources, that there isn’t support out there for doing this kind of work—but it’s not always easily accessible, it’s not always readily available, and it’s not always right for us, right? ‘Cause there is—there’s a lot of this kind of information that I feel like comes through frameworks that might not really work for us personally. 

And you know it’s not like, it’s not like you just choose one time. 

I’m gonna be myself and I’m gonna be authentic and I’m gonna be 100% real 100% of the time. 

And I don’t think that anybody is that, right?

I don’t—I think we all wear different masks at different times under different circumstances for different reasons.

What’s hard is when—or I suppose, like, more problematic is when we think that the mask is us. When we mistake the mask for who we really are and not as—we’re not able to acknowledge it as a survival mechanism because when we embark on kind of a journey of self reclamation, we have to accept that it’s not something you choose once and it’s done. Not a one and done kind of situation.

You choose it over and over again and there’s a continual unfolding and shedding of layers and sometimes realizing that oh, I’ve been wearing masks all my life and I’ve been—I’ve had to mask in order to survive. And which is especially a common feature of those of us who are neurodivergent, but I do feel like it’s something that is not exclusive to the neurodivergent experience, either. I feel like it’s just a human experience to have to adapt in a way that feels inauthentic because of the way we’ve been taught to survive. 

Especially because there is so much that is deemed “unacceptable” depending on the culture you’re in. There’s a lot of things that are deemed as being unacceptable and cognitively, I feel like in our present day climate, it’s easy to dismiss how important acceptance really is, right? Like, we all kind of know vaguely like, oh we all wanna be, like, loved and accepted, right? But I don’t feel like we always give full stock to what that really means and why it is so hard wired for us. Because historically as humans, if you were not accepted first off by your caregivers as a child, as an infant, you… I mean, you wouldn’t survive. You had to have that basic level of acceptance from your caregivers in order to survive into childhood and adolescence and adulthood.

And then there’s the broader sort of tribal acceptance that, you know, back when we were more, where, when we were kind of operating more out of a tribal… sort of… what’s the word… framework—tribal framework—you needed to be accepted by the tribe because if you were exiled it was often a death sentence. 

And so it’s something that is very deeply—it’s something that’s deeply ingrained in our nervous system to need to be accepted and so we figure out how do I accept myself, right? 

How do I remove the masks?

How do I figure out which masks I’ve been wearing that I thought were actually my face?

And we accept that this is a process and that it is something that you choose over and over again, and each moment where you realize that you’re not—that you’re being inauthentic—is a moment that is inviting you to grow and practice compassion for yourself. 

When we let go of those old identities, when we take those masks off, we are able to make space for what wants to emerge. For what feels less like survival and more like flourishing. 

And also accepting that as we go through this process and become more ourselves, as we begin to accept and integrate our wholeness and our experiences, there’s a lot of feelings that are going to come up and we’re gonna have to meet grief and anger and fear. We might feel depressed, we might feel anxious. We might have already felt those things but they might come up in a way that has a different kind of texture or flavor that we’re not really accustomed to. 

And our survival instinct is often going to tell us that we want to push it away, to push it down, to compartmentalize it, to dismiss it, to even vilify it, or bypass it. There’s a myriad of ways in which we do this, where we avoid what we truly feel—what our present experience is, or the experiences that we’ve really had in the past. And it makes sense that we try to kind of numb ourselves to this and that we wouldn’t want to feel it, especially because most of us are ill equipped, right? And that’s not—it’s not a fault of ours. It’s something that we’ve inherited.

I feel like most people aren’t given the tools or the space or the resources or the support to actually feel their feelings, and when you don’t feel your feelings they just leak out sideways. They don’t stay contained. You know, you’re-you’re trying to bottle a tsunami. And this just doesn’t work. And you can try—but controlling your feelings is… I don’t feel like that’s really the goal, right?

It’s not about controlling them—it’s about accepting them and honoring them and listening to them—what they wanna say, what they have to tell you about your experiences, right? And learning how to work with them.

How to befriend them.

All of the feelings.

Including the anger, including the grief, including the fear.

I feel like that’s the biggest one—like, we’re often taught that fear is the “enemy” and, you know, you gotta “fight the fear” and “ignore the fear” and all of this stuff and…

What happens when you stop?

When you actually sit with fear and open a dialogue and have a conversation? 

I know for me, befriending fear, naming fear as my friend and not an enemy, not something to fight or beat or overcome, that has made a huge difference in the way I operate and the amount of compassion that I can have for myself and then extend to others.

Even right now, there’s a lot of fear coming up for me in expressing everything that I’m saying because even if nobody hears me, even if nobody ever listens to this, I feel vulnerable because this is a true expression of my thoughts, right?

This is a stream of thought.

Like a very, you know, present—me sitting here speaking essentially to myself, whispering into the void, you know?

And everything in me says that visibility is unsafe—being seen is unsafe, that I’m gonna get hurt. 

And so the fear that comes up with that is natural.

It makes sense.

And I know that it’s there because it loves and cares about me.

It’s not there to stop me.

it’s not there to hurt me.

It’s not there to control me, either.

And I don’t have to be controlled by it.

But I can acknowledge it and I can affirm it and say “okay, that makes sense.”

“It makes sense that I would feel that way.”

“It makes sense that I would feel afraid.”

A lot of this has to do with just, not only listening to our emotions, but listening to our bodies, and I think emotions are kind of born from the body. There’s a sort of feedback loop between the mind and the body when it comes to emotions, right? Because the way you think can absolutely influence the way you feel, but the way you feel also influences the way you think and it’s a whole thing. 

And I also feel like most of us are very disconnected from our bodies. We are taught to ignore our body’s signals, our intuition, and not honor that our somatic experience is what really shapes our reality. And we have to understand it—we get a chance to understand it and what it wants to tell us and what it means for us as people and utilize it as a sort of gateway to what—to truth.

And this is especially hard if we have been gaslit and abandoned and invalidated and dismissed, especially repeatedly, especially throughout our entire lives throughout multiple, you know, relationships and experiences where this is something that’s really reinforced. That our body and our feelings and our experiences can’t be trusted. 

And then trying to differentiate the sensations you feel—is what you’re feeling, you know, are you just, are you, are you triggered?

I don’t want to say “just” triggered. ‘Cause triggering too is a, is a gateway, right?

It’s an invitation to examine something that is coming up for us, usually something that’s old, something that’s been tucked away, maybe put in—compartmentalized, you know? Perhaps for years or decades—our entire lives.

And I feel like humans tend to be quite intuitive creatures, right?

Everything is energy, and different energies kind of have different flavors, different textures—what is palatable and enjoyable for different people is going to be different. And our own personal perceptions are going to also contribute to how we actually interpret certain energies, and especially if we’ve experienced copious amounts of trauma, ongoing stress, you know, chronic stress—various experiences that I feel are fairly common throughout the scope of humanity, right? 

We often get cut off from our intuition.

And we struggled to reconnect to it and to recognize the difference between something that is a trauma response and something that is really our body and our deeper knowing telling us “hey, this isn’t right for us.” 

And sometimes that they can be the same—that’s what’s really challenging—is when you have something that it’s like “oh, I’m feeling something because this is similar to situation in the past that have resulted in trauma for me and there’s also something about this that is genuinely unsafe or unhealthy for me.”

And it can be really confusing when you are attempting to, kind of like, come back home into your body and you can’t shame yourself for that.

I mean, you can, but I don’t personally feel like that’s very helpful.

Extending compassion to ourselves and just doing our best—doing what we can to be aware and conscious and compassionate, first and foremost, to be compassionate towards ourselves—to make room for the fluidity, you know, that—the multiplicity, the evolution—because we’re not static.

I think that’s what is challenging too, sometimes, is people think that they have some sort of static, authentic self, right?

That just is like a, you know, a rock, and it’s just steady and solid.

And I mean, I’m speaking from my own experience so maybe some people are like that.

But I feel like as humans, as anything that exists, we’re subject to change and change is the constant, right?

We’re not static beings.

We’re constantly moving and evolving and changing.

sometimes the changes are smaller or more subtle, imperceptible, even.

But there are shifts and we ideally can have space, we can open space for that to be the truth.

I’ve had people in the past accuse me of being inauthentic because I’m not the same with everyone and I can understand that kind of perception, right? 

And I also understand that, for me, I’m not the same with everyone because everyone is different. It doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily being inauthentic, it just means I’m adjusting what—how I need to be in that present situation. And of course, that could be interpreted as being inauthentic. 

Like, well, what’s true for you? Are you—are you—is it because I’m acting out of survival based adaptations?

And that’s a valid question. 

And that’s something that I ask myself a lot about my own behavior, you know?

I’m often asking myself if I’m being authentic when I interact with people because authentic—authenticity is something that’s really important to me.

I value integrity, I value authenticity, I value honesty and presence and I do my best to embody those values and I also know that I have been essentially trained not to be those things, right?

And so because kindness and compassion are also really important to me, I get to extend those to myself and honor that sometimes I’m not authentic.

Sometimes I’m not capable of it.

Sometimes I don’t have the capacity for it.

And, ironically, in a roundabout way, that’s me being authentic, right?

Because I am honoring that that’s where I am at in that moment.

Ideally we don’t abandon ourselves.

Ideally we learn to work with what is in front of us in such a way that we don’t abandon who we are, what is really true for us.

That we hold ourselves accountable for the navigation of our experiences to the best of our ability.

That we hold space for softening into who we’re becoming—who we are—and deepening the relationship we have with ourselves instead of forcing—instead of trying to force ourselves to heal or to be something we’re not or that we don’t feel like we can be in the moment, because that’s just abandonment.

That’s self abandonment.

It’s a balance.

It’s a dance.

Each moment, through each little moment that we are able to really connect to ourselves is transformative. It’s radical. It’s a radical thing to choose self compassion—to choose not to abandon yourself, to choose to hold yourself accountable in a loving way. Because we’re not trying to be perfect, here. Nobody’s perfect and what even is perfect? Even if that was attainable, I feel like everyone’s idea of perfection would be different. So that’s not the goal—it’s never the goal. You know what they say, they say “progress over perfection,” right?

Because this is all just about coming home to ourselves and the journey that we go on in order to get there, and the journey is the thing.

And sometimes that’s frustrating and that is fair.

Sometimes, at least, I know for myself—I feel like I should just have arrived and I should just stay there and it should just… I shouldn’t have to keep shedding all these layers and shifting my perception over and over again.

But that’s the entire point.

I don’t feel like we would incarnate as humans and have this experience of being humans if we were meant to stay static—if we were meant to just be one thing and experience one thing.

We’re here for the full spectrum, right?

The full spectrum of human experience.

And to have the experience is the whole purpose of the experience, and so how yourself—how much of yourself do you feel like you’re being?

How much of yourself do you feel like you’re capable of being?

Who do you want to be and why do you want to be that?

‘Cause the other thing, too, is that sometimes, I think, we think we want to be a certain version, a certain character, or even caricature of ourselves. Or we are attracted to something in someone else that we want for ourselves. And it’s important to ask “why”? You know, what does that mean for me?

What does that really mean if I could embody that?

And is that what actually feels like fullness, is that was feels like peace?

And then you think of peace and I feel like even that is a concept that is often kind of warped and distorted because if you have peace with yourself then you also have peace with the chaos, right?

Chaos and peace aren’t necessarily opposites—they’re intertwined—because there would be no reason for there to be a concept of peace if you didn’t have a concept of chaos.

There would be no reason for there to be a concept of order if you didn’t have a concept of chaos, right?

And so we all carry a certain degree of chaos.

But are you at peace with that?

Do you accept your chaos?

Do you acknowledge it?

Do you honor what that chaos means for you?

Or do you refuse to see it?

Do you feel like you need to disconnect from it because to be in relationship with your chaos would mean you’re not peaceful?

These are just thoughts—my thoughts.

Take it or leave it.

I do hope that if you’re listening, if you’re still here listening to me, that there’s something I’ve said that has felt like it is recognition.

I think I’m gonna wrap this up, so, if you’re still here—thank you.

I would like to invite you to reflect a bit and maybe ask:

“What does authenticity feel like for me today? What does it feel like in my body?”

And

“What would reclaiming myself look like right now, in this moment?”

You are not alone in this.

It might feel like it, and paradoxically, in some ways, yeah, you are.

And at the same time, you’re not.

I am here and I exist and I am—this is my journey, too, right?

I don’t have it all figured out.

I’m figuring it out as much as I can figure it out—I’m walking the path, I am taking each step—even though it’s dark—trusting that it’s… it might make sense at some point, right?

And there’s some days it makes more sense than others.

So, I encourage you—if you’re able to do your best to meet yourself with softness, with grace, with care, and compassion—wherever you are, whatever part of the journey you’re at, whatever your journey looks like.

You’re here.

And that’s enough.

So thank you for being here.

And remember, that I love you.