Life as Alchemy

My twenties were marked by a quiet, persistent disappointment.

Is this it?

Is this adulthood?
The responsibilities?
The repetition?
Work. Rest. Clean. Eat. Repeat.

Is this what faith feels like? Praying and then carrying on unchanged. Living inside the tension of a God we could never quite understand but who always seemed to have opinions about who was in and who was out.

I had imagined something brighter.

As a teenager, I dreamed of adventure. Of becoming a woman lit from within. I imagined travel, meaningful work, deep friendships, a life that felt textured and electric. The world felt wide then.

And yet somewhere along the way, that width narrowed.

I did not fit easily. Community felt conditional. Faith felt dissonant. The more I tried to press myself into the mould, the more something in me dulled.

When I left my faith tradition in my early thirties, I thought what I was really leaving was disappointment. I assumed that once I stepped outside the structure, I would rediscover my spark.

Instead, I found myself 33 years old, with two children, a mortgage, a marriage, and a fractured belief system. The spark did not magically reignite. The days were still made of dishes and deadlines and interrupted sleep. The ordinary did not evaporate just because I had.

First I thought Jesus would transmute my life into something radiant.
Then I thought marriage would.
Then motherhood.
Then achievement.
Then success.

Each time I believed something external would act as my alchemist. That someone or something would arrive with a Philosopher’s Stone and turn my lead into gold.

But nothing did.
And that was the beginning of the real shift.

The tradition of alchemy has always been misunderstood as the act of changing something worthless into something valuable. But true alchemical thinking assumed potential was already present. The work was not to manufacture value. It was to reveal it.

That distinction matters.

Because if you believe you are lead, you will spend your life searching for a rescuer.

If you begin to suspect you are already gold, the work changes.

Carl Jung wrote in The Undiscovered Self,

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”

Not to become someone else. Not to upgrade. Not to reinvent. To become who you are.

That sentence dismantled something in me.

Perhaps I did not need saving. Perhaps I needed remembering.

The disappointment of my twenties was not evidence that life had failed me. It was the friction created by living misaligned with myself. I was asking external structures to provide meaning that could only come from inhabiting my own particularity.

The spark I was chasing was not gone. It was obscured.

Obscured by performance.
By expectation.
By inherited narratives about what a faithful, successful, good woman should look like.

Alchemy, as I understand it now, is creative participation in your own unveiling.

It is not a miracle that tilts reality on its axis. It is the slow recognition that your ordinary life is already saturated with worth. That your particular temperament, your longings, your disappointments, your humour, your doubts… none of it requires replacement.

It requires permission.

You are not unfinished metal waiting for transformation. You are layered. Covered. Conditioned. And remembering who you are beneath the costumes can feel like transmutation.

Not because you changed. But because you stopped pretending to be something you are not.

CONSIDER THIS: Where are you still waiting to be saved? Notice one place you are hoping for a circumstance to rescue you. What if the work there is not reinvention — but remembering?

L xo