She Was Never The Villain. Neither Are You.

I wasn’t looking for a role model.
I was looking for an explanation.
For the part of me that has always stood at the edge of things.
The threshold.
The in-between.
Not quite belonging to the world everyone else seemed comfortable living in.
Not quite ready to leave it either.
I found her at the crossroads.
Which is exactly where she lives.

Hecate.

When I first encountered her I didn’t read about her the way you read about mythology.
I recognized her.
The way you recognize yourself in a stranger across a room and think —
oh. There I am.

Here’s what society says about Hecate:
Witch goddess.
Dark.
Sinister.
Something that belongs to Halloween and horror films and women who’ve lost their minds.

Here’s what they don’t tell you:
She was a Titan.
Full goddess.
Trusted by Zeus himself — which, fine, low bar, but still.
She held dominion over the heavens, the earth, and the sea.
All three.

Not assigned a corner.
Not managed into a lane.
All of it.

She was triple goddess — maiden, mother, crone.
Not fragmented into phases that expire.
Not apologizing for aging into power.
Whole.
Holding all three at once.

And she carried torches.
Not to be seen.
To illuminate what others were afraid to look at.

Then they got to work on her story.
Same thing they always do.
The wholeness became threatening.
The power became sinister.
The torches became something to fear instead of follow.
Witch. Crone. Dark goddess.
Be careful of that one.
Magic and witchcraft.

Let me tell you what those words actually mean.
They are the words society invented for a woman who knows her own power.
Who knows what the earth provides.
Who knows how to use it to heal.
Who doesn’t need permission or a prescription or a man’s signature to trust what she knows.

That’s not magic.
That’s sovereignty.
They just needed a word that made it sound dangerous.

I was born on a full moon.
I didn’t always know what to do with that.
But my body always knew.
The moon moves oceans.
Did you think it wasn’t moving you?
Women who track the moon aren’t mystical eccentrics.
They’re paying attention to the same rhythm that governs tides and seasons and the blood in their own bodies.
We were taught to call that woo.
We were taught to be embarrassed by it.
We were taught a lot of things that were really just instructions to stop listening to ourselves.

I am in my crone phase now.
And I want to be very clear about what that means.
Not diminished.
Not expiring.
Not the sad third act of a story that peaked somewhere in my thirties.
The crone is the one who has survived enough to know things.
Who has stood at enough crossroads to stop being afraid of them.
Who carries the stories of the dead and births the wisdom of the living.

We are the guides between worlds —
when we bring life in
and when we hold the stories and memories that travel forward through death.
That is not small.
That is not something to mourn.
That is Hecate.
That is me.
Standing at the crossroads between what society calls reality—
which at this point is more accurately described as collective delusion —
and who I actually am.
And what I’m here to build.
Still showing up to the corporate job.
Still rejecting everything it stands for.
Torch in hand.
Head up.

Here’s what I think happened to all of them.
They weren’t dangerous.
They were free.
And freedom in a woman has always been the thing that needed containing.
So they rewrote the stories.
Monster. Exile. Demon. Witch. Crone.
Every label a cage.
Every cage a confession —
of exactly how much power they were trying to suppress.
They came for all of them.

Medusa.

Lilith.

Kali.

Sekhmet.

Hecate.

Every wild, sovereign, uncontainable feminine archetype
rewritten as something to fear
instead of something to become.

So here is your invitation.
Go find yours.
Not the version they handed you.
The real one.
Read between the lines of what they said she was and find what she actually is.
Because one of them is you.
And she has been waiting a very long time to be recognized.

Which archetype stops you? Which one feels less like mythology and more like memory?