The Years the Locusts Ate
What if this quiet, aching chapter is where the real abundance begins?
There’s a chapter no one seems to talk about.
You’ve done “the work”. You’ve cried in therapy. You’ve journaled so hard the ink bled through the pages. You’ve walked away from people who didn’t love you right. You stopped performing. You even started believing in your own worth and trusting yourself again.
And then, you wait…
Not for validation, not for someone to rescue you. But for life to meet you halfway. For the fruits of all that inner work to finally ripen.
But instead of abundance? You get…silence. Emptiness. Maybe a suspiciously high credit card bill. Maybe your inbox goes quiet, or your bank account hovers at barely enough.
And then, you start to look around.
Everyone else seems to have effortlessly healed their way into their next chapter.
They left the dead end relationship, and now they’re getting married to the love of their life who is quite amazing if you say so yourself.
They walked away from the job that was draining them, and now they’re thriving in a dreamy new role, with benefits and a bomb ass yearly in person luxury retreat.
That friend who “took a break” from their business? She’s now glowing, freelance flourishing, vacationing in Portugal, captioning photos with things like “sometimes the pause is the plan.”
Meanwhile…you’re here. Still in the in-between. Still unsure if your leap will land, or if you even made the right choice at all.
And in that lonely middle place, a question starts to creep in:
Did I do something wrong?
We’ve been led to believe that healing comes with some kind of automatic payout. Like once you check the final box on your personal growth checklist—
Inner child work? Done.
Left the toxic relationship? Check.
Daily affirmations and shadow work? You bet.
God would slide into your DMs like:
“Congratulations, girl. You did the work. Here’s your direct deposit and all your dreams are about to come true.”
As if healing is some kind of spiritual punch card, and once it's full, the blessings immediately come rolling in.
As if the reward is instant.
But the truth?
Healing doesn’t always hand you a harvest.
Sometimes, it hands you a shovel and walking shoes.
What no one tells you is that there’s still a stretch of wilderness between the healing and the harvest. A valley to walk through. And it’s quiet down there, lonely too.
This is the gap between the inner work and the outer reward.
The space where everything looks still, but everything is shifting.
Unfortunately, this healing stuff isn’t a rom com. There’s no tidy resolution in 90 minutes. No montage set to soft indie music where everything magically clicks into place.
Sometimes it looks like uprooting your entire life.
Like walking away from the old story with no new script in hand.
Like letting things lie fallow.
You know that word? Fallow.
It means the field rests.
It looks empty, but it’s not.
It’s becoming ready. And God, it’s so hard to believe in readiness when your world feels like lack.
But maybe lack isn’t punishment. Maybe it’s just the echo of a life you no longer fit inside.
You used to force things. People-please. Perform. Hustle. You could’ve survived like that forever. You were good at it. You wore burnout like a badge.
But now your body says no.
You have to learn how to live again…
But in this new skin.
And that’s not instant.
That’s not always profitable.
I’ve shared this a couple times here, but I still remember the day I announced on Facebook that I was closing my astrology business.
I hit “publish,” closed my MacBook, looked over at my husband, and said:
“Well, I guess I’m just a housewife again.”
And listen, this was after I’d done The Artist’s Way maybe a year or two before that. I can’t remember exactly now. Time blurs when your identity is shedding.
But what I do remember is the shock of realizing that doing that chapter of the the inner work was only the beginning.
Reading the book? Doing the pages? Feeling the firelight of awakening? That wasn’t the end of the journey. That was the door creaking open.
Because as an artist, I had to make things. Share them. Get eyes on them. Let them be seen and misunderstood and loved and ignored and still keep going. I had to embody this new identity one story, one paragraph, one awkward, too honest substack post at a time.
Even after years of working professionally as a healer, I found myself at the start again having to embody all the things I’d been teaching clients for years.
There is so much work in the becoming.
Not that you have to be fully healed to receive. That’s not it.
But it’s like God says: “You chose to follow. You said yes. Now I’m going to shape you to hold what you asked for.”
And sometimes we don’t choose. Sometimes the thing collapses and we get shoved into the next chapter with no map, just a suitcase full of grief and a single blinking sentence: Begin again.
But as my Daddy always told me:
“Sometimes you gotta step back to sling shot forward.”
And yet, there is so much life in the in between.
The very chapter you keep trying to pray away?
One day, you’ll look back and see it was full of gems, quiet ones. The kind you almost missed in your overwhelm and confusion.
You’ll see the lessons.
Understand how the ache shaped you.
How it carved space for what’s coming.
You know that part of the movie.
If you plot your screenplays or novels with the Save the Cat method, this is what’s called the “All Is Lost” moment.
It’s not just a little setback.
It’s the part where the hero is on their knees.
Where everything they thought would work…doesn’t.
Where the plan fails, the love interest walks away, the money runs out, the truth comes out.
The lie they believed about themselves gets exposed.
And for a moment, it seems like the story might actually end right there.
In the Save the Cat structure, this is the point right before the “Dark Night of the Soul.” That beat where the hero feels completely alone, defeated, and unsure if they can go on.
But here’s the thing: this moment isn't failure.
It's foundation.
Because after the Dark Night comes the Break into Three, that spark of realization. The internal shift. The “aha.”
The hero gets back up, but not as who they were before. They move forward with new clarity, new strength, a deeper truth.
So if you feel like you're living in that slow scene where you're looking up at the ceiling and asking, "Was this all for nothing?"
Please hear me:
You are not at the end of your story.
You are in the beat every great character passes through before they rise.
So no, you’re not doing it wrong.
You’re not ungrateful.
You’re not missing the secret code.
You’re just in that scene.
The one you’ll point to later and say:
That’s where I became her.
You’re in the part of the movie where the heroine thinks she’s lost everything.
The lighting is gray. She’s barefoot. Maybe crying on the bathroom floor.
But she’s not done.
She’s becoming something.
And one day, when everything starts to flow easily again, not in the way they promised, but in the way you designed…you’ll look back at this chapter and whisper to yourself:
Of course it had to happen this way.
And it will all make sense.
Every aching, uncertain, holy moment of it.
Need a little support while you navigate this scene of your life?
I made something for you:
The Main Character Energy Toolkit for Your Next Chapter.
Think of it like a care package from your future self — part pep talk, part practical guide, part survival manual.
Because yes, you're the heroine. And yes, this scene matters.
“I will restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten…”
— Joel 2:25 (ESV)
Nothing is lost.
Not to God.
Not to your story.
This is exactly where I am. Thank you for helping me put it to words.
This was hauntingly beautiful. The honesty in your reflections the ache of what was lost and the quiet hope of what remains really hit home. There’s something sacred in naming the grief and still choosing to hold on to grace. Thank you for putting words to what so many of us feel but can’t always express.