The Night Shift

When the Truth Has Its Way With You

On New Year’s Eve, I attended a cacao ritual at a converted barn on the edge of town. I was drawn to the mystery of it. I didn’t know much about cacao aside from it being a Mexican chocolate with special properties. When I arrived, most of the others already seemed acquainted, relaxed and chatting. I took a spot near the back and rolled out the yoga mat provided. As I settled into my meditation posture, I thought a bit about what I hoped the year ahead might bring.

I had much to anticipate. I had a new book set to launch in March. I was living in a stunningly beautiful part of Michigan in a storybook town. I had made friends. And my children had found partners they loved and had promising careers. And still, something tugged at me. What was I yearning for?

A statuesque woman entered the room and took her place at the front. She had the bearing of a woman who spends her life in yogic repose— lithe, graceful, and unflappable. About an hour into the meditation, we were offered cups of cacao, a thick chalky substance, and told to sip. Soon after, I was lying on the floor with chimes undulating in the background. My thoughts drifted aimlessly. And then nothing. For how long I can’t be sure, my mind slid away from my own awareness. I didn’t doze off. Nor did a vision arise. Just a pleasant absence.

When the lights faded up, people were chatting about how it felt and what they saw when they “dropped in.” Because I couldn’t account for where my mind went, I quietly folded the blankets and rolled up the mat. Nothing to report. I drove home in lashing snow.

I had spent 2025 in exhausting cycles of fight or flight until my nervous system rebelled and delivered what Dr. Judith Herman, expert on PTSD, calls, “a shock to the body.” I retreated for a while to reflect, long and hard.

Hadn’t the year extracted its truths? Hadn’t I chased my shadows into corners and confronted them? I was leaving 2025 feeling shaken, but not broken— and ready to move on. Yet something flitted at the edge of my awareness that I couldn’t pin down. Something I hadn’t yet named. With windshield wipers thumping away sleeves of sleet, I recalled something David Foster Wallace once said: “The truth will set you free, but not until it’s had its way with you.”

Later that night, with temps hovering below freezing, I huddled under billows of winter blankets topped by the white duvet my sister gifted me for Christmas. From my window, I saw the stars, tight fists of light against an indigo sky. Pondering the void I’d felt during the ritual, I wondered if my dreams might shed light.

From under those blankets, I sent up a prayer. That in my sleep I might be taken to the place of my next beginning. See it. That I might look around and size up the territory. Maybe to spot a few landmarks so that I might recognize the place when I arrive in waking life. It was a little before midnight, Dec. 31.

I woke calm and clear headed. But if that territory revealed itself in my dreams, any clues had evaporated by sunrise. I couldn’t summon a single flicker.

While scrambling a few eggs, my imagination suddenly lit up with a strange image. I saw threads, their tips electrified and probing to find other threads. When met they wove a mesh–the beginnings of a new story.

Over a plate of steaming eggs, I suddenly grasped two things: the events of the past year had torn something within me that was still mending, and the emotional task before me was to see to its repair. This, I believe, is what Carl Jung called the work of integration. It’s reckoning and redemption braided together—mending the torn spots and odd fragments into something more whole. Perhaps then a complete garment can be fashioned. One that is wholly beautiful and loosely flowing. Not to hold the body captive, but to free it.

I also understood that the work doesn’t begin with the warp and weft of a loom. Not yet. First comes the unglamorous cleaning of the weaving room, hauling buckets of scalding water and scrubbing the floor to reveal any planks that have chips, or came loose or have given way entirely.

Is this the most sacred part of any life story? The passage where we face our messes, straighten things up, stand back, and survey it all: Why I’m here. What I have left to give. The gift of life. What’s good underneath.

By evening, I decided. I want to write about this process. I have much to learn about this business of integration. I need to source books. And read some poetry, because fiction writers trade in the grand arcs of human drama. Integration is subtler, I think.

Still, committing to a monthly missive on my journey to discover what it means to make oneself whole after things fall apart feels right. So here we are.

I’m asking you to bear witness. And tell me your thoughts. And we can learn together.

I’m naming this experiment The Witness Project.

The Witness Project: A personal examination of the unglamorous work of integration to make sense of how life causes us to splinter, fray, and lose the thread of self. To understand the conscious sustained work involved to maintain a coherent sense of self and what that effort actually looks like in practice—not the polished outcome, but the messy, often tedious process of becoming a more whole person.

I’ll be posting Witness Project updates monthly.

As always, thanks for following along.