The Devil You Know

Hello friends,

I hesitated to write about this topic. Not because I don't know it but because once you name it, it can feel like stepping into a spiral.

I'm talking about desperation.

It found me on a perfectly fine Sunday afternoon—after a beautiful day. No obvious trigger. No crisis. Just a sudden, hollow weight that seemed to rise from nowhere.

Desperation doesn't have a great reputation. Somewhere in adolescence, most of us learn to play it cool. Not to come off too needy, too intense. Once you cross that invisible line of being seen as "desperate," social walls go up fast. I've been on both sides of this, like probably all of us. We worry about the optics, about looking unstable, or out of control. And so we hide it. Keep it just contained enough to function. But desperation doesn't disappear underground. It just resurfaces at the worst possible time.

When it does, it doesn't arrive gently. It feels urgent. It shrinks time. It convinces us we need to act now, that waiting is dangerous, that thinking things through is a luxury we can't afford.

There's often a recklessness that comes with it—a willingness to throw things out the window just to escape the feeling underneath. Boundaries. Discernment. Self-trust. And sometimes, if we're honest, there's a slightly unhinged edge to it too. A part that wants to burn it all down. To confirm what an old voice has been whispering: See? You were doomed anyway.

This is where it gets personal for me.

One of my quieter fears is that if I don't stay deeply devoted to my inner life, I'll slip back. Back into overwork. Back into reactivity. Back into a life that looks fine on the outside but feels hollow on the inside. Afraid of ending up alone—not because I choose it, but because it chooses me.

When that fear gets loud, I try to reassure myself with the visible evidence of my life: my loved ones, my home, my work. And yet, when despair takes hold, none of it quite reaches that deep, dark place. That void doesn't respond to logic or gratitude. It only sharpens the sense of what we might lose—or how undeserving we suddenly feel.

And so self-sabotage can start to feel like relief. A strange kind of confirmation. A way to stop fighting the feeling by letting it win.

That was the rabbit hole I found myself in that Sunday afternoon. And then I remembered that at the start of the year, I had pulled tarot cards to set intentions for 2026. The Devil card came up for February. That Sunday, I pulled it again. In five years of pulling cards monthly, those are the only two times it's ever appeared. In tarot, the Devil isn't about evil—it's about inner demons. Unfaced fears. Patterns that keep looping until you're willing to look directly at them.

This was the demon I was being asked to face. Not to fix. Not to banish. But to see.

So I journaled. To expose it to myself. And maybe to you too so it could lose some of its power. Because once desperation is named, it becomes a feeling rather than a prophecy. A state, not an identity.

What pulled me out wasn't forcing positivity or trying to transcend the feeling. It was thinking of artists. Writers. Poets. People who have put words to these same dark, tender places and how beautiful their work was. Suddenly, I didn't feel quite so alone. I felt human.

The next day was light, full, and easy. I swung to the other side, feeling free. And I noticed something: by letting the darkness be there without rushing to escape it, my capacity had grown. Not just for the dark, but for beauty, joy, light too.

So if you've felt desperate lately. Or reckless. Or a little unmoored.

I won't tell you it's easy. I won't tell you I've figured it out—I know this feeling will visit again, wearing some new disguise, catching me on another perfectly fine afternoon.

But I do know that desperation isn't a personal failure. It's part of being fully alive. And sometimes, simply naming it—to yourself, to a page, to someone you trust—makes it feel less urgent. Less suffocating. Not because the feeling disappears. But because you remember you're not the only one who's been in the rabbit hole and that this isn't the first time, and probably won't be the last.

Not a stranger at the door. Just the devil you know.

With love,
Mathilde

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