A femme figure with long, dark, curly hair, wearing a black hooded cloak adorned with white symbols, holding a ball of fire in their hands. The setting sun casts a warm light behind the blurred trees and dry grass, creating an atmosphere of mystical alchemy and transformation.

This isn’t a manifesto.

It’s a remembering—for those who’ve lived in the dark long enough to know it’s alive.

We’ve always been here—just out of sight.

Forgotten, not gone

Dark workers don’t fit into the systems that were never meant for them.
We aren’t built for endless growth, for constant visibility, for flat, linear timelines.
Our truths don’t show up on a spreadsheet.
Our wisdom isn’t always easy to explain

Dark workers are often forgotten because the stories about the underworld weren’t written by those who live there.

They were written by Empire—

By those who fear the dark because they cannot control it. Not because they don’t understand the power here, but because they do.

When I say empire, I mean the systems that reward obedience and erase complexity—patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, colonization. The machine that demands we choose between truth and belonging, survival and soul.

They know the dark is fertile, raw, unpolished.
It refuses order. It cannot be dominated.
And so, it is cast as dangerous.

Anything that resembles the dark—anything wild, nonlinear, chaotic, emotional, uncontainable—is deemed wrong.
We are told to be ashamed.
Taught to exile these parts of ourselves.

But when the generative dark is demonized, and no one is taught to be with it, that power doesn’t disappear.
It becomes distorted.
It turns into greed, manipulation, extraction, abuse.
It becomes Empire.

How Empire Tried to Erase Us

Dark workers are often misunderstood, pathologized, or dismissed entirely.
Empire didn’t write stories for us.
And when it did, it turned our power into pathology.

Our sensitivity became dysfunction.
Our wildness became instability.
Our rage became hysteria.
Our cycles became disorder.
Our grief became weakness.

Western psychology offered labels—
repackaged survival as pathology.
It gave us diagnoses instead of context.
It missed the initiations we were living through—
trying instead to fix, polish, contain.

But dark workers remember.
We are the ones who feel the pulse of something ancient moving in the shadow.
We’re not here to be palatable.
We’re here to be authentic.

What Does It Mean to Be a Dark Worker?

Dark workers are those who move in the unseen.
Who carry truths that aren’t always easy to name—let alone prove.
Who feel timelines collapse in their bodies.
Who walk through endings while everyone else is still pretending it’s fine.

Maybe you’ve always felt out of rhythm with the world.
Like you couldn’t keep up—or didn’t want to.
You need more rest than others.
You feel everything too deeply.
You carry grief like a river under your skin.

You might lose your voice in crowds but speak clearly in dreams.
You might shapeshift to survive—and then wonder who you really are.

Dark workers often know how to read a room before anyone says a word.
We’ve had to.
Many of us learned to attune in childhood—not because it was safe,
but because it wasn’t.

We developed night vision early.
Not metaphorically—somatically.
We know what it feels like to hold contradictions in the body:
joy and sorrow, rage and tenderness, clarity and confusion.

We refuse to flatten ourselves into one thing.
We are the ones who can sit in the ache and not look away.
We compost.
We transmute.
We make art and ritual out of rupture.

Many dark workers are initiated by mystery.
Illness. Burnout. Depression. Sensitivity that won’t shut off.

Being born into the Underworld.
Cycles that don’t follow the sun.
Dreams that won’t leave us alone.

And still—somehow—we find the way through.
Not by escaping the dark,
but by becoming intimate with it.

How Do You Know You’re a Dark Worker?

You’ve likely asked questions no one else around you was asking.
You’ve likely felt things others couldn’t name.
You might’ve been called too much, too emotional, too dramatic, too intense.
Or maybe no one saw you at all.

You’ve probably held space for others long before you knew how to hold it for yourself.
You know things without knowing how you know.
And even when you try to follow the rules—you just can’t.
Something deeper always calls you off-script.

Your power doesn’t come from pushing.
It comes from presence.
From willingness to descend,
to be undone,
to feel it all and still choose to stay.

The Gifts of the Dark Worker

Dark workers are alchemists of the unseen.
We don’t just survive the underworld—we work there.
We know how to sit in the liminal without rushing to label it.
We know how to hold people through transitions they can’t yet name.

We have eyes for what’s missing.
We see what others avoid.
We hear the whispers beneath the noise.

Intuition is one of our native languages.
It’s not always gentle. Sometimes it roars.
We might receive it through the body, in dreams, through art, or through grief.
We might not always be able to explain why we know what we know—
but we know it.

Creative genius moves through us in spirals and seasons.
We birth poetry out of pain.
We turn endings into offerings.
We create portals through music, movement, ritual, silence.

We are stewards of transformation.
We know how to hold paradox:
to be both fierce and tender, grounded and ethereal, sovereign and connected.

We are the ones others come to in their unraveling—
not because we have answers,
but because we aren’t afraid of what they’re becoming.

We work with the dead.
Sometimes literally—through grief work, end of life care, through mediumship, through ancestor rituals.
Sometimes symbolically—through initiations, identity deaths, ego dissolutions.
We guide others across thresholds because we’ve walked them ourselves.

We are initiators.
We might not even realize we’re doing it—
but just by being who we are,
we challenge the systems that rely on numbness and avoidance.

We’re truth-tellers—
not because we seek to provoke,
but because we refuse to abandon what’s real.
We say the thing no one else will say.
We name the patterns others fear to look at.
We reflect the mirror back when it’s easier to turn away.
We don't do this to shame—
we do this to liberate.

To be in the presence of a dark worker is to be invited into your own depths.

Myths and Mirrors: Who We Walk With

Dark workers often walk in the lineage of archetypes who were demonized, discarded, or misunderstood—because they carried too much power for Empire to digest.

You might recognize yourself in:

The Witch
Intuitive. Unruly. A bearer of medicine.
In communion with the land.
Remembering through blood and bones.
Refusing to be tamed.

Lilith
Sovereign. Exiled. Unapologetic.
Refused domination.
Chose the unknown over obedience.
The shadow’s mirror.
The soul’s companion.

Hecate
Threshold keeper. Torchbearer. Guide through the in-between.
Holding keys.
Protecting gates.
Walking with the lost.

Inanna
The descender—by choice.
Stripped bare, layer by layer.
Until only essence remains.

Persephone
The one pulled down before she was ready.
Still found sovereignty within the underworld.
Learning to move between worlds.

Kali
Fierce destroyer of illusion.
Cuts away the false.
Reveals what’s sacred.

Medusa
Not a monster, but a mirror.
Transformed through violation.
Forged by rage denied.
Became untouchable.

These aren’t just stories.
They’re soul maps.
They’re encoded with the wisdom of descent, the power of survival, and the art of return.

If this stirs something in you…

if your entire body leans in…
If you’ve been told you’re too much, too sensitive, too intense, too strange—
If you feel most alive in the liminal,
if your medicine doesn’t fit clean labels,
if you’ve always known how to navigate the dark—

You might be a dark worker, too.

Because you’re not here to bypass the shadows.
You’re here to walk with them.
To midwife what others discard.
To hold paradox in your bones.
To refuse the violence of being flattened into one thing.

You are many.
You are cyclical.
You are ever-changing.

And that is your magic.

This is the collective myth.
But every myth lives in a body.
And this is how it lived in mine.

In the next piece, I’ll take you into my story—
the initiations that undid me,
the descent that revealed who I really was,
and the path I walked to become a dark worker.

Not as an identity to claim—
but as a way of being forged through fire,
grief, mystery, and the endless spiral of becoming.

As part of this series, I’ll be offering reflective questions at the end of each post—an invitation to pause, turn inward, and engage with these themes in your own way.

Where have you been asked to flatten yourself to belong?
What truths, identities, or parts of yourself have you tucked away to survive in systems that reward obedience over authenticity?
Which archetypes whisper to you?
Is there a story, figure, or symbol from myth or memory that mirrors something you've buried, resisted, or longed to reclaim?
What truths do you carry that don’t fit cleanly into the world you were handed?
How have you been shapeshifting to survive—and what would it take to stop?

In devotion to the descent,

AW🖤

P.S. If you enjoyed this post and know of someone who may too, please share.

Dancing with Darkness: The Alchemy of the Dark Worker (Part III)