The Raven Chronicles -- Part 4 of 5
I am going to say the thing plainly and without decoration.
I have loved men who were not built to hold what I brought to the table.
Not men who were evil. Not men who set out to destroy me. Men who were simply not equipped. Men who carried their own fractures and unfinished business and brought those things into the space between us and called it a relationship. Men who wanted the warmth of what I offered without the responsibility that came with it. Men who could receive my love like a resource and disappear when it was time to give something back.
I kept showing up anyway. That is the part I have to be honest about. I am not a passive participant in this story. I chose these men. I stayed longer than the evidence supported. I applied my spiritual knowledge, my emotional intelligence, my rootwork, and my patience to situations that were telling me clearly and consistently who they were.
I believed in potential over presence. And that is a lesson I paid for in years, not weeks.
I am not writing this to wound anyone. I am writing this because I know I am not the only woman sitting with this particular kind of tired. The kind that comes from giving your best to someone who was never going to be able to meet you there. The kind that makes you question whether the problem is you because it is easier to find fault with yourself than to accept that some people simply do not have the capacity for what you are offering.
You are not the problem. You were just in the wrong room.
THE PROMISE OF PROTECTION
There is something specific about the promise of protection that I need to talk about.
Not financial provision only, though that is part of it. The deeper thing. The feeling of being covered. Of moving through the world knowing that someone who loves you is also watching out for you. Of not having to be the most alert person in every room because someone else has got the perimeter.
I have wanted that. I want to say it without shame because I think a lot of women who are as capable and self-sufficient as I am carry this quietly... the desire to be held by someone solid. The desire to not always be the one holding everyone else. The desire to lay something down for a minute because someone you trust has it.
I did not get that consistently. What I got instead were men who needed me to be their stability while offering me very little of their own. Men who were drawn to my groundedness and then slowly tried to borrow it until there was less of it left for me.
And I let it happen. Because I had been trained, by the church, by culture, by every message about what a good woman does, to give. To pour. To hold. To be the strong one. To not need too much. To make it work.
The problem with being strong is that people stop asking if you are okay. They assume. And you stop telling them because you have been strong for so long that you have almost convinced yourself too.
Does this live somewhere in your body right now? The exhaustion of being the stable one while waiting for someone to be stable for you? Leave a comment below. I mean it. This is the conversation I wish I had been able to have years ago.
PROVISION THAT WAS ALWAYS ALMOST HERE
Let me talk about provision specifically because this one has a particular flavor.
I have been in relationships where the potential for provision was always present and the actual provision was always deferred. Always coming. Always being planned. Always one breakthrough away. The man who was going to handle it once the situation stabilized. The man who had big plans that required my patience and my support and my resources in the meantime. The man who was impressive in vision and inconsistent in execution and somehow that gap became my problem to fill.
I filled it. More than once. With my time, my money, my energy, my belief, my spiritual work.
And I want to be precise about something... I do not regret loving people. I do not regret being generous. I do not regret the hope I had for what those relationships could have been.
What I regret is the silence I kept about what it was costing me. The way I absorbed the deficit and kept moving as if it was not accumulating. The way I made it look easy because making it look easy was another version of the strength performance I talked about in Part 2.
The accumulation is real. You cannot pour out indefinitely without consequence. The body keeps score. The spirit keeps score. And at some point, the thing you have been quietly hemorrhaging comes due.
For me it came due in the form of a reckoning. A moment where I looked at what I had built... the love I had given, the support I had extended, the years I had invested... and looked at what had been built in return, and the accounting did not balance.
That reckoning was not comfortable. It was not a gentle awakening. It was a hard and clarifying look at a pattern I had been participating in and a decision that the pattern ended here.
WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND
Here is the part people do not talk about enough.
When the relationships ended, when the men who were supposed to protect and provide did not, and eventually left or were released, they left things behind. Not just absence. Things.
They left behind my own clarity. Every difficult relationship I survived taught me something about what I would not accept again. About what my actual boundaries were versus what I thought they were. About the difference between a man who is working through something and a man who is using you as the place he processes it.
They left behind my creativity. Some of my most productive seasons spiritually came directly out of the grief of a relationship ending. The oils I developed, the knowledge I deepened, the practice I committed to more fully... some of that happened because I needed somewhere to put what I was feeling and the altar was what was in front of me.
They left behind my business. I want to say that clearly. Rich Bitch Conjure exists in part because I stopped pouring my best energy into people who were not building anything with it. The energy had to go somewhere. It went here. Into these oils. Into this brand. Into the women I serve who are sitting with the same things I sat with and need something real in their hands.
They left behind Raven. Not the oil, the woman. The version of me that stopped asking for permission to be fully herself. That stopped compressing her knowing to fit someone else's comfort level. That stopped waiting for a man to make her feel safe and started building the kind of life that felt safe from the inside out.
That woman is the one writing this.
THE HARDEST QUESTION
I have asked myself this question more than once and I want to ask it here because I think some of you are carrying it too.
What does it mean about me that they left?
I have turned that question over in every direction. In the quiet after a breakup. In the middle of the night when grief is loudest. In the clinical detachment of a long time after when you think you should be over it and are not quite.
Here is what I have arrived at after all of that turning...
It means they were not built for this level of woman. That is not arrogance. That is an honest accounting. Some people have the capacity for depth and some people have the capacity for something shallower and there is no moral judgment in that. But when you are a deep water woman and you keep inviting shallow water men to swim with you, the ending is always going to be the same.
It means nothing about your worth. Your worth is not determined by who chose to stay. It was not negotiable to begin with. It exists independent of witness.
It means you are now free. Not immediately. Not without grief. But eventually. The departure of what was not right for you creates the space for what is. I believe that. I have watched it be true in my own life. The clearing out that felt like loss was preparation. I do not know yet for what. But I know the space is not empty. It is available.
RAVEN OIL AND THE WOMAN WHO STAYS
Every time I have been at a threshold in this journey, every time the grief was loudest, every time the reckoning was hardest, every time I needed something to anchor me to who I was before the relationship and who I was becoming after it, I came back to my Raven Oil.
Not because an oil fixes a broken heart. Let me be clear about that because I will not oversell what conjure work does. An oil does not replace a person. It does not dissolve grief on contact. It does not shortcut the work that needs to be done.
What it does is give you something intentional to do with your hands while your spirit is working through something. It anchors the internal process in the physical world. It says I am here, I am present, I am tending to myself. In a season where everything feels like it is falling away, that tending matters more than people acknowledge.
Raven Hoodoo Conjure Oil is the one I reach for in those seasons because it carries the energy of the woman I am working to remain. Dark and clear and rooted and unbothered by the shadow. Moving through the hard things without being consumed by them. Present with the grief without being defined by it.
If you are in a season of reckoning right now, if you are doing the hard accounting of what a relationship cost you and deciding what happens next, Raven Oil is a companion for that work.
Find it here at richbitchconjure.com.
TO THE WOMAN READING THIS IN THE MIDDLE OF IT
I want to speak directly to you for a moment.
If you are in the middle of a relationship that is taking more than it is giving. If you are waiting for protection that keeps being promised and deferred. If you are the one holding the stability while he figures himself out. If you are pouring your best spiritual energy into a situation that is not being built with care on the other side.
I am not going to tell you what to do. That is between you and your discernment and your God and your ancestors.
But I will tell you what I know from the other side of it.
The thing you are afraid to lose is not as solid as it feels right now. The life you are afraid you will not be able to build without him is already inside you waiting to be built. The woman you are suppressing to make the relationship work is the exact woman you need access to for everything that comes next.
You are not waiting to be chosen. You are waiting to choose yourself.
That is the whole work. That is what the Raven Chronicles has been building toward from Part 1. The rage was information. The shedding was preparation. The altar was always available. And what the men left behind, the clarity, the creativity, the freedom, the business, the woman, those are the gifts.
Not the men. What they left.
THE RAVEN CHRONICLES: ONE MORE TO GO
Here is the full series schedule leading to my birthday on May 2nd:
Part 2: April 19 -- The Snake Shed (live now at richbitchconjure.com)
Part 3: April 25 -- The Altar Was Always Here (live now at richbitchconjure.com)
Part 4: April 29 -- What the Men Left Behind (you are here)
Part 5: May 2 -- I Am the Birthday (Birthday Drop)
One more. May 2nd. My birthday.
Part 5 is the one where everything lands. Where the rage and the shedding and the altar and the reckoning all arrive somewhere. Where I tell you who Raven actually is and what Rich Bitch Conjure is actually for and what I am building toward.
Subscribe to my email list so you do not miss it. The birthday drop includes something I have not announced yet and my subscribers find out first.
CLOSING CALL TO ACTION
What the men left behind built this.
Not them. What they left. The space. The clarity. The woman who had nothing left to give anyone else and finally turned it all toward herself.
If any part of this series has landed for you, if you have been reading from Part 1 and something in you has been shifting, I need you in the room on May 2nd.
Subscribe. Come back for the birthday drop. And shop my Raven Hoodoo Conjure Oil at richbitchconjure.com because if there was ever a season to work with something intentional, it is this one.
And leave me a comment below. Tell me: what did the hard seasons leave behind for you that you did not expect? What gift came disguised as a loss?
I read every single one.
- Nurse Raven | LadyDi
Founder, Rich Bitch Conjure, LLC