Why I Walk with Inanna: My Own Descent and What Called Me to Her Myth

I built two identities before I became obsessed with Inanna's mythology.

The first was the indie author. For over a decade, I wrote paranormal and urban fantasy with my love of mythology and comparative religion woven into every book, because that's genuinely what I'm drawn to.

The second grew out of the first: teaching other indie authors how to publish, because it made sense to combine the two, and because teaching it helped me understand my own process better.

Both worked. For years, both worked.

But somewhere in there, something else started trying to come through. Not a new idea for a book. Something underneath the books. Something much larger. And because I'd spent so long building those two identities, it was hard to make room for whatever this new thing actually was.

So I tried to blend them instead of letting go. I started teaching manifestation for authors. Meditation for authors. Thinking that niche would satisfy whatever was trying to grow in me.

It didn't.

The Crumbling

It wasn't a graceful transition. It took the businesses actually cracking, the traction I'd built disappearing, the growth stalling out, and everything internally crumbling at the same time as everything externally was crumbling, before I stopped trying to satisfy the new thing inside the old container.

And here's what I didn't expect: it was in that exact crumbling that I found out I was autistic and ADHD. Listen, I'm 47 years old. Finding out at 45 that you're AuDHD is a bit of a trip. But it genuinely cracked something open in a way that made everything else make sense.

Before that, I just thought I was high-functioning. A high achiever who could do things other people couldn't. I saw connections across diverging ideas, concepts... hell, realities.

I didn't put together, however, that the thing letting me do those things, and the thing burning me out doing them, was neurodivergence. I probably should have known sooner, both of my sons have been diagnosed, and I now believe my daughter is too. But I hadn't seen it in myself. I guess I was too close?

Once you see it, though, you can't unsee it.

Ishtar, Then Inanna

There was a day, particularly frustrated with how everything was going, where I was channeling and asking, genuinely asking, what I was actually supposed to be learning. Was there a god or goddess I should be connecting to? I guess that was the right question because I got an answer.

Ishtar.

Now, look. I went to school to become an archaeologist. (Different life and story, I know.) But even as a young child and then young adult, I loved all things ancient history, mythology, and comparative religion. I wasn't unfamiliar with her name. But I certainly wasn't as familiar as I am now.

The more I learned about her, and then Inanna underneath her, the more I recognized I was being guided onto a specific journey: the seven gates.

Not a metaphor I picked because it was pretty. A path I was already smack dab in the middle of walking through.

I think being AuDHD makes me particularly sensitive to injustice.

Religious hypocrisy.

Wealth inequality.

The way people get treated across the political spectrum.

None of that sits right with me, and it never has. That sensitivity is part of where Aureya came from too, when she arrived as a download in April 2025.

The Ishtar moment came about a year before that, in the summer of 2024.

The connection was so strong to her mythology and journey that I started writing a book about the seven gates in personal transformation that same year. It's still not finished. I think I had to actually build Manifest Differently, live inside it for a while, before I could understand what the book really needed from me. (Yes, it's still in the works. Yes, it will be closely tied to Temple of Mysteries and the way we work with the gates.) More on that soon.

What Actually Fell

My ego death wasn't abstract. It was very, very specific.

It meant letting my author identity and my teaching identity be allowed to crumble.

Which meant letting the money that came with both of them fall too. And then, scarier yet, trusting, without proof yet, that something stronger would be there on the way back up.

That's not a story I'm telling you because it makes a good parable. It's the actual shape of the gates I now teach, lived before I ever thought of teaching them.

Releasing an identity built to be seen and approved of, that was my author platform.

Releasing the need for protection that money and a built business provide, that was letting the income fall.

Surrendering attachment to how the growth was supposed to look, that was watching the traction disappear and not forcing it back.

And let me tell you, all of that... is damn uncomfortable.

I didn't walk through the seven gates because I read about them somewhere. I walked through them because my life required it, and Inanna gave me the language for what I was already living.

Where This Leaves Me

I'm still writing the book. I'm still building the pieces of Temple of Mysteries, gate by gate, the same way I walked them. I'm not on the other side of this looking back at you from somewhere finished. I'm still in it, still returning to gates I thought I'd already cleared.

If any part of this is landing, the crumbling, the identity you built that stopped fitting, the sense that something else is trying to come through and you don't yet have language for it, the free gate reading is a good place to start naming where you actually are. I know what it feels like to be lost and searching for answers. My hope is that this will give you some clarity that you're on a path and the path has a shape.

And if you want the fuller architecture behind all of this, The Seven Gates of Inanna, what a mystery school actually means in this context, and Temple of Mysteries are where it keeps going.