Some Nights Are for the Village. Others Are for the Forest.

The invitation arrives just as the sun disappears behind the trees.

Down in the village, preparations are underway for the autumn gathering. Lanterns hang from doorways, tables crowd the square, and the smell of woodsmoke drifts toward the forest. Someone has brought cider, while someone else has brought an unnecessarily elaborate opinion about how the festivities should unfold. Music will begin after dark. Before long, the village will fill with conversation, laughter, and the warmth of gathering with people who know one another.

At the edge of the forest, a witch sits beside her cottage window, watching fallen leaves collect along the garden path. Bundles of rosemary and lavender hang above the kitchen counter, books occupy nearly every available surface, and a kettle begins to sing over the stove. Several candles flicker beside whatever she was working on before deciding she would rather read.

Across the room, her closest friend has made herself comfortable beside the fireplace. She happens to be a werewolf. Most evenings, she looks like any other woman, although the approaching full moon tends to announce itself in subtle ways before anything particularly furry happens. Her senses sharpen, her energy shifts, and sleep becomes peculiar. Sometimes she feels restless enough to wander the forest for hours. During other months, the transformation leaves her craving quiet afterward. Tonight, however, she is wearing an oversized sweater, reading a book, and eyeing the last piece of bread on the table.

Neither woman has spoken for nearly an hour, which isn’t unusual for them. They’ve known each other long enough that companionship doesn’t require constant conversation, entertainment, reassurance, or evidence that they’re enjoying themselves appropriately. Sometimes they talk until midnight, wandering through folklore, relationships, strange dreams, village gossip, magick, and whatever obscure subject has captured their attention. Other evenings, they occupy the same room while doing entirely different things. Silence between them isn’t awkward because neither woman has to perform being social to remain connected to the other.

When the Village Can Wait

The witch glances again at the invitation. She genuinely likes many of the people who will be there, and if she goes, she’ll probably enjoy herself. Yet her period is approaching. Her body feels heavy, her tolerance for noise has narrowed, and the thought of fastening boots suddenly seems wildly ambitious. When the gathering was first announced, earlier in her cycle, she had been looking forward to it. Now, with her period approaching, the same celebration feels like one demand too many.

Her friend looks up from her book and asks whether they’re going. After considering the question, the witch admits she’d rather stay home. Her friend nods, reaches for the bread, and returns to reading. Apparently, they have plans after all, even if somewhere beyond their little cottage a culture continues operating under the remarkably persistent assumption that a good life should involve considerably more socializing.

The Village Has a Script, Even When Nobody Remembers Who Wrote It

The village has always valued togetherness. People gather for celebrations, share meals, help one another through difficult seasons, tell stories around fires, and participate in traditions that connect one generation with the next. There is genuine beauty in that kind of community. Meaningful connection contributes to well-being for many people, although the amount, form, and intensity of connection we desire can vary enormously.

The trouble begins when an invitation becomes an expectation. Many of us encounter that expectation early. Children are encouraged to make more friends, join activities, speak up, participate, and “come out of their shells.” Adults inherit a more sophisticated version involving networking, collaboration, social gatherings, community involvement, professional visibility, and maintaining enough relationships to demonstrate that we’re doing life correctly.

Certain qualities become particularly easy to recognize as healthy. Enthusiasm looks like happiness, sociability looks like confidence, and participation looks like belonging. Quiet can be harder to interpret.

When Quiet Gets Mistaken for Something Being Wrong

Put two people at the same gathering and watch what happens. One moves enthusiastically between conversations, laughs loudly, tells stories, and seems energized by the room. Another spends most of the evening beside the fire, listening and eventually becoming absorbed in a long conversation with one person. We readily recognize the first person’s enjoyment, while someone will eventually ask the second whether she’s okay. Perhaps she’s more than okay. Maybe this is exactly how she enjoys people.

Personality matters, but so do autonomy, sensory experience, emotional capacity, culture, relationships, stress, hormones, and whether someone actually wants to participate. Eventually, we can begin mistaking the behaviors society rewards for the behaviors everyone naturally needs.

The witch notices this whenever she visits the village. People attend gatherings they don’t want to attend, stay longer than they want to stay, and apologize when they need to leave. Invitations occasionally arrive with an invisible second message attached: If you care about us, you’ll come.

She understands showing up for people we love. Relationships sometimes ask us to stretch beyond convenience, and community requires reciprocity. Still, she finds it curious that declining an entirely optional gathering can require a defense worthy of a minor criminal proceeding. Somewhere along the way, social availability became tangled up with goodness.

Breaking Free From the Matrix of Prescribed Happiness

The modern village is considerably larger than the one beyond the witch’s forest. It follows us through phones, workplaces, advertising, entertainment, social media, and the endless parade of messages showing us what a fulfilling life supposedly looks like.

We’re encouraged to build networks, cultivate friendships, travel, collaborate, participate in communities, and remain visibly engaged with life. A weekend spent at restaurants, parties, concerts, and events produces plenty of evidence. A weekend spent gardening, reading, wandering through the forest, creating something, or doing absolutely nothing noteworthy is considerably less impressive online. Yet visibility and fulfillment aren’t the same thing.

Countless people are happily disappearing into libraries, gardens, workshops, forests, craft rooms, gaming worlds, kitchens, fandoms, and homes without issuing a press release about it. Their relative invisibility tells us very little about whether their lives are meaningful.

When Happiness Becomes Something We’re Sold

Commercial culture adds another layer. We can buy retreats to disconnect, memberships to connect, experiences to become interesting, and planners to optimize ourselves before we’ve even had coffee. Apparently, sitting quietly beneath a tree is no longer sufficient when someone can sell us a six-week program for doing it correctly.

None of those things is inherently harmful. The problem emerges when one culturally celebrated version of fulfillment becomes a prescription. That is the matrix worth examining. It isn’t a secret machine controlling our minds. It is the web of cultural expectations, social rewards, workplace norms, commercial incentives, family beliefs, and inherited assumptions that quietly influences what we believe a successful life should look like.

Breaking free doesn’t require rejecting society or relocating to a suspiciously affordable cottage deep in the forest. It begins with becoming curious about whether we actually want the things we’ve been taught to want. The question sounds simple until we realize how rarely many of us were taught to ask it.

Hermit Mode and the Psychology of Chosen Solitude

Back at the cottage, the fire has settled into a gentle glow. The witch has reached the interesting part of her book, while her friend appears to have acquired the bread despite absolutely no formal negotiations taking place. Outside, rain continues its steady conversation with the forest.

The witch has entered what we might affectionately call Hermit Mode. The Hermit offers a fitting archetype for this experience. In tarot, the Hermit carries a lantern and steps away from collective activity in search of reflection, wisdom, and inner guidance. The archetype doesn’t necessarily reject other people. Instead, the Hermit recognizes that some things become easier to hear when the surrounding world grows quiet.

Psychological research offers a similarly nuanced picture. There doesn’t appear to be one ideal ratio of solitude to socializing for everyone. Time alone can sometimes be associated with greater autonomy and lower stress, particularly when the solitude is freely chosen, while unwanted or prolonged isolation can be an entirely different experience.

Being alone and being lonely are not synonyms. Imagine two people spending Friday night alone. One desperately wants companionship but doesn’t have anyone available. The other has spent all week anticipating an evening with a book, comfortable clothes, and absolutely nobody asking a follow-up question. From the outside, both are home alone, but psychologically they may be having completely different evenings.

Hermit Mode can give us a place where nobody needs anything from us for a while. We can follow our attention instead of continually redirecting it toward someone else’s needs. For the witch, that might mean reading, gardening, practicing magick, wandering through the forest, making something with her hands, or staring out the window while drinking tea and accomplishing absolutely nothing measurable. Rest doesn’t need a résumé.

Sometimes Hermit Mode Has Company

The witch doesn’t always want to be alone when she enters Hermit Mode. Sometimes she wants to be with the one person around whom being together doesn’t feel particularly social, and her friend understands.

There are evenings when the werewolf arrives after hours in the village. She has laughed, participated, answered questions, navigated conversations, interpreted expressions, adjusted herself to different people, and genuinely enjoyed parts of the evening. By the time she reaches the cottage, she has nothing left to perform. The witch doesn’t interrogate the silence. She simply moves a stack of books from the neighboring chair so her friend can collapse into it.

When Connection Requires Performance

For some neurodivergent people, this distinction between being with people and having to perform socially can be especially meaningful. ADHD and autism can affect sensory processing, attention, communication, executive functioning, emotional regulation, and the effort involved in navigating environments designed around particular social expectations. Masking may add another layer, requiring someone to monitor or modify natural behaviors, communication, sensory responses, expressions, or needs. Even enjoyable connection can carry an energetic cost.

Recovery doesn’t always require complete isolation, though. Sometimes it requires low-demand companionship, the kind of relationship where silence doesn’t need fixing and nobody has to demonstrate that they’re sufficiently engaged.

Technically, sitting beside someone isn’t solitude. Experientially, being with someone who doesn’t require social performance can provide some of the freedom we seek when retreating from more demanding environments.

The witch and werewolf have learned this over years of friendship. They can abandon conversations halfway through because someone became distracted, one can read while the other naps, and plans can change without becoming evidence that the friendship is in danger. Most importantly, they know each other beyond the versions presented to the village. Their friendship isn’t built upon constant availability. It is built upon recognition.

Village Mode and the Beauty of Wanting People

Several weeks later, another invitation arrives. This time, the witch smiles before she’s finished reading it because something has shifted. She wants music, stories, warm cider, and the peculiar pleasure of several conversations unfolding around her at once. Her energy has returned, her curiosity has turned outward, and the idea of getting dressed seems entirely reasonable.

Her friend wants to go too, so they follow the lanterns toward the village together. Soon the witch becomes absorbed in a discussion involving folklore, dreams, and whether the strange mushrooms appearing near the northern trail are medicinal, poisonous, or merely trying to mind their own business. Her friend disappears into conversation with people she hasn’t seen in weeks. The witch stays for hours, and nothing about enjoying the gathering contradicts her love of solitude.

This is Village Mode, the part of life that turns us toward companionship, community, shared experiences, mutual care, collective joy, and the pleasure of being witnessed.

Meaningful connection doesn’t require performing extroversion, either. One person’s village may contain dozens of friends and frequent gatherings. Another person’s may consist of a partner, three close friends, a sibling, an online community, and the person at the bookstore who somehow always knows what she’ll like.

A person can want Village Mode on Saturday and Hermit Mode on Sunday without experiencing an identity crisis. Our needs are allowed to move.

The Witch, the Werewolf, and the Changing Rhythms of the Moon

As autumn deepens, the moon grows fuller, and the werewolf notices first. Her senses sharpen, sleep changes, and energy gathers beneath her skin. The forest becomes louder somehow, filled with sounds most people cannot hear. Her human body begins carrying the unmistakable anticipation of transformation.

When the moon reaches fullness, the transformation comes. The woman who sat beside the fire the previous evening runs through the forest on four legs beneath silver light. By morning, muddy footprints cross the cottage floor and a very tired woman is asleep beneath a blanket near the hearth, having returned to human form with absolutely no interest in discussing her evening yet.

The witch understands something about cyclical bodies too. Her changes are less likely to frighten passing villagers, but her menstrual cycle can influence how she experiences energy, sleep, physical comfort, emotions, attention, sensory input, sexuality, and social capacity. Over time, she has noticed that these changes don’t always arrive randomly. Sometimes, they have a rhythm.

For generations, menstruation and the moon have been connected through symbolism, folklore, fertility traditions, and the shared imagery of waxing, fullness, waning, darkness, and return. The symbolism can be meaningful without requiring menstrual cycles to synchronize literally with lunar phases. The werewolf follows the moon because she is a werewolf, while the witch follows the rhythm of her own body.

The Four Phases of the Menstrual Cycle: When the Body Has Seasons of Its Own

Although every woman’s experience is individual, understanding the four phases of the menstrual cycle can provide a useful map for noticing patterns. The map is not a prophecy, but maps can be useful when we’ve spent years wandering through the same forest wondering why the terrain keeps changing.

Menstruation: When the Body Turns Inward

The menstrual phase begins when bleeding starts. Estrogen and progesterone are low, and the uterine lining is shedding. For some women, this phase brings cramps, headaches, fatigue, disrupted sleep, lower physical energy, or increased sensory sensitivity. Socializing may feel less appealing simply because the body is already doing plenty.

This can resemble Hermit Mode, with fewer demands, softer environments, familiar people, warmth, rest, and a little less expectation. Other women feel relief once their period begins, particularly if the days preceding it were more difficult. Someone with pronounced premenstrual symptoms may discover that the arrival of menstruation feels less like descending into the cave and more like finally emerging from one. That distinction becomes important when we talk about PMDD.

The Follicular Phase: Energy Begins to Return

The follicular phase actually begins with menstruation and continues until ovulation. As the cycle progresses, estrogen generally rises while the body prepares an egg for release.

Some women notice increasing energy, motivation, concentration, curiosity, or willingness to engage with the outside world during this time. Tasks that felt cumbersome several days earlier may become easier to initiate. Social plans can sound more appealing, while creativity or sexual interest may shift.

For our witch, this may be when the village starts looking interesting again, not because estrogen has issued a mandatory party invitation but because her available capacity has changed.

Ovulation: Turning Toward the World

Around ovulation, an egg is released following hormonal signaling that includes a surge in luteinizing hormone. Estrogen has risen substantially leading into this phase.

Some women describe feeling more energetic, socially interested, confident, communicative, physically comfortable, or sexually interested around this portion of their cycle. Others notice very little. For someone who does experience this shift, Village Mode may feel easier here. Conversation requires less effort, the world feels interesting rather than intrusive, and plans sound appealing rather than exhausting.

This is a tendency some women recognize, not a requirement for womanhood.

The Luteal Phase: When the Volume Can Change

After ovulation, progesterone rises during the luteal phase. If pregnancy doesn’t occur, progesterone and estrogen eventually fall as the body approaches menstruation.

For many women, this is where the terrain becomes particularly interesting. Some experience only mild changes. Others notice fatigue, irritability, lower frustration tolerance, sleep disruption, headaches, food cravings, difficulty concentrating, physical discomfort, or a stronger desire to reduce demands. Someone who happily made plans earlier in the month may reach the late luteal phase and wonder what possessed her to agree to leave the house.

For some neurodivergent women and women with significant hormone sensitivity, the change can feel much larger. That is where the story becomes more than a charming metaphor about wanting to stay home.

When Hormonal Shifts Turn Up the Volume

Hormone sensitivity helps explain why two women can move through similar reproductive hormone fluctuations and experience them very differently. In conditions such as premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, the problem isn’t necessarily that someone has abnormal amounts of estrogen or progesterone. Current understanding instead points toward heightened sensitivity to normal cyclical hormonal changes, particularly after ovulation.

That distinction matters because a woman can have laboratory results that appear perfectly ordinary while her lived experience is anything but ordinary.

She may notice that during the late luteal phase she becomes intensely irritable, anxious, depressed, emotionally overwhelmed, exhausted, unable to concentrate, or unlike herself. Relationships may suddenly feel harder, work becomes more difficult, noise feels louder, and ordinary demands become unbearable. Then menstruation arrives, the fog begins to lift, and she wonders what happened. Month after month, the haunted house resets itself.

PMDD is more severe than ordinary premenstrual discomfort and can significantly interfere with work, relationships, school, and everyday functioning. It deserves appropriate assessment and treatment rather than being dismissed as someone being “hormonal.”

There is also premenstrual exacerbation, or PME, in which an existing condition is present throughout the month but becomes noticeably worse before menstruation. Anxiety, depression, migraines, and other conditions can follow this pattern. Understanding the difference can matter because not everything that becomes worse before a period is PMDD. Sometimes symptoms emerge primarily within the premenstrual window, while other times the cycle turns up the volume on something already there.

ADHD, Autism, and the Menstrual Cycle

For neurodivergent women, another layer may be hiding beneath the floorboards. Research on ADHD and reproductive hormones is still developing, but growing evidence suggests that some women with ADHD experience meaningful changes in symptoms across the menstrual cycle. Studies and recent reviews describe changes involving attention, executive functioning, mood, working memory, emotional regulation, and perceived medication effectiveness, with many women reporting greater difficulty during the luteal or premenstrual portion of the cycle.

That may help explain an experience many women have struggled to put into words: My ADHD isn’t always this hard. Why can I manage everything one week and lose every coping strategy I own the next? The person hasn’t suddenly become less capable. Her available cognitive resources may have changed.

Autistic women and other autistic menstruators have also described menstruation as amplifying sensory sensitivities, anxiety, burnout, emotional regulation difficulties, and the effort required to manage everyday life. Research in this area remains comparatively limited, but the lived experiences being documented deserve attention.

Now place those experiences inside the village. The music hasn’t objectively become louder, the conversations aren’t necessarily more complicated, her clothing hasn’t suddenly become scratchier, and the fluorescent lights at work haven’t developed a personal vendetta. Yet her ability to filter, tolerate, organize, compensate, mask, and recover may have changed. The environment may be exactly the same, but her available bandwidth is not.

For a neurodivergent woman who has spent years surviving through competence, masking, preparation, people-pleasing, or sheer force of will, cyclical changes in that capacity can be confusing. She may interpret them as laziness, inconsistency, oversensitivity, or personal failure. Context offers another possibility.

PMDD, Neurodivergence, and the Difference Between Needing Rest and Needing Support

This is also where we need to resist romanticizing every retreat into the cottage. If a woman experiences severe depression, hopelessness, rage, anxiety, emotional dysregulation, relationship conflict, or significant functional impairment during the premenstrual phase, she may need more than permission to cancel plans and light a candle.

Hermit Mode can be restorative, while PMDD may also require appropriate care. The two can coexist without treating either rest or treatment as the complete answer.

Someone can reduce sensory and social demands because she knows those accommodations help while also working with qualified healthcare professionals to assess and treat significant cyclical symptoms. Psychotherapy can support pattern recognition, emotional regulation, self-advocacy, relationships, shame reduction, boundaries, and accommodations, while medical professionals can assess reproductive and physical health and discuss appropriate treatment options.

Tracking symptoms across cycles can sometimes help reveal patterns that memory alone misses. The purpose isn’t to turn the body into another productivity project. It is to gather information, because there is a considerable difference between I am defective every month and something predictable may be happening to me every month. The second understanding gives us somewhere to begin.

Perimenopause: When the Familiar Map Starts Moving

Eventually, even a familiar forest can change. A woman may spend years learning the contours of her cycle. She knows approximately when energy rises, when sleep changes, when she needs more quiet, and when she feels most like turning toward the world. Then perimenopause arrives and moves the trail markers.

During the menopause transition, hormonal fluctuations can become less predictable. Periods may change, and women may experience sleep disruption, hot flashes, mood changes, irritability, anxiety, fatigue, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, memory complaints, or changes in sexual desire. The experience varies considerably from woman to woman.

For neurodivergent women, this transition can be particularly disorienting. A woman with ADHD may discover that organizational systems she relied upon for years suddenly aren’t holding everything together. Attention feels slippery, working memory becomes less reliable, emotional regulation requires more effort, and sleep disruption steals resources she was already carefully budgeting.

A woman who learned to mask autistic traits may find that maintaining the same level of social performance requires far more energy than it once did. Sensory experiences may become harder to tolerate, and recovery may take longer.

Emerging research increasingly recognizes these intersections, although the evidence base remains younger than it should be. Women’s experiences of ADHD, autism, menstruation, PMDD, and perimenopause have historically received far less attention than they deserved. For some women, finally understanding these connections doesn’t feel like receiving another diagnosis. It feels like finding the missing page of the grimoire, where experiences that once seemed unrelated finally begin forming a recognizable pattern.

Two Women, Two Cycles, and Absolutely No Requirement to Match

One evening, several days before the full moon, the werewolf can barely sit still. She wants to go somewhere, preferably anywhere. The forest sounds interesting, the village sounds better, music drifts somewhere in the distance, and she has already changed clothes twice.

Meanwhile, the witch is curled beneath a blanket with cramps and has reached the stage of the evening where putting on shoes would constitute an unreasonable demand. Their cycles have absolutely failed to coordinate.

Her friend pauses beside the door and asks whether she’s sure. The witch gestures vaguely toward the kettle, heating pad, and book beside her, which answers the question quite effectively. So the werewolf goes to the village while the witch stays home, and nobody is abandoned.

A week later, the situation reverses. The witch wakes with more energy and wants the market, conversation, and perhaps dinner somewhere she didn’t have to cook herself. Her friend has recently transformed back into human form after the full moon and looks at the proposed itinerary as though the witch has suggested they hike across the continent. This time, the witch goes while her friend stays, and their friendship survives this astonishing display of autonomy.

People who love one another don’t have to need the same things at the same time. Healthy connection can make room for changing capacities, bodies, preferences, and rhythms. Sometimes we meet in the village, sometimes we meet at the cottage, and occasionally one person goes wandering while the other stays home. Belonging doesn’t require synchronization.

When the Nervous System Needs the Forest

Hormones are one influence on capacity, not the explanation for everything.

Imagine entering a crowded gathering where music plays, conversations overlap, lights flicker, people move constantly, and someone keeps trying to speak to you while another conversation unfolds directly behind your shoulder. One person finds the environment thrilling, while another genuinely likes everyone there and begins quietly running out of bandwidth. Both can be true.

Sensory processing, neurodivergence, stress, fatigue, chronic demands, hormonal changes, sleep, grief, illness, caregiving, work, and the amount of social interaction someone has already navigated can all influence what an environment requires from them. This is why “But you had fun last time” isn’t particularly useful evidence that someone should want the same experience today. Capacity changes, and so does context.

For someone who masks, social interaction may also require continually monitoring facial expressions, communication, tone, body language, sensory responses, or whether she’s behaving in the expected way. Even enjoyable connection can become exhausting when a second invisible job is happening underneath it.

Sometimes stepping away helps us regulate and return. Other times, we don’t need complete solitude. We need a person around whom the monitoring can stop. When one friend says, “I can’t people today,” the other doesn’t hear, “I don’t want you.” She hears exactly what was said, and no translation is required.

When Hermit Mode Becomes a Fortress Instead of a Sanctuary

Of course, not every retreat into solitude represents restoration. Sometimes people withdraw because relationships have become painful, unpredictable, exhausting, or unsafe. Depression, anxiety, grief, burnout, rejection, trauma, social fear, and severe premenstrual symptoms can all change how accessible connection feels.

Protective withdrawal often develops for understandable reasons. If relationships have repeatedly required masking, people-pleasing, emotional labor, or abandoning ourselves to maintain connection, solitude may become the only place we feel entirely safe. That protection deserves compassion, even while a sanctuary can gradually become a fortress.

The useful question isn’t simply whether we’re spending too much time alone. Instead, we might ask whether our solitude supports the life we actually want. Does time alone leave us restored or increasingly empty? Can we reach toward meaningful relationships when we desire them? Are there people around whom we can be ourselves? Does declining interaction feel like a choice, or has avoidance begun making our world smaller?

Sometimes healing involves learning to say no, while at other times it involves discovering relationships safe enough to say yes.

The Magick of Being Known Without Performing

Late one evening, the witch hears footsteps approaching the cottage. Her friend has returned from the village. There is no full moon tonight, no transformation, and nothing particularly dramatic has happened. She’s simply tired.

The door opens, and the werewolf steps inside in human form, removes her boots, and gives the witch the particular look that means she has exhausted her capacity for language. The witch understands, so a pile of books disappears from the neighboring chair and her friend sits. Tea arrives soon afterward, but for the next hour, conversation does not.

There is no tension in the room because nobody wonders whether something is wrong, and neither woman feels responsible for keeping the other entertained. Eventually, the werewolf reaches across the space between their chairs and steals one of the witch’s biscuits. The witch looks at her, her friend shrugs, and apparently communication has resumed.

There is something deeply nourishing about relationships in which silence doesn’t threaten belonging.

Learning to Belong Without Abandoning Yourself

From a Jungian perspective, we might think about individuation here, the ongoing process of becoming more conscious of who we are beyond the identities, expectations, and adaptations we’ve inherited.

Most of us learn how to belong before we learn how to belong to ourselves. We discover which behaviors earn approval, which emotions seem acceptable, which needs inconvenience others, and which versions of ourselves move most easily through the world.

Some adaptation is simply part of living with other humans. Authenticity doesn’t mean doing whatever we want without regard for anyone else. Problems emerge, however, when adaptation becomes chronic self-abandonment. Eventually, we can become so practiced at being acceptable that we struggle to recognize ourselves when nobody is watching.

Solitude can help us rediscover those parts of ourselves, and so can relationships where we don’t have to perform. The witch and werewolf haven’t discovered a life without compromise, social responsibility, or uncomfortable moments. They’ve discovered something more realistic: places where they can take the costume off.

The Forest and the Village Have Always Belonged Together

By late autumn, another celebration arrives, and this time both women want to go. They follow the path toward the village beneath a sky scattered with stars, carrying bread, herbs, and several jars of preserves the witch claims she intentionally made in quantities sufficient to provision a small kingdom.

The evening unfolds easily. They eat, laugh, wander between conversations, and remain considerably later than either expected. Eventually, they walk home through the forest, talking at first and then gradually falling silent.

Nothing about enjoying the gathering disproves their need for solitude, just as the evenings hidden away in the cottage never meant they disliked people. Perhaps this is what our cultural scripts so often miss. A fulfilling life doesn’t require us to choose between independence and connection, solitude and community, Hermit Mode and Village Mode.

Human beings move through changing rhythms. Personality influences those rhythms, but so do nervous systems, relationships, sensory environments, menstrual cycles, hormone sensitivity, PMDD, perimenopause, neurodivergence, stress, health, sleep, responsibilities, and seasons of life. A body can be reliable without being identical every day.

Forests don’t remain in bloom throughout the year. Tides move inward and outward. The moon waxes and wanes without anyone accusing it of inconsistency. Human beings are more complicated than moons and forests, of course, and there is no perfect formula telling us when to connect or withdraw. Perhaps that’s precisely the point.

We Don’t Need to Be Consistent to Be Ourselves

Breaking free from prescribed ways of living doesn’t mean replacing society’s rules with a prettier collection of rules decorated with moons. It means becoming curious enough to notice ourselves.

Understanding the menstrual cycle can give women language for experiences that previously felt random. Recognizing hormone sensitivity can help explain why one person’s cycle barely registers while another person’s profoundly affects her emotional or cognitive life. Understanding PMDD or premenstrual exacerbation can help someone recognize when symptoms deserve professional attention. Learning about ADHD, autism, and hormonal transitions may provide context for changes in executive functioning, sensory tolerance, masking, and emotional regulation. Recognizing perimenopause can help a woman understand why the familiar map of herself suddenly seems to have changed.

None of that removes individuality. Instead, it gives us more context for understanding it.

The Magick Is in Knowing Your Own Rhythm

We can value community without measuring our worth through social availability, enjoy solitude without romanticizing isolation, and recognize cyclical patterns without allowing them to dictate who we’re supposed to be. Most importantly, we can build lives flexible enough to accommodate who we actually are.

When the witch and werewolf finally reach the cottage, the fire has nearly gone out. They rekindle it, make tea, and settle into their familiar chairs. Neither feels like talking anymore, and no one needs to.

Beyond the windows, village lights glow faintly through the trees. The village will be there when they want its warmth, stories, laughter, and companionship, while the forest will remain when they need quiet. Inside the cottage sits something that belongs fully to neither Hermit Mode nor Village Mode: two friends sharing a room without performing for each other, each entirely free to be herself.

Perhaps that is the real magick. It isn’t learning how to need nobody or forcing ourselves to need everybody. It is learning what nourishes us, understanding the rhythms that shape our capacity, recognizing when those needs change, and finding people with whom we don’t have to abandon ourselves in order to belong.

Outside, the moon continues quietly through its cycle, and inside, so do they.

Therapy for PMDD, Perimenopause, Neurodivergence, and Changing Capacity at Storm Haven

Sometimes understanding the pattern is where therapy begins.

A woman may arrive wondering why her ADHD feels considerably harder during certain parts of her menstrual cycle. She may notice that sensory overwhelm, masking, irritability, anxiety, executive dysfunction, or social exhaustion intensify before her period. Perhaps she wonders whether what she experiences is PMS, PMDD, or the premenstrual worsening of something already present.

Another woman may have navigated ADHD or autistic traits for decades before perimenopause seems to rearrange the landscape. Strategies that once worked become less reliable. Sleep changes, brain fog appears, emotional regulation takes more effort, and social environments feel harder to tolerate. She may find herself asking a question that can appear in many different forms: Why does everything suddenly feel harder when I used to be able to handle this?

These experiences deserve curiosity rather than shame.

Therapy That Looks at the Whole Ecosystem

At Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness, our humanistic and neurodivergent-affirming approach creates room to explore the whole ecosystem surrounding these experiences: nervous-system capacity, masking, sensory needs, relationships, boundaries, people-pleasing, identity, burnout, hormonal transitions, emotional regulation, and the expectations women have learned to carry about who they are supposed to be.

Therapy does not replace appropriate medical evaluation or treatment for PMDD, menstrual concerns, or perimenopause. Instead, psychotherapy can become one part of collaborative care, helping clients notice patterns, understand their experiences, develop accommodations and boundaries, communicate their needs, strengthen relationships, and separate genuine needs from the shame that often accumulates around them.

Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness offers in-person psychotherapy in Temecula, California, as well as online therapy for clients throughout California. For women seeking neurodivergent-affirming therapy, support around ADHD or autism, PMDD and emotional well-being, perimenopause and mental health, masking, sensory overwhelm, burnout, or changing social capacity, therapy can provide a place to explore what is happening without reducing the person to a diagnosis or expecting her to become more convenient for everyone around her.

You don’t have to become more outgoing to deserve belonging, force yourself through the village when your nervous system is asking for the forest, or assume that every difficult change means something is wrong with who you are. Sometimes the work begins by learning the landscape: noticing when you want the village and when you need the forest, what happens across your own cycle, what changes when your hormones change, where you are masking, and who can sit beside you at the cottage when you don’t feel like being anything for anyone at all.

Because belonging should not require leaving yourself at the door.

About the Author

Jennifer Hyatt, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, writer, and founder of Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness in Temecula, California. Her work is rooted in curiosity about the stories people carry, the ways the mind and body adapt to experience, and what can become possible when we understand ourselves with greater context and less shame. Drawing from neurodivergent-affirming therapy, depth psychology, nervous system awareness, relational approaches, storytelling, symbolism, and a lifelong fascination with folklore and the strange things humans have imagined lurking in the dark, Jennifer explores psychology through both clinical and narrative lenses.

As The Nerdie Therapist, Jennifer is also the author of The Understory: Going Beneath the Surface in Psychotherapy, a therapist’s guide to the hidden ecosystems beneath symptoms, stories, and the roots of change, and co-creator of Thread & Tether, an archetypal card deck designed to invite reflection, curiosity, and deeper exploration of the stories, patterns, and parts of ourselves we carry. Storm Haven’s Spooky Season series uses fictional characters, familiar monsters, haunted houses, ghosts, witches, shadows, and other seasonal oddities to explore the very human experiences hiding underneath them. Sometimes the things that go bump in the night become considerably more interesting when we ask what they might have to tell us.

Disclaimer

This article is intended for educational and reflective purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized mental health or medical care. Experiences of solitude, social connection, neurodivergence, masking, menstrual cycles, PMDD, premenstrual exacerbation, hormonal changes, perimenopause, and emotional well-being vary widely.

The four menstrual phases discussed here describe general physiological patterns and possible experiences, not a universal emotional or behavioral schedule. References to moon cycles, witchcraft, tarot, werewolves, and other archetypal or folkloric imagery are used symbolically and for storytelling and are not intended to suggest that menstrual cycles are biologically governed by lunar phases.

Significant cyclical mood changes, severe premenstrual symptoms, new or worsening symptoms during perimenopause, or changes that interfere with relationships, work, safety, or daily functioning deserve appropriate professional assessment. Psychotherapy can be one part of care, but medical and reproductive-health concerns should also be discussed with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.