Greetings my lovelies,

So, I was minding my own business in Disney Dreamlight Valley, doing whatever ridiculously important task apparently only I could accomplish. You know how these games work. Someone desperately needs flowers growing six feet away, but naturally I’m the only qualified person to pick them.

Then I stopped to talk to Onyx.

Onyx is my Forgotten, the dark version of my character. She’s basically me if Disney dipped me in midnight, gave me glowing green eyes, added some emotional baggage, and sent me wandering around the Valley looking mysterious.

Then she said:

“If we let our dark feelings have control, they will take over. They’ll overwhelm and trap us.”

Well, shit.

Apparently we weren’t picking flowers anymore. Disney had scheduled me for shadow work.

Excuse Me, I Was Just Playing a Game

What struck me was that she didn’t say we shouldn’t have dark feelings. She didn’t tell me anger was bad, sadness needed to disappear, or that we should slap a smile on everything and sprinkle some pixie dust over the uncomfortable parts.

She said not to let them control us.

There’s a difference.

I’ve spent enough years on this planet to know that stuffing painful emotions into some imaginary box doesn’t make them disappear. Grief, anger, fear, hurt—they’ll sit quietly for a while, but eventually one of them is going to kick open the door yelling, “REMEMBER ME?”

Yeah. I remember you.

I’ve learned that the darker parts of ourselves don’t necessarily need to be destroyed. Sometimes they need to be acknowledged and understood. They can ride with us.

They just don’t get the keys.

Obviously, I Needed to Rename Her

After this surprisingly deep conversation with my dark Disney counterpart, my next thought should have been profound.

Instead, I thought, Can I change your name?

Because Onyx wasn’t doing it for me.

It described what she looked like, but not who she was. If this character represented a shadowy part of me, I wanted something that actually felt like her.

First came Vesper. Dark, mysterious, twilight-ish. I loved it.

Then I started thinking about that strange time just before morning when darkness is still there but light is beginning to return. That sent me wandering through mystical names until we landed on Solenne.

Beautiful.

Also entirely too serious.

Suddenly my dark alter ego sounded like she should be wearing seventeen yards of black velvet while staring mournfully from a castle window.

Ma’am.

Eventually I’m going to get hungry, come downstairs and make coffee.

That’s when I realized the problem.

Why Does My Shadow Have to Be Miserable?

I was naming her entirely around darkness.

Dark. Solemn. Brooding. Tragic. Mysterious.

But that’s not me.

I’ve known grief. I’ve been angry, hurt and afraid. I’ve carried things I didn’t know how to put down, and I’ve hidden parts of myself because sometimes looking directly at them hurt too much.

But I also laugh.

I’m sarcastic. I get ridiculously excited about things. I believe there’s still magic in this world. I can have a deep conversation about life and five minutes later be laughing over something completely stupid.

My darkness never took that away.

So I didn’t want some tragic shadow wandering around looking like she hadn’t smiled since 1847.

I wanted a dark Disney character.

Now we were getting somewhere.

She needed to be magical and mystical, but also fun. Chaotic. Mischievous. A little unpredictable. The kind of character who gives you profound life advice and then enchants your coffee mug because she thought it would be funny.

She needed glowing eyes and questionable judgment.

Basically, she needed personality.

Enter Nyxie Vex

We tried Fable. Cute, magical and storybook-ish.

Then Vexa. More attitude. More trouble.

Then came Nyxie.

There she was.

Nyxie sounded like darkness with sparkles. A mischievous little night creature who probably shouldn’t be left alone near anything enchanted.

But she needed a little more bite.

Vex.

Nyxie Vex.

DONE.

That sounded like my dark Disney character.

She’s not evil. She’s not miserable. She’s mysterious, magical, sarcastic and probably responsible for at least one incident nobody in the Valley is allowed to discuss.

And somewhere in this completely ridiculous journey of renaming a video-game character, I realized something.

Maybe That’s What Healing Looks Like

I don’t want to erase my shadow.

Those darker pieces are part of me too. Anger has shown me where my boundaries were crossed. Grief exists because I loved. Pain changed me, even when I would’ve preferred it hadn’t.

But none of those things get to become my entire identity.

Maybe healing isn’t about becoming all light. Maybe it’s learning how to stand in both—the light and the shadow—without letting either one erase who we are.

I don’t have to banish the darker parts of myself.

I can look over at them and say, “Yeah, you’re mine too. Come on.”

We’re just establishing some ground rules.

Nyxie Vex isn’t driving.

She’s not touching my coffee.

And under absolutely no circumstances am I leaving that bitch unsupervised with anything labeled DO NOT OPEN.

I may have embraced my shadow.

I haven’t lost my damn mind. 🖤✨