the Sól in me

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Sól, the sun goddess, from Norse mythology.

The woman who drags the burning sun across the sky every day while a wolf races behind her, relentless and biting at her heels.

And maybe it’s the Leo in me, maybe it’s my relationship to visibility and expression and intensity, but there’s something about her story that feels painfully familiar to me.

Because people look at the sun and they think radiance. Confidence. Warmth. Life force. They think she is untouchable because she shines brightly.

But in the myths, Sól is not peaceful. She is in motion constantly. Running. Carrying light while being hunted by Sköll, the wolf fated to swallow her whole at Ragnarök.

And I think what unsettles me so deeply about that story is that the wolf is not separate from her mythology. He is stitched into it. A shadow sewn directly into the fabric of her existence.

Without the wolf, there is no chase. Without the chase, there is no movement across the sky. Without the darkness, there is no myth of the sun.

That feels devastatingly true for me.

Because the brightest parts of me have never existed separately from my darkness. My tenderness has always lived beside rage. My beauty beside shame. My longing beside terror. My devotion beside grief that feels ancient and bottomless.

There are parts of me that feel solar. Warm. Alive. Generous. Creative. Sensual. Loving.

And there are other parts that feel wolf-like. Starving. Protective. Feral. Suspicious of love. Capable of cruelty when wounded deeply enough.

For a long time I think I believed healing meant killing the wolf. Silencing the darkness. Becoming “all light.” But the older I get, the more I realise that fantasy is its own kind of violence.

The wolf shaped me too.

My wounds shaped me. My grief shaped me. My fear of abandonment shaped me. The humiliations I survived shaped me. Even my shame carved its teeth into who I became.

Not always beautifully…

And maybe that’s why I resonate so deeply with these old myths. The Norse gods were never clean or pure. They were brutal and grieving and doomed. They loved knowing loss was inevitable. They fought knowing the end would still come.

There’s something unbearable about Sól knowing the wolf will one day catch her. That no matter how brightly she burns, she is still mortal inside the myth. Still consumable.

But there’s also something achingly beautiful about the fact that she rides the sun anyway. She does not extinguish herself because darkness follows her. She burns anyway.

Honestly, I think a lot of women know what that feels like. To carry light while carrying ruin. To be deeply loving while also deeply afraid. To be seen as radiant while privately surviving your own internal apocalypse.

Maybe that’s part of being human.

Maybe we were never meant to become light without darkness.

Maybe we were meant to learn how to keep burning while knowing the wolf is real.