Every demon I’ve named so far works alone.

This is the exception.

I’m at lunch with my friend Moira at a women’s retreat in Savannah when I first say it out loud. That I found him. The self-sabotage demon. The one who had been quietly setting me up to fail before I ever got started. Moira looks at me across the table and always seems to ask the perfect question when something lands with weight: when?

Just this week, I tell her.

She sits back. Surprised. Because that is the thing about real discovery. It doesn’t always arrive on schedule. Sometimes it shows up in the middle of an ordinary week, unannounced, and by the time you’re sitting across from the right person you are still turning it over in your hands, still finding the words for it. That is part of my process. I write to find the shape of something. And then I talk it out, because I have always believed this: words matter. The act of finding the right ones, out loud, to another human being, is how the discovery finishes becoming real. My friends are well familiar with my saying something, squishing up my face and uttering “not the right word but you get my gist. Working on it.” They know my process. My work in progress and partnership with my edit fairy working hard to polish and finesse so the words land just right so my reader can link arms with me as we take this journey together.

Moira was my perfect person to hear this exploration. She listened. She reflected. And she told me it resonated with her too. That it wasn’t just mine.

It never is.

Meet Mr. Nidhogg and Mrs. Ate. Partners. A unit. The only duo on the roster, and the most dangerous thing about them isn’t what they do. It’s that you never see them doing it.

Nidhogg comes from Norse mythology. Before your eyes glaze over, stay with me, because this one matters. He lives at the absolute bottom of Hell. Not the cleaned-up version. The deepest possible layer. And he spends eternity doing one thing: gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, the “world tree,” from underneath. Not from the outside. Not where anyone is looking. From below the foundation. From the place you never check because everything above it still appears to be standing. The rot at your base, your support to everything above.

He is not loud. He is not dramatic. He just lives where the light doesn’t reach and does his work, slowly, without stopping. By the time you notice something is wrong upstairs, he has been at the roots for years.

He is the deepest, darkest demon I have yet to really look in the eye. Dead center, like I have with the wine witch and her clown car of friends. And as I came to that realization about this newly revealed character who has been an anonymous and hidden member of my demon cast, I could feel a different temperature of fear.

If that wasn’t news enough: his wife is Ate. Greek. Ancient. Thrown out of Olympus by Zeus himself because she got inside his head so completely that he made a catastrophic decision entirely of his own free will. That is her whole game. She doesn’t push you toward disaster. She just adjusts your vision slightly, just enough, so that you walk there yourself. Every step feels like yours. Every choice feels sound. You arrive at the wreckage fully convinced you were the one steering.

You were not steering.

He gnaws. She blinds. He erodes the foundation. She makes sure you never look down to notice as you walk off the cliff. Norse underworld meets ancient Greece, and the most international couple you will never want at your table shows up anyway, uninvited, already seated, already deep in their work on you.

Here is what they looked like in my life.

I have always been genuinely, deeply curious about how people find their way to meaning. All religions. All cultures. All of the pathways human beings have carved toward something larger than themselves, spirituality as one chosen word to describe it, faith for others. And in describing my interest and search I don’t mean that in an armchair way. I mean it in a shoes-on-the-ground, go-find-it way.

I have stood inside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and felt the air change. Centuries of prayer absorbed into those walls from not one faith but several, layered on top of each other like geological strata. I have pressed my hand against the cool stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem and understood without anyone explaining it why people come here to leave their most private words hand written on tiny slips of paper in its cracks. I have ducked into tiny white Greek Orthodox churches on islands where the only sound was wind and the only other person was a woman in black lighting a candle for someone she loved. I have sat in Buddhist temples in Mongolia feeling the vibrations of drums and singing rumble through my body, and stood in cathedrals in Europe and walked into mosques and synagogues and chapels in my own backyard. Not as a tourist. Not as an observer. As someone who genuinely wanted to understand what happens to a person inside these walls. I kept going farther, thinking the far-flung places would give me a deeper layer of understanding, a version of the answer not available closer to home.

What I found, every single time, is that the definitions are almost always the same underneath. The words are different. The rituals are different. The architecture is different. But the core is universal. Something that draws you forward, fills you with strength and love, connects you to other people and to something larger than yourself. I have spent my whole life leaning toward it.

Which is exactly why this trap was so elegant.

When I decided to get sober-minded, I needed a community. I found one on social media, the algorithms easily targeting me with searches about mocktails, monthly detoxes and moderation. On paper the program, from its initial reset through its graduating levels, checked every box for me. Women. Sobriety. Support. Ritual and routine. And there was a genuinely honest thread in my interest. These women had found their way to something and I wanted to know how. If faith was part of that equation, I was absolutely there to learn from it.

I noted the God-forward culture. The words of faith and Christ interwoven tightly to their online presence.

I joined anyway.

I can hear Nidhogg cackling from underneath my floorboards. Because what I did not let myself examine at the time, what I let Ate cloud over, was the voice a few inches below the honest curiosity. The one that said, very quietly: you know exactly what’s going to happen Iris. Someone is going to push too hard. The conversion energy is going to hit you wrong on the wrong day. You are going to start sputtering and cursing about all the God stuff, the eyeroll is going to kick in, and you will have your exit, nice clean and without needed thought. A perfectly justified, completely righteous exit. You didn’t fail. They weren’t for you. Totally reasonable.

And in that reasonable exit, alcohol wins. That asshole wins.

Not because it fought for me. Because I handed it the opening myself with a neat bow tied on it and signed the card myself with a cursive flourish. They would be the reason for my failure. Not me. And I would return right back to the same path, same addiction, same story, with a brand new excuse freshly installed.

Then something happened that I did not see coming.

In the early days, I came across something in the community’s materials about moderation. The language was clear and it was kind: if you have a “data point,” their phrase for a drink, neutral, non-shaming, just a moment of data, you are still welcome. It is part of the learning journey. It does not disqualify you. You are not excommunicated.

I stared at that for a long time.

I had been so certain I would fail. So certain that one slip would mean the door slamming shut, which of course was exactly what Nidhogg had been banking on. The exit already built. The excuse already waiting. And here was this community saying: that’s a data point. Bring it. Keep going. You still belong here.

That was not a policy. That was my angel talking.

That one note dismantled the entire trap. Because if I couldn’t be excommunicated, I couldn’t use failure as the exit. The door Nidhogg had been building for years, the one I would blow through with my middle finger raised and my righteousness fully intact, he had built it on the assumption that there was somewhere to be thrown out from. And there wasn’t.

That is the psychological genius of this particular pair, and also the precise location of their undoing.

Nidhogg spent years at the roots of my relationship with faith, with belonging, with trusting that a community would not try to change me. He made the ground soft enough that one well-placed friction point would send me straight through it. And Ate made sure I chose the exact community most likely to produce that friction, while making the choice feel like curiosity, like openness, like the most reasonable thing in the world. Ready to grab my ankles just as I began to soar and yank me back down.

I almost let it work.

The thing about naming them is that you cannot un-name them. Once you see the architecture, you wake up and see it everywhere. The choice that felt obvious. The community you joined with one eye already on the exit. The project you started with a built-in reason to abandon it. The relationship you entered half-convinced it would fail.

Not bad luck. Not bad timing. That was the couple, doing what they do.

The dethroning is not dramatic. It’s the moment you say it out loud to another person, over lunch in Savannah, just days after the discovery, and watch the whole structure lose its power in the light. Nidhogg has never survived being seen. And Ate’s fog dissolves the second you ask out loud: whose idea was this really, and what was it actually supposed to accomplish.

And it does not go undefended.

Jophiel is my counterforce. Beautiful Archangel of creativity, beauty, and illumination and often brought forth in times of chaos. She knows exactly what my word is for 2026. Soar. She understands every layer of what that means: the professional reach, the personal excavation, the daily decision to rise above the froth instead of drowning in it. Where Nidhogg gnaws in the dark and Ate clouds what’s directly in front of you, Jophiel leads with love, with creativity, with the untangling of chaos into clarity. She will draw her sword for this fight. But here is what I have learned: she cannot do the first part for me. Drawing them into the light, seeing them, naming them, saying it out loud to Moira over lunch just days after the discovery lands, that part takes courage. That part is mine.

I stayed.

I let the God talk be theirs without making it a verdict on mine. I found my teachers. I found my sisters.

And here is where the demons’ script fell completely apart.

If you had told me that a community of women who are overwhelmingly church-based, Christ-forward, and God-anchored would be among the most genuinely curious, diverse, and accepting people I have ever encountered, I would have smiled politely and waited for the catch. That was the script Nidhogg wrote. That was the version Ate made feel inevitable. But it was not what happened.

These women asked about me. They wanted to know about my background, my Jewish roots, my relationship with faith on my own terms. Not to redirect me. Not to open a door they were hoping I’d walk through. Just because they were curious about another human being sitting in their circle. The conversion energy I had been so certain was coming never arrived. What arrived instead was something I had not budgeted for: genuine interest. Real welcome. A circle wide enough to hold all of it, mine included.

I was not just not excommunicated. I was embraced.

And then that very morning in Savannah I joined the prayer circle.

My second one. My first had been in Nashville, and I wrote about that one already in these pages. But this was Savannah, and my observation lens was wide open, and what I can tell you is that I was drawn in. Fully. Not as a guest watching from the edge but as someone who felt it move through her. Love. Energy. Zolts of something indescribable buzzing through my body from my feet to the top of my head, the kind that don’t have a name in any language I know. And in that buzzing I felt my own power. Not borrowed. Not reflected. Mine. The kind that was always there and had simply been waiting for a room like this to remind me.

And every other person in that ballroom had it too.

When we brought it together, when all of that power pooled in one place, there was a light that filled that hotel ballroom that I will not attempt to describe. Not because I lack the words. Because the words do not exist. Language is not the right instrument for what happened in that room. Perhaps music would be closer. But that is another chapter.

What I will say is this: that light, that collective, indescribable, fully human and completely beyond-human light, is more powerful than any demon. Seen or unseen. Named or not yet known.

And then that Saturday night on the dinner cruise, I got to watch it work in real time.

I look up from the table and one of the two musicians playing is slumped on his stool. His playing partner is desperately trying to hold him upright, one arm around the man and the other somehow still managing the weight of an electric bass guitar. My rescue diver training kicks in before my brain finishes processing what I’m seeing and I am up and moving. I reach him, help stabilize him, and as any musician would, make sure the instrument gets safely out of the equation. Within seconds Colleen and Missy, my sisters from the circle who happen to be nurses, are at the bandstand. A wave of women with medical backgrounds crashes in from every direction. Qualified hands take over and I step back, having gingerly helped ease the poor man down. He is either having a heart attack or a blood sugar crisis. Nobody knows yet.

I am shaking the way you shake after something like that. The adrenaline doing its necessary and unwelcome work.

I turn back toward the long banquet tables and what I see stops me completely.

Every eye is fixed on the bandstand. And then, without announcement, without anyone calling for it, prayer begins. Spontaneous. Immediate. Fervent. The women with their hands still on the man are praying. And the women at the tables, hands clasped, eyes shut, are praying just as hard. Sending it across the room in waves you could almost see. It was as focused and as physical as anything happening on that bandstand. Two kinds of help moving toward the same person at the same time.

I could not help but think: this man could not have chosen a better place to have this incident.

911 arrived. Low blood sugar. Crisis averted. He was taken care of.

Later one of my sisters sidled up to me with a grin. She told me that the moment she saw me bolt toward the bandstand and grab that bass guitar, her first thought was not medical emergency. Her first thought was: oh my God, Iris is going to play and entertain us.

I laughed until my eyes watered.

And that, right there, is the other thing Nidhogg did not account for. Not just the prayer. Not just the nurses. But the laughter afterward. The warmth. The woman who watched a crisis unfold and her first instinct was to picture me launching into a set. These women did not fit the script in any direction. Not in how they showed up for a stranger in distress. Not in how they made space for my Jewish background without flinching. Not in how they led with curiosity instead of conversion. And not in how they could move from fervent prayer to genuine, full-bodied, table-slapping laughter inside of five minutes.

That is diversity. That is acceptance. That is joy. All of it in the same room, on the same night, on a dinner cruise on the Savannah River.

If he had written a better script, he would have put us anywhere else.

I found something I was not supposed to find, according to the plan.

The couple did not get what they came for. Not yet at least and I’m still fighting. This time in a different way. And while they may still be squatting in my basement, I will file the eviction papers and make sure to change the locks.

---

P.S.

One more thing. And I say this with full awareness that the universe has a sense of humor and is not subtle about it.

We were on a boat.

Not just any boat. The Georgia Queen. A genuine riverboat, wide and steady on the Savannah River, carrying every one of us through the night. A lifeboat in the most literal and the most beautiful sense of the word. And when one person on that boat needed help, everyone on that boat responded. No hesitation. No looking around to see if someone else would go first. Just hands, and prayers, and nurses, and laughter, and the whole magnificent chaos of people who have decided to show up for each other.

My circle has talked about the lifeboat for as long as we have been a circle. Who is in yours. Who you would call. Who would call you. It is one of our foundational questions and it lives in these pages too.

So when I tell you that we were all literally on a riverboat on the Savannah River when this happened, and that every woman on that boat threw a lifeline without being asked, I think you understand why I don’t need to say much more.

Some of you are nodding already.

We are on the right boat. Together. And we are going to be just fine.