After a life-altering trauma, the author sought healing beyond conventional medicine. What followed was a demanding inner transformation—integrating fractured parts, rebuilding self-worth, and shedding inherited identities. Through somatic work, intuitive guidance, and spiritual practice, she championed a personal relationship with God, cultivated self-reverence, and learned to forgive, quiet the ego, and live from Love.
Waking from your first sleep after a life-altering event is a surreal experience. You know how, in the movies, after a character receives tragic news, or a bomb detonates in close proximity, the film slows down, external sounds are muffled, and the affected character witnesses their surroundings with a new separateness, as if in the world but not of it? I suppose that is as good a portrayal as any for an experience that lies just outside of articulation. There is an impression that the world stops, but you keep moving. Or, maybe it’s the world that keeps moving and you stop. Either way there’s a frenetic weightlessness that hits you in the gut when the line is cut and you’re left drifting, unmoored from everything that once felt familiar. You realize a threshold has been crossed and the door to The Way Things Were has been slammed shut, locked, bolted, and barred behind you.
It was a late Saturday afternoon at the end of August. I had just opened my eyes in my room in Brooklyn. I contemplated the dust motes caught in the sunlight streaming through the window. I felt the familiar beat of the heart in the chest and heard it pulse in the ears. A mote sparkled and then refracted the light. I tried to follow its course through the air, but it was quickly swept into the collective turbulence of its kin. Slowly, I started to remember what had happened just a few hours ago. As the memory started to take shape, my narrative core flirted with disbelief. My brain made a mad dash to secure a plausible reason to adopt a stance of denial. That didn’t happen…stuff like that doesn’t happen…at least not to me…this stuff only happens on TV and in the movies…does this kind of thing actually happen?...Then, just as soon as this internal struggle flared up, it just as quickly came to a halt (like a garage door being dropped). Resigned, a damp blanket of melancholy settled as I accepted that what I thought I remembered happening, actually happened.
The sleep I had just awoken from had not been restful. (It could be described as more of a forced shutdown.) I was punch-drunk with exhaustion; my physical body was broken down, muscles atrophied, with an overloaded mind dangerously close to short-circuiting. The heat rippled off the pavement, and the humidity added weight to the breath. Yet, I could not get warm. I shivered in spasms, goosebumps rising on my forearms. I think I vomited, although I don’t remember being nauseous. I do remember being very much in my head, like I only existed from the neck up. All my awareness had been vacuumed into my brain, which hemorrhaged under the strain of holding everything together.
The preceding months had been marked by hostility—psychological torment, isolation, and threats of sexual violence that loomed with invasive menace. That Saturday was the crescendo, coinciding with an event I’d been preparing for over several weeks.
I know you’re curious about what happened—specifically. And if I laid it out, it wouldn’t disappoint: intrigue, shock, suspense—the full spectrum of car-crash emotions we’re conditioned to crave. But that’s not where I want to linger. What happened is not so important to this story as the fact that it happened. What matters more is the aftermath, and the transformation it set into motion.
I did not have enough sense on my own to remove myself from that situation. Instead, I had every intention of continuing to “show up.” I had a strong belief that an injustice had occurred—and I wanted to fight. The problem with this resolve was that I didn’t have anything to fight with, except my uncanny stubbornness: to keep showing up, take the punches (metaphorically speaking), and somehow not get knocked out. It wasn’t really a viable strategy.
Fortunately, someone close to me stepped in—a family member who understood, even if I couldn’t figure it out, that it was time for a change. Two days later, I was back in my childhood home, shell-shocked and steeped in the quiet shame of feeling like I’d failed.
Now we get to the heart of the matter: recovery—picking of the pieces, rebuilding.
In hindsight, I view my healing process over the past 13 years as divided into three distinct chapters. The first is defined by my passive involvement in that process—meaning I didn’t take full ownership of my recovery during this time, and any improvements largely occurred in spite of me, not because of me. Don’t get me wrong: I made the decisions to “go through the motions” and put myself in situations conducive to healing, such as going to therapy, agreeing to take antidepressant medication, and taking Muay Thai lessons. None of that happened without my consent. What defines this chapter is the belief I held at the time—that healing would come from an external source, something done for me by someone or something else.
In the next post, we’ll discuss the activities I undertook during this time that I believe are worth mentioning, as they can be viewed as the foundational work upon which the rest of the healing process was built. I’ll share the conscious reasons I had at the time for doing them. Then we’ll take a bird’s-eye view and consider how they fit into the process as a whole.