I learned early how to leave my body and still keep going. I didn’t call it dissociation then. I called it strength. I called it maturity. I called it doing what had to be done. It wasn’t until years later—after births, breakdowns, silence, and pain—that I realized survival had been my primary language.
I was supposed to become a nurse. That was the plan I clung to when I needed something solid to believe in. Healing lived in hospitals, I thought, in white coats and protocols. That belief took me to Costa Rica, where I studied abroad and quietly began unraveling. Something about the land—the humidity, the slowness, the way life wasn’t rushed or sterilized—started to undo me. My body felt things my mind couldn’t explain, and for the first time, I sensed that healing might be something you remember, not something you’re given.
I moved through all of this as a twin, always half-reflected, half-separate. Being a twin teaches you how to disappear without leaving. It teaches you how to be seen and unseen at the same time. I learned early how to make room for others, even when it meant shrinking myself.
I left nursing not because I failed, but because my body refused to keep pretending. I became a massage therapist, then an entrepreneur, drawn to work that required presence instead of detachment. But while my hands learned how to heal, my personal life told a different story. I stayed in abusive relationships longer than I should have. I learned how to justify harm. I learned how to endure. Endurance, it turns out, is often praised when it should be questioned.
After my first child was born, the floor dropped out from under me. Postpartum depression hollowed me out in ways I didn’t have language for. I fed my baby, paid my bills, showed up. Inside, I felt absent from my own life. Medication was offered. What I wanted was to feel my body again without fear. So I started studying—holistic practices at first, then certifications—less to build a career than to save myself. Each modality gave me back a piece of myself I didn’t know I had lost.
When I became pregnant again, I promised myself I would not abandon my body this time. When my healthcare provider dropped me without warning or support, something in me snapped awake. I stopped asking for permission. I turned to herbalism, plant medicine, and deep embodied trust. I birthed my second child unmedicated, grounded, and present. It wasn’t just a birth—it was a reclamation. I remembered that my body held wisdom long before anyone told me it couldn’t be trusted.
That remembering gave rise to my business. And then, as if to test how deeply I trusted that wisdom, life intervened again. A car accident left me with a traumatic brain injury that stripped me of basic function. I struggled to read. Words fell apart in my mouth. My thoughts came slowly, fractured. I was a single mother with two children and a brain that no longer worked the way it used to. Survival returned, familiar and cruel.
This time, I refused to disappear. I slowed down when everything demanded I speed up. I rested when productivity would have destroyed me. Healing led me into shamanic medicine and energetic work—places where the body is believed before it is corrected. I rebuilt myself slowly: brain, nervous system, spirit. Not by forcing recovery, but by listening.
This is the beginning of a confessional and I hope it inspires you out of darker times. I left my body to survive. I came back to live. And every time life tried to break me, it unknowingly taught me how to return—to myself, to my power, to the quiet intelligence that had been there all along.
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