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Ever since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with transformation—reaching for what my parents used to call “impossible things.”
By the time I was four, I had already traveled more than most my age. I saw early on how different places either limit or ignite our growth. I’ve always rebelled against environments that favored conformity over creativity, choosing instead to seek genuine connection—even in the harshest of human conditions.
If you’ve followed my writing, you’ve seen the recurring themes: the quest for belonging, the ache of toxic entanglements, and the slow unraveling of old blueprints.
I’ve lived through a long run of abusive relationships, ones I now recognize were mirrors to an energetic pattern I didn’t yet know how to interrupt. I studied politics to understand power. I trained in acting to understand people. Yet somehow, the fusion of the two disciplines had produced a version of me that derived power from what I now recognize as abuse.
This way of life blew up in pieces in 2018. Since then, I have spent much of my life learning about and understanding trauma. I entered survival mode. Expansion stopped. My world shrank each day. My voice changed. My body language shifted. My relationship with everything that I had known changed. My spirit shattered.
Some around me were alarmed, while others continued to exploit this fragility. The changes I went through didn’t look like “good changes.” From the outside, healing looked really bad. It looked like I was breaking, and in many ways, I was.
I didn’t want to go to sleep because of the night terrors that would be my inevitable reality, and I had a lot of trouble getting out of bed. They say trauma is not the events that happen to us, but how we respond afterwards. I fought against it at first, and then got exhausted, and in the end froze in the face of more punishments and others’ disbelief. I became resigned.
My word of the year after trauma was surrender.
A healer who had scanned my body three years into PTSD told me I was carrying too much that was already dead. I felt that way—I was an encyclopedia of grief.
For years, everything I did still echoed and belonged to the past, regardless of how many healing offers I subscribed to: anti-depressants, coaching, therapy, psychotherapy, every book on post traumatic growth and neuroscience, traveling, relocation… The scientific research on post traumatic growth is fairly new, and as we start to explore the studies, we find “there’s a split view in the literature,” which is most unhelpful.
Besides, I didn’t need inspiration. I needed new ways of thinking, concrete tools to build new structures and new ways of perceiving the world.
That’s when I started studying neuroscience and brain biology. I was introduced to new ideas, such as the blueprint of our mind, what governs our choices, and the importance of recognizing and releasing old patterns. So, my 2025 word of the year is release. While this triggered some changes, nothing was radically or energetically different, until I brought my questions and frustrations to my coach, who introduced me to the concept of “time bending.”
I became obsessed with this concept, but didn’t know how to do it. After months of not getting it, I started to ask different questions until this one session when I presented her with all my frustrations of my failed attempts. She responded by asking me:
“Who are you choosing as—your past self or your future self? What would your future self choose?”
And just like that, it all made sense to me.
It’s still about belonging—but to which version of ourselves do we belong?
If our present is nothing more than an accumulation of the choices we’ve made in the past, then a different path forward commands different choices. Choices made by our wounded self will never lead us to wholeness, a world of expansion, or growth. We must choose as our future self.
Unimaginable trauma can fuel unimaginable growth. That’s another “impossible thing” I’ve come to believe in.
Today marks seven years since PTSD shattered the world I knew. With a renewed curiosity and obsession with the idea of belonging, instead of focusing on the outer quest of one’s space in this larger world, perhaps the more important journey is one’s belonging within our inner-world.
And the one question we should all ask ourselves:
Which version of ourselves do we belong to?
Each version of ourselves will lead us through a different version of life. Bitterness leads to a hardened life. Victimhood leads to a resentful life. These energies trap us in the past, and as long as we are choosing as our past selves, we can’t venture beyond the fog or darkness. But as long as there is still light inside us, what will we do with it?
How would our future self harness all that we have within us? I have no doubt that the answers to these questions would lead us to a place that I cannot yet describe to you today.
So, how will our stories continue?
~
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