A Manifesto: Reproductive Trauma, ADHD & Breaking Generational Cycles

For the women who feel like they're missing a limb. For those carrying burdens that aren't entirely their own. For anyone who's wondered why their ‘body keeps the score’ of wounds they can't remember receiving.

You found this essay because something in you was looking. Maybe you typed something into Google that felt embarrassing to search. Maybe a friend sent you here. Maybe you've been circling this kind of work for years and something finally made you click.

This essay exists because I was done hiding behind a professional bio.

The women I work with don't need another coach with a clean origin story and a tidy transformation arc. They need someone who has actually been in the spiral — the near-death experiences, the shame-filled medical rooms, the breakups that shouldn't have broken them but did, the diagnoses that finally named something they'd been living with their whole lives.

I wrote this so you could decide, before we ever speak, whether I'm the right person to walk alongside you. Not because my story is yours — it isn't. But because the texture of it might feel familiar. The longing. The body that kept breaking down. The grief that never quite belonged to just one event. The sense that you've been carrying something that predates you.

If you read this and felt seen rather than impressed, that's the point. That's who this is for.

Trigger warnings: miscarriage, virginity, abortion, blood, hospital, out of body experience, exorcism

I saw a visual recently. A spiral. Karma, healing, awakening. Very elegant. Very this could be on a yoga studio wall.

And instead of feeling inspired, my body went, oh. That's uncomfortable. That's a bit too accurate.

Have you ever had that reaction? Where something doesn't feel aspirational so much as… revealing?

I haven’t healed or come to terms with certain bits of myself, by simply moving forward. I'm still not convinced that's how this works. What I've been doing instead is circling back. Again and again. To the same themes. The same questions. The same tender spots. Just with a little more awareness each time. A little more space. Slightly less panic at the mere memory of the thing.

The origin, in this case, is not only that I was born, but that I was born without my twin.

Throughout most of my childhood and into adolescence, I felt like I was really, truly missing a limb. I'd always begged for a sibling. It seemed like the number one thing I wanted at all times, and it just didn't seem to happen. I would cling to friendships with an intensity that was often deemed, way too much.

Did you ever want something that badly yet … have no idea why?

For years, I assumed I was just being dramatic. Or lonely. Or overly attached. All things that had been told to me about me.

Turns out, my body was actually missing someone.

I didn't know I was searching for something that had been with me for a few months and then—wasn't.

Absence leaves a mark. Sometimes quieter than trauma, but just as shaping. Whether in the subconcious or conscious, marks are etched all over us.

TW: virginity, blood, hospital, out of body experience

At fifteen, I lost my virginity and died. Twice.

Yeahhhhh, that sentence still lands wildy af when I say it - but I figured, let’s rip this bandaid off and be real.

It wasn't poetic. It was a week night volleyball game in North Jersey—the kind of Soprano Jersey suburb where most people knew most people and secrets lasted about five minutes. I was just warming up for our game when I felt a rush from my butterfly that made me slightly nervous. I knew something was off, but at fifteen, I was admitting nothing to no one. Obviously.

My best friend at the time, T, saw my face from the literal bleachers, grabbed what she needed from her bag without me saying a word, and we walked briskly to the private bathroom in our schools’ dungeon.

Blood was everywhere. Spread on the stall walls as I pulled my spandex down to sit on the seat. I couldn't believe what the hell I was seeing. I wasn't just bleeding—I was watching a gushing cascade of blood that was moving fast.

I plugged up x2, added a nighttime pad, put on another pair of spandex and went upstairs to play. Everyone was waiting on my return - my team, their team and about 50ish people in the stands.

I was in my usual middle block spot, at the net, when a drip dropped. Then just a stream down my leg. A girl from the other team actually screamed, 🙄, and the game stopped before it began.

My coach rushed me to the bench and signaled the nurse, trainer and my mom to come over. Everyone was looking and the low drum of incessant whispering sounded like the room was getting smaller and tighter by the embarrassing minute.

I had no idea what to say or do - I vageuly thought, there’s no way this has to do with losing my virginity earlier today? That was 6 hours ago!? I won’t mention it.

My mom drove straight to the ER. Which was luckily, in a teaching hospital and less than 5mins away.

The towel I'd wrapped as a DIY diaper was soaked in red.

My mom left the car parked in the bay to rush me in, where with one look from the desk person, she ESP’d a gurney out for me. More rushing into a medical room, where inevitably there were at least 12 doctors, student doctors and nurses puttering about.

My dad stormed into the medical room an hour or so later—my legs were spread on the table, blood everywhere, vagina all out. He damn near broke both ankles running right back out. As he went out, a nurse screamed: She's not pregnant!

Great.

TLDR: Six inches torn along my arterial wall, within my V. Four pints of blood lost in an hour—humans have twelve total, so this was not good. My blood pressure wasn't altering, so I wasn’t able to receive a transfusion, although my Dad was begging them to let them take his universal donor blood.

In another hour, there was an extremely high likelihood that it would be my last few moments.

I flatlined twice on that table. Thirty then sixty seconds.

The first time, I was simply viewing my body from the height of the ceiling at a corner above the door. I was attached to my physical body by a golden, glistening thread as I drowsily drank in the entertaining chaos below me. The room seemed greyed over, like when you used to turn on those old Panasonic TV sets and it took a few seconds for the colors to come through. I saw my mom squatted next to my face, whispering to me that everything would be fine and to stay strong. I didn't hear her through my own ears, but I felt her words. I came back with loads of harsh, painful, what seemed like paper towel stuffed in to then lower my lids again and knock out.

The second time was a full minute, but felt eternal. I seemed to just suddenly be in a vast, bright white expanse. It was nothingness yet also, oddly substantial. Think: when Harry Potter gets hit with the killing curse and ends up in a kind of, greyed Platform 9 3/4.

Ahead of me, uncertain if it was near or far, was a robust yet bare tree. I just stared out, emotionless, but being. I heard a resounding voice come from everywhere that said: It isn't time.

I woke up in recovery, freshly stitched, with a new iron deficiency and absolutely zero clue what had just happened to my life. My parents were in the recovery room with me, reading and waiting.

There was an out-of-body experience. There was fear. There was silence afterward. No roadmap. No "hey, this is a lot for a teenage nervous system." Just a quiet lesson I absorbed deep in the tissues: sex and sexuality isn't safe, bodies are fragile, don't talk about this, tuck it away.

So I tucked it away.

By the time I got back to school a few days later, it seemed like all two thousand students and every teacher knew exactly what happened. Great. The girl that died after losing her virginity.

I used humor as a coping mechanism instead of coming clean about something shocking to my parents and grabbing hold of a therapist. My parents were left to believe by the doctors, that this was a freak accident. I let them believe this. While internally, I was shifting already.

What was I so afraid of?

Looking back, I realize: my body was speaking a language I didn't yet understand. And I sure as hell wasn't ready to listen. There was also probably some karmic baggage in there. But what was slowly becoming a pattern in lessons, were that they were in the form of sex, sexuality, femininity and womanness.

Fast forward to twenty-one, 6 years later. I was a college senior at the University of Maryland, drowning in a breakup that shouldn't have destroyed me the way it did.

KPD—a wide receiver with NFL dreams, my first love whom I ‘got the same way I lost him’, and the emotional availability of a brick wall—had chosen someone easier. Someone less intense. Someone who didn't read Many Lives, Many Masters before bed or ask impossible questions like soooo, what are we doing here?

The devastation was nuclear. I lost twenty-five pounds in three weeks on an already slender frame. I locked myself in my dorm room and lived vicariously through Sex and the City reruns. I worked out twice daily to exhaustion and considered eating a few times. I felt alone, stupid, and sad.

My friends didn't want to hear about it anymore—or at least, that's what I told myself. In reality, I just couldn't figure out how to explain why this seemingly average breakup was so atomic. This was more about the gaping hole in my chest that had been there my whole life, and he'd just been the latest person I'd tried to fill it with.

What I didn't know: I wasn't just grieving a relationship. I was grieving a pattern I'd been living my entire life without knowing its name.

I'd spent twenty-one years trying to be whole by subtly attaching myself to other people. Best friends I'd cling to like drowning. Boyfriends I'd dissolve my boundaries for. Anyone who would let me become their missing piece, because I was so desperate not to feel like I was missing mine. [Some therapy and lots of plant medicine got me to this understanding.]

It was during this season of complete destruction—crying on the floor of my dorm, subsisting on Chex Mix and self-pity—that I found myself in a series of experiences that would completely reshape my understanding of reality.

In my twenties, I went searching. Hard.

Akashic Record readings. Temezcal ceremonies in the mountains of Mexico. Ayahuasca ceremonies that showed me lifetimes I didn't know I'd lived. Journals filled with questions and revelations and surely this is it moments. Lots of deep integration on my own.

And listen, these experiences mattered. They cracked things open. They gave me language and lineage connection and perspective. But if I'm honest, I was often trying to think my way through something my body was whispering about. I’m sure that sounds familiar 🙃

Have you ever tried to understand your way out of a feeling?

My body wasn't asking for insight yet. It was asking me to stay.

And then, sandwiched somewhere between the spiritual awakening and the slow acceptance that KPD was never coming back, came the abortion.

At twenty-eight, I had an abortion in a country where it was illegal, immoral, and against their religious code.

The trauma part - wasn't the decision. It was everything around it.

I went in the deep of night. Paid in cash. Was shamed the entire way by a doctor who made sure I knew I was going to hell. I requested not to hear the heartbeat—they made me listen anyway. I asked not to see the ultrasound photo—they handed it to me as I left, a little souvenir of my sin.

There was no consent. No softness. No sense of agency. Just my body learning, once again, that reproduction/sex/sexuality/being a woman and shame were entangled.

What I didn't realize at the time was that this, too, was part of the pattern. Part of the lineage wound playing out in my body in real time. The women before me had shame, guilt, losses that they never spoke of. Miscarriages they buried in silence. Children they gave away because they had no choice.

I was living out their unprocessed grief.

I don't tell this story because it's dramatic. I tell it because it sits in the middle of my spiral. Unresolved. Still integrating. Still teaching me how to stay present with grief instead of trying to outrun it.

But here's the thing about generational trauma: it repeats until someone is able to finally look at it.

And I was about to get really fucking broken open.

Rewind a touch, back to twenty-one, when I finally told my mom what had actually happened when I lost my virginity at fifteen [ICYMI, that’s what happened].

I was living with my parents after graduating uni, still raw from the KPD breakup. We were in the kitchen, just me and her. We had a very real conversation for possibly the first time.

The sex. The near-death. The out-of-body experience where a voice told me it wasn't time. The consistency with which I was seeing a medium and doing spiritual work.

Inevitably, it was then when I learned I was a twin. Not from eating them, but from an accident.

The room tilted.

Suddenly, the grief I'd been carrying had a lineage.

Suddenly, lots made sense.

The feeling like I was always missing a limb, especially.

I wasn't crazy. I wasn't broken.

I was incomplete—and I had been since before I took my first breath.

We hugged for what seemed like hours. No words. Just the understanding that we'd both been carrying this weight, alone, and now we didn't have to anymore.

After the twin revelation, the universe decided I was ready to listen.

And let me tell you—when the universe wants your attention, it does not fuck around.

It started with that psychic medium I mentioned after the KPD breakup. Sandra was a Roma woman, the kind with generations of the gift running through her maternal line, the kind who looked at you and saw past every mask you'd ever worn.

I was a walk-in. She made me wait twenty minutes while she drove from her home, and when she arrived, she took one look at me and canceled all her other appointments for the day. Here’s what I wrote in my journal from the time:

The psychic emerged from a small room with a hectic woman, the psychic looked at the couple on the couch and at us [my friend joined me]. “Danielle, I’m sorry to do this to you and your boyfriend, but I have to take this girl right now. Please come back tomorrow, I’ll have something extra for the inconvenience.”

Hawi immediately got up and led me into the small room, darkened by the single curtain over the window. One candle was lit on a small table for two. Biba sat on the floor and stared.

The psychic locked the door and sat directly across from me. “I’m Sandra, thank you for coming.”

Me: “Hi Sandra, I’m Viki and this is my friend.”

Sandra: “I know. Listen, it doesn’t happen often that I need to cancel an appointment to take a walk-in, but something is happening here. I know that you have the gift and you’ve resisted it, so let’s move past that. Let’s also move past the fact that you’re here about a boy and he’s with some little girl, he’ll come back to you for a time, but that’s not why you’re really here. Do you know about a gift?”

Me: “Um, I know that my mind works differently.”

Sandra: “Well, that’s a start. Are you aware that a gilded black cat stands sentry next to you wherever you go? He’s to your left right now.”

Me: Looking down into emptiness and then quickly at Habiba, “I am not aware of that, no.” By this point, I am 100% fascinated by what’s happening.

Sandra: “Do you know anything about gilded black cats in history?”

Me: “...they were significant in Ancient Egypt.”

Sandra: Sitting closer to the table, the vibe in the room surged. “Do you know anything about spiritual guides?”

Me: “No, I’m not religious.”

Sandra: “This isn’t religion honey, it’s spiritual. And you have 23 guides, which is the most I’ve ever seen attached to one soul. Yours. And you have a guard, who is staring at me hard. If you believed in reincarnation, would you have any idea who you may have been?”

Me: Hawi is looking dead at me, imploringly, to possibly get out of this crazy place but also to give her the information she knows I have. “Yes, I have an idea.”

Sandra: “No charge today. Can you come back tomorrow? I will not say the name aloud if it is incorrect, I have to meditate and sleep on it tonight and I want to discuss this further with you tomorrow. You are both lucky and damned Viki, with greatness comes deep tragedies.”

Two hours later, Hawi and I ended up sitting silently on the top of Sandra’s stairs. We were speechless, tear stained cheeks, and a silent ride home. I didn’t sleep much that night, a common occurrence that left me typically irritable and pale, but I had a feeling that something was happening. Something I’d always sought, but never really knew what it was called. I’d type positive affirmations into Google and slowly but surely, clicking here and there, I’d find myself in different esoteric and metaphysical forums, book recommendations, and stories of souls. I was becoming more attracted to spirit than ever before, which I might add, was something that had been a constant hindrance for KPD.

We returned the following day with total uncertainty. Sandra mentioned that she cleared her schedule for the afternoon, so we had ample time. First things first, she meditated and felt certain of why I was so closely watched by my spirit guides (sidenote: I’ve been to many psychics since then and each had made it clear that I had 23 guides following me, much to their fascination).

Sandra: “Do you know of any Ancient Egyptian history?”

Me: “Interestingly, yes. I’ve always felt very connected to Egypt and most of my tattoos are Egyptian. Actually, I was in Egypt earlier this year and something kind of crazy happened.”

Sandra: “Really? Not surprising. Do you have an idea of the entity you’re reincarnated as?”

Me: “Yes.” Hawi head was bouncing back and forth with this game of verbal badminton.

Sandra: Sits back slowly, “So, this is exactly who I thought yesterday, but didn’t want to summon more negativity in case I was misled.”

Me: “More negativity?”

Sandra: “We have some deep work to do. Are you ready for that?”

[I'd heard this before. A few years earlier, I'd met a photographer in NYC named Faruq who stopped me on the street, took my picture, and later told me I looked exactly like depictions of this particular ancient goddess.]

Sandra and I worked together for months, as it turned out. Twice a week, sometimes three times, doing deep spiritual work. She told me about the entity that had latched onto me since birth—since I lost my twin. It hovered in my doorframe. It awakened me in the middle of the night. It fed on my fear and my grief.

We had to get rid of it.

For months I hadn’t paid Sandra, now I had to.

Hawi, in the heat of the moment, said: Vik, I’ll cover it and you pay me back. I have it and I think this is necessary.

$1,500 upfront for Sandra to travel to Canada, to a specific Catholic Cardinal, to create a wax effigy of me to be burned during a long-distance exorcism at midnight on New Year's Eve. 😵‍💫

Then, my grandparents mysteriously reimbursed me the exact amount days later, for no rhyme or reason from their end. 🔮

The night of the exorcism, I lit my candle at exactly midnight. Sandra was in Canada, I was in my childhood NJ home.

I felt my body purge—vomiting, dizzy, nauseous for days.

But afterward, something shifted.

The darkness that had followed me my entire life—the depression, the night terrors, the feeling of being watched—began to lift. Even my parents noticed, to their relief.

Sandra's last words to me were: Make sure you write all this down. You're going to write a book.

I laughed. Sure, lady. Sure.

After Sandra, the signs didn't stop. If anything, they multiplied.

I was in Cairo, Egypt in 2011 and I was just entering the Cairo Museum when a tour guide pulled me aside. He spoke no English, so he genuflected frantically - seemingly pointing for me to follow him. He speed-walked me circuitously trough the museum, with my parents basically sprinting behind me, to a single small table of artifacts and said simply: Isis. You.

He asked if I could stay in Cairo another day. There was an old seer an hour outside the city who needed to see me. My parents—understandably—were like absolutely the fuck not, we're not driving into the desert during Arab Spring, so I waved goodbye to what was probably a very important spiritual appointment. So it goes.

In Oaxaca, Mexico a few years later, I was walking down the street when a street vendor selling crystals looked up and called out to me. In a language that wasn’t English, Spanish or even Nahuatl … it was something else. Through a translater, he said he'd seen my "bright golden light" from far away and had been waiting for me for several years.

Through a translator he talked at me about my power, my voice, my leadership abilities. He told me I was being closely watched by my guides because I held a gift I kept trying to shrink. Then he told me about the man still occupying my mental space.

Dark-skinned. Professional athlete. Tall. Muscular. Vascular. Tattooed. Dominant.

He described KPD perfectly. Years, later.

And then he said: Whatever you do, please do not return to him sexually. He has and will continue to deplete your inner energy, never allowing it to refuel on its own. He needs to be let go completely.

I started crying on the street.

The vendor gave me a crystal with nine instances of three dots, the numerological significance of completion, of the divine feminine, of cycles ending so new ones can begin. Gifted to me after I declined yet another spiritual adventure, being initated into an ancient Mayan wisdom tradition [iykyk] over the course of a few monts in the Mexican hills without any conveniences.

Honestly, I was scared at the time and I was traveling the Panamerican highway alone - so I declined. I think about it often.

In Sedona, Arizona another series of years later, I walked into a psychic's shop as a walk-in. When she sat down across from me, she said: "Well, these twenty-three guides you have here are really trying to get in touch with you."

I asked if she was mistaken. I'd only heard that number once before—from Sandra, years earlier.

Definitely not mistaken. There are twenty-three right here around us and they love you very much. They want you to know that you need to start writing again. You stopped out of fear or pain and you must resist those base feelings. Writing will liberate you.

In Kansas City, a missionary couple cornered me in the kitchen. The wife teared up and said: "Are you some sort of writer?"

I told her I used to write poetry, and I was slowly writing a book, but I wasn't a writer.

She shook her head. "Oh honey, you are. You have stopped, it seems, and the Lord is imploring you to start again. Don't doubt yourself. You know you are supposed to do this."

The message was clear, from every corner of the spiritual world, in every language I could possibly understand:

Write. Tell the story. Stop hiding.

It still took nearly another decade to get to even this point, which is certainly not a book, but something.

My husband didn't rescue me. Let's be 100% about that.

What he did was much less cinematic and far more radical, for me. He was steady. Kind. Attuned. Safe.

And if you've never experienced safety in your body before, let me tell you: it's disorienting. Healing doesn't always look like fireworks. Sometimes it looks like your nervous system finally unclenching enough to feel what's been waiting underneath.

Through that relationship, I started noticing something deeper. A gap in my connection to femininity. To reproduction. To my ancestral line. Loss and silence didn't start with me.

They started to unstick, loosen up.

After moving to Denver with my relatively new man [whom I married] after living in a van for about a year, I felt called toward modalities that didn't require leaving my body. No substances. No transcendence. Just breath.

Shocking.

Breathwork was different. It didn't give me answers. It gave me access.

I had a really intense experience that first time and immediately decided to become a breathwork facilitator. About a year later, I wanted to become a coach as well by using somatic modalities.

In that first breath session, I connected with the child I had terminated all those years prior.

Not as punishment. Not even as closure. Just as presence. Relationship. Completion in the quietest sense. Acceptance.

Nothing was fixed. But something softened.

That experience didn't make me wise. It made me careful. It taught me how much responsibility comes with holding space for bodies, stories, and nervous systems.

That's what led me into facilitation and coaching—not mastery, but reverence.

At thirty-two, I was diagnosed with ADHD.

And although this wasn’t shocking [lol], the chaos started to take a shape.

Finally—FINALLY—an explanation for the erratic thoughts, the hyperfocus, the inability to regulate emotion, the way I could read an entire book in one sitting but couldn't remember to eat lunch, the incessant rearranging of my bedroom at 3am, the ways I became obsessed about certain topics and on and on. The way I felt like I was living life at 1.5x speed while everyone else was on normal time.

But the ADHD diagnosis came with friends: polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and pre-diabetes. 🙃

All while trying to conceive.

What if none of this was random?

What if the spiral wasn't failure, as I thought, but communication?

My body was essentially screaming: "Hey! Hiiiii! We've been trying to get your attention for YEARS and you keep ignoring us!"

My body—this vessel I'd spent years ignoring, punishing, forcing into submission, trying to make smaller and quieter and more acceptable—was basically done with me.

As I was at a loss for words with the functional doc I was working with, with a list of diagnoses that read like a medical bingo card:

Maybe … my reproductive issues weren't random? Maybe they were the physical manifestation of the repression I’d been carrying.

The grief. The loss. The shame. The secrets about babies lost and pregnancies hidden and women's bodies treated like they were public property instead of sacred vessels.

Much of it—passed down through the line.

Women in my family didn't talk about the babies they lost. They didn't process the trauma of abandonment, of being cast out by their own mothers, of pregnancies that ended in silence and secrecy. My grandmother didn't even acknowledge my existence until I was thirteen because my dad is Black and my mom is white, and apparently that was too much for good Irish Catholic sensibilities.

But bodies remember what minds forget.

The PCOS, the hormonal chaos, the womb that seemed to be holding onto every bit of grief and rage and unspoken truth—these were some of the ways my body was telling a story my lineage had refused to speak.

In the rearview, there's a very clear, distinct karmic pattern for me that has to do with lineage, the reproductive and feminine natures of the body, and carrying so much of those burdens for the women in my line. Nearly every health issue I have, is invisible and related to being a woman. It’s hard NOT to connect those dots.

And somewhere in this whirlpool, I realized, is where my gifts really sit.

At twenty-six, I donated my eggs.

A biracial couple, unable to conceive on their own, chose me from a registry I'd signed up for years earlier.

For three months, I went through the invasive, exhausting, hormonally chaotic process of IVF preparation. Twice-weekly appointments in Manhattan to have my ovaries checked. Birth control pills to regulate my cycle. Then the big guns—needles I had to administer to my own belly or booty, nightly, for a week.

I did it alone. In my Bay Ridge, Brooklyn apartment, sitting on the edge of my bed, dissociating from the odd feelings that were being brought up. I wish I hadn't done that all on my own, in retrospect. But I guess, that’s what retrospect is there for.

If ever people asked why I was doing this [which weren’t many, because many didn’t know]—why I was putting my body through hell for strangers—I told them a partial truth: I want to help a family who can't have kids.

But here's the real truth, the one I could barely speak aloud:

It was for the brother I lost.

This was my way of honoring him. Of completing what had been severed before we even took our first breaths.

The extraction was interesting. They found cysts then and told me that was common with the injections. No one considered that I might get further testing for my own body…I don’t know, possibly I might’ve found out about PCOS earlier.

Can’t cry over spilt milk, for too long.

So, eleven eggs total were taken from both ovaries under local anesthesia, my mom holding my hand the whole time. The migraine afterward that wouldn't quit. The lights and sounds at work the next day that made me want to crawl into a dark hole.

I received $6,000 and felt bittersweet.

But years later, as I write this at thirty-six, now married and trying to conceive our own children in our first home?

Can’t cry over spilt milk.

When I think on it now, I feel validation in knowing I did something for the memory of my brother.

I felt, and still feel, I honored the twin I never met. I completed the circle. I turned one lineage wound into a gift to someone else.

I don't believe I'm carrying these patterns because I'm broken.

I think I'm carrying them because I'm willing to look. To feel. To tell the truth without polishing it into something more palatable.

A bit about ancestral healing, reproductive trauma, and breaking generational cycles that doesn’t get enough air time:

Your body is not broken. It's speaking a language you were never taught to understand. Many of those "unexplained" symptoms? The PCOS, the endometriosis, the chronic pain, the hormonal chaos? They're not random, espeically if they’re not hereditary. They're your body's way of holding the stories your lineage couldn't tell. [In addition to epigenetics, like the endocrine disrputors we’ve been breathing in and consuming since many of us were conceived.]

The patterns repeat until you break them. The unavailable men. The friendships where you dissolve yourself. The constant feeling that you're too much and not enough at the same time. These aren't personality flaws. They're survival strategies you inherited from women who had to make themselves small to survive, for generations.

Spiritual awakening often looks like destruction. When KPD shattered me, I thought it was the end. It was actually the beginning—the catalyst that cracked me open enough to finally hear the guidance I'd been ignoring my entire life. Often you have to fall completely apart to remember who you actually are.

We can't heal what you won't name. For years, I called my near-death at fifteen a freak accident. I called my obsessive relationships just how I love. I called my body's breakdowns endlessly bad luck. Once I named them for what they are, trauma, lineage wounds, repressed emotions, epigenetics - I could finally begin to heal.

Neurodivergence is not a flaw. This ol ADHD brain, the one that made me feel broken and inferior my whole life? It's actually what allows me to see patterns, make connections, and hold space for the complexity of trauma and healing. It's what makes me a good coach. It's a feature, not a bug.

Cultural identity and spirituality are deeply interconnected. As a nuanced biracial woman—Black dad, white mom, raised in North Jersey, now living in Denver with an Eastern European immigrant husband—I've spent my whole life navigating multiple worlds. That liminal space? That's where the magic happens. That's where we learn to see beyond the binary, beyond the either/or, into the both/and. Dare I say, I’m kinda good at it.

The twin I lost is still with me. He isn't gone. He's in many choices I make to honor wholeness over perfection. He's in my refusal to shrink myself to make others comfortable. He's in the words I'm finally brave enough to write, right here. He's in the home I just bought, the marriage I just entered, the family I'm trying to create.

Somewhere in this spiral is where my work lives. Not in answers, but in accompaniment. In staying. In walking alongside people learning how to carry their lives without collapsing under them.

I haven't healed my way out of loss.

I'm learning how to walk with it. Some days more gracefully than others, let’s be real. Some days tripping over the same old lessons like it's my first time.

This essay is for you—if you've ever felt like:

• Something fundamental is missing, but you can't name what it is.

• Your body keeps breaking down in ways doctors can't fully explain [PCOS, endometriosis, unexplained infertility, chronic pain, autoimmune issues].

• You're carrying grief that doesn't feel entirely yours.

• Romantic relationships destroy you in ways that seem disproportionate to the actual connection.

• You've had spiritual experiences [psychics, guides, synchronicities, downloads, wisdom medicine] that you're afraid to talk about because people will think you're crazy.

• You're the one of the ones in your family breaking generational cycles—and it's lonely af.

• That neurodivergence makes you feel like you're experiencing life on a completely different frequency than everyone else.

• You’ve been leading life with a disproportionate masculine energy for as long as you can remember.

• Maybe you’re trying to conceive and realizing you have to heal your own shit before you can bring new life into this world 👀.

This is also for the women who've experienced:

• Pregnancy loss

• Twin loss

• Reproductive trauma

• Family secrets around motherhood, sexuality, or the female lineage

• Intergenerational trauma that shows up in your body [this is intuitively led baby]

If you're reading this and something in your chest is saying Yes. This. Me.—you're not alone.

I spent thirty years running from my story!!! Scared to share. Nervous to not save face relentlessly.

Burying it under humor, achievement, geographic escape [I've lived in many places around the world], performative normalcy, and the belief that if I just kept moving fast enough, the pain couldn't catch me.

Spoiler: It caught me though. 😅

But here's what I know now, at thirty-six, as a PCC ADHD coach with trauma-sensitive training, experienced in somatic work and cultural intersectionality:

• The wound is where the light enters.

• The breakdown is where the breakthrough begins.

• The story you're most afraid to tell is the one that will set you free.

If this story touched something in you, trust that. Bodies recognize patterns before minds catch up.

You're not behind.

You're not failing healing.

You're not doing this wrong.

You might just be mid-spiral. And honestly? That's where change lives.

I re-launched my business as Victorious Coaching in March 2026 because I was done pretending that I was THAT when really I was THIS. Done remaining generalized and for everyone, when that simply hadn’t been true for years.

I'm done with coaching that ignores the body.

I'm done with pathologizing your grief instead of honoring it.

I'm done with wellness culture that tells you to manifest abundance while ignoring the fact that your nervous system is stuck in 2004.

Victorious Coaching is for the women who are ready to:

• Make sense of the chaotic mess [because it's not chaos—it's a pattern, and patterns can be understood].

• Accept their journey [the messy parts, the shameful parts, the parts that don't fit into an Instagram caption].

• Integrate their learnings ([rom therapy, from spiritual experiences, from that one trip that changed everything].

• Realign to their chosen life [not the one they inherited, not the one they think they should want, but the one that actually feels like home].

I work specifically with women navigating this messy middle of transformation. For those wanting to live with intention, less tension. I’m talking:

• Reproductive trauma and fertility challenges

• Ancestral/lineage healing and breaking generational cycles

• ADHD, neurodivergence, and nervous system regulation

• Cultural identity, race, and belonging

• Spiritual awakening and embodied integration

My approach combines somatic work, trauma-sensitive coaching, breathwork, and cultural intersectionality—because what you want can't happen if we're only working with your mind and ignoring your body, your ancestry, and your lived experience.

If you're on your own journey of making sense of the chaotic mess, accepting your path, integrating your learnings, and realigning to your chosen life—I see you my friend.

The work isn't easy. The healing isn't linear. You'll cry in Walmart. You'll have abrupt breakthroughs at 3am. You'll question everything you thought you knew about yourself. You’ll tap into some rage. You might even take a solo drive just to SCREAM!

And on the other side of this unraveling is a version of you that YOU would be proud of.

A version that knows: You were never broken. You were always becoming whole.

Victoria Andrijević (née Cumberbatch) is a PCC resilience and ADHD coach with trauma-sensitive training, experienced in somatic work and cultural intersectionality. Originally from North Jersey, she now lives in Denver with her husband, where they recently eloped and bought their first home. Victoria's supportive work centers on neurodivergence as it parrallels with reproductive trauma, ancestral healing, and breaking generational cycles. Her practice, Victorious Coaching, offers 1:1 virtual and in person coaching, digital resources, workshops, and breathwork.

Ethnicity, ancestry, spirituality, travel, cultural identity, neurodivergence, and embodiment aren't just topics for Victoria—they're the foundation of her life and her work. She believes the women who come after us deserve to inherit liberation, not trauma.

To work with her or follow the journey, visit here.