This Past Year Has Been A Mind F*ck… And Then I Died

On my 33rd birthday, I declared it was going to be my Jesus year. My goddess year. I felt an initiation coming, and I said it like it was going to be some glowy, powerful thing.

What I forgot is that initiations require a fucking ego death of some sort, which, spoiler alert, are uncomfortable as HELL… and… Jesus fucking died, bro.

So that's your preview into what the fuck happened to me this past year, in case you've been wondering where I had disappeared to — I stopped the podcast. I stopped social media. I pulled away from pretty much everyone and everything, and I was in the middle of a depression I'm not going to sugarcoat for you. Let me back up and tell you how I got there.

It started, weirdly, with a business program. In January, I joined a coaching-for-coaches program — the practical stuff, how to charge, how to get clients. Sounds super great, right? What nobody warns you about is that you can't build a business without confidence and a sense of your own worth, and also a belief in yourself and what you are offering… and I did not have much of either lying around. So digging into "where does my belief that I'm not worth being paid come from" took me exactly where you'd expect: straight back to my childhood, and my childhood had a fuckload of trauma sitting in it, mostly untouched.

I'm the type of person who is kind of an overachiever… well, not kind of. I’m a full on overachiever, with a dash of perfectionism thrown in just for funsies. Oh, and I suck at accepting support. Don't help me, don't even offer advice unless I ask for it, which I basically never do. Anyway, the program was supposed to take a year. I finished it in four months — which sounds impressive until you realize that's four months of unsupervised emotional excavation on a body that had been in therapy for six years and never once actually felt any of it. I could talk about my childhood beautifully. Analyze it, explain it, make it make sense… Feel it? Absolutely not.

So, it was a slow decline. Almost invisible to me, even as everyone who loved me could see it plainly. "You need help," they kept saying, gently and then... not so gently. And I would not hear it. My last real therapist had felt like finding a unicorn — an actual needle in a haystack of people who genuinely should not have been allowed to practice. I'm talking a woman who literally threw a stack of my session notes at my face because I pushed back on a coping tool. And another who used our sessions, that I was paying for, as her own form of therapy — talking about her issues with her partner and friend group. I was not about to go wading back into that swamp. So instead I told myself: I have the tools. I teach women this exact stuff. If I can't fix myself with what I already know, that must mean something is fundamentally wrong with me — and maybe it means I shouldn't be teaching anyone else either.

That belief did a number on me. Ego death, if you want to get poetic about it. It was not poetic. It was awful.

Here's the part that scared me the most. Years ago I went through a brutal depression — the kind that had me in and out of hospitals for four solid years after my son was born, until TMS treatment quite literally saved my life. I'd beaten it. I was so proud of that. People who knew me back then and people who know me now will tell you those are two different women. And then last year, that exact depression came back with a vengeance, and it wasn't just sad — it was infuriating and terrifying in the same breath, because what does it say about me if this happens again?

The suicidal ideation came back with it. Passive, mostly. Thoughts like, if I don't wake up tomorrow, that's fine, I'm fine with that. There were nights I'd lie in bed talking to my guides — guides I'd stopped even being able to hear, that's how disconnected I'd gotten — and I'd say, if you're out there, I can't hear you anymore, but I'm done. I don't want to do this. Unsubscribe. Beam me up, bitches. I just couldn't see a way out of the hole I had dug for myself. There were actually so many ways out of that hole. You just cannot see a single one of them while you're standing at the bottom of it.

Nobody tells you what the heaviness of depression actually feels like, and you don't fully understand it until you've lived inside it. I went weeks without showering. My bedroom looked like Hurricane Katrina had come through — and smelled worse. I couldn't hold a conversation. I stopped answering texts from my closest friends, not because I didn't love them but because I had nothing left in the tank and I didn't want to be the friend who's always a downer, always struggling, never has anything good to say. So I disappeared instead thinking to myself, I’ll come back when I feel better. Except the "I'll come back when I feel better" version of me never showed up, because feeling better wasn't coming — and the isolation just made the loneliness worse, which made the depression worse, which made me isolate more. A truly excellent system. My cup was empty. A simple text back felt like scaling a mountain. And underneath all of it sat this quiet, constant guilt: “I'm a bad friend. They're better off without me.”

Physically, it felt like being wrapped in a weighted blanket, except with none of the coziness — just pressure, everywhere, all the time. Like wading through thick mud that's actively trying to suck you under. Getting out of bed some days felt like a physical impossibility. I wasn't eating regularly, and when I did, it was junk — chips, anything easy — because, as I learned later, a body that deep in shutdown starts craving quick, cheap energy since it doesn't have the resources to digest much else. Classic freeze response. I just didn't know that's what it was called at the time.

People told me, over and over, to find a therapist. And I had an excuse ready for every single one of those conversations. "There aren't any good ones out there". "I had already found the only good one out there and she decided to fucking up and move and not even do therapy anymore". Still fucking mad about that. Love you, Sally. I did reach out to a trauma therapist I had begun sessions with years ago but couldn’t finish the work because of the current circumstances, and she never wrote back, which I decided meant the universe was telling me therapy wasn't in the cards for me. (That is not how any of this works.) If you are in that kind of darkness right now — please, seek help. I know it's terrifying. But you cannot do this alone. I know how hard it is to let someone carry you, especially if you're the type who carries everyone else without blinking. But refusing to be carried isn't sustainable. It's one of the fastest ways into full nervous system shutdown. It's exactly what happened to me.

One of my best friends — a somatic coach herself — had been quietly (and then not so quietly) offering me free sessions for months. And every time, I said no. I didn't want to be a burden. I had nothing to give her in return, and giving nothing back felt unbearable. Eventually I was too exhausted to keep saying no. I said yes. And in that very first session, I realized I had been holding my breath, essentially, for seven months. I could finally breathe again. It felt so good I cried just from the relief of it.

We did about eleven sessions together. She got me to a felt sense of safety in my own body that I had genuinely never experienced before — not once, in six years of prior therapy. And once my body felt safe enough, all the trauma that had been sitting quietly underneath everything finally felt safe enough to come up too. Gently, at first. I remember thinking, okay, I can handle this, this isn't so bad. And then the dam broke — too much, too fast, all at once — and I panicked. I shoved it back down as hard as I could. Nope, nope, nope, not touching that. Which, predictably, sent the depression crashing right back in. By the time I'd recovered enough to try again, my friend had her own things going on, and I didn't want to add myself back onto her plate. She would have said yes if I had asked, but there was more guilt attached to that. So, I finally went looking for a therapist on my own and found one who does somatics and hypnosis. So, it is possible. Two sessions in, plus a lot of solo work between them, and something in me actually started to shift.

Looking back now, I can see clearly what was happening underneath all of it. One part of me was finally ready to stop being numb. And another part of me was terrified, because numb is so much easier than feeling decades of buried things all at once. That tug-of-war between those two parts is what created the depth of that depression. It's the messy middle of healing that nobody warns you about, and I got stuck there far longer than I needed to — because this kind of work is so much easier with someone beside you. In the dark, you genuinely cannot see your own way out. You need somebody to take your hand and say, okay, foot goes here now, and now here, one step at a time.

Last August and September, I tried to force my way back. I told myself I could build a program to fix myself the same way I build them for other people — let me just do this exercise, and this one, and this one, and maybe I won't have to actually feel any of it. But that was just another form of control, another way of trying to outrun what was already surfacing. And that over-effort, layered on top of a nervous system already teetering on the edge, is exactly what tipped me into full collapse. Depression, it turns out, is a freeze state — your body deciding there's simply too much coming in and shutting the whole operation down.

And here's the specific cruelty of it: this time, unlike five years ago, I actually had the tools. I understood the nervous system. I knew what to do. And none of it mattered, because your prefrontal cortex (which is your logical brain and is in control of executive and cognitive functioning)  goes fully offline when you're that deep in survival mode. Knowing exactly what you need and being completely unable to reach it is its own particular flavor of hell. On top of that, I lost my connection to spirituality entirely — the one thing that had always been my comfort, my anchor. Anything remotely positive sent me into instant rage. Everything happens for a reason? Straight to jail. Gratitude practice? A big fat fuck you to the entire universe. Even the things that used to help me didn't help anymore, and that scared me more than almost anything else.

What I actually needed, this whole time, was to stop shaming myself for being there and let somebody hold me. I wish I'd surrendered that control willingly. Instead it took total, bone-deep exhaustion to finally make me let go.

One more layer, just to make it extra fun: you don't go straight from shutdown back to regulated. You pass through activation first — irritable, jumpy, overstimulated, convinced you're backsliding. You're not. That's just your body waking back up. It needs compassion in that stretch, not frustration at yourself for not being "further along" yet.

So, my Jesus year. I said it half as a joke on my birthday, and it turned out to be exactly, literally that — a death and a rebirth. A part of me had to die so the part that was already in there, underneath the outdated version of myself, could finally come out. I'd basically been walking around in a meat suit that had been quietly rotting the whole time. Zombie Jesus, honestly. Unhinged? Yes. Accurate? Also yes. Something had to actually die first.

I should really be used to this cycle by now — apparently death and rebirth is just the Gemini special — and yet somehow, every single time, it still catches me completely off guard.

Here's where all of this leaves me. The program I used to teach was built to help women have better relationships — romantic ones, friendships, whatever — through the lens of looking at old patterns and attachment wounds. This year showed me that none of that mindset work is even accessible when your body is dysregulated. You cannot do pattern work from a nervous system stuck in survival mode. So my focus now is getting a woman regulated first — and teaching her how to do that herself, so she's not depending on me forever to feel okay.

That's what The Relief Container is. Twelve weeks — stabilization, then rewiring, then embodiment — woven through with energy work and hypnosis to make the process gentler than it was for me. I'm also building a smaller entry point, The Relief Workshop: ninety minutes, live on Zoom, just enough to feel what actual regulation feels like in your body if twelve weeks sounds like too much to commit to right now. And if you're not ready for either of those yet, I've got you — I'm doing a whole podcast series on nervous system states coming, so there's a free way in too.

That's the story. That's where I've been for a year. I'm back now, for the most part.

We'll see how it goes.

P.S. I recorded a podcast about this, in case you wanna listen to that, follow this link. Same title and everything :)