Before the Soul
A Memoir of Remembering
This piece is from my current novel in progress, Before the Soul, a personal and poetic memoir of survival, identity, and spiritual reawakening. It traces the journey of losing myself to the world and slowly, painfully, finding my way back home to me.
For as long as I can remember, I had been standing in the shadows. Not literally, of course. I was present, I was there, but not truly seen. People didn’t just look past me, they saw that I was lost. And maybe they were right.
I had come out of a marriage where I felt like I’d lost my soul. But if I’m being honest, I think my soul had started slipping away long before the marriage even began. If I had truly been connected to it, if I had known myself, I wouldn’t have chosen that relationship. Or at the very least, it would have looked very different.
I learnt how to make myself small from a young age. The youngest in a big family, I was the baby, the one who was teased, cuddled, or overlooked. I became the entertainer. It was the role that made people laugh, the one that kept me included, even if I didn’t feel understood. Behind the humour and the bright smile, all I really wanted was to be loved for who I was. Even at five years old, I didn’t feel seen. I felt like I had to earn my place by performing, not by simply existing.
By the time the marriage ended, I wasn’t just emotionally drained, I was in survival mode. My nervous system was completely shot. I had lived in fight or flight for so long that I didn’t even know what calm felt like anymore. Being around people was exhausting. I didn’t know how to regulate my energy or feel safe in my own body. Some days I’d talk too much, over-explaining, trying to fill every silence just to prove I was okay. Other days, I couldn’t speak at all, I simply shut down. But because I wasn’t connected to myself, I didn’t know any different. That was just my normal. Alcohol became my regulator at night, and coffee was the fuel that pushed me through the morning. I lived on edge, bouncing between numbing and surviving, never really landing anywhere that felt like peace.
Writing this book wasn’t a way out, it was a way to give back. A way to share what I’ve learnt now that I’m living from a place of nervous system regulation, soul connection, and deep self-trust. Through the years, I gathered tools, rituals, and small but powerful moments that helped me return to myself. And now, I want to offer them to you. My hope is that these pages guide you to your own remembering. That you find your breath again. That you connect to your body, your truth, and your soul before the world convinces you to be anything less.
Because it’s not always the world that breaks us. Sometimes, it’s the way we keep abandoning ourselves to stay in places we were never meant to fit.
