I Didn’t Get a Facial. I Got Honest. ✨

Lately, people keep saying some version of the same thing.

“You look different.”

“There’s something about you.”

“You’re glowing.”

Which is confusing, because I am tired. Manuscript-deep tired. The kind of tired that comes from living inside your own story for weeks on end—reopening rooms you once sealed shut and deciding, again and again, whether to tell the truth or soften the edges.

I assumed it was good lighting. Or hydration. Or denial. But when I mentioned it to my therapist, she said something simple:

It’s the inner work.

That landed harder than I expected.

For the last while, I’ve been trying to get my memoir across the finish line. And when I say finish, I don’t mean perfect. I mean honest. Writing it has been exhausting, exhilarating, humbling, healing and eye-opening—sometimes all in the same afternoon.

Each pass through the story brings new realizations. New grief. New compassion for the version of me who did the best she could with what she knew at the time. And each time I write, something loosens. Something integrates. Something lets go.

What I didn’t anticipate was how physical that process would be. Apparently, when you stop arguing with your own truth, your body notices. 🫶

For a long time, the more traditional, cognitive approaches to healing never quite fit for me. Not because they were wrong—just because they weren’t how my system works.

I’m deeply attuned to people. To reading a room. To sensing what’s happening beneath the words. Staying purely in analysis often felt like circling the experience instead of actually touching it.

What’s helped me most has been work that drops me into the body—where sensation comes before story.

One approach I was initially skeptical of (Deep Brain Reorienting — DBR — which, to be clear, sounds more like a procedure than a conversation) ended up being less about technique and more about presence.

Often, it felt like very little was happening.

And then, days later, I’d realize something had shifted.

Working with different healers has also been part of my toolkit — not in a checklist way, but in a listening-for-what-my-body-actually-responds-to way.

And just to say this clearly: you don’t need a psychedelic journey to the inner world to heal — although it’s definitely on my list. Purely for research purposes. 😉

Sometimes the work is much less cinematic. Sometimes it’s noticing a sensation. Staying with discomfort a few seconds longer than usual. Letting your body finish something it started a long time ago.

No ayahuasca. No drum circle. Just a lot of noticing.

Triggers used to be paralyzing. Not always dramatic—just quietly consuming. They’d hijack my nervous system, narrow my thinking, pull me back into old patterns before I even realized what was happening.

This work hasn’t erased that. It’s still a work in progress. But over time, I’ve noticed something subtle change. The trigger still shows up—and then it passes more quickly.

My body recovers faster. There’s more space between the sensation and the story I used to tell myself about it.

Less spiraling. Less collapse. Less urgency to fix or flee.

It’s not that I don’t get triggered.

It’s that I don’t get stuck there as long.

And that difference has been quietly life-changing. 🌱

If any of this sounds familiar—the paralysis, the overthinking, the way your body reacts before your mind can catch up—you’re not broken.

You’re not failing at healing. And you’re not behind.

You’re likely someone whose nervous system learned early how to stay alert, agreeable or prepared. Someone who learned how to read a room before you learned how to listen to yourself.

And if you’ve noticed even the smallest shift lately—a quicker recovery, a softer response, a moment where you pause instead of collapse—that matters more than you think.

That’s capacity building.

That’s integration.

That’s progress, even when it doesn’t look dramatic.

For most of my life, I lived in Switzerland. Neutral. Diplomatic. Able to see every side of a story—except my own. And don’t get me wrong, Switzerland kept me safe. It made me empathetic. Perceptive. Good in a crisis.

But writing this book has made it impossible to keep abandoning my own side of the story.

Lately, I’ve been choosing it more often. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just honestly.

Finding my voice hasn’t meant confronting people or standing on a soapbox or announcing my truth at full volume. It hasn’t meant burning bridges or drawing lines in permanent ink.

For me, it’s been quieter and somehow braver than that. It’s meant letting my “no” be complete. Letting my feelings exist without justification. Letting myself be misunderstood without rushing to clean it up.

Truth, it turns out, doesn’t have to be aggressive to be powerful.

There’s something deeply regulating about no longer negotiating with yourself. About living in a way that doesn’t contradict what you know to be true. About letting your nervous system relax because it knows you’re finally on its side.

I didn’t arrive here all at once. I’m still arriving. 🤍

And yes—there’s an afterglow to that.

Not the kind you get from a new serum or a weekend escape. This kind of glow comes from staying. From feeling. From telling the truth long enough that your body finally believes you.

It’s exhilarating. And it’s exhausting. Shedding an old version of yourself always is.

I’m still getting used to this new skin. Some days it fits beautifully. Other days it pinches. I’m a work in progress, if I’m honest. But I no longer mistake that for failure.

Apparently, when you stop betraying yourself, your face gets the memo. ✨

So if someone has told you lately that you look different—softer, steadier, brighter and you don’t quite know why, maybe it’s not that you’ve added something.

Maybe it’s that you’ve finally stopped carrying what was never yours.

And if you’re still learning how to stay with yourself when things get hard, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

It means you’re becoming.

And that quiet, unexpected afterglow?

It’s not confidence or clarity or arrival.

It’s your nervous system learning—slowly, honestly that you’re finally on your own side.