Paris 2015 – extract from my journal.

Another sleepless night. My hives are so itchy they drive me crazy, and I cannot stay asleep.

It is as if they play this game of waiting for everyone to be asleep for them to be fully awake.

As if my body wants me to stay awake all night.

I am exhausted, angry, and scared.

Exhausted from the rest I can’t get.

Angry as my 15-hour intense workdays require my full mental capacity that I’m losing.

Scared that doctors wouldn’t find what this is about and give me the right treatment on time. The time is the wedding I am planning with my college sweetheart.

My body must calm down, my hives must go away so my life can continue as planned.

New York City in 2018.

Three months after my husband and I moved to New York, the American dream I was hoping for transformed into a nightmare. Everything I worked so hard for and built was collapsing. I was initiating a double divorce, from my husband and my job.

In the following months, the act of waking up each day was the hardest time.

Every morning, for a few precious seconds, I enjoyed the amnesia state between sleep and consciousness. I would reach out my hand to cuddle my husband, like I did for the past decade, until I was being slapped in the face by the nightmare of my reality.

That suffering was what I needed to start work I’ve never done before – the work of sitting still and observing what was happening inside of me – meaning my thoughts, emotions, sensations – with radical honesty and acceptance.

Which was terrifying at first but has by far delivered the highest return on investment I’ve ever made.

What I had realized was that I was not waking up from a dream to a nightmare but to a rebirth.

The rebirth was the beginning of the process of unbecoming everything I was not so that the essence of me can re-emerge as the main dancer of my life.

That act of waking up each day was actually an act of awakening.

Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer”.

As painful as that winter in New York City was, the perspective of a new life was exhilarating. Not a life based on fantasies, fairytales or lies but a life based on truth, courage, and purpose.

And one day, I remembered that I had been given a chance to wake up more gently. My body had shown me the signs, but I didn’t listen.

I understood that my body knew what my mind ignored. And those itchy hives were trying to wake me up for a reason, urging me to admit the truth to myself and have the courage to speak it and live by it. A truth that meant saying no to what I had committed to so I could yes to my authentic self.

I always took pride in being a loyal person, but that winter in New York, I learned that being loyal begins with being loyal to our own selves.

And from a place of loyalty to self, we find the inner peace, confidence, and courage to see the rebirth in the obstacles and the chance to recreate, reinvent and rewrite our story.