Hello, my name is Sophia-Magdalena and two and a half years ago, I got sick, which led me to stop working and focus solely on my healing journey. This approach has been effective, and now I consider myself "in recovery" as I am slowly getting better.

To heal, I have a support circle consisting of two physiotherapists, three doctors, one nutricionist and Ana Noram­buena, who supports me on this journey.

I have slowly started to work again (I have made it to the point for enough energy to do a bit), but to cover all my monthly expenses and continue supporting my healing journey, it’s not enough. Working full-time right now is not possible because it would jeopardize my health journey—in short, I cannot do that yet. I am slowly building resistance in my body/system to be able to do more things every day again.

I have just turned 29 years old, and my wish is to keep receiving the support I need and want without having to stop because I cannot work full-time yet. As someone who is really good in thinking that: "I have to do it all by myself!" it is scary to ask others for help. It took me a while to realise that I can just ask for support. This is what I am doing now, I am asking for support, stepping out of "I have to do it alone".

I am on a path that is making me healthier every day; I can feel it and sense it. Nothing is more precious than the balance within myself. I finally have accepted and learned that it is incredible important to take care of myself, of my body and soul and along this healing journey I was able to stop ignoring my own voice who was trying to tell me that my body has some problem that needs attending.

I am in the process of getting better health insurance support, which will, in a few months, also reduce my costs significantly, but I am not there yet. Some things take time, I have learned that as well in the last 3 years, so, I am relaxing into what is.

A bit about the physical illness:

The journey started with problems in my stomach and intestines, and my doctors discovered I have an autoimmune condition affecting my intestines (I won't name it exactly to avoid branding myself too much) that caused most of the pain. My last blood tests indicated this autoimmune condition is now inactive. This is a significant achievement. With my doctor and nutritionist, I have learned a lot about diet and what I need to eat to ensure my gut stays healthy. My body no longer needs to create constant inflammation. Some days are still difficult, but I keep learning about food every day, and I am grateful for discovering what my body truly wants to eat.

Due to this illness, my body developed vasovagal nerve syndrome, which can be triggered by five different factors. And which made me have to stay in my bed for about one year, learning how to handle intense physical pain.

Part of the syndrome is fainting a lot, I used to faint about 5x a week. I am not fainting every day anymore. I am managing the episodes and need weekly support to regenerate my muscles and get my nervous system accustomed to movement again. Now, I have more and more periods where I am okay with constant support, but I am not yet okay if I go over three weeks without support. The more muscles I build, the better I feel, and this has proven to be true. Since the beginning of the year, I have had physiotherapy four times a week, and I have built a significant amount of muscle(which is not working in my body like in a "normal/healthy" body due to the sickness), which has reduced the pain. The pain is slowly leaving my body. I am in the middle of recovery and look forward to sharing my learnings with the world through this journey. I am going to do it slowly because I am not completely stable yet. I am better than yesterday and will be better tomorrow—this is what my physiotherapist tells me when things get hard. Hard means painful, difficult to move and to keep going. I will keep going. For a strong body and a healthy life.

Thank you so much for your support - I have no expectations on your side & I am already just glad that I dared to write this text and stop pretending that sometimes I would not worry about the financial part of this.

I will use your support to pay my physiotherapists, vitamin supplements, emotional support, basically the money is going to the team I have built to help me heal. I appreciate each single soul of this team and I am so thankful for them. I also have 3 checkups coming that will see how much the healing process has moved on - basically how my body is doing now. This includes check of my stomach & intestines & how my hormones are doing. They are a little out of control since my body got sick. As well as organic food, the better I eat the better I heal. This will give me the opportunity to go swimming and do everything I need to do to keep healing and become better and better.

Will you support me?

Here are some thoughts about healing and its connection to culture:

I do think that healing is a journey that looks at the whole of me. A lot of the possibility of healing, in my experience, has to do with my willingness to look at myself as a whole system—a complete being. To heal, I need to change, because the way my system has been functioning is what got me sick. Healing cannot occur without transformation, without allowing myself to truly confront the things that have tormented me, the things I wanted to run from, the things I would rather not have to face. These include the lack of integrity within me.

These challenges can be both big and small. How am I eating? How am I listening to my five bodies? Am I balanced or not? Illness brings automatic imbalance, so what is it that I need to do to restore balance? Back to balance? No! Because there is no "back." If I try to go back to something while healing, I will not actually be healing. Going back would mean revisiting the very thing that made me sick. Yes, the physical symptoms that appear as illnesses are connected to all parts of my existence. By allowing myself to accept that the culture I was living in was making me sick, I create the possibility of changing that culture and becoming a healthier version of myself.

So yes, healing goes deep—deep into all parts of my system. Realizing that I cannot go back, that there is no place or game world waiting for me, but instead I can choose what and where I source my culture from has significantly increased my physical strength. I choose to live a life in which consciousness matters, where it is important that I open my mouth when I sense it is necessary. A life in which I do not hide what I stand for and use my voice to speak out if I find myself in a situation I do not agree with.

I can be conscious or unconscious. I choose to walk my path with integrity. I won’t try to be something I'm not because I think it would be better to be something else. The best version of me is who I truly am. So, I stopped fighting to fit in, I stopped trying to be something else, and I stand for my culture. I stopped trying to prove my worth and instead learned my own worth and walk with it. In my culture, it is valuable to be vulnerable. It is beautiful to create relationships in which intimacy nourishes me and fuels my heart, my being, and my creativity.

It is not about being perfect; it is about choosing to learn, again and again. I am thankful to myself for having the willingness to change what needs to change in order to get healthy. I do not take that for granted. For a long time, I was at war within myself because I could not decide what I wanted to source from or which culture would be the right one. Now, I have realized that the only culture I can source from is the one that is alive in me—the one that already exists in my actions, in how I relate to others, and in how I spend my time. Healing means taking back my authority and power.

Thank you for reading.