Breaking Free: My Journey from Hyper-Independence to Self-Care

If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been so quiet here it’s because I’ve been hard at work taking care of myself and leveling myself up. This is my journey from running myself ragged to intentional self-care. At some point over the last few years I started to realize I was living in a particularly masculinized version of myself and I got tired of it.  I was just tired in general to be clear.  

I was working constantly, stressed constantly, self medicating until mid 2022 with cannabis, and also in a relationship in which I felt responsible for everything from finances to affection. All of it was by my own design. My hyper independent ideals had bitten me in the ass and I was really starting to struggle. 

When I turned 30, I hit a wall.  The relationship was the first to go, long overdue as it added a lot to the stress and to be clear again it was by my design. I had manifested all of it in my yearning for hyper-independance. I was the one to be depended on and when I couldn’t do it all, I was the one at fault. I could say more about this and I have privately but its not really important the details beyond what I am sharing here which is that it needed to end. What matters here is that the end of that was the first step in me stepping into a new timeline for myself. 

I was financially struggling, unhealthy, unhappy, completely unable to set and maintain boundaries. I’m not saying he caused it, I am saying that he was just a side effect of the life I manifested to that point. It was all in alignment until it wasn’t. I started to yearn for a lifestyle that was simpler, one in which I felt safe to sink into my feminine instead of simply existing in a state of hyper masculinity with a partner that desperately craved for me to be feminine while he refused to exist in his masculine role to support that. 

Sometime in the months leading up to my 30th birthday I decided that I wanted to find a way to shift things and 30 seemed like the perfect age. For any human design nerds out there, I am profile 6/2 role model hermit. My first 30 years were INTENDED to be chaos and from 30-50 I am here to go within or on the roof if you will, assess what happened and take care of myself. I felt the shift coming since 28, but now it was finally there. Time to go. 

So I started to settle into what that looked like. And I ended up falling in love with someone who taught me how to receive. He taught me that I don’t have to do everything myself. He encouraged me to rest. And he inspired me to embrace my feminine. So I did. 

And to be clear he didn’t really have to do anything other than treat me extremely well to get me to shift. He never told me I needed to focus on my hair and skin like I did and have for the past year or so. He just loved me and embodied the masculine as best he could as provider and protector. And when hes physically here he treats me like the queen I have always known I could be.  

Step one was to quit birth control. I’d wanted to for years but was too afraid. Afraid of breaking out again badly while my hormones adjusted. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of pregnancy. Afraid of the intense periods I experienced while on the copper IUD, which is a barbaric torture device and you cannot convince me otherwise. 

And as my skin started to break out and my hormones went wild in the months to follow I started to look into how to heal my hormones. The remainder of this post will be an explanation of what I found that worked for me. I’ll link a few books I read on the topic as well. 

1. Stress: My biggest enemy. Constant worrying. Constant work. Relationship drama. Of course this stuff lessened to a great degree after 2019 but it was still a thing till the start of last year and mostly has calmed down but mostly because I’ve cleared a lot of stuff out.  No situations are perfect but if most of my interactions with people cause cortisol dumps, I probably shouldn’t be interacting with those people. Same for working situations. I even mostly stopped the crochet business cause the stress of explaining why it costs minimum 30 bucks to ship anything to the US got old, as well as the stress of undercharging because I wanted to remain affordable. 
2. Naps: This plays into stress but I started letting myself sleep when I felt tired even if it was a few hours after waking. I read somewhere that when you shift out of survival mode you become fatigued and spend a lot of time sleeping to heal. That has been true for me. So I embraced the naps and as I started to do so things started to shift. 
3. Food: I have been unable to do the full cycle syncing diet recommended by the books I’ll share below but I have upped my daily protein.  I also try not to eat sweet breakfasts ever mostly because it just makes me feel bad.  But I eat higher protein especially for breakfast. I supplement hydrolyzed collagen, black seed oil, digestive enzymes and most recently inositol as recommended for PCOS.  I take ginger turmeric shots I make myself.  All of these things help my gut and support my liver which helps the hormones. I also occasionally take digestive bitters as a tincture to help support my liver. 
4. Teas: Technically in food but how I consume my collagen is by making herbal tea and mixing it in.  I use Ahmad tea brand blends that include things like: dandelion, nettle, licorice, mint, ginger, fennel, turmeric, red raspberry leaf and more. Those ingredients in particular are important. Also recently got a care package with Alfa Vedic Immortality Tea, Chamomile Dreams flavor from someone who knows who they are, and its amazing.  If I keep up drinking two cups a day minimum I experience pain free periods. If I quit the tea, the pain comes back, that I learned after Anarchapulco this year. 
5. Mandatory Rest Days: Before I would work for months on end without taking days off. I’d run myself ragged until I was forced to take days off with sickness or headaches and I’d feel guilty the whole time.  Now I take one day a week to do nothing or I at least try to. If that means I stay in bed all day only leaving for food and to use the bathroom, that’s what it means.
6. Breathwork: This ones a recent one but too important not to share. I had my first session with Sam Pilbeam from The Quantum Questions at Anarchapulco this year when I basically had an emotional breakdown due to stress of work and life. She did angelic reiki and a breathwork session and that helped a lot. She encouraged me to take the 28 week Breath of Life course they offered and I have been doing so. I’ve done more sessions with her virtually as well as keeping up with the course work and despite some big emotional and in general life changes recently I am handling things better than I used to. I have more tools in my toolbox for taking care of myself and lowering my stress. 
7. Journaling: I also recently started journaling. There’s a lot going on for me with legal stuff, personal stuff, work. I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed and at the suggestion of Sam I have been journaling and I can say without a doubt its really helping me get my mind right. Getting all these intense conflicting feelings out of my mind and onto paper or in this case a document on my computer, helps me to focus on other things. Actually I journaled a lot about some big stuff happening now just before doing this and went from wanting to go to bed to writing these posts I’ve wanted to share for months but been too overwhelmed to do. 
8. Self care: The next two posts will go into detail on this, but I established a skincare and haircare routine and I stick to it religiously. It feels good to take care of my body. 

For me my biggest source of hormonal imbalance seems rooted in cortisol in the body. The more I work to reduce that, the better I feel. Some people have to be really strict with the diet, no gluten dairy or sugar for example to see results but I personally have found the big game changer to be stress. 

Stress is a part of life but there’s things we can do to reduce it and also reduce the effects of it on our bodies, which is what I’ve really focused on. Stoicism has helped a lot with this as well. I wrote a post about this last summer for Agorist nexus, you can find here.

I’ll eventually go into more details on these things specifically over the next months but I figured I would start with an overview.