Trigger Warnings Self-harm, Drug + Alcohol abuse, Assault, Overdose

 Hello and welcome! My name is Stephanie and I want to share my story with you.

But first I want to explain why I want to tell my story. This is not to get sympathy from anyone. This is not for me to just dump all my trauma out there on the internet. This is not for me to promote or endorse any of this behavior or anything that happened to me.

This is not to excuse anything that has happened to me, or what was done to me by others. This is purely being shared from a place of experience, strength, and hope. This is to show you what is possible for a human being to experience and endure and overcome, and then to become something that is so far beyond what I once was. 

This is for you to see sort of a glimpse at what I had to experience in my life so that I could be here now with all of this knowledge, with my power fully embodied. All the things that I had to survive, all these initiations that I had to go through along the way to become the woman I am today.

I am not saying that trauma is a good thing, but some of us have certain initiations in this life to become a healer to become what other civil civilizations would've called a shaman. I am not calling myself a shaman, but a shaman has to learn how to heal themself first, right?

So all of these things that I'm about to talk about and share with you are from a place of me truly owning it. Truly owning the choices that I made. Also from a place of healing my voice, healing my throat chakra, and telling the truth about what has happened to me and my past, and not having any shame around any of it. Because I truly am in a place now where I know that every single thing I ever went through had a bigger purpose and a bigger lesson involved.

 I have done so much work on myself to understand that all of these things were lessons, all of them were initiations. All of my trials and tribulations were ways for me to know, love, and accept myself on a deeper level. So I do not hold any energetic attachment to any of these things that I'm about to share with you, and that was the biggest thing that allowed me to keep going was I never made it my identity.

I mean, I, I did struggle with addiction and that was my identity for a while, but all of these other things that you're gonna hear me talk about, I never, I never labeled myself. I never owned it as an identity, and that allowed me to just press on and keep going. Also, I always knew on some level that everything that I was going through was for a greater purpose.

And now I know that that was my higher self helping me through all these times in my life. But, I never made it my identity and I never, I never let anything hold me down for very long. I always found my way through or found my way over or under, I always found a way through it. So I just wanna make that really clear.

This is not me telling you all of this from a wounded place, this is me sharing my story with you because I have overcome so much in my life and I know that the greater purpose was for me to eventually share this story and for many people to find a link to me or a common ground with me in order to get into my work and heal themselves.

Sometimes we can't do that until we know someone's story until we know someone's background until we can look at everything that they've gone through and see that it got better. So enjoy. I mean, I don't know how enjoyable it is,  but it is shocking, riveting, and not boring, that's for sure.

So here we go.