From Collapse to Calling

The journey that led me to Velvet Dawn

Who am I?

For a long time, that question followed me without an answer.

I spent years moving from one job and one idea to another—retail, hospitality, administration, optics, photography, and attempts at creating businesses of my own. From the outside, I was moving forward. Inside, I felt increasingly lost. I kept looking for the thing that would finally make sense of who I was and what I was here to do, while carrying the expectations I had absorbed from family, relationships and society about what a successful life was supposed to look like.

Eventually, the search became much heavier than simply not knowing what career I wanted.

When the questions became too heavy

What I came to understand as my own Dark Night of the Soul was not a peaceful spiritual awakening. It was a period of profound psychological and existential upheaval.

After a deeply painful period in my life, I reached a point where the questions I had been carrying became overwhelming. What is the purpose of life? Why do we suffer? Who am I beneath everything I have been taught to be? What remains when the identities, relationships and expectations that once gave life structure no longer seem to fit?

There was a point when the weight of those questions became so great that I began questioning whether I wanted to continue living. I chose to stay, but staying did not immediately make life feel meaningful. For a time, I felt alive in body but strangely absent from my own life.

There were also periods when the intensity became so great that I felt I was having mental breakdowns. I questioned my own sanity. I experienced moments of profound detachment and a sense that I was watching my life rather than fully inhabiting it. I did not have a neat spiritual explanation for any of this. I was simply trying to understand what was happening to me.

The slow death of an old self

Looking back, one of the hardest parts was that something in me was changing before I understood what that change meant.

The version of myself I had spent years building was beginning to fall apart. Old beliefs, identities, patterns and ways of relating to myself were being exposed. But the death of an old identity does not necessarily feel like liberation while you are inside it. Sometimes it feels like loss. Sometimes it feels like chaos. Sometimes it feels like you are falling apart.

There were moments of anger, grief, fear and exhaustion. Beneath them were older wounds and experiences I had never really understood. I began to see how much of my life had been shaped by trying to be what I thought I should be, rather than listening to what was actually happening within me.

And somewhere within all of that uncertainty, a very small question began to emerge: Who am I?

It was not an intellectual question. It became something much deeper. If I could no longer rely on the old answers, I had to begin looking inward.

When writing became a way through

I started writing.

At first, it was simply a way of getting everything out of my head. I wrote the thoughts I could not say aloud, the emotions I could not make sense of, the memories that resurfaced, and the questions that kept returning.

Over time, something changed. Writing became more than an outlet. It became a way of witnessing myself.

Through journaling, I began to notice patterns. I could see where shame, guilt, anger, fear and grief were influencing me. I could begin to separate what I had experienced from the meanings I had attached to those experiences. Most importantly, I could begin to meet parts of myself with compassion rather than immediately trying to silence, fix or judge them.

I continued writing consistently for years. What began as a way of surviving an incredibly difficult period gradually became part of how I understood myself, healed old wounds and developed a deeper relationship with my inner world.

From healing myself to helping others

Eventually, another realisation began to take shape.

I wanted to help other people who were experiencing the kind of inner upheaval I had once struggled to put into words. People who might feel lost, disconnected from themselves, overwhelmed by questions of meaning or identity, or as though an old version of their life is falling away without knowing what comes next.

I became particularly drawn to the space where psychological and spiritual questions meet. Not because every difficult experience needs a spiritual explanation, but because sometimes people are carrying questions that are deeply existential: Who am I? What gives my life meaning? Why does this feel like it is happening to me? What happens when the person I thought I was no longer feels like me?

My own experiences eventually led me to study Spiritual Counselling, where I began finding language for parts of what I had lived through. My training also introduced me to approaches that became particularly meaningful to me, including parts work and hypnotherapy. These experiences deepened my understanding of how much can emerge when we create enough safety to listen to the different parts of ourselves with curiosity and compassion.

Why Velvet Dawn exists

Velvet Dawn grew from that journey.

It is not about having all the answers. It is not about telling someone what their spiritual experience means, or trying to turn every period of suffering into a lesson.

For me, it is about creating a space where the whole person can be met—the uncertainty alongside the hope, the grief alongside the possibility, the parts that feel lost alongside the parts that are beginning to emerge.

I know what it is like to be in a place where your inner world feels difficult to explain. I know how isolating it can feel when the questions become bigger than the language you have to describe them. And I also know that sometimes, beneath all the uncertainty, there can be the smallest glimpse of something new.

That glimpse was where my journey began to change.

From collapse, slowly, came a calling.

And that is the space from which Velvet Dawn was born.