Expiring Before We Desire: First-Born Childhood Trauma Survivors Speak

On International Day of Persons with Disabilities

From Catholic choir girl to Buddhist seeker: My journey from absorbing family abuse to nearly expiring from environmental toxins reveals the fatal flaw of dismissing the silent sufferer.

On International Day of Persons with Disabilities, I share how invisible illness and systemic dismissal harm those of us carrying childhood trauma into adulthood.

Hello, Dear Peaceful Heart. You are protecting your peace, doing all the things to feel better and yet still living with illness. Thank you for being here — your presence helps me feel less alone.

If you know Pema Chödrön, you know the energy I carry. Being online and learning how to make YouTube videos is not my gift but I cannot sit back and watch another soul be dismissed by doctors who do not have the tools to heal us. In Canada, they harmed both me and my mother.

My mom passed with MAiD on May 5, 2022, during COVID, with no one by her bedside. I was meant to be her end-of-life doula — to give her the peace she never had in life.

March 17 has always been sacred to me: the day my parents wed while I was in the womb. And now it is the date Canada plans to expand MAiD to those whose sole condition is mental illness — March 17, 2027.

But my illness is not mental.

It is mould illness. Environmental illness. CIRS.

Invisible, dismissed and deadly. Just like those allergic to peanuts. We are allergic to toxic air and gyms for us healthy souls are the worst places on the planet. I began bleeding internally from 2013- October 2024, when I completed my first detox.

They told my mother and me the same words again and again: anxiety. Severe depression. Bipolar disorder. Once, after airplane air triggered a full-body reaction during a stressful time, I was given another psychiatric label. They wanted to medicate me because I was suicidal.

In that moment, a compassionate police officer saw me, understood my distress and brought me safely to the hospital.

At the same time, I had been supporting someone who had just lost his first-born brother to suicide. We ended our relationship one week prior but I could not abandon him — he had no immediate family left.

Invisible illness survivors do not break because we are weak.

We break because our systems fail us.

And on this International Day of Persons with Disabilities, I am speaking because I don’t want another sensitive body, another first-born peacemaker, another dismissed soul to lose the battle my mother lost.

You are not alone.

And you are not a burden.

You deserve to be believed.

🌱 A Little Gift for You — Thank You for Spending These Minutes With Me

If you are spiralling or your nervous system feels overwhelmed, here is the exact practice I used for severe medical anxiety — the anxiety that came from being repeatedly dismissed by doctors:

1. Ground yourself.

Sit or stand with your feet planted.

2. Hands on belly.

Feel your breath moving under your palms.

3. Repeat slowly:

I am the medicine.

I am safe.

All is well in my world.

This isn’t permanent — it’s just for right now.

Nothing is permanent, including how I feel.

4. If you can, step outside.

If not, look out a window.

Jump up and down lightly to bring the body back online.

5. Breathe through your nose until you can’t.

Exhale from deep in your gut and let whatever sound wants to come out… come out.

That sound is stored trauma leaving your body.

I still use this practice when falling asleep — even after healing lifelong insomnia.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to see me today.

I hope this helps you see yourself with more softness too.
You matter. You are medicine.

Sending Loving Kindness from Canada’s Capital,
Dee
May you feel seen. May you feel heard.
May you heal with ease.
May you live with deep inner peace.