On Overcoming a Toxic Childhood, Harnessing Desire, and Remaking Myself

As an awkward, insecure, and self-conscious ugly-duckling child, I always envisioned the day I would become a swan.

Only in retrospect have I realized that much of my insecurities and health issues were due to both parental neglect and the larger toxicity of the environment I grew up in. As the child of parents who had a rationalist, sober worldview, I grew up worshipping the mythologies of academia and progress. My poor socialization and poor sense of self-worth were further exacerbated by continual ill health — nothing that qualified me for a disability, but chronic allergies, colds, and eczema flare-ups. The inflammation, I’ve later learned, was literally the manifestation of my physical, emotional, and spiritual dis-ease. Our medical and food systems unfortunately perpetuate these cycles of inflammation and un-ease.

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream American diet had not been doing me any favors. It is no coincidence that the acronym for Standard American Diet is S.A.D. Nutrition is fundamental for our health; food either helps to nourish and heal you or it ails you and upsets your equilibrium. Likewise, my reliance on Western medicine had not been ultimately helping me; in using topical steroids to treat my symptoms, I was only masking the issue and prolonging my ongoing cycle of inflammation.

Though I became vegetarian and then vegan for a time afterward, it would be many years before I could further heal or begin to address the spiritual wounds I’d experienced in my childhood. As I’d written in my piece, Trauma and Healing After the Death of a Beloved, “I thought of myself as intrinsically inferior, with bad genes (not only my skin and allergies but also unruly, thick curly hair and a proportionally large nose) and a legacy of perceived poverty due to my parents’ extreme, even irrational frugality, that I’ve long struggled to shake off.” Anyone who has felt this sense of intrinsic inferiority is familiar with this tendency to internalize the trauma. The tragedy of course is that it is never the child’s fault to have been born into toxic family or cultural systems, but we must bear these burdens.

As many advocates of earth medicines have pointed out, what manifests for many as depression, social anxiety, and a general sense of malaise is, at heart, PTSD from being raised in a toxic society. The struggle for someone raised in a negligent, abusive, or otherwise toxic or traumatizing environment is to realize that he/she is not culpable for the trauma that occurred. Earth medicines can help us to heal from both our own individual traumas as well as our ancestral traumas, helping to promote epigenetic healing.

Nadine Burke-Harris’s research on the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has been truly transformational to help me to locate and understand my years of struggling, in both childhood and early adulthood. Her research, together with that of Dr. Gabor Maté and my own spiritual journeying with earth medicines, have finally helped me to realize my new incarnation as a swan. I’d been preoccupied with spirituality and the hidden realms of knowledge since childhood, but the weight of my traumas had kept me from finding true healing for years.

I stumbled across an interesting article the other day, “What Do Female Incels Really Want?” This was my first time reading about the term “femcel,” referring to a woman who is involuntarily celibate. Though I was never a femcel, I struggled with my self-perception and in my relationships (friendships included) for decades, both because of my ongoing struggles with eczema and because of my asymmetrical and very pronounced nose. I struggled to feel worthy in relationships, and I struggled to be able to articulate my struggle even to myself, and much more so in any relationships.

In my early 20’s, I flew to Argentina for a rhinoplasty, where the procedure was significantly cheaper than it would have been in the U.S. Though my nose was still larger than I desired and still not fully symmetrical, it improved both my appearance and my sense of self. I wasn’t fully happy with the results or my appearance, but I decided to embrace my slightly off-kilter nose as a quirk of mine.

I played up the “sexy school teacher” vibe throughout my 20’s. I was the sexy Jewish teacher. It was my niche. I played up my sexiness and hustled on the side, capitalizing on my sex appeal. I did not yet fully feel like the swan, but I found that harnessing my desire and capitalizing on it was empowering for me. I reveled in being worshipped and in being paid for it. It was tremendously healing for me to be able to center myself as the object of desire and to see myself as a fantasy. To help people realize their fantasies and to provide such sexual and sensual healing felt both taboo and yet completely liberating for me.

Yet I struggled to reconcile my personal dating, my sense of self, and my sense of purpose with my moonlighting exploits. I still struggled with connecting to myself spiritually and fully recognizing my own divinity and self-worth. Only with a later reconstructive rhinoplasty (this time correcting the deviated septum) was I able to finally be happy with myself. The “femcel” literature apparently sees make-up as a soft fix and surgery as a hard fix that can help a woman “ascend.” And it is true that I’ve felt that my cosmetic procedures have helped me to ascend. I don’t have shame in it. The only shame I have is that I didn’t feel free to fully pursue refining my appearance as I had wanted for so long. Finances and concern with being judged for too extremely altering my appearance had held me back for too long.

What I have learned from my roundabout journey is the affirmation to follow your dreams, your intuition, and your sense of purpose. I also cannot emphasize enough the importance of investing in yourself, of truly investing in and pursuing what matters to you. No cosmetic procedure can guarantee self-confidence or can replace the spiritual healing work that needs to be done. But no one should feel ashamed for any kind of work — surgical, spiritual, physical, nutritional, or otherwise — that they feel would benefit them in their path.

So when a man asks if I know I’m pretty, should I really be expected to be humble about it? The centering of prettiness still irks me, but in being able to harness my desirability, I also feel more empowered to share my message of the importance of coming home to oneself, to finding and living in your authentic path. To transform from an ugly duckling to a swan requires courage. It requires ongoing maintenance; and I mean true, deep spiritual maintenance, physical maintenance, and self-connection, not just superficial work.

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