🌿 When Your Body Was Right All Along

A Green Witch’s Reflection on Being Heard

There is a strange kind of grief that comes when you realize your body was telling the truth all along… and no one listened.

Before I go any further, I want to say something I know some people are probably wondering.

Why share this?

Why be this open about something so personal?

The truth is, Green Magick Apothecary was born from this journey. It has never just been about products—it has always been deeply tied to my healing path, both outwardly and within. And part of that healing has been finding my voice. Finding a way to express what I used to keep locked behind a smile and an “I’m doing fine.”

So I share because this is part of that process.

For years, I’ve struggled with things I couldn’t fully explain. Not just being tired, but a kind of exhaustion that settled deep into my bones. Dizziness that would come out of nowhere. A heart that would race when it shouldn’t. A body that simply refused to keep up no matter how much I willed it to.

And like so many others, I was told—directly or indirectly—that maybe it was stress, maybe it was anxiety, maybe it was just in my head.

But recently, I started getting answers. Not all of them yet, but enough to know one very important thing: it was never in my head.

My lung scan wasn’t great. There are nodules, calcification, and confirmed asthma. My heart shows reduced blood flow to a specific area, and there’s a possible congenital condition called myocardial bridging, which means one of my arteries runs through the heart muscle instead of along it. There are thyroid autoantibodies pointing to autoimmune activity, my cortisol levels are low, and my blood pressure and body temperature run low. And one of the earliest signs that something wasn’t right goes back more than ten years—I lost over 100 pounds without trying, and I’ve never really been able to gain it back. At this point, I’m bone-skinny, and that has just become my baseline.

There’s still more testing to come, including evaluation for POTS and adrenal function, but even just what we know now starts to paint a picture. Not one big dramatic diagnosis, but multiple very real things happening in a body that has been trying to get my attention for a long time.

The truth is, I didn’t come into herbalism because I was trying to fix physical illness. I came into it because I needed to heal my spirit. But in that process, I learned something that I think many of us forget—our bodies speak in whispers long before they ever scream. And I had been hearing those whispers for a long time. The exhaustion after events, the crashes that didn’t make sense, the way my heart would react to things that shouldn’t have been a big deal. I just kept going, because that’s what we do. We push through, we show up, we carry on, until one day the body decides it’s done asking.

After Roots & Renewal, I hit that point.

I had been carrying a lot, and as soon as we got home, it was like my body finally let go of whatever it had been holding together. The vertigo hit, the dizziness, widespread pain, and a level of fatigue that I couldn’t push through even if I wanted to. It genuinely felt like my body knew we were done with what we had to do, and it made me go lay all the way down. The next morning I woke up to my test results, and I’ve been sitting with them ever since. Not posting, not working, just trying to process everything while the brain fog and exhaustion have been very real.

There is relief in finally having answers, and there is validation in knowing that something real is going on, but there is also fear—because once you start getting answers, you often end up with even more questions. Questions about what it all means, how it all connects, and what comes next. And once you know something is real, you can’t ignore it anymore.

And part of what makes this so heavy is everything that came before it.

Years of medical downplaying. Years of being dismissed. Years of being made to feel like what I was experiencing wasn’t serious or wasn’t real. After enough of that, something shifts. You stop trying to be heard. You start to question yourself. You begin to ignore your own body, because what good is listening to it if no one else will?

And now that I’m where I am on my healing journey, I can see that for what it was.

A trauma response.

Because when all your life you’ve been told, in one form or another, that you don’t matter… that your needs don’t matter… that your voice shouldn’t be heard… eventually, you learn to silence yourself.

Even when your own body is trying to speak for you.

And that’s where I was for a long time.

And then I became truly ill. Not just run down, not just exhausted, but sick in a way I could no longer push through or explain away. My body nearly failed me completely, and there are moments I can look back on now and realize just how serious it really was and how lucky I am to still be here.

That’s a hard thing to sit with, because it forces you to face what happens when your body is ignored for too long, whether by yourself, by the system, or by both.

So now I’m in this strange space where there is both relief and grief at the same time. Relief, because I was right. Grief, because I was right. Because it means my body has been asking for help for a long time, and I didn’t always know how to listen, and the people I needed to hear me didn’t. And now I have to learn how to respond to it differently… while also accepting that my long journey to find answers still isn’t over.

For the past ten years, I’ve tried to get answers, and like many others, I’ve run into a system that often won’t look deeper unless something is already clearly out of range. Specialists won’t see you without abnormal labs, and sometimes by the time those labs are abnormal, you’ve been struggling for years.

So if you’ve ever felt dismissed, overlooked, or like you had to fight to be taken seriously, you are not alone.

I go back on April 1st to learn more, and I don’t have all the answers yet. But I do have something I didn’t have before. I have proof, I have validation, and I have a reason to trust my body again.

And maybe that’s the most important part of all.

If your body is telling you something is wrong, even if no one else can see it yet, listen anyway.

And don’t stop using your voice and advocating for yourself until you are heard.

Because your body is not the enemy.

It’s the messenger.