At eighteen, a video of me was shared without my consent. It took more than a decade to stop hiding from it. This is what I learned about shame, the body, and taking your story back.
Everyone has a moment that splits them open. A phone call. A text. A conversation that starts one way and ends somewhere you never come back from. The details are different. The feeling is the same: the sound drops out, and the air leaves the room.
Mine came on a Tuesday night in 2009. I was eighteen, in my dorm room, watching a movie with my roommate. My phone rang. It was my sorority sister. She had just seen a video of me online. Her boyfriend, who knew me from back home, recognized me too.
I laughed. I said, I guess I’m a porn star. That is what the body does when something breaks it all the way open. The room kept going. The movie kept playing. My world stopped.
My nervous system knew before my mind did. It would take me years to catch up.
The Girl in the Video
The girl in the video was eighteen. She had migrated to the United States. She was the eldest daughter of a Latina single mom and had been mothering her little brother for as long as she could remember. She loved God with everything she had, even though the God she’d been given was angry and punishing. Love in her house came with conditions.
She still had dreams. She had just crossed into her sorority. She was going to finish college and start a life.
When she reached out to the man who made the recording, he told her it was her fault. That she had given permission. That she couldn’t play the victim.
The first wound was the video. The second wound was being told I had earned it. The second one took longer to heal.
Ten Years of Leaving
Shame doesn’t always look like hiding under the covers. Sometimes it looks like a triple major.
After the video, I built armor out of everything that looked like success. I amplified the good girl, the church girl, the girl with a plan. The performance had to be airtight. It had to be loud enough to drown out the fear that someone, somewhere, was watching.
I lived two lives. In one, I was untouchable, the girl who could handle anything. In the other, I was obedient, high-achieving, God-fearing. Neither of them was me. Both of them were trying to survive.
I stopped looking in mirrors, or I used them as a performance. I put on weight without realizing I was trying to disappear. I blurred the years with drinking and achievement stacked like a wall. Then I moved countries, from the US to Colombia, because I was afraid my name on a research paper would follow me into a room full of people who respected me.
Ten years of surviving looked like leaving. Leaving countries. Leaving relationships before they could leave me. Leaving rooms when I felt too seen. Every relationship ran on the same code: I don’t deserve to be fully known. I need to be wanted but not seen. I need to perform my way to love.
I was trying to make myself small enough that the video couldn’t find me. I was trying to take up less space than the shame.
The Body Was Holding What I Couldn’t
In 2018, I was the heaviest I had ever been. I had been let go from two corporate jobs in the same season. My logical mind filed it under failure. What it actually was: redirection.
I started working with a mentor on emotional eating, and I learned something that changed everything: my body wasn’t the problem. It had been holding everything I hadn’t been able to process.
So I went into the body. Tantra with my husband. Ancestral plant medicine. Breathwork. Ice baths. Retreats where I let myself be seen without flinching.
My first assignment from my mentor was to write down the words that came to mind when I thought of myself. I wrote: slut. Whore. Fat. Victim. In retreat, I wrote those words on my skin. Then I washed them off and wrote new ones.
When I found mirror work, I wasn’t trying to be sexy. I was trying to stay, to look long enough to tell the truth and feel every emotion without running. That practice eventually became my energy work.
The shift wasn’t that I stopped caring what anyone might find. It was that I began to feel safe being seen anyway.
The Turn
The moment it became a gift arrived in a meditation. The guide said: Bring forth the person you love most. I expected my mother, my husband, my children.
He showed up instead. The man who made the recording. And what I felt wasn’t rage. It was recognition. Something old and agreed-upon, at a level I didn’t have language for yet.
Through a modality called Spiritual Response Therapy, I came to understand that in another life, our roles had been reversed, that I had been the one who humiliated him. Shame needs an innocent and a guilty. This reframe made us both human. Both accountable.
This is what loosened it for me. It is not a map anyone else has to take.
I wrote him a letter I never sent, on pink craft paper with pressed flowers. It held grief and tenderness and release. Part of it said:
What you did was wrong. I was eighteen. I trusted you. You don’t get to hold power over me anymore. You never really did. I just let you borrow it for a while.
Had the video never surfaced, I would have kept living a life that made everyone else okay. Everyone would have been fine. Except me. My soul wasn’t cursed. It was shaken awake.
The Bangs
In 2025, my family of four was living in one room of my mother’s apartment. Old childhood wounds came off like layers of paint. I felt like I was living two timelines at once: the teenager I had been and the mother I was becoming. So I mothered both.
I showed up on camera for three months straight without waiting for my body to look a certain way. Then on April 20th, I cut my own bangs as a ritual of release. My body bled afterward, old blood, outside of any cycle, and I understood it as the last thing my body had been holding. The last resistance to being fully seen.
Once on the internet, always on the internet. I’m sure the video will surface again. I am ready.
Her Body Is Hers
When my oldest asked for bangs, everything in me wanted to say no. Then I caught myself, and I said yes. Not because bangs matter, but because her body is hers. Even at four years old. Especially at four years old.
I am not a perfect conscious parent. Not long ago, I held her down for a shot while she screamed. Afterward I sat with her and told her I was sorry, and that no one who loves her will hold her body down against her will again. Her body belongs to her, even when it inconveniences people. Especially then.
What I am passing down to my daughters is sovereignty: a mother who loves herself out loud. That is the inheritance I never received. It is the one I am choosing to give.
If You Are Carrying Something You’ve Never Said Out Loud
You are allowed to feel all of it. The rage, the grief, the shame, the strange love for the people who broke you.
And you are responsible for the life you are creating, not for the guilt and shame of what was done to you. Both things can be true. You were victimized. You are also the creator of what comes next.
As long as you believe life is happening to you, you keep handing your creative power to the fear, to the story, to the version of you who needed to survive. You don’t have to live there anymore. You are allowed to love yourself anywhere in your process.
I hope you regain trust in your body. I hope you love yourself so unapologetically that even the moment you are most ashamed of becomes the beginning of your greatest story.
Because that is what mine became.
Despite everything. Because of everything.
If your body is still holding a story it was never meant to carry, start with the free 6-minute body scan. It shows you where the holding lives. Take the free body scan