Dani's Story

I didn’t become who I am through gentle change.

I was forced into it, piece by piece, over years that felt like they were designed to break me.

My body was already a battleground. Severe scoliosis twisted my spine until I needed major surgery just to function. Metal was placed inside me to hold me together. Recovery wasn’t a clean healing, it was pain that sat deep, constant, unrelenting. The kind of pain that teaches you to endure whether you want to or not.

But the body wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it was what I lived through with the people who were supposed to love me.

I was in relationships where I was worn down over time, mentally, emotionally, psychologically. Not always in obvious ways. It was the slow kind. The kind that makes you question your own reality. The kind that isolates you, reshapes how you see yourself, and convinces you that you’re the problem. People telling me to “die quieter”, I was coughing too loudly, keeping them awake

There were periods where I was pushed so far past my limits that I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

It felt like being driven to the edge of insanity, like my mind was unraveling in real time. I wasn’t stable. I wasn’t grounded. I was surviving minute to minute, trying to hold onto something that felt like me while everything else was being stripped away.

And there’s something people don’t talk about.

When you’re in that place, you don’t rise gracefully.

You claw your way out.

It’s messy. It’s ugly. It feels like dragging yourself back into existence with bloodied, broken fingernails, because no one is coming to pull you out. You have to do it yourself.

And I did.

Not all at once. Not cleanly. But I did.

I rebuilt myself in pieces. I had to relearn what was mine and what had been put on me. I had to reclaim my mind, my sense of reality, my ability to trust myself again.

That’s where my practice changed.

Magick stopped being something abstract. It became survival. It became a way to understand chaos, to hold it, to shape it into something I could live inside without it consuming me.

And that’s when I started noticing something familiar in the spaces others avoid.

Spirits that felt fractured. Agitated. Misunderstood. Not evil, just… altered. Stuck in patterns, carrying energy that hadn’t been resolved.

I recognized them immediately.

Because I had been there.

So my work became something else entirely.

I don’t dominate. I don’t command. I sit with them. I listen. I help stabilize what’s unstable, soften what’s too sharp, and give space to what’s been ignored or pushed aside. I don’t force change, I create the conditions where it can happen.

The same way I had to do for myself.

Everything I went through, my surgeries, the abuse, the years of being pushed to the edge, gave me something I didn’t have before.

Not hardness.

Not control.

But the ability to sit in chaos without being consumed by it.

To recognize pain without turning away.

To meet something broken without needing to destroy it.

I am not untouched.

I am not whole in the way people expect.

I am altered.

And now I use that to help other beings, human, demon, or something in between, who are trying to find their way out of what changed them.