The Wildberry Letters: Letter Four

November 15, 2025

The Wildberry Letters: Letter Four

The Return to Myself

People talk a lot about rock bottom like it’s one clean moment. One collapse. One shattering. But what I learned is that rock bottom is not a singular moment.

It’s an entire season.

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After June 28th, after the breakdown in the food trailer, life didn’t snap into clarity. It didn’t get better because I said I was done. It actually got messier.

Once I stopped sprinting, all the pain I had been outrunning finally caught up with me.

It started with a panic attack in a grocery store parking lot. I am talking about the kind of panic attack that steals your breath and makes your body shake like it’s trying to move something ancient through you. I sat there gripping the steering wheel, feeling waves of fear and grief that didn’t make sense on the surface, until they did.

It wasn’t just about money. Or burnout. Or another hard season.

I thought I was just scared of being seen, or recognized, in public that day, but underneath it all I came to know that this was a symptom of betrayal trauma, abandonment trauma, nervous system collapse. Loads of unprocessed pain from years ago, resurfacing because I was finally still enough to feel it.

What made it hurt wasn’t failure.

It was watching people disappear when I finally chose myself.

People I had given to for years. People I thought knew my heart. People who once stood at my market space and called this place “home.” The moment I stepped back to survive some of them stepped away. Not a message. Not a check-in. Just silence. Some unfollowed. Some whispered. Some called me things I wasn’t. Some said their “values no longer aligned.”

Not one of them asked if I was okay.

And that should’ve broken me, but strangely it didn’t. It clarified me.

Because if someone can lose access to you the moment you stop giving yourself away… they never valued you in the first place. They valued the version of you that served them.

So I let them go.

And in the quiet that followed, I met myself.

My sister-in-law (who is trauma-informed) gave me language for what I was living. She helped me understand that what I was feeling was real. Not weakness. Not overreaction. Not “too much.” Trauma. Nervous system overload. Emotional injury that needed tending, not ignoring.

She taught me my first grounding exercise. And I felt my body exhale for the first time in months.

Then my friend offered me time in the salt cave. No agenda. No transaction. Just space. It was the first place I felt held. I didn’t fully understand it then, but that cave became a womb of becoming for me, the very place my rebirth began.

I turned inward.

Meditation. Journaling… I am talking pages and pages of truth I had never let myself say before. Breathwork. Inner child work. Tarot. Nodal work. Shadow work. Trips into the places I had been too afraid to go. Places I had covered with productivity and called it purpose.

On family vacation, while everyone else slept, I got up early to study my human design and birth chart, finally beginning to understand how I was built, wired, and meant to move in the world. For the first time, I felt like I wasn’t broken. I was just misaligned.

When I discovered nervous system healing, something clicked.

It became the bridge. The missing link. The language of my own becoming.

My nervous system wasn’t broken, it had been protecting me.

It kept me alive. It kept me safe. It kept me from expanding before I had the capacity to hold it.

Healing was never about becoming someone new.

It was about returning to who I’ve always been.

I finally realized:

• I deserve to be chosen by me first.

• I am the lightning, not just the spark. It was never the farm. It was never the products, or the baked goods, or the markets. It was me all along.

• And after years of self-abandonment, I didn’t just find my fire again, I fell in love with myself for the first time in my life.

Not in a surface way. Not affirmations and bubble baths. In a sacred, cellular, soul-deep way. The kind of love that creates boundaries, honors capacity, protects purpose, and knows when to walk away.

The truth is, healing changed everything.

And healing brought me home to myself.

More soon.

💛Bridget