The Woman Who Kept Leaving: My Own Story of The Disappearing

I didn't have a name for it for a long time.

I just knew that I kept going. Not physically, not always. But somewhere inside, in the middle of conversations, relationships, ordinary moments, something in me would quietly slip away. I'd be there and not there at the same time. Present enough to function. Gone in the way that mattered.

I thought it was just how I was. Too sensitive, maybe. Too much inside my own head. A bit floaty. A bit somewhere else.

It took me nearly three decades to understand what was actually happening.

Where it started.

Four years of bullying taught me, at a level far beneath conscious thought, that being seen was dangerous. That taking up space invited pain. That the safest thing I could do was make myself smaller, quieter, less. The exit I built then was a masterpiece of self-preservation. I just didn't know I'd built it.

At sixteen, a man in a position of trust did something to me that changed everything. A violation I froze through. I couldn't speak. I couldn't say no. I couldn't move. My body did the only thing it knew how to do in that moment. It left.

What followed were years of not knowing who I was beneath everyone else's version of me. Years of performing the version of Victoria that felt safest in any given room. Years of doing, managing, achieving, helping - all from that slight distance from myself that I had come to mistake for just the way I was made.

Then the diagnosis. End-stage endometriosis. Fibroids. The slow, devastating realisation that I would not become a mother. My body, which had already felt like an unsafe place to live, now felt like somewhere I actively didn't want to be. The disappearing deepened. Of course it did. It was only doing what it had always done. Protecting me from what felt unbearable to feel.

I tried the things that were supposed to help. And some of them did.

Talking helped. Counselling gave me something I couldn't find anywhere else — the experience of being witnessed in things I had never said out loud to another living soul. That mattered enormously. It still does.

But something remained that words couldn't reach. The part of me that kept leaving wasn't a thought. It wasn't a belief I could examine and reframe. It was a body pattern. A nervous system response that had been running for so long it felt like personality.

No amount of understanding it made it stop. Because understanding lives in the mind. And The Disappearing lives in the body.

My path into somatic and body-based work was not straightforward. It rarely is. It was a series of small doorways, each one opening into something a little deeper, a little closer to the part of me that had been disappearing for so long.

Reiki. Breathwork. Somatic practices. The slow, patient, sometimes frustrating work of learning to feel safe in my own body again. Not to think safe. To feel it. In the nervous system. In the breath. In the ground beneath my feet.

What I discovered, over years of this work, was that the body that had learned to leave could also learn to stay. That the same sensitivity that made The Disappearing feel necessary was also a profound gift - an intuitive attunement, a capacity to perceive and feel and know at a depth that most people spend their whole lives searching for.

The exit hadn't taken that from me. It had just been keeping it at arm's length.

I know that The Disappearing is not who you are. It is what you learned. And what was learned can be unlearned, not through force or willpower or yet another attempt to think your way out of a body pattern, but through patient, compassionate, body-based work that meets you exactly where you are.

I know that Maya - the woman who learned to leave - was never the enemy. She was the most loyal protector I ever had. And I know that Amaya, the woman on the other side of all that disappearing, was always there. Waiting. Already whole.

I built Landed because I needed it once and it didn't exist. Because the work that finally reached the part of me that kept leaving deserved to be in the hands of every woman who recognises herself in this story.

If you recognise yourself here, come. The 14 days will not fix everything. But they will give you something no amount of understanding ever could.

They will give you the felt experience of staying.

And once you have felt that, even once, even briefly, everything changes.

Landed is a 14-day somatic challenge for midlife women ready to stop disappearing and come home to themselves.

Starts 13th July. $22 / UK Women ~£16.66