From Horror to Healer: Looking Back at the Little Girl Who Became an Author

Featured in Take a Break Fate & Fortune magazine

Back in the day, there would always be a copy of Take a Break floating around. My mom has always been a big fan of a crossword, so to find myself featured in the latest edition of Take a Break Fate & Fortune felt pretty novel.

I had a little moment when my daughter and I went to pick up a copy from the local newsagents. I opened the pages, and there I was, looking back at me.

Little me.

And I found myself feeling quite emotional.

That little girl had no idea what life had in store for her. She couldn’t have imagined the grief, the pain, the challenges, the healing, the spiritual journey, or that one day her story would become a book published by Hay House.

I look at her now with so much tenderness. She was the blueprint for my joy, but she was also a little girl trying to make sense of a world she didn’t always understand. And in many ways, I still identify with her.

The little girl who saw things differently

Growing up, I had experiences I didn’t always know how to explain.

I remember seeing strange colours, hearing voices and sensing energies that other people didn’t seem to notice. Sometimes these experiences frightened me. I didn’t have the language to make sense of them, and I didn’t always feel that I could talk openly about what was happening.

When you’re a child, you’re still learning how the world works. You look to the adults around you to help you understand your experiences, and when the things you see or feel don’t seem to fit with what everyone else believes, it can leave you feeling confused and alone.

For a long time, I questioned myself.

Was it all in my head? Was I imagining things? Why did I seem to experience the world differently from the people around me?

I didn’t have the answers, and I certainly didn’t have a roadmap for what would eventually become a significant part of my life.

Looking back now, I can recognise how much of my journey has involved learning to trust myself, becoming curious about my own experiences and finding the confidence to explore the things that have always felt meaningful to me.

But that hasn’t been a straightforward process.

When life changes you

My life has held some deeply profound experiences of grief and loss.

At 18, I lost my boyfriend suddenly. The impact of that loss stayed with me for years, shaping how I understood the world, how safe I felt within it and how I navigated my own emotions.

There were things I didn’t know how to process, feelings I struggled to articulate and parts of myself that I learned to keep quiet.

Later, I found myself navigating other significant challenges, including infertility on my journey to becoming a mother, struggling with my mental health and experiencing a life-changing spinal cord injury.

I don’t share these experiences because I think suffering needs to be a prerequisite for growth, or because I think every painful thing that happens to us has some grand purpose. Although much purpose has emerged from my life’s path, some experiences are simply devastating. Some things change us in ways we would never have chosen.

But I have come to understand that the way we meet those experiences, the support we receive and the space we give ourselves to heal can make a difference to how we move forward.

For me, healing has never been about returning to the person I was before everything happened. It’s been about learning to understand the person I am now.

And that has required me to look at parts of myself I had spent years trying to understand, suppress or make sense of.

Finding my way back to myself

For years, I carried shame around my spirituality, much of which stemmed from religious teachings and beliefs I had absorbed along the way.

Even now, in a world where spirituality is increasingly visible on social media, speaking openly about these parts of my life can feel vulnerable.

There’s a little girl inside me who still remembers what it felt like to be different, to wonder whether her experiences were acceptable, and to question whether it was safe to share what she felt and believed.

Putting my head above the parapet and talking about spirituality doesn’t always feel easy.

But I’ve reached a point where I no longer want shame to dictate what I’m willing to explore, express or share with the world.

My spiritual journey has been deeply personal. It has involved questioning, learning, reflecting and finding my own relationship with the things that give my life meaning.

Journalling became an important part of that process. So did spending time in nature, sitting quietly with my thoughts and allowing myself to become curious about what was happening within me.

I began to recognise that I didn’t have to understand everything immediately. I could make space for uncertainty. I could explore my experiences without needing to have every answer.

And slowly, I began to feel more connected to myself.

Not because life suddenly became easy, but because I was learning to listen to myself differently.

From personal experience to purpose

When I first began exploring the possibility of writing a book, I had no idea that my experiences would eventually become Activate Your Light.

I wasn’t sitting around with a carefully mapped-out plan to become an author. In fact, when the opportunity to attend a Hay House writing workshop came along, my first thought was that I couldn’t afford to go.

Thankfully, I applied for a bursary and was given the opportunity to attend.

My first book proposals were rejected. I could have taken that as a sign to stop, but instead I returned to my ideas and began again, this time with a greater willingness to write what I genuinely wanted to say.

Looking back, that was an important turning point.

I had spent so much of my life worrying about how other people might perceive me, what they might think of my experiences and whether I could really put my own perspective into the world.

Writing invited me to approach things differently.

What if I didn’t have to write what I thought people wanted to hear? What if I could simply share what I had lived, what I had learned and what I believed might help someone else?

That shift changed something for me.

Activate Your Light, published by Hay House in May 2026, brings together the experiences and insights that have shaped my journey, offering a practical, three-stage approach to healing and reconnecting with ourselves: Exhale, Activate and Expand Your Light.

It’s a book about creating space to process what we’ve been through, reconnecting with who we are beneath the layers we’ve accumulated, and learning to move forward with greater awareness and intention.

It’s also an invitation to recognise that even when life takes us somewhere we never expected to go, we can still discover new possibilities for ourselves.

Looking back with compassion

Perhaps the most meaningful part of seeing myself in the pages of Take a Break Fate & Fortune wasn’t the feature itself. It was the opportunity to look back.

To see that little girl and recognise how much she has lived through.

To acknowledge the things that frightened her, the things she didn’t understand, the experiences that shaped her and the parts of herself she would spend years learning to embrace.

I wish I could sit beside that little girl and tell her that she doesn’t need to have everything figured out.

That she won’t always feel the way she feels now.

That there will be grief, and there will be challenges she cannot yet imagine, but there will also be moments of joy, connection, discovery and possibility.

I’d tell her that she doesn’t need to have all the answers to begin trusting herself.

And I’d remind her that being different doesn’t mean there is something wrong with her.

Of course, I can’t go back and change what she experienced. None of us can return to those earlier versions of ourselves and give them the understanding we have now.

But we can learn to look back with a little more compassion.

We can begin to understand why we developed certain beliefs, why we learned to hide particular parts of ourselves, and why some patterns that once helped us feel safe might no longer serve us.

We can stop judging our younger selves for not knowing what we know today.

And perhaps, in doing so, we can begin to offer ourselves something we may have needed all along: understanding.

Your story is still unfolding

Life still throws its curveballs. I’m not writing this from some imaginary finish line where I’ve healed everything, answered every question and mastered the art of being human.

I’m still learning. Still growing. Still finding my way through experiences that challenge me and invite me to see things differently.

But I’m also learning to recognise how far I’ve come.

I can look at that little girl now with tenderness rather than shame. I can acknowledge the experiences that shaped me without allowing them to define every part of who I am. And I can share my story, not because I have everything figured out, but because I know how powerful it can be to discover that someone else understands.

That’s what I hope my work offers people.

An invitation to look at themselves with fresh eyes. To become curious about the beliefs they’ve inherited, the experiences they’ve carried and the parts of themselves they may have learned to keep hidden.

And to remember that they are allowed to keep discovering who they are.

We don’t have to have our entire lives mapped out to begin moving towards something different. We don’t have to wait until we’ve healed everything to share what we’ve learned. And we don’t have to become someone entirely new to create a life that feels more connected to who we truly are.

Sometimes, the journey is about finding our way back to the parts of ourselves we’ve always known were there.

So here’s to little Zo, and to all the versions of ourselves we’ve been along the way.

May we learn to look back at them with compassion, honour what they’ve carried, and give ourselves permission to keep growing into who we’re becoming.

Because our stories are still being written.

And we never quite know where the next chapter might lead.

Zoe Fox is the author of Activate Your Light, published by Hay House. Through her writing and work, she supports people on their journeys of healing, self-discovery and spiritual growth.