From Breakdown to Bloom
From Breakdown to Bloom: A Sacred Testimony for Mental Health Awareness Month
By Isa’Rose Sophia | Isa’Rose Reflections
I was born a storyteller.
I’ve been writing since I can remember —
short stories by age 7, and haikus in elementary school.
Maybe it’s because I’ve lived a thousand lives.
Maybe I was an Indigenous scribe in a past life —
the kind who painted myth into the bones of the Earth.
And isn’t Life, after all, just one giant story?
Of heroes and villains… monsters and magicians…
of good, evil, and everything in between?
But even storytellers aren’t spared the storm.
Before I became the voice behind SPROUT from Darkness,
I was a little girl trying to survive the silence.
Not the poetic kind —
but the kind that swallows your voice whole.
I didn’t grow up in temples of truth.
I grew up in a house where love came laced with violence.
Where addiction dressed up as celebration, and confusion lived in the closets.
Where childhood was cut short by “sex play” no child should have to decode.
My mother stayed in the storm — bound by her own trauma, financial abuse, and inherited silence.
When I ran away at 12, she thought I abandoned her.
But I wasn’t running away…
I was running through.
I Shattered Before I Rose
When my biological father died, I was just 12 years old —
too young to name the grief,
so I buried it instead.
Something inside me shattered — quietly, permanently.
A rupture no one saw… but everything that followed spiraled from it.
And from those buried fragments rose my shadow self:
Lucia Lilith.
Fierce. Flame-tongued. Sacred destruction in motion.
She was rage in red heels.
The fire that protected the little girl no one came to save.
I call it my Kali era now —
because I had to become the fire that no one else brought.
For those unfamiliar, Kali is a powerful Hindu goddess — often misunderstood, deeply revered.
She is not a demon. She is not darkness without purpose.
She is the fierce embodiment of transformation, time, death, and rebirth.
The dark mother. The liberator. The one who destroys illusions and breaks chains.
Kali doesn’t show up to coddle —
She comes to cut.
She wears a necklace of skulls, dances on the edge of destruction,
and reminds us that sometimes what is sacred must also be fierce.
So when I say I entered my Kali era, I mean this:
I became my own reckoning.
My own protector.
My own revolution.
It was the season of my life when I stopped shrinking,
stopped waiting for someone to come save me —
and instead, burned everything that tried to cage me.
Because Kali teaches this:
Destruction is not the opposite of creation — it is the part that clears the soil.
And sometimes, to become who we truly are,
we must first become unrecognizable.
A Return with Roots
I survived commercial sexual exploitation as a child.
The world calls it CSEC.
I call it a wound no child should ever wear.
I didn’t just survive trafficking —
I survived being treated like a commodity before I even knew my worth.
Juvenile detention.
The prison pipeline.
And through it all, I held on.
I earned my Administrative Health Specialist Certificate in 2012.
My Massachusetts Real Estate License in 2015.
And later — much later — my freedom.
But in the summer of 2021, I spiraled again.
I returned to a halfway house —
yes, again as a resident.
Another violation. Another reckoning.
But not a failure —
a return with deeper roots.
What the world might’ve labeled a setback
was actually a setup for sacred reentry.
From that space, I volunteered —
at the same YWCA shelter I once fled to in 2012,
when my middle son was only two weeks old.
That full-circle moment became a portal. A path opened.
I was hired part-time as a Shelter Advocate.
Then promoted to a Human Trafficking Support Specialist.
And when that department closed, I didn’t retreat —
I stepped into the role of a Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Counselor.
I didn’t just heal privately.
I showed up publicly — in service to the pain I once drowned in.
I joined the Human Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation Workgroup — a collaborative initiative of the Opioid Task Force of Franklin County and the North Quabbin Region of the Franklin County Justice Center.
I found my way in through word of mouth, joining Zoom meetings independently — not just as a lived survivor, but also as a field professional.
I showed up in both roles simultaneously — a voice from the inside, contributing to change from both wound and wisdom.
I later interned with at-risk youth in after-school programs.
All while parenting.
All while healing.
All while remembering who I truly was.
The Bloom Was Not Polished
People saw the glow-up —
but not the nights of suicidal ideation.
Not the dissociation.
Not the quiet ache of wearing masks like Serenity Delve to survive.
They didn’t see the diagnosis.
They didn’t see the trauma.
They didn’t see the sacred rage I turned into ritual.
They didn’t see the multiple stints in respite,
the two Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHPs),
or the Baystate inpatient crisis admission —
the moments where my nervous system was screaming
and the world only offered prescriptions and padded rooms.
But I didn’t stay caged.
I transmuted.
I alchemized.
I didn’t just build SPROUT from Darkness.
I remembered it.
Through tears, mirror work, journal spells, and ancestral altars,
I called my archetypes back:
Lucia Lilith — the Flame-Tongued Truth
Jypze Nyx — the Rebel Wing
Isa’Rose — the Sovereign Bloom
My Diagnosis Is Divine Design
They gave me many names.
Borderline. CPTSD. PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. OCD. ADHD. Oppositional Defiance.
A catalog of conditions from systems more invested in sedation than liberation.
Legal labels. Corporate prescriptions.
Bandages for soul wounds they never intended to uproot.
But I am not a disorder.
I am a divine design.
I feel deeply because I was born for depth.
I resist because I was never meant to comply with cages.
I don’t need to fit into their molds —
I was made to remember what they tried to erase.
And I’ve stopped apologizing for how my spirit moves.
And still… I spiraled forward.
I was chosen as the 2025 Commencement Speaker for Holyoke Community College.
I became a proud inductee of the National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS).
I completed my Associate’s Degree in Human Services —
and this summer, I begin my Bachelor’s in Psychology at Westfield State University.
But let me be honest —
This isn’t about degrees.
It’s about becoming.
This Storybook Was Written for the You Still Splintering
The 13th Aeon Storybook wasn’t written for the perfect, polished version of you.
It was written for the you still doubting. Still rising.
Still tending to the garden even while breaking open.
It’s for:
The mothers unseen
The misfits with a mission
The soul sparks born from trauma
The ones whose diagnosis is not dysfunction — but divine architecture
I, too, was a mother unseen.
But I became the garden —
and carried the light for all of us.
Why I Wrote This Book: A Mythic Confession
I didn’t grow up with sacred answers.
I grew up in a church that gilded the cage.
Catholic school. Knees bruised on pews.
Prayers recited louder than love ever was.
I was adopted, and no one told me until the wound had already formed.
So I began my life not living — but searching.
For soul. For source. For memory.
I didn’t ask to become a theologian of ache — but pain made me one.
Because the questions never stopped:
Why does suffering find the innocent?
Why did Christ feel closer in my trauma than he ever did in stained glass?
Why did the sacred feminine get buried — and who has the shovel?
I realized:
I wasn’t faithless.
I was remembering.
This Isn’t a Sermon — It’s a Reclamation
This book is for every soul the church couldn’t hold.
Every daughter/son of silence.
Every rebel with a womb full of wisdom.
Every visionary who blooms in spiral, not in straight lines.
If you’ve ever felt like too much —
too sensitive, too scarred, too soft, too strange —
I wrote this for you.
You are not too much.
You are a myth remembering itself.
And we were never meant to follow the map —
We were born to become the myth.
Let the Book Be Your Mirror
The 13th Aeon: The Garden That Remembered The Stars
Available now:
— Paperback and eBook on Amazon
— Sigil-Signed Edition + Ritual Portal Access
Plus, explore sacred tools from the Soulful Resource Garden:
7-Day Soul Retrieval Journal
Mirror Ritual Prompt Companion
Crown Your Contradictions Soul Mirror Video Journal
and other ritual downloads — in our Garden Library:
www.sproutfromdarkness.com/garden-library
Bloom Across the Realms
🎙️ Podcast: SPROUTed Reflections of Isa’Rose on Spotify
📖 Blogs: Isa'Rose Reflections | SPROUT from Darkness
🎥 YouTube:
— SPROUT from Darkness Channel
— Isa’Rose Petals & Thorns Persona Channel
📸 Instagram: @jypze_iam
🌱 Website: sproutfromdarkness.com
You are not behind.
You are in the spiral.
You are not broken.
You are blooming.
You are not forgotten.
You are the mirror.
Welcome to the 13th Aeon.
Welcome to the myth.
Welcome home.
With roots & reverence,
— Isa’Rose Sophia
SPROUT from Darkness
Isa’Rose Reflections
