✨ Finding the Light Within: A Story of Roots, Resistance, and Rediscovery
The Silent Child with Too Many Questions
I was a good kid. Too good, maybe. Too quiet. Too nice.
I wasn’t rebellious or loud. I was cautious, careful, always scanning for safety.
Fear wrapped itself around me like a second skin—fear of being wrong, being abandoned,
being too much. Or not enough.
I had questions—so many whys—but I rarely asked them out loud.
Being adopted—even within the same family—meant I knew part of my story, but never all of it.
I knew my biological father. I was raised by his sister; the woman I called Mom.
But my biological mother… she wasn’t there.
The police had to remove me from her care.
I grew up with a sense of being both known and unknown.
Dance: The Language I Was Allowed
I didn’t have a voice for the things I felt.
But I had movement.
I was shy—deeply shy.
Scared to talk to people.
Group settings overwhelmed me. I froze in conversations.
My mom tried to get me involved—signed me up for Girl Scouts, other activities—but I couldn’t handle it.
I didn’t understand why then. No one did.
I was seen as a quiet, difficult child—hard to figure out, hard to reach.
Maybe even hard to love.
Looking back, I think my neurodivergence—my sensitivity, my quietness, my deep inner world—was misunderstood.
It wasn’t supported. It was tolerated.
Sometimes it felt like I was a project—someone to prove something with.
I was the “saved one,” the adopted one.
Only, I wasn’t even legally adopted until I was 27.
But then… there was dance.
Dance made sense.
It became my way out—and my way in.
It was where I could finally feel, express, and belong… without needing to explain.
No words. No expectations. Just breath, music, and motion.
In a world that often felt too loud, too fast, too unpredictable, ballet gave me structure.
It gave me beauty. Precision. A kind of magic I could count on.
But it also gave me a mask.
I learned to perform grace even when I was aching.
To hold perfect posture while holding back tears.
To disappear into a role when I didn’t yet know who I was.
On the outside: strength, elegance, control.
On the inside: questions, sensitivity, and a quiet longing to feel safe being me.
The Healer in Hiding
After an injury ended my dance career, I didn’t know who I was anymore. But deep down, I always knew I wanted to help people feel better.
I had always been the one who saw others' pain—who wanted to comfort, advocate, support.
(“Devil’s advocate,” my mom would call me—I couldn’t help trying to understand everyone’s side.)
So I studied massage therapy.
Then Reiki—hands-on healing, the quiet kind.
Then Gyrotonic—where I discovered I could still dance, just differently.
And finally sound healing, where everything—breath, body, vibration—comes together.
Each of these steps wasn’t random. They were ways of rebuilding myself—piece by piece, layer by layer.
Rediscovering Myself Through My Children
It was through my daughter Zoe, who lives with deep anxiety, that I truly began to see myself.
Her overwhelm, her caution, her need for safety and softness—it mirrored the child I used to be, the one who didn’t yet have the words.
Watching her taught me to slow down, listen deeper, and ask new questions.
And then there’s Daphne—my older daughter—who shines with her own quiet brilliance, her “neuro sparkles,” as I like to call them.
She sees the world through a different lens, and we are just beginning to understand what those subtle differences truly mean.
The three of us are connecting dots together.
We’re not just healing—we’re reimagining.
Reframing.
Redefining what it means to be ourselves.
On Labels and Softness
There’s a lot being said in the news right now about autism—what it looks like, who gets diagnosed, and what support should look like.
But I’ve come to believe that this conversation needs more compassion and more nuance.
There are so many different shades, spectrums, and stories within what we’ve labeled as “autism” or “neurodivergence.”
Some children are loud, some are silent. Some are social but exhausted. Some are hidden in plain sight.
Some are like Zoe—diagnosed with anxiety disorder, but responding to the world with the same sensory intensity as a neurodivergent child.
They all need the same thing:
Understanding. Support. A softer world.
So in our home, we call it being neuro sparkly—
because these brains, these hearts, these ways of seeing and feeling the world—
they aren’t broken. They’re just lit a little differently.
And that light?
That’s where the healing begins.
The Bloodline That Made Sense
All my life, I wondered where I came from—who I was really connected to.
And one thread always felt solid: my biological grandfather on my father’s side—Pierre Lauwers.
He lived in Brussels and worked as a photograveur for Le Soir, the newspaper.
Front page of “Le Faux Soir” — the secretly printed resistance newspaper my grandfather helped create in 1943.
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I always knew he had been part of the resistance.
My mom told stories growing up—like the time he smuggled a heavy ham from the black market, swinging the suitcase casually past SS officers so it wouldn’t draw suspicion.
He swung it so convincingly that he couldn’t move his arm properly for days afterward.
There were stories of hiding soldiers in the basement. Of printing materials in secret. Of courage woven into daily life.
What I only now fully understand is the weight of those stories.
He had been a soldier at seventeen during World War I. A teenager, already pulled into the trauma of war.
And then, decades later, in the middle of World War II, he fought again—this time not with weapons, but with words.
In 1943, he helped create a fake version of the Nazi-controlled Le Soir, called Le Faux Soir.
It took 21 days of secret meetings, hidden printing presses, and underground planning to bring it to life.
They printed 50,000 copies—full of satire, truth, and coded messages—and distributed them across Brussels before the Nazis realized what had happened.
They chose to release it on November 9, 1943, just before the anniversary of the World War I armistice on November 11.
It was more than resistance. It was remembrance.
We remember what freedom feels like.
We are not afraid to dream of it again.
Growing up, those stories amazed me.
But now—living in a time when truth feels threatened, when fear is used as control—
they mean even more.
They aren’t just history. They’re a message.
And I realize now:
I have a voice too.
And maybe I’ve had it all along.
Connecting the Dots
All this time, I thought I was floating—half known, half lost.
But the dots were always there, waiting to be connected.
A grandfather who used ink and silence to fight oppression.
A child who used dance to speak.
A mother who finally saw herself in her daughters.
A healer who reclaims her voice through movement, herbs, sound, and soul.
This is not just my story—it’s a map.
A way of finding light in the dark, not by running from the questions… but by walking straight through them.
For every child who didn’t have the words—but found their own way back to light.
Veronique
The Gentle Witch's Nook
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