The Fire That Forged Me
"It was not despite the fire that I rose again. It was thanks to it."
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A quest born from silence and pain
Before I speak to you about mitochondria, chronic cortisol, or cellular dysfunction, I need to tell you about a little girl who grew up in fear.
Not the ordinary fear of childhood. Daily terror, the kind that never lets go, the kind that settles in the body like an indelible imprint. I grew up in an abusive environment, where violence was the common language and fear the only horizon. From childhood on, my body answered what my mouth could not say: severe ketotic episodes every year on my birthday, witness to my revolt against a mother disgusted to see another daughter arrive.
An inability to fall asleep at night until very late, which left me stunned on waking.
Hyperactivity, revolt, and inner agitation I could not name, and that no one around me heard.
I know today what it was. A nervous system on permanent alert. Adrenals running on cortisol since childhood. A body carrying what the mind could not yet integrate.
Adult life did not lighten this burden; it complicated it
Trials, I have been through them. Like many. Breakups, betrayals, years raising my children alone while working, training, searching. I completed four years of acupuncture training while holding a full-time job, enduring workplace bullying and coming home late at night.
Joint pain set in gradually. The back first, then the knees. Then the hands, neck, elbows, shoulders, ankles. Tingling, loss of sensation and strength in the hands, painful and snapping fingers, nodules forming on the joints of those fingers, and muscles that flared after the slightest effort and no longer recovered.
I took painkillers and anti-inflammatories to keep going. I practiced acupuncture on myself to calm the pain, and I kept going.
I had grown up with a mother who ran on medication: antidepressants, anxiolytics, and whatever doctors were willing to prescribe.
I had sworn I would never go down that path. And yet, by holding the unbearable, I ended up there too; not with the same molecules, but with paracetamol, anti-inflammatories and other such comforts, taken more and more often, in rising doses, with less and less relief, just to be able to function.
"One day, I opened my eyes and saw myself in a state of decline that was growing more marked by the day."
Withdrawal was brutal. Because stopping meant letting all the pain return that I had spent years compressing.
I did it alone, like everything else. And at the same time, there was this fatigue that had been setting in gradually for several years. A fatigue that leaves you exhausted in the morning on waking, even after nights where I sank into dreamless sleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow and did not wake before the alarm.
I thought I was sleeping well. But I was never rested.
Then came the collapse.
A monumental burnout, the kind where the brain gives out when you have pushed yourself to the limit and refused to listen to the body. I no longer knew my own name. My codes, my date of birth, the simplest words, all vanished into a thick fog.
In the morning, putting my foot on the floor was an ordeal. Excruciating pain in my heels made me hesitate to get up.
Nausea was constant. I ran on anti-nausea medication, Coca-Cola, and peppermint essential oils to fight nausea at work and on the commute.
As long as I was caught in the rhythm, my mind held; I did not think, I just had to hold on, whatever it cost. But on days off, anxiety tortured my stomach and woke me early.
The day I collapsed, I broke down in tears at work and could not stop. For three months, I did not stop crying. I was unable to speak without dissolving into tears. Something in me had broken. It was over.
But long before that burnout, something had already shifted.
At the birth of my last child, I lived through a near-death experience.
I, who had grown up without any spiritual beliefs or metaphysical frame of reference, experienced something of such intensity that it called into question the very foundations of what I believed reality to be.
That experience opened doors I was not prepared for. It also triggered in me a visceral, almost animal need to understand life, the body, consciousness, what keeps us here and what destroys us. It was what lit the fire of the quest.
During that period, I was also able to observe up close what conventional medicine could do when it goes off course. My mother was taking an impressive quantity of medication: antidepressants, anxiolytics, and many other things besides.
An inappropriate prescription put her in real danger, to the point of causing a serious car accident. That tragedy, and the way her doctor reacted to her, is what decided her to stop everything.
That is when I offered her complementary support, with herbs and supplements.
As she was staying with me, I was able to observe her closely. And what I saw next marked me deeply. But what struck me most, what I will never forget, is that she no longer needed antidepressants. No longer needed anxiolytics. Those molecules she had taken for so long and that had been presented to her as indispensable, were not.
Important: I draw no general conclusion from this experience. I am simply bearing witness to what I observed, in this specific case. But this experience reinforced in me a deep conviction: the body has resources we underestimate, and cellular biochemistry deserves to be taken seriously. I had been carrying some of this knowledge for a while. I did not yet know I would have to apply it to myself.
The near-death experience had been the first upheaval. The burnout was the second, the one that forced me to truly stop and take up again this fundamental questioning: why are we here, on this earth? What meaning can we give to everything we go through? And who are we really?
I worked on myself with an intensity few people can imagine. Doctors and even insurers wanted to impose antidepressants on me. Again!
There too, I refused. I wanted to understand how I had arrived there, accepting the unacceptable, mistreating myself and allowing myself to be mistreated in this way.
Psychology, spiritual approaches, regressions, energy work.
I dismantled beliefs I had carried forever and that were rotting my life. Societal conditionings imposed on us from the start of our education and that kept me from being truly myself.
I learned to explore the depths of my subconscious, to listen to my intuition but also my body by being more present to the signals it sent me, to nourish it differently. No longer as a machine to keep running, but as a living being of extraordinary intelligence and resilience, which never stops communicating, even when no one listens.
Then covid arrived.
Loss of taste and smell for a year. The fatigue I had managed to overcome long after that burnout thanks to the ketogenic diet returned and settled in unpredictable waves.
And above all, joint pain that exploded, generalized inflammation, nights where pain woke me with every movement, mornings where I had to set my alarm thirty minutes early to manage to get up and get moving on time, flare-ups with fever after every physical effort I could do less and less, pain and neuropathy in my hands that kept me from writing, from holding a needle without pain, from holding my phone without burning, feet that burned and tingled in the evening in my bed.
Symptoms I already knew, but that returned far more violently. There, I understood that something fundamental was at stake.
So I searched. Again! But this time differently.
What I did not yet know is that this dark period was going to accelerate everything.
Covid triggered something deeper. It opened a new level of understanding, on the body, on what governs us, on the mechanisms that keep humanity in ignorance of its own power.
The meaning of everything I had been through appeared with a clarity I had never known. SLAKE was going to be born from that.
That is where I found the mitochondria.
Not in a medical textbook. In my own symptoms, cross-referenced with months and years of research, connections drawn between my biochemistry, my story, Chinese medicine, and what my body kept telling me.
The state of my intestines, why my belly was always distended, then supplements, NAC, P5P, intracellular magnesium, nattokinase, serrapeptase, …
The ketogenic diet that had already, years earlier, given my brain back the clarity I had lost and extinguished the inflammation in my joints.
I understood that my adrenals, exhausted since childhood by decades of chronic cortisol, had drained reserves no one had ever thought to rebuild.
That childhood fear had been written into my cellular biochemistry. Those pains I had as a child, starting from the back of my legs and rising to the neck, in fact followed the path of the bladder meridian — linked to the kidney meridian and therefore to fear — and the gallbladder meridian — linked to the liver meridian and therefore to anger and the revolt that had lived in me forever.
That understanding changed everything.
"My body had not betrayed me; it had simply carried, for too long and too alone, what no one had helped it release."
SLAKE was born from that.
Not from a theory. Not from a diploma. But from a whole life spent searching for answers conventional medicine did not have.
From a body that had experienced everything before science put words to it.
From a woman who obstinately refused to be told antidepressants were the only answer.
If you are here, perhaps it is because you too are searching.
Because you too feel your body speaking and no one knows how to listen.
Because you too sense there is something deeper behind your fatigue, your pain, your malaise.
Because you too have understood that the solution lies in reclaiming your Self and your Sovereignty, in your own power over your body, your health, your well-being, and your soul.
You are in the right place.
Marie