The Art of Returning Home: How I Stopped Abandoning Myself to Reclaim My Wholeness and Heal the Systems That Shaped Me
Marisha Dixon
NOV 2025
MY WORK
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For most of my life, I lived by a script I didn’t write. One that taught me that being “successful” meant abandoning myself, my needs, my body, my softness, all to prove my worth.
I was the overachiever, the caretaker, the one who showed up polished and prepared for everyone but myself. My resume stretched across classrooms, campaigns, and boardrooms, from serving as a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, to relationship coaching, content creation, and matchmaking at Tawkify, to facilitating global wellness collaborations as a freelancer, and developing after-school programs supporting teen girls in technology at YWCA. These and every other role I had looked like progress on paper. In truth, I was unraveling quietly inside systems that rewarded extraction and called it excellence.
I used to be the woman who could carry a room without ever exhaling. I taught, led, advised, and produced at a high level, always with a smile and a schedule, to the point where my nervous system mistook urgency for oxygen. It looked like excellence. It felt like erosion. The quiet root cause was a pattern I now name plainly, self-abandonment, which is the repeated habit of leaving myself to meet expectations that were never designed with my wholeness in mind.
It wasn’t one single moment that broke me open, though. It was slow undoing, a series of small betrayals, ignoring what I needed, silencing what I felt, and staying in spaces that celebrated my output but neglected my being. I didn’t yet have the language for it then, but I do now.
This conditioning of self-abandonment is something I had mastered for decades.
Healing Begins With Returning
How slowing down became her most transformative act of healing.
In 2022, I began what would become My Year of Kintsugi, a year-long, unpaid sabbatical of rediscovering myself through solitude, nature, and creative expression. This process of intentional disruption became a profound creative and emotional rebirth, leading me to personify four aspects of myself into “The 4 Personas,” whom I’ve named Khalia, Hunter, Nik, and Mari. They each represent a specific chapter of my lived experience, the repeated conditioning of self-abandonment I was unlearning, as well as the tools, practices, and environments that were essential to my evolution.
Through each persona, I began to explore the relationship between vulnerability, identity, pleasure, and transformation. Khalia, in particular, taught me how to reconnect with my sensuality after years of shame and suppression. Hunter reminded me of my strength and discipline. Nik allowed me to prioritize pleasure in the design of educational frameworks and social impact initiatives. Mari helped me rediscover the power of storytelling as healing.
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What began as a private reflection evolved into a public model for transformation, a journey from extraction to regeneration. And together, The 4 Personas became mirrors reflecting all the ways I’d left myself behind, and all the ways I could return.
That return is now central to my lifestyle, both personally and professionally.
Now, at 40, I’m no longer striving to fit into systems that extract value from people, but instead, I intend to take my lessons and design Creator-in-Residence experiences and regenerative ecosystems that help people, brands, and communities experiment in how art, education, media, and wellness can intersect to heal individuals and institutions. My interdisciplinary work will be more anchored in multisensory offerings that facilitate self-awareness and total well-being.
Through initiatives like Auralism x Khalia™, I look to experiment with sound as a sensory tool for self-honoring and collective healing, bridging neuroscience, storytelling, and intimacy education. Through Ease as a Regenerative Practice™, I aim to explore the science of slowing down, unlearning self-abandonment, and reclaiming creativity and cultural storytelling as a personal and community-care strategy. And through Purposefully Pursuing Pleasure™, I’m researching how pleasure-centered frameworks can strengthen leadership, learning, and wellbeing.
Reclaiming Wholeness Through Ease
Mapping identity, creativity, and healing through intentional self-return.
Each initiative is both a personal experiment and a social blueprint to challenge extractive systems while modeling new paradigms of collaboration, creativity, and care.
In this new direction, I’m particularly curious about 40+ women’s pleasure, intimacy, and health, the creator economy, and global, career-connected education. My work draws from more than 15 years in education, community engagement, marketing, and enrollment-related leadership roles, where my focus was connecting mission-driven programs to the right audiences.
What I’ve learned through it all is this: abandoning self-abandonment is the most radical act of biohacking.
If we each learned to honor our inner ecosystems, to rest, express, listen, and reconnect, our outer systems would follow. Healthier leaders create healthier cultures. Healthier cultures create healthier communities. And that’s the future I’m building, one story and one initiative at a time.
Follow my journey on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or visit my personal site msmarisha.com for more on my residency initiatives. For collaboration, storytelling partnerships, or peer-reviewed features through Biohack Yourself Media, reach out directly.
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