#62: Victoria Vyraeth

"Sit in silence and wait. An answer will come. Occasionally, it brings tears."

Aug 17, 2025

Victoria (@kryptosphaira) works at an apothecary shop and publishes secret writings online. We share the same birthday, +/- a year.

Health Gossip with Victoria
Gemini/Cancer/Pisces
📍 Toronto, ON

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Health, to me, signifies a state of wholeness. The integration of body, psyche, and spirit. My approach is holistic, I consider all these parts inseparable. The mind, breath, blood, dreams, and the earth.

I track lunar cycles more than time. I can be a bit chaotic, tidal. I feel less confined this way. More feminine. I don't like taking the advice given to me. I like experimenting with arcane and obscure health hacks. I like what Clarissa Pinkola Estés says — about the wild woman, the deep self. Sometimes I think my health comes back when I let myself cry at strange times, when I fall apart or dissolve. I don’t believe in fragmenting the self into parts to be fixed. The Western medical model is obsessed with isolating symptoms, prescribing, and naming what perhaps ought never to have been named. To me, true health is harmony and alignment.

In The Divided Self, R.D. Laing writes of the ontologically insecure individual. One who feels compelled to split the self into fragments in order to survive a life lived in bad faith. He suggests that psychic fragmentation is not a defect, but rather the consequence of a world that demands inauthenticity. This fracture is only healed by remembering that one was never truly separate. In my experience, living in a dense city can become quietly corrosive over time, compelling us to wear masks rather than live authentically. I’ve come to believe that the root of most illness is shaped by a sort of psychogeography, not in the chemical or microbial sense, but in the psychic and spatial one. Street grids, glaring LED lights, an absence of trees, crowds of entfremdung souls…when the land is hostile, so is the body. What we call ‘dis-ease’ is often just the body’s final attempt to express what the psyche has been whispering for years: this is not a life that sustains me.

I do confess a distrust of conventional definitions of health… I avoid doctors, dentists, have never taken any sort of flu shot, and regret every X-ray I've gotten. That’s not what I'm here for. Wholeness, to me, is the allowance of all things to coexist without shame. The remembrance of our innate unity, a refusal to fear the unfolding process of life. Because it is always happening, forever, always. Yeah, I’m an eternalist!

What we call ‘dis-ease’ is often just the body’s final attempt to express what the psyche has been whispering for years: this is not a life that sustains me.

Ultimately, my pursuit of health is a journey toward non-duality. Not a “fix,” but a return.

How would you describe your current lifestyle?

I have inhabited the lives of many women, like a matryoshka doll. I carry them all within me, in my pocket, in my purse, all these past selves. Now, my manner of living is decidedly slow, despite my environment. I try to move with softness rather than haste.

I’ve always worked in creative jobs.

Currently, I split my time between assisting at an art gallery and a herbal apothecary. I try to do many different things in one day. I like pushing my body. I like drinking freshly pressed juice. I spend more time outside than I do inside. Parks, riverbanks, untended gardens, or forest trails. These are my domains. I must go outside daily, even when inclination fails me. I am trying to make 20,000 steps the new normal. This is easy for me as I don't have a car. There is also, I believe, a certain necessity to lay one’s body beneath the sky, as if for recalibration. I write. I’ve filled out four journals this year! I love the sun. I love smelling like dirt. I love finding leaves in my hair. My excursions rarely carry me far, though on occasion I seek the climb of a steep incline! I often dream of high altitudes, and I imagine one day settling somewhere high up, mountainous.

I have three friends and a cat, Sibyl (Sibby), who I found in a cardboard box in a parking lot last summer.

I’m pretty laissez-faire. I rush nothing, yet I am never late. I read strange books. I have little interest in mere functionality, I’m more interested in becoming porous and receptive. Sometimes that means I forget what day it is. I love giving gifts. I love belly-dancing. I am nostalgic. I am willfully solitary. Ascetic, in some ways.

There is no convenient title for my way of life. Something between a hermit and a bohemian.

How do you start and end your days?

I prefer to wake up with the sun and go to bed with the moon. My devices always charge in another room. Mornings begin with coffee. Always one, sometimes two. Lately, I’ve taken to adding condensed milk.

My apartment is a sanctuary from overhead lighting, which I consider both violent and disgusting!! Instead, I use salt lamps or beeswax candles. However, I love letting night fall without using any light at all and letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I want to improve my scotopic vision, like that of an owl or a fox. I need to consume more carotenoids to help protect my eyes from harmful blue light and free radicals…

There is no convenient title for my way of life.

Midday, I am usually steeping herbs. Hibiscus, holy basil, and lemon balm are in season right now. I always have fruit for breakfast. Occasionally, I apply rose tincture to my wrists or chamomile. I’m naturally sensitive and a little nervy, herbs and aromas tend to calm me instantly. I’ve been using Living Libation’s Bliss Tonic as perfume. I also swear by Bach’s Rescue Remedy.

I’m obsessed with this wooden fascia roller I purchased from a crowded shop in Chinatown. It smells faintly of tiger balm. It hurts, but in the way I like. I roll my entire body with it. One time it made me cry.

Before bed, I will douse myself with topical magnesium and a few drops of lavender. I read something. Everyday. Right now, a stack of Laing, Lowen, Weil, Guattari, Lispector, and Peat sits heavy on my desk.

Right before I fall asleep, I speak to myself in silence. I do not know who I am speaking to. We rarely agree, but we are never unkind. I look forward to this.

Was there a moment when your relationship to health changed?

Yes. In 2017, I fell ill. Chronically so. My body, gaunt and misaligned, rejected nearly everything offered to it. I was underweight, beset with allergies, and hospitalized so frequently I no longer knew the days. Sleep evaded me for months. A simple walk down the street left me breathless, often ending in nausea and confusion. My speech was disordered, and those around me grew concerned. This went on for almost a year.

One morning before sunrise, I wandered outside, fevered and delirious. I saw, with cold clarity, a hallucination or perhaps an apparition in the middle of the road. Death itself, suspended in the sky. He hovered above the rooftops, larger than any house, than any tree. It was impossible and absurd, and yet... composed. Utterly composed.

In the aftermath, nothing ever remained quite the same. Geography shifted for me. Relationships burned out. My very gait changed. I no longer moved through the world, but I felt as though I was starting to create it. My old self did not survive… In her place emerged someone sharper, quieter, and infinitely more watchful. It was, I suppose, like waking from a very long and deeply troubled sleep.

Before that year, I was splintered. And afterward, there was a very clean seam. A demarcation dividing what came before from what followed. That night, that death redefined my understanding of what it meant to be well. To be whole. I wish I could recount precisely what led to it, but I suspect I had simply wandered too close to the edge, and reality, ever theatrical, chose to split for me. My good health returned almost immediately.

Shortly after, I became obsessed with reading the works of Catholic Saints. Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Saint John of the Cross, and so on. A curious pattern emerged: the divine appeared for all of them, but only after prolonged physical agony. It seemed they, too, were dismantled first and then broken open.

Perhaps polarity is the burden and blessing of Gemini.

I do not believe I was ill. Nor mad. But I was touched by something. Something terrifying. But something that had my best interest at heart. Maybe that is love. Love feels like that to me. Or God. Annihilation, when done right, can be an act of mercy. Perhaps polarity is the burden and blessing of Gemini.

And sometimes, I imagine myself caught in that vision still. Pale and trembling like a Baroque saint, suspended in oil paint. Wide-eyed, hands clasped, forever gazing upward toward the shape in the sky.

What’s your relationship to self-healing?

Sometimes it’s slow, barely visible, like a seed pushing through cracked concrete. At other times, it is sudden and raw, a gaping wound reopening before it has had time to close. It is always constant. I place my trust in the parts of myself that medicine cannot touch. I try to be patient with the shadows inside, the parts that resist “fixing.”

This process began longggg before my birth, stretching backward through lifetimes. I view healing as the gradual lightening of the burden I bear. Peeling away the karmic weight so that I might move freer, lighter (vipāka විපාක). I like to imagine myself one day living as a bird or a blade of grass. I hope to ease what has been carried, so that it need not be borne again for me, nor anyone entangled with me.

If someone hands me their pain, I will hold it. I don’t believe we’re meant to heal alone or only think of ourselves. We’re all connected. Your healing touches mine. Mine folds into yours. When I soften, maybe the whole world does too.

I can bear any pain as long as it holds meaning. A dear friend of mine, a practitioner of flower essences who has treated me on multiple occasions, recently gave me a copy (now I have two) of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Fond of referencing Nietzsche, he writes:

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

I came across a tweet the other day that was like: “Why don't doctors prescribe seaside sojourns anymore?” Honestly... a good question. Female suffering has historically been medicalized without being understood. Hysteria, the diagnosis given when a woman’s emotionality exceeded protocol, now sounds a lot like PMS, PMDD, endometriosis, and PCOS diagnoses. These are rarely treated holistically.

Some time ago, the perfect trifecta of post-grad joblessness, heartbreak, and a heavy dose of chronic ennui hit me so terribly. I did what any girl with a proper Victorian malady would do — I prescribed myself the seaside. No doctor’s office or sanatorium could attend to this particular affliction, so I fled to Europe and promptly decided to speak to no one. For nearly two months, I perfected the art of silence. It was very medieval. I might as well have been locked in a tower!

I posted an Instagram story once or twice a week to confirm to my friends that I hadn’t died or joined a cult. I wasn’t texting anyone back because there was no “back” to return to. I went to the beach every day, got super tan. “Sorry. So dramatic of me to die again, lol.” Back in the city, I relayed my newfound lore with them over biodynamic wine, like some feral thing who’d just come down from the cave. I was aglow.

This is why I have not set foot in a doctor’s office in nearly a decade. What could they say? “Take this, it is for forgetting.”? No.

Doctors ought to prescribe such things nowadays. Tragic coastal fog, extended silences by the sea… The psychosocial dimension also cannot be overstated. Removed from the urban grind + hollow rituals of society + clinical pathologizing = full-body/spirit factory reset. Did you know that negative ions carried by the salty ocean breeze can enhance serotonin production? That was the only remedy that worked for me. Perhaps also some Jungian dreamwork and local seafood. This is why I have not set foot in a doctor’s office in nearly a decade. What could they say? “Take this, it is for forgetting.”? No. No one can help me. And anyway, I find that being suspended in a barely repressed psychic spiral is itself a kind of catharsis. I like it. I like who I am after it.

What are some interventions that have changed your health, for better or for worse?

For eight or nine years, I was vegan — at one point, raw vegan, which is to say I once believed in purity as sustenance. Letting go of it was not easy. But over time, I became mineral deficient, developed osteopenia (now reversed). Post, I began to see that death, too, is part of the ecology. That consumption wasn't violence, but participation in the ongoing exchange of life. That's not to say I now eat meat flippantly. Actually, I can't say I do anything in life flippantly.

Yoga and meditation have also become daily practices, instructing me in patience and presence. I must thank the lama who first taught me how to breathe Tibetan pranayama, and about the subtle body’s hidden anatomy. I love being aware of my body, my organs. S.N. Goenka's technique of Vipassana makes me cry. As I scan my body, I get so emotional, I can't believe all of this is me. Sometimes it scares me.

I was merciless when I was younger, seeking conflict, demanding the world align itself one way or the other. I craved tension, or rather, saw it as proof of life; it made me feel alive, yet it exhausted me. Perhaps at the time, I needed that divide even if it was unkind to my frame and maddening to my thoughts.

I am softer now, more fluid. Still sharp, but less harsh. There's my polarity again!

Do you have any guiding principles?

Sit in silence and wait. An answer will come. Occasionally, it brings tears.

When I feel disoriented or adrift, I immediately lie flat on the ground.

If you sense peril, it is wise to trust that instinct. Depart quickly.

Do not pursue fleeting pleasures or diversions.

Do not lie. Do not hide. Imitate no one. Strive instead to be better, kinder, even in solitude. Refrain from uttering unkindness, and, if possible, from entertaining such thoughts altogether. I love Health Gossip, but I really, really do not love gossip-gossip. Do not gossip.

Where do you look to for guidance?

I’ve always been solitary, even as a child. And now, it's still just me. That's not to say I'm not inspired by the people in my life, the people I've loved, strangers, writers. But inspiration is different from guidance. One illuminates you, touches you. The other leads.

I do listen to that small voice. The God within me. I look in the mirror. In the way the sun shines through the tree leaves. I do not dismiss synchronicities.

Do you remember your last dream?

The moon unzipped itself and revealed a second, smaller Earth curled up like a baby.

What’s your perfect meal?

With good company, a small portion of tender, well-prepared beef or liver, soft-cooked root vegetables. Olives. Warm sourdough with salted butter. A Glass or two of Beaujolais Nouveau. Fresh berries lightly macerated in a splash of orange blossom water, served with a dollop of whipped cream!

Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.1

Fuck: grass-fed gelatin gummies and Gerolsteiner, marry: science-backed rebellion against modern nutrition dogma, kill: stevia as a sugar substitute.

What advice would you give to your past self?

There is no self.

When the world feels unbearable, go to where the trees are old.

And above all, to endure. With whatever grace a lady might muster while hiding a bruised shin beneath her gown.

What advice would you give to the person reading this?

Place no faith in your government.

What would you like to see or create more of in the world?

Neurotechnology rooted in phenomenology, not surveillance. Decentralized knowledge networks that bypass corporate gatekeepers and foster radical intellectual freedom. Plant healing modalities without commodification. State defection. Babies. LOVE. BEAUTY. TRUTH. A good novel could still be written again. Secret gatherings. Letter writing. Gardens tended with care. Dream analysis. Homeschooling. Friendship that lasts decades. More Health Gossip news. More secret submissions on www.kryptosphaira.com.