#62: Victoria Vyraeth

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

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!

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…

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.