For years, I carried a truth in my body long before I could say it out loud: my womb had been absorbing everything my mind and heart didn't have the capacity to hold. This is the story of how a "tiny, insignificant" fibroid became the loudest, clearest voice in my life - and how listening to it led me home to myself and eventually to Home Of Nula®.
I'm sharing it because I know I'm not the only one who was never taught to listen.
The Silence We're Taught
Growing up in Southern Africa, most of us learn about our bodies the way we learn folklore - in fragments, from family, friends or nobody at all. Reproductive health has never been a strong thread in our formal schooling. As recently as 2016, only an estimated 5% of South African schools were delivering truly comprehensive sexuality education, despite it being part of the curriculum on paper. That gap shows up in outcomes: in 2020 alone, over 34,500 babies were born to South African girls aged 17 and younger - 688 of them to mothers as young as nine and ten.
When formal education fails us this early, we're left to build our understanding of our own bodies from word-of-mouth, guesswork and silence. And that silence doesn't stay in childhood. It follows us into adulthood, into relationships and into consulting rooms - where we're often just as uninformed and just as unprepared to advocate for ourselves.
When the System Fails You
The gaps don't end with education. In South Africa, our healthcare system - public and private - is often not built for the sensitivity that reproductive and gynaecological care demands. Even where resources exist, the experience of care frequently doesn't hold space for the vulnerability of the person receiving it.
Layered onto this is a far darker reality. South Africa's femicide rate is roughly five times the global average and intimate partner violence remains alarmingly common - recent national research found that around one in three South African women have experienced physical intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Sexual offences reported to police number in the tens of thousands each year, yet conviction rates remain low, and countless cases never get reported at all. For too many women, the violence against their bodies and the neglect of their reproductive health are not separate crises. They live in the same body, often at the same time.
I know this because it was my reality.
My Body Kept the Score
I was diagnosed with a uterine fibroid in my first year of full-time employment. The consultation lasted under fifteen minutes and cost me around R1,600. My gynaecologist - highly recommended, casually dismissive - told me it was "nothing to worry about" and that I should come back if I ever struggled to conceive. No education. No resources. No follow-up plan. So, like many women are conditioned to do, I absorbed his indifference as my own and moved on.
This is not a rare story. Uterine fibroids are one of the most common conditions affecting women's reproductive health worldwide, impacting up to 70–80% of women by the time they reach menopause - and Black women are affected earlier, more severely, and far more frequently than any other group, with some studies showing prevalence rates two to three times higher than in white women. Yet fibroids remain chronically under-discussed, under-researched and under-treated, particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa, where data is sparse and care is inconsistent.
A year later, I got engaged, contracted a month-long bout of COVID-19, moved in with my then-partner after nearly a decade of living independently in multiple cities and countries, took on the demands of leading a nationwide, 24-hour security technology business through its most turbulent growth period, and started building what would eventually become Home Of Nula® - all at once. I believed, as so many high-performing women are taught to believe, that this was simply what ambition costs.
What I didn't yet understand was that my body was keeping a ledger I wasn't reading. Married life brought its own quiet unravelling - a home environment that left no room for rest, expectations I hadn't agreed to, and a growing distance between the woman I was building a career as and the woman I was suddenly expected to be at home without discussion. My body began to signal, through unexplained womb health issues, that something was fundamentally wrong.
The science backs up what I felt intuitively: chronic stress activates the body's HPA axis, elevating cortisol in ways that can influence oestrogen production and inflammation - both directly implicated in fibroid growth. My fibroid, "insignificant" in 2019, had grown to 6cm during my first marriage of just 2 years, and then expanded to 12cm during a 3-year divorce battle that I initiated that was met with aggressive resistance . My womb, clearly, had been holding the stress that my mind and heart didn't have the capacity to process.
Initially, I sought help - an integrative practitioner introduced me to acupuncture, salt and essential oil baths, and gentle at-home womb care. Those bath times became sacred pauses in a life with none. I found an executive coach to help me navigate the layered pressures of being a young Black woman leading in a space that rarely made room for people like me. I was doing the work. And still, my body kept declining. Chronic stress, anxiety, and what I now recognise as undiagnosed PTSD took hold. I moved through weekly hyperbaric chamber sessions and homeopathic care, even as I lost control of my finances and, eventually, my income.
The Turning Point
It was an intense seven-day gut health programme, guided by a Johannesburg-based integrative gut health practitioner, that became the unexpected breakthrough. It cleared far more than my gut - it lifted a fog I hadn't realised had settled over my mind, my skin, my mood, my sense of self. I understand now why the gut is so often called our second brain.
(If you'd like to explore gut-health support similar to what guided my own turning point, you can find it here.)
Within two weeks, something in me recalibrated. My intuition returned with a clarity I hadn't felt in years. I began quietly preparing to leave a marriage that had cost me nearly everything - my confidence, my finances, my health. I finally recognised patterns of abuse the moment I saw them clearly for the first time. And one morning, after waking with a pain I couldn't explain and couldn't prove, I told a trusted elder simply: I feel like I've been deeply bruised, but there are no marks. The trusted elder told me to pack my bags. I did, that same day, and have never looked back since then.
The First Home I Ever Knew
When I left, I went to the one place that had never once made me feel unsafe: my parents' home. My mother's (or "my first home") words to me in that season of deep pain and confusion have stayed with me since - "you don't have to feel lost, you can always come home." I returned to the first safe space I have ever known, and it healed me in ways I still can't fully put into words. My parents gave me something rare: as much time as I needed to simply exist, without performance, without explanation, without a deadline on my healing.
I had given myself six months to recover. The pain I carried asked for far more than that.
This is not unusual, even if it's rarely said out loud. Research on trauma recovery is consistent on this point: healing is non-linear, safety and stable ground are the foundation everything else is built on, and recovery cannot fully begin without them. Studies on survivors of intimate partner violence show that longer exposure to abuse is associated with a longer, more complex recovery - and that strong social support significantly improves outcomes, while isolation and rushed timelines tend to prolong or complicate healing. Globally, roughly one in three women who have been in a relationship report experiencing physical, financial, social, environmental, psychological or emotional violence from a partner. Recovery for that many women cannot be a footnote squeezed between obligations. It has to be given room.
I know this because the "high-performer" in me initially tried to schedule my healing like a project with a deadline. What actually healed me was the opposite: unhurried time, in a home that asked nothing of me, held by people who loved me without conditions. That immersion became something I hadn't expected - a calling. The six months I'd planned (and beyond) became the deeply purposeful business of coming home to myself, and eventually, of building a home for others to do the same.
Coming Home
I share this not to place blame, but to illuminate something I wish someone had told me sooner: your womb is not separate from your lived experience. It absorbs what your mind and heart cannot yet hold - stress, grief, fear, neglect - often long before you have the language or awareness to notice.
It was a Wellness Coach, an Integrative Gut Health Practitioner, an Indigenous health-informed Physiotherapist, and an Integral Traumatologist - not the traditional system I'd first turned to - who ultimately helped me rebuild a life that is more meaningful and whole than the one I left behind.
This is why Home Of Nula® carries the name it does. Nula is derived from Alkebulan, the ancient name for Africa - Mother of Mankind. Because the womb is the first home for all of us, and it deserves to be revered, understood and cared for accordingly. Home Of Nula® exists because my healing did not come from being dismissed in a fifteen-minute consultation. It came from being met with education, safety and reverence for exactly what my body was trying to tell me.
Every part of what Home Of Nula® offers today - for your mind, skin, body and spaces - is quietly modelled on the home I grew up in and returned to when I needed it most. The unhurried permission to just exist. The gentleness that asked nothing of me while I found my footing again. The safety that let me regain, in my own time, the independence I'd built before that brief but life-threatening disruption. I don't offer any treasure or service through Home Of Nula® that I haven't first needed myself, in some form, on the way back to who I am. I now enjoy a far more healthy and resilient body than I ever have, by continuing to honour the my womb as the source of my wellbeing and gatekeeping its access through the wellness interventions I am blessed to have been exposed to, which have preserved my health in the best way.
If any part of this story is speaking to something you've felt but haven't yet named - a pain you've explained away, a fatigue you've normalised, a body you've stopped listening to - I hope you'll take it as an invitation, not an alarm. You don't have to wait for a crisis to start listening to your womb. You can start today, gently, in whatever way feels safe.
That's what Home Of Nula® is here for: a gentle and safe return home, to yourself in a world that makes it easy to harden.
If you're navigating your own womb health journey, or simply want a space to reconnect with your body and mind, explore Home Of Nula's Inner Wellness Services or book a session.