There’s a moment in You Are Okay: A Survivor’s Story thru Darkness where everything shifts. After years of surviving one crisis after another, author Natasha M. Faulkner describes something she calls her “awakening” — a period of profound spiritual and emotional transformation that reshaped how she understood her own life.
For most of her younger years, Natasha kept a part of herself hidden. She grew up sensing and feeling things other people around her didn’t seem to notice — a heightened intuition, a pull toward the unseen, a sense of connection to something larger than her circumstances. Rather than being met with curiosity, that part of her was often met with suspicion, labels, and diagnoses that tried to explain it away. For years, she learned to mute it.
The turning point came after the loss of her grandmother, the one steady, loving presence in her life since childhood. In the grief that followed, Natasha describes stepping fully into a spiritual practice she’d carried quietly for most of her life, and choosing, for the first time, not to hide it. That decision cost her some relationships. But it also gave her something she hadn’t had before: a sense of purpose that didn’t depend on anyone else’s approval.
What follows in the book is less about the specifics of her spiritual beliefs and more about a universal experience — the moment you stop asking permission to be who you are. Natasha writes about reconnecting with her father after decades apart, learning to set down guilt that was never hers to carry, and slowly building a small, intentional circle of people who see her clearly.
By the book’s final chapters, the tone has changed entirely. The chaos hasn’t disappeared — she’s still navigating family, health, and financial pressures like anyone else — but something underneath it has settled. Her message to readers, in the end, is simple: love yourself first, because everything else — the healing, the growth, the ability to rise above what you’ve been through — grows from that foundation.
You Are Okay isn’t a book that promises darkness won’t come again. It’s a book from someone who has been through more of it than most people could imagine, and who wants readers to know that even a small flame of self-love is enough to guide you forward.
You Are Okay: A Survivor’s Story thru Darkness is available now. Read Natasha’s full journey — from the chapters that broke her open to the ones that helped her find her voice.