About
Who is she?
A novelist, poet, speaker, mentor, mother, history nerd and professional collector of strange rocks. Mostly she’s someone trying to be fully human on purpose, and taking notes.
True things
pinned to the wall, in her handwriting. some of them unfold.
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Shoes have always seemed like an unnecessary negotiation between her and the earth, and she has spent enough of her life being told there should be something between her body and the things it wants to touch.unfold ↓fold back up ↑
She wants a world where nobody has to become smaller, quieter, straighter, whiter, richer, more productive, more agreeable, or easier to control before their humanity is considered worthy of protection.Sovereignty means standing fully inside your own life without requiring someone else to surrender theirs.She thinks we could build from there.unfold ↓fold back up ↑
How the same species that paints ceilings, writes love songs, holds dying strangers, and invents gods can also build gas chambers, slave ships, torture rooms, and entire governments around deciding which human beings count.She wanted all of it. The beautiful and the atrocious. The wars, art, genocides, revolutions, empires, resistance, and ordinary people who woke up inside terrible systems and had to decide whether to obey them.She kept digging until humanity bled onto the page because somewhere beneath all that studying was the question she has never really stopped asking:If human beings made this world, what else are we capable of making?
There's a pink chair in her room holding a pink skeleton, a sloth, a dragon egg and a toy sword.
She falls asleep in meadows.
She is equally capable of turning grief into a poem and abandoning the poem because a dog, a bug, a strange rock or something ridiculous became more interesting.
She writes poems on her walls in marker, and some of them are older than the paint around them.
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We are the ones standing here while people are still being taught that some bodies belong to governments, some lives are worth less than others, some suffering is acceptable if it happens far enough away, and somebody else’s freedom is somehow a threat to our own.We don’t get to shrug at the wreckage and blame the dead people who built it.We are alive now.That means the work belongs to us.We have to notice what is happening beyond the borders of our own comfort. We have to remember what someone worked very hard to erase. We have to question what we inherited, tear apart the systems that require another human being’s suffering to function, protect each other when it costs us something, and build whatever comes next with our own fucking hands.She refuses to spend her one wild, temporary existence pretending neutrality is the same thing as innocence.Someday she will be dead, and the world will belong to someone else.Until then, she intends to leave fingerprints all over it.Her beliefs aren’t tucked politely inside her.She wears them where you can see them.Her manuscript gets weighed down with stones, a pinecone and an articulated dragon.
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She has no interest in spending whatever remains of her life disappearing.She wants to make strange, beautiful things. Tell the truth as precisely as she can. Ask questions that make comfortable rooms uncomfortable. Love people ferociously. Change her mind when she learns something new. Take up the space her life requires.And fight like hell for a world where everyone else gets to do the same.She already knows what silence costs.She's very afraid of fire and walks into it anyway.
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If she could understand how cruelty becomes culture, how oppression gets dressed in respectable language and written into policy, how a lie gets repeated until children inherit it as truth, maybe she could find the place where the machinery could be interrupted.History taught her something else too. Human beings resist. We hide each other in attics. We smuggle books, food, medicine, people, stories. We stand in streets. We make art under regimes that forbid it. We love each other across borders somebody else drew.Maybe there was never going to be one formula.Maybe the closest thing we have is learning exactly how the world was built, then becoming brave enough to build differently.unfold ↓fold back up ↑
She believes we are living inside things human beings invented and then forgot were inventions. Borders. Hierarchies. Economies. Systems of power. Entire definitions of whose life matters and what a human being is allowed to be.And if we made them, we can make something else.She believes pieces of that something else are already alive all over the world. In artists dragging impossible things into existence. Scientists refusing to stop at what we already know. Mothers raising children without handing them the same wounds. Survivors ending bloodlines of pain inside their own bodies. Historians digging their fingers into the dirt where someone buried the evidence. Children still wild enough to ask why the world has to be this way.She doesn’t believe some brilliant person is coming with the blueprint.She believes we are the fucking blueprint.Millions of human beings carrying fragments of a world that has never existed, building it inside classrooms and kitchens, laboratories and bedrooms, books and protests and conversations that change one person forever.Maybe that sounds insane.Good.Every world that has ever existed began in the human imagination before somebody built it with their hands.This is the piece she came here to build.She can spend years building an entire fantasy world and still write the important sentence on the nearest scrap of paper.
She is a mother. Her kids are mostly grown, and she loves them more than anything on this wall. That’s exactly why they aren’t on it. Their lives belong to them.
What does it mean to be human, and how the fuck do we do it without abandoning ourselves or each other?
What I believe
Being alive comes with responsibility.
I believe our liberation is tangled up together, which means I can’t talk about sovereignty while ignoring the systems that take it from other people.
I believe Black lives matter. Trans lives matter. Palestinian lives matter. The people of Congo and Sudan matter. Indigenous sovereignty matters. Bodily autonomy matters. Reproductive freedom matters. Disabled people deserve lives built around dignity rather than accommodation as an afterthought.
I believe workers deserve dignity, safety, rest and enough money to live. I believe hoarding obscene wealth while people are hungry is a moral failure, regardless of how beautifully capitalism explains it.
I believe patriarchy hurts all of us. White supremacy doesn’t disappear because we become uncomfortable naming it. Colonialism isn’t only something that happened in history books. And systems built by human beings can be dismantled by human beings.
I believe children are people.
I believe survivors get to decide what healing looks like.
I believe bodies belong to the people living inside them.
I believe love without liberation isn’t enough.
I believe spirituality that requires me to stop looking at suffering isn’t spirituality I want.
I believe mindfulness should make us more present to the world, not better at tolerating what should never have been acceptable.
I believe self-mastery without humanity becomes another form of control.
And I believe sovereignty means very little if the only freedom I’m interested in is my own.
Giving back
Here’s where we’re putting our hands.
I don’t want my values to live exclusively in paragraphs on a website.
A portion of my work, money, platform and time has always gone back into people and causes I believe in. This is where I’ll keep a record of that work, the organizations and movements I support, and ways you can help when there is somewhere useful to point our collective attention.
you don’t have to do everything. do something.
- 01Move your moneyfrom mega-banks to local credit unions.
- 02Practice mutual aida recurring slice of your budget, to local funds.
- 03Spend with co-opsshift what you buy toward worker-owned businesses.
- 04Know your rights, teach themICE protocols. Tenant protections. Then pass it on.
- 05Know your neighboursa text thread on your street is a safety network.
- 06Grow it, share itcommunity gardens, tool libraries, food that isn’t owned by anyone far away.
- 07Show up smallcity council. School board. The rooms where it actually gets decided.
- 08Give your skillsoffer what you know, pro bono, to people already doing the work.
The whole list of tangible acts, and who is already doing the work, lives on The Human Ledger.
For press, organisers and programs
The Official Version
Biography
Nikyla Maria is a novelist, poet, speaker, self-mastery mentor and trauma-certified practitioner whose work explores story, memory, power, embodiment and human sovereignty. She is an advanced energetic surgeon and master healer who has spent more than a decade guiding people through self-discovery, inner-child work, mindfulness and reclamation, including immersive retreats around the world. She is the author of Unearthing: Blood & Bone, Book I of the seven-part dark fantasy series The Frequencies of Eden, and creator of Poetry with a Pulse, where poetry moves beyond the page through voice, sound and performance. Across every form, her work asks some version of the same question: what becomes possible when we stop performing who we were taught to be and remember how to belong to ourselves? She lives with her two teenagers and two dogs, Atlas and Luna, in a house whose walls are slowly becoming a manuscript.
Short biography
Nikyla Maria is a dark fantasy author, poet, speaker and inner child guide. She wrote Unearthing: Blood & Bone, hosts Embodied Divinity, leads retreats, and writes her poems directly onto the walls of her home.
Press & speaking
Built from your doc. The two opening lines under “Who is she?” and the photo captions are my working copy; everything else is your words.