The Death I Didn’t Choose: How God Buried the Woman I Used to Be
🎧 Prefer to listen? Hear the spoken-word version above.
Editor’s Note: This journal entry contains vivid descriptions of spiritual dismantling and inner transformation as experienced during the author’s prophetic journey. It reflects her personal process of dying to the old self and awakening to her God-given identity. Readers are encouraged to approach with prayer, discernment, and openness to the Holy Spirit.
What It Really Means to Die to Your Old Self
People talk about “dying to self” like it’s something ethereal.
Something poetic.
Something you can light a candle for and journal your way through.
No one tells you it feels like an execution.
No one tells you it feels like being marched into a spiritual wilderness
with nothing but the clothes on your back
and the faint memory of who you used to be.
No one tells you God will pry your fingers open
from everything you once worshipped
— your dreams, your identity, your plans, your people —
and ask you to lay them down one by one
as if you were placing your entire life on an altar
you never volunteered for.
Because real dying to self?
It’s not aesthetic.
It’s not romantic.
It’s not a Christian catchphrase.
It is the brutal dismantling of the woman you built
from coping mechanisms,
from survival instincts,
from unhealed wounds,
from the world’s applause,
from the lies your family told you,
from the false vision of your future you clung to
because it kept you sane.
And then one day God says,
“That version of you cannot carry what I’m giving you.
Lay her down.”
And you do.
Sobbing.
Screaming.
Fighting the air.
Feeling your insides tear.
Because you know you can’t take her with you.
You cannot take the self-made woman into a God-made calling.
You cannot take the old wineskins into the new mountain.
You cannot take dead weight into resurrection.
So yes — I died.
I died when God stripped my business.
I died when my home life collapsed.
I died when my family turned against me.
I died when friendships crumbled like paper.
I died when the plans I’d crafted with my bare hands
were set on fire in front of me
and God simply whispered,
“Let it burn.”
I died to the life I thought I’d live.
I died to the places I thought I’d thrive.
I died to the woman I thought I was becoming.
I died to the expectations of others.
I died to the version of myself that was built by trauma,
by ambition,
by survival,
by pride,
by fear.
I died to the story Babylon wrote over my life.
Real dying to self is not gentle.
It is not peaceful.
It is not soft.
It is God-engineered demolition.
It’s waking up one morning and realising
your old life is a corpse
and you are the one being asked to bury her.
It’s watching the scaffolding collapse
and somehow knowing
you must not attempt to rebuild it.
It is letting God remove people you once loved
because they cannot walk the next mile with you.
Because their voices belong to an old chapter
God has permanently closed.
Because their smallness would suffocate your calling.
It is surrender without negotiation.
It is grief without control.
It is obedience without clarity.
But here is the part religion never teaches:
Dying to yourself is not the end.
It is the doorway through which resurrection enters.
The woman I used to be needed to die
so the woman God designed could finally live.
I had to die
so the prophet could rise.
I had to die
so the thunder could speak.
I had to die
so I could walk without apology
into the identity God wrote into my bones
long before my family tried to shrink me,
long before the world misnamed me,
long before Babylon trained me to self-abandon.
Death was not punishment.
It was preparation.
And the moment I stopped fighting the burial,
I realised something holy:
God had not destroyed me.
He had rescued me
from the woman I was never meant to be.
This is the death no one chooses.
The death no one wants.
The death no one volunteers for.
But it is the death that births destiny.
I am not who I was.
And thank God for that.
Because the woman I buried could never
have carried the mantle I now carry.
The old me would have broken.
The new me was born from fire.
“Whoever loses their life for My sake will find it.” — Matthew 16:25
With fire and grace,
This message carries fire. Pass it on. 👇🏻
Victoria Player is the founder of Daughter of Thunder, a movement awakening spiritually sensitive women to truth, purpose, and divine power in a world that’s lost its compass. After walking through her own season of fire and rebuilding, she now writes and speaks to those who sense there’s more — guiding them from confusion to clarity, from awakening to assignment.
“I don’t bow to Babylon — I walk with the Lion.” — Daughter of Thunder
