THE FALL THAT MADE ME: How I Went From Peak Performance To Total Collapse And Why It Became The Birthplace Of My Prophetic Calling
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“For you, God, tested us. You refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let people ride over our heads. We went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.”
~ Psalm 66:10 to 12
Editor’s Note: This journal entry forms part of the ongoing Daughter of Thunder series documenting the stages of a prophetic awakening. Every moment described here represents a season of stripping, refining and divine reformation. Nothing has been embellished. Nothing has been softened. This is the unvarnished truth of what it costs to carry a prophetic mantle. May this testimony strengthen those walking through their own wilderness season and illuminate the pattern of how God forms His messengers in every generation.
There was a time when my life ran on precision. My mind was sharp, my business unstoppable, my discipline frighteningly effective. I wasn’t just thriving. I was travelling the world, living in the tropics, waking up in sunshine and ocean air, building my dream life with my own hands. I lived in expansion because I chose expansion. I could shift atmosphere, mindset and momentum like flipping a spiritual switch. Women followed me because I lived what I taught. My frequency was sky high and clean.
When I dipped, I didn’t spiral. I rose.
I rebuilt my Inspired to Greatness community.
I showed up daily.
I called in women who reflected the future I was forming.
I climbed back into power the way I always had.
And then the storm rolled in.
My mother landed in Thailand, bought the property I lived on, and overnight I found myself living under her emotional climate. Her rules. Her disruptions. Her moods. Her accusations. Her domination. Everything in that once peaceful sanctuary cracked under the spiritual weight she carried. I lived on eggshells. One day she shouted. The next she accused. Then she dropped the line that detonated something inside me: “You are just like your father.” She knew exactly what she was doing.
That was the first destabilising blow.
Then the next tremor hit the world. The George Floyd moment. And while the world screamed one narrative, something in my spirit screamed another. A prophet can hear the spiritual frequency behind the noise. My discernment lit up long before I had the vocabulary for what I was sensing.
Then COVID hit. Borders snapped shut. And I was stuck in Thailand with my mother while the atmosphere was already suffocating me. Then the government told me I had to leave. There was only one place I could legally fly. Back to the UK with my son, with almost no money, and with no plan.
That was the beginning of the freefall.
I ended up staying with an ex whose life had become a collapsing vortex of alcohol and chaos. One night he kicked the door in, drunk and raging, and the police said, “It’s not safe to stay here.” I grabbed my child and left that night with nothing but suitcases and survival instinct.
I had one last option. My brother.
He gave me a box room barely bigger than a single bed. My son slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor. Our suitcases were stacked up the walls like we were living in a storage unit. My brother’s mental health was already deteriorating. Too much drink. Too many drugs. Too much dissociation. I was living inside someone else’s darkness while trying to educate my son and rebuild a life with no quiet, no space and no oxygen.
The weight of that season is something only God understands.
When lockdowns loosened, I found a place to live. But by then my nervous system was wrecked. My business wouldn’t resurrect. Not because I lacked gifting, but because I could see Babylon everywhere. I could see the psychological operation behind the world’s shifts. The online space felt rotten. And my family turned on me because I warned about the vaccines. My mother called me crazy. She accused me of ruining my child. Every prophetic alarm inside me was met with scorn, hostility and rejection.
Then came the next descent.
With no income and refusing to bow to Babylon by going to the council for help, I slipped into homelessness. Not because I was reckless or incapable, but because the entire country was in a housing crisis. After the lockdowns, people fled the cities in waves, flooding into smaller towns, and suddenly twenty people were applying for every single rental. There were too many people and not enough homes. As a single mother, I never even made it to the shortlist.
So I stayed with friends for a year. Living out of bags. Watching my life shrink down to whatever I could carry. And twice during that time I came within hours of sleeping on a park bench. Not metaphorically. Literally. Me and my child standing on the edge of a night with nowhere to go, praying for a miracle before the sun went down. The terror of that urgency still lives somewhere deep inside me. The awareness that one closed door could have left us outside in the dark.
There was another blow that nearly finished me. The slander from a friend’s family. False accusations. Whisper campaigns. Someone hired a private detective to dig into my life, trying to paint me as something I wasn’t. They meddled, they lied, they inserted themselves into places they had no right to be, and their poison seeped straight into my family. They went to my brother with stories that were pure fabrication, and he cut me off without ever asking for the truth. That betrayal shattered something in me. It wasn’t just slander. It was character assassination at a time when I was already fighting for air.
From there I found myself in a homeless shelter. A rundown former hotel being used for crisis accommodation. A place full of women with shattered lives. Some fresh out of prison. Some running from violence. Some so numb they had stopped speaking altogether. I remember thinking, How on earth has my life collapsed this far. I had been a woman who once ran a business and travelled the world, and now I was sharing a shower with women who had nothing left. The humiliation was thick.
And yet that was the moment I became a Christian.
This is where everything turned.
I eventually moved into my current home. Fragile. Battered. Still breathing. And then came the final blow. My brother died by suicide. The grief tore through me, but it also severed the last unhealthy tie. I detached from my entire family because the atmosphere was spiritually lethal.
And the moment those ties broke, something opened.
God walked in.
The dreams.
The early morning visitations.
The life review.
The prophetic signs.
The mantle.
The calling.
The supernatural training.
The awakening.
The very season that stripped me bare became the womb of the destiny I had carried all my life.
My collapse was not a curse. It was strategy.
If I had stayed successful, I would have stayed deaf.
If I had stayed comfortable, I would have stayed blind.
If I had stayed surrounded, I would have stayed spiritually stagnant.
If I had stayed self-sufficient, I never would have recognised the voice of God when He spoke.
I thought I had been abandoned. He was preparing me for glory.
The fall was not punishment. It was purification.
The dismantling was not cruelty. It was consecration.
The stripping was not failure. It was formation.
God removed every person, every structure, every false safety net and every illusion I had built my life upon. Not because He wanted me destroyed. Because He needed an empty canvas to write His calling on.
Prophets are not formed in comfort. They are forged in collapse.
And mine was intentional. Meticulous. Divine.
The fall didn’t ruin me. The fall made me.
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
