From Surviving in the Shadows to Taking the Reins – This Is My Story
Hi, I’m Rebecca. Born on July 11, 1989, in Hoorn, the Netherlands. Today, I live independently in a beautiful home in Watergraafsmeer, a lush, green neighborhood in Amsterdam. With my faithful chihuahua Jimmy by my side and my dream car, a Range Rover Evoque, parked out front, I launched my own media company, Zohra Media, alongside my corporate role within the federal government.
Beyond the professional success, I’ve built a deeply loving, solid relationship with my mother and sister—something that used to be completely unthinkable. Today, as a proud aunt to a nephew and two nieces, I get to fully experience and enjoy the warmth of family. I am happy, powerful, and living life entirely on my own terms.
But it wasn’t always like this. Not even close.
The Outsider and the Identity Crisis
My story began in West-Friesland. My mother is Dutch (with French and Italian roots), and my biological father is African-American and Native American (Choctaw). My parents met in Germany when my mother was working on a cruise ship and my father was stationed at the military base in Frankfurt. Until 2014, he was a complete mystery to me.
As a mixed-race girl who looked nothing like the rest of my family, I grew up feeling zero connection to my environment. I didn’t fit the European beauty standards of the time. I had different hair, darker skin, and a tall, athletic, less conventionally feminine build with full lips. I found solace in animals, and for a long time, horses were my absolute favorite escape.
People constantly reminded me that I was different. The passive-aggressive, racist "jokes"—which I laughed along with for years just to survive—secretly cut deep. I felt entirely alienated at home and at school, becoming stubborn, fiercely independent, and hyper-focused on avoiding social obligations. By the time I turned 15, the tension exploded. One evening, the breaking point arrived: I was kicked out of the house.
I moved to Wognum, a small village about six miles away, to live with my grandparents. At first, it felt like a dream. My grandfather, grandmother, and aunt took over all my bills and completely spoiled me. I was given a massive room—twice the size of my room at my mother's—with a private bathroom and a panoramic view of a horse pasture. My grandfather promised that if I finished my equestrian degree at NHB Deurne, he would buy me a horse of my own. My grandmother focused her entire universe on me, cleaning my room and buying me anything I wanted. I even chose what we ate and what we did on weekends. For a second, I thought I had found paradise.
But before long, that love revealed itself to be painfully conditional.
My grandmother was battling her own deep, generational trauma: her own mother had only wanted sons, leaving her feeling unwanted her entire life. She had dreamed of studying to become a doctor but was forced to drop out to take care of the household. She projected all of that unresolved pain onto me. She fed me lies, telling me that my mother had wanted to give me away at birth and that the family was "so much happier" without me around. She demanded I become the perfect trophy child to prove to the world that my mother was the failure, not me. I had to get flawless grades, act perfectly compliant, and prepare to start a riding school—all to feed an old-school societal image.
I couldn't stand the theater of it. Why should I live out someone else's script just to keep the peace? The moment I refused to comply, my grandmother completely withdrew her affection and care. It was high-level micromanagement designed to control everything, down to who my friends were. It backfired completely, fueling a deep self-hatred within me. I fully believed the lie that my own mother didn't want me. It made me feel like an accident that shouldn't exist, believing nobody in the world would ever fight for me.
Standing on My Own and the Uncovered Truth
By the time I was 18, I couldn't take the emotional suffocation anymore. I packed my bags and left. For a while, I was completely adrift. I stayed briefly with an uncle in Hoorn (before running away), spent a month in a youth shelter in Schellinkhout, and lived with another uncle in Heerhugowaard for about a year. Just before turning 19, I cut ties with the family altogether. I wanted to figure it out on my own. After bouncing between rented rooms in various cities across the country, I finally landed in Amsterdam at age 19. And I knew I never wanted to leave.
Adapting to Amsterdam was a massive culture shock. Suddenly, I had to completely fend for myself, whereas before, every single bill had been taken care of. Because I had spent my life living under someone else's control and suppressing my true identity, I had no idea who I actually was. I lived entirely out of a victim mindset, deeply traumatized by the perceived rejection from my mother.
In 2014, I took a massive leap of faith and participated in Spoorloos (the Dutch version of Find My Family) to track down my father. The producers found my story so compelling that they asked my grandmother to verify my background. To my shock, she flatly refused. But when the cameras started rolling and I flew to Del City, Oklahoma, everything changed. I met my father, my American grandmother, two brothers, and three sisters. They welcomed me with an overwhelming, unconditional warmth. For the first time in my life, the biological puzzle pieces clicked.
But the real breakthrough happened after the cameras stopped. Seeing my father made me feel whole, and for the first time, it awakened a profound longing to connect with my mother. I slowly reached out to her because the timeline in my head simply didn’t add up. That was when the devastating truth finally came to light.
My mother had never wanted to cut contact with me. The very day after I was kicked out at 15, she had called my grandparents' house. My grandmother coldly told her never to contact me again and immediately demanded monthly child support. I had been lied to for over a decade, carrying the crushing weight of believing my mother abandoned me and refused to support me. The one person I had trusted—my grandmother—had manufactured an entire web of lies to fight her own bitter war.
The revelation shattered my reality. My anger shifted completely from my mother to my grandmother, and my trust was broken. I realized how many years of deep-seated rage, grief, and self-destruction could have been avoided if I had just known the truth.
Toxic Choices, the Shelters, and Pure Survival
Even though I finally knew my true history, the emotional damage left me feeling intensely alone in the world. I was aimless and saw no future. I was done living by other people's rules, but I had no idea what I wanted. I had lost my passion for the equestrian world. I was completely lost.
To survive social interactions, I put on a thick mask of hyper-independence and became obsessed with one singular goal: getting rich. To me, money equaled freedom. Because I felt like I belonged nowhere, I sought connection among other outsiders—misfits and wounded souls. The streets and that harsh environment temporarily numbed the ache of a missing family bond. It offered a distraction. I could finally drop the need to project a perfect image. In that world, I could be angry, grieve, curse, and break the rules.
Eventually, the toxic choices of that era caught up with me, pulling me into a dark downward spiral.
I was scammed, robbed, taken for granted, and threatened. At one point, I was literally pulled off the road on my scooter by law enforcement due to thousands of dollars in outstanding government-issued fines. On February 28, 2019, the ultimate hammer dropped: my lease ended, and I had to hand over the keys to the Amsterdam apartment where I had managed to live for eight years. My entire life was packed into an Allsafe storage unit, and I was officially homeless.
With the help of a social worker, I moved into a Salvation Army shelter in the city center. It was the only bed available—a cramped room with a bunk bed shared with three strangers. I found myself surrounded by active addicts, people with severe psychiatric disorders, and ex-convicts. It was a brutal shock to my system. I vowed to get out of there, no matter what it took. Two months later, I scraped together enough resources to sublet a nearby houseboat.
In total, I have moved over 40 times in my life. I sublet illegally, slept in my car, stayed in winter emergency shelters, lived in a trailer on an illegal campsite, did anti-kraak (property guardianship), lived in commercial warehouses, and eventually, even a garage box. Through it all, a toxic, abusive relationship held me hostage. I knew that if I wanted my life to change, I had to take absolute control of the narrative.
I reached out to multiple rehousing agencies. Thanks to structured institutional support and an incredible caseworker named Ronald, I was finally placed in a transitional studio apartment in Amsterdam-Osdorp. It was my temporary safe haven while I waited for permanent social housing. Flipping that internal switch—with zero blueprint for stability and a complete lack of trust in humanity—felt impossible. But I did it. I drew a definitive line in the sand, closed the door on my past, and finally chose myself.
The Crash That Changed Everything
At age 32, the chaos finally settled. I was granted permanent housing priority, cleared all my historical debts through a rigorous, self-managed municipal restructuring program (MSNP), and secured a stable roof over my head. I was completely debt-free and ready for a massive restart.
I pitched my business concepts to the City of Amsterdam and was accepted into an exclusive entrepreneurial program designed to transition high-potential individuals into independent business owners. I was ready to launch. I wanted to break into modeling, I had a dog, a boat, bought my dream motorcycle (a KTM Supermoto), and felt more motivated than ever before.
But the universe had a different timeline.
Just a week and a half later, I was violently struck by a car while on my motorcycle. My entire body was shattered. My entire right side—my hand, elbow, knee ligaments, and tailbone—was completely destroyed. I, the woman who prided myself on being fiercely, hyper-independent, was suddenly completely paralyzed. I couldn't even use the restroom without assistance, and the doctors couldn't guarantee I would ever fully recover. The physical agony and the mental devastation were so unbearable that I decided I was done. I made a profound, systematic attempt to end my life.
My Wake-Up Call and the Rise
But I woke up.
My dog was standing by my bed, wagging his tail. It wasn’t my time yet. The universe, God, or whatever higher power you believe in, decided I had more to do. And I listened. I realized that if I was going to stay on this earth, I was going to squeeze every single drop of potential out of this life.
What followed was a grueling four-year rehabilitation journey that stretched all the way into 2026. During those years, I joined a spiritual church community, utilized peer-support networks, and underwent intensive EMDR trauma therapy. I rotated through multiple specialized medical centers, ending at the CIR rehabilitation center in Diemen. That was where I learned to master chronic pain and truly understand my new body and mind. I literally had to relearn how to move, how to think, and how to live and work with a fundamentally altered physical frame. Through that fire, my inner drive and self-confidence returned a thousand times stronger than before.
The accident was brutal and agonizing, but looking back, what came out of it was an absolute gift. I certainly didn’t see it that way at the time, but that is how I view it now. It provided me with profound, unshakeable wisdom. It ignited a fierce new belief in myself and restored my capacity to love and trust the people around me. After solving my own deepest crises and conquering every imaginable trauma, I knew I was meant to build a legacy helping others do the same. I am no longer a victim. I am not even just a survivor. I am a victor. My most beautiful chapters are being written right now—built entirely on a foundation of self-love, purpose, and impact. And I want everyone to experience that level of personal freedom.
Back to Business: Rewriting the Script
To regain my absolute independence and give back to a society where so many people had ultimately reached out to save me, I looked for employment the second the worst of my physical rehab was behind me. Because of my permanent physical injuries, I am officially registered under the government's occupational disability framework—something I used to feel immense shame about, but which now gives me a profound sense of peace and security.
I secured a corporate role within the federal government. In the beginning, it was incredibly taxing for a brain that had spent four straight years in pure survival mode. But it immediately gave me a mission, rebuilt my professional confidence, and reconnected me to a healthy, high-functioning environment. Deep down, I knew this stable corporate foundation was the ultimate launchpad for my own empire.
By deeply reflecting on my past choices and investing thousands of hours into studying psychology, behavioral science, spirituality, and reading endless biographies of elite performers, I completely reprogrammed my subconscious mind. I love myself now. The real me. Not the version wearing a social mask, or the version desperate to please others, or the version that wants to hide in the shadows. I finally dare to be unapologetically myself—vulnerable, raw, and completely honest.
Even though I am an INFJ personality type—an introvert to my very core—I am on a global mission to hand you the keys to this exact same level of empowerment. I want you to feel like the absolute main character of your favorite movie. Because if I could climb out of those depths, you can master your life effortlessly. Your appearance, your religion, your current social status, or the number in your bank account do not dictate your destination. You do.
And honestly, my transformation isn't finished—it evolves every single day. Due to the accident and years of forced physical immobility, I gained a significant amount of weight. For the sake of my reconstructed knee, it is vital that I return to a healthier, leaner weight. That’s why I recently enrolled in an elite, comprehensive medical lifestyle and metabolic optimization program (GLI). Now that my mental, emotional, and spiritual health is completely unshakeable, my physical body is next in line—and I am incredibly excited for the journey. I live for the beautiful experiences this world has to offer, and performing at your peak is simply much easier when your body matches your ambition.
Why I Am Now Here for You
Every now and then, old, limiting thoughts try to creep back in: "Rebecca, aren't you too old? Too damaged? Too uneducated to build a global legacy?" My answer to that old conditioning is a resounding, definitive no.
Today, I wake up fulfilled and I fall asleep with a smile on my face. I made it out. Not to prove anything to the outside world, but for myself. I discovered the truest definition of self-love: daring to dream at the highest level, and having the courage to ruthlessly execute those dreams.
Most self-help coaches approach you with the assumption that you are broken and need to be "fixed." I don't buy into that. You aren't broken. You are simply misaligned. You have drifted out of alignment with your highest, most potent self because you spent way too long adapting to an unhealthy, toxic, or limiting environment.
I don’t sell fairytales. I show you the raw, strategic science of lasting human transformation. Calmly, clearly, from personal experience, and with undeniable big energy. Are you ready to stop people-pleasing, establish iron-clad boundaries, and become the undisputed director of your own life?
Let’s glow up, RISE, and shine together!
How I Can Help You
Today, I deliver high-impact keynote speeches, custom corporate workshops, and elite masterclasses globally, focusing on self-confidence, identity mastery, and personal leadership. These are not superficial self-help theories; they are interactive, deep-dive frameworks engineered to activate your personal power so you can build your ultimate reality.
For elite individuals ready for radical acceleration, I offer exclusive, high-end 1-on-1 private advisory and mentorship.
