The Woman Behind Nammu
Triplet · Daughter of two worlds · Thalassemia · Croupier · MSc student
The Woman
Behind Nammu.
A genetic diagnosis buried for nineteen years. A depression. A casino. A university IQ test at twenty-three. This is the story of how a health system's silence became a platform's reason for existing.
The File
I am twenty-five years old, sitting at a table with a stack of medical records I have requested myself — from a hospital that examined me when I was six years old. No one asked me to do this. No doctor sent me here. I am here because nineteen years of unexplained exhaustion, of dismissals and non-answers, have finally made me decide to investigate my own body as if I were the last person left who might actually try.
I am not looking for anything specific. And then I find it. Six words. Buried so deep in the file that it takes me a moment to understand what I am looking at. My heart does something strange. Not relief — something more complicated than that.
Thalassemia. A genetic blood disorder. Diagnosed at age six. Never communicated to my parents. Never followed up. Filed, and forgotten.
"This knowledge could have changed my life. It should have been given to me. It was mine."
Click the envelope to open the file.
A Body That Would Not Wake
I could not get out of bed. Not in the way people say it when they mean they did not want to — I mean genuinely, physically, could not. My mother would pour water on my face, on my pillow, on my sheets. Cold water. Sometimes even that was not enough. I was six, seven, ten, sixteen years old. The fatigue was total. It was the first fact of my life, long before I had language for it.
Thalassemia is a genetic blood disorder that reduces the body's ability to produce functional haemoglobin — the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen. My red blood cells were smaller, paler, and less efficient than they should have been. Every cell in my body was running on less oxygen than it needed. Every day.
There is a specific cruelty in having a biological explanation for your struggle and not knowing it. Because without the diagnosis, the only available explanation is you. Your laziness. Your weakness. Your inability to simply get up.
"I was not lazy. I was running on low oxygen. For nineteen years."
Nineteen Years of Silence
Somewhere in a filing cabinet, in a hospital in the Netherlands, there was a document with my name on it that said: thalassemia. They had the tests. They had the results. The diagnosis was confirmed. And then — nothing. No call. No letter. No follow-up. Just a file, closed, stored, forgotten.
The system is not always malicious. Sometimes it is simply indifferent. And indifference, when it sits between a six-year-old girl and the information that explains her entire life, causes damage that is just as real as any deliberate harm.
"The diagnosis was always there. The only thing missing was someone who thought to tell me."
The Dark
Depression is not sadness. I want to be precise about that. It is the absence of a future. It is watching everyone around you graduate, start university, build things, move forward — while you are still trying to get out of bed at noon. I did not graduate high school. The fatigue made consistent attendance almost impossible, and without an explanation, there was no accommodation, no understanding — just the assumption that I was not trying hard enough.
When my parents divorced and I moved to a new city, I developed pleinvrees — agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces — and then I had almost nothing. No diploma. No city I recognised. No certainty about anything. The world had become very small.
At some point I understood, with clarity, that small steps were not going to work. What I needed was not a gradual improvement. What I needed was a complete change of direction. Something so demanding that it would force me to become a different person just to survive it.
"I could not walk towards the light. So I decided to run straight at it."
Drag to move between darkness and dawn.
← drag to move between darkness and dawn →
All In
I applied for a job as a croupier at Holland Casino. I do not know exactly what calculation I was making — it was not entirely rational. But I knew that I needed something that would require me to be present, sharp, visible, and accountable for every single shift. Something with stakes. Something that would not let me disappear.
I got the job. I worked hard for it — not just the skills, the mathematics, the technique, but personally. I had to become someone who could stand at a table and run it, fully, every night. I had to learn to hold my ground against customers who were awful, against men who underestimated me, against the part of myself that still remembered being afraid of open spaces. Every shift was a proof of something. I showed up. I stayed. I ran the table.
I worked nights at the casino to pay for university. I did both simultaneously for years. The casino taught me things no classroom ever could — about reading people, about composure under pressure, about what it means to show up for yourself even when nobody is watching.
"The house always wins. Except when you are the one who decides to play."
The Gate
I had wanted to go to university my entire life. It was not a vague ambition — it was specific, persistent, something I carried through every bad year, every dismissal, every night I could not get out of bed. I was going to get there. I did not know how yet. But I was going to get there.
I did not have a high school diploma. In the Netherlands, this is not a small obstacle — it is the legal requirement. But there is a pathway called the colloquium doctum: for people who can demonstrate, through a serious series of assessments and IQ tests, that they have the intellectual capacity for university study without the conventional credentials. I sat those tests at twenty-three years old. Still working nights at the casino. Still managing fatigue I did not yet have a name for. Still, in some ways, the person from that dark city who was afraid of open spaces.
I got in. Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Creative Business. I sat in my first lecture and I was the oldest person in the room and I did not care even slightly. I worked through those years the same way I had worked through everything else — showing up, staying, proving something, to myself more than anyone.
When I finished that degree, I was not done. The more I learned, the more I understood that systems were what I was actually interested in — the structures that produce outcomes, the policies that determine whose health gets studied and whose does not, the institutional logic that allowed a six-year-old girl's diagnosis to sit in a file for nineteen years without consequence. I applied for and was accepted into the MSc in Innovation Sciences at the University of Utrecht — the research university, this time. The master's gave me the methodological language for what I had already been doing intuitively: reading the system, finding where it fails, and building something better in the gap.
"They gave me a test instead of a diploma. I passed it. That is enough."
The Rabbit Hole
In the middle of my university years — working night shifts, managing the fatigue I now finally had a name for, trying to stay on top of assignments — I started reading. Not for coursework. Obsessively, personally, because doctors had still not been able to help me in any meaningful way and I had decided, definitively, to become the expert on my own body.
What I found was a gap so large I could not look away from it. For decades, women had been systematically excluded from clinical trials. The drugs in my medicine cabinet had been tested almost exclusively on male subjects. The diagnostic criteria I was being assessed against had been developed from male data. The fatigue that had been called psychosomatic, unexplained, exaggerated — had a biological explanation that the medical system had no framework for, because it had never thought to look for one.
This was not a conspiracy. It was a neglect so normalised it had become invisible. And I had been living inside its consequences my entire life.
"I was not an edge case. I was simply female, in a medical system that had not yet decided women were worth studying."
Nammu
Before there was anything — before the sky and the earth were separated, before the gods had names, before the first human hands shaped clay into vessels — there was Nammu. In Sumerian cosmology, the oldest written mythology we have, Nammu is the primordial sea. The first thing. The source from which all existence emerged. She did not create the world from nothing. She was the nothing from which everything became possible.
She is described in the ancient texts as the mother who gave birth to An, the sky, and Ki, the earth — and from their union, the rest of creation followed. She is not the goddess of something. She is the condition for everything. The Sumerians called her the mother of the gods before the gods existed. The tablet that carries her name — one of the oldest written documents in human history, pressed into clay in Mesopotamia roughly five thousand years ago — describes her as the one who initiated creation itself: who went to her son Enki and said, the human beings are suffering. Help them. Build them. Make something from this.
Mesopotamia. The ancient cradle of civilisation — present-day Syria and the surrounding region, the land from which writing itself was born, where the first cities rose from river clay, where the first known medical texts were pressed into tablets. My mother's side of the family is originally from Syria, with roots now in Hatay — a region that sits at the edge of that ancient world, carrying its history in the soil. When I first encountered the name Nammu — this ancient, pre-linguistic mother-force from that same part of the earth — something clicked into place that I did not fully have language for. Here was a figure from my own heritage, from the ground my mother's lineage came from, who had been quietly doing what I was trying to do: making the invisible visible, naming the unnamed, building something out of the raw material of what was missing.
I am a triplet. The daughter of immigrants from opposite ends of the world. I grew up between languages, between cultures, between identities — and for most of my life that felt like a source of instability. It took a long time to understand that it was actually a source of depth. You see systems differently when you have lived inside more than one. You see the gaps differently when you have been in them. Nammu — the primordial source, the mother before motherhood had a definition — felt like a name that could hold all of that. Not a brand. A lineage.
"She was the source before the source had a name. That is exactly what I wanted to build — something that existed before the institution thought to provide it."
The Art of Female Health became a book. Nammu Academy became a platform for science-backed education that the medical system has not yet delivered. The advocacy became a mission — more research funding, better diagnostic practices, women who know their own biology before a crisis forces them to learn it. My Creative Business degree gave me the tools to build and communicate. My MSc in Innovation Sciences at the University of Utrecht gave me the research framework to understand why the gap exists and how systems produce it — the institutional logic, the policy failures, the funding structures that have consistently treated women's health as peripheral. I am still completing that master's, and with every seminar, every paper, every research conversation, the platform I am building becomes more precise. Not despite the system — through understanding it well enough to change it.
The fatigue that kept me in bed. The file that was never opened. The depression, the casino, the IQ test, the night shifts — all of it is in here, in this platform, in every peer-reviewed source I cite, in every piece I write that says: this is what is happening in your body, and you were always allowed to know.
Nammu did not wait for permission to create. She was the sea before there was a shore. She was the depth before there was a surface. She went to her son and said: something is missing. Build it.
That is the brief. That has always been the brief.