I've been where you are.
I grew up in a home shaped by my father's alcoholism — tense, unpredictable, and it trained me early to abandon myself just to keep the peace. Then in my last year of high school, five months from graduation, my first boyfriend — the first person I ever loved outside my family — died suddenly in his sleep. I wasn't just grieving him. I lost my sense of purpose entirely. No religion had answers that satisfied me, and no therapist could touch what was actually happening in my soul.
The 25 years since have tested me in ways I couldn't have imagined at 17 — marriage and motherhood in my twenties, a divorce in my thirties that broke me open, losing my father, a body that stopped working when my mind couldn't keep up, a business dismantled overnight by a pandemic. There was a rock bottom in there I won't describe in detail, out of respect for the people who were part of it. I'll just say I came back from further than most people ever have to.
I don't do this work because of a degree or a text I memorized. I do it because I've been to the bottom and found my way back — the exact person my 17-year-old self needed and didn't have. My mission now is to help you find that same freedom, not by teaching you what I read somewhere, but by walking beside you the way I wish someone had walked beside me.
