My Story

The person my 17-year-old self needed

I grew up in a home shaped by my father's alcoholism. It was tense, unpredictable, and it trained me early to abandon myself just to keep the peace. I developed an unhealthy level of empathy — the kind that lets you feel something coming before it arrives, so you can respond and manage it before it lands. I was the peacekeeper. It would take me decades to unravel what that role cost me.

Then, in my last year of high school — five months from graduation — everything changed. My first boyfriend, the first person I ever loved outside my family, someone I'd spent the past year falling for and imagining a whole life with after school, died suddenly in his sleep from an untreated heart condition. It happened on a Monday night.

My body knew before I did. I had a sharp, dagger-like pain in my gut all day at school on Tuesday. The police showed up at my door around dinnertime that night to tell me. The pain in my gut stopped. My heart and mind never went back to normal.

"What is the point of anything, if we can just be taken away this easily?"

I think this hit me differently than it might hit someone else, because underneath the grief of losing him — and not getting to say goodbye — was something that went even deeper: a complete loss of purpose for being alive at all. In my undeveloped 17-year-old mind, I couldn't reconcile it. No religion gave me answers that satisfied me. No therapist could touch what was actually happening in my soul.

This is why I do what I do today. I'm in my early 40s now, and looking back, I can see that I've spent the last 25 years becoming exactly the person my 17-year-old self needed. Not someone with a big degree, or someone who'd memorized the religious texts — someone who had actually gone into the depths of their own darkness and found their way back out. Someone who had studied relentlessly, lived what they learned, and turned knowledge into wisdom.

That's who I needed. I didn't have anyone like that. If I could go back and mentor that younger version of myself, I would. That's why I do this work now — to be a guide, a shepherd, for people who are longing for exactly that: someone who has been where they are, and can lead them back to themselves.

There's a second part to this story. After the tragedy, I started pursuing meditation and exploring every spiritual text I could find, looking for an answer to the same question: what's the point of any of this? In the hope of finding one, I got married young and had my two kids in my mid-twenties — if I couldn't find a clear purpose, at least raising two humans who needed me felt like a worthwhile one.

I raised them while I kept exploring. It took me deep into yoga and eastern philosophy, into a real study of consciousness — countless books, courses, certifications, training in modalities from body therapy to hypnotherapy. I was teaching classes, running weekend seminars, seeing 1:1 clients.

Then life sent a storm I wasn't sure I'd survive.

At 32, my marriage fell apart. I had to move out of my home, torn between being a full-time mother and a part-time healer and teacher. The divorce broke me in ways I didn't know I could break — I won't go into the details, out of respect for the people involved. Around that time, I stepped back from teaching entirely, because I suddenly found myself being asked to actually practice everything I'd been preaching, and I knew I had work to do first.

Six months into the divorce — it would take years before the dust fully settled — my father passed away. Losing someone you loved, who also caused you a lot of pain, is a confusing, heartbreaking kind of grief. In the space of six months, I'd lost every source of masculine support I had.

Two weeks after my dad died, both of my eardrums ruptured at the same time. I was almost completely deaf for about ten days. Doctors had no explanation. I knew exactly why it happened — it was stress, and my body was forcing the world around me to go quiet. Once again, my body was telling me something my mind hadn't caught up to yet.

I remember standing in my kitchen not long after his death, feeling like the ground was crumbling under me — like everything I'd spent years building was falling apart, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Not long after that, COVID hit, and the business I'd rebuilt from the ground up after my divorce was dismantled overnight. I was sent home from the clinic and wasn't allowed to see clients — at the time, most of my work was hands-on body therapy, and I wasn't allowed to touch anyone. I spent four months at home, in limbo, wondering when I'd go back. By the time I could, all the momentum was gone, and it would be months more before people felt comfortable going out at all.

That six-year stretch found me at an absolute rock bottom — one specific low point I'm not going to describe in detail, both for my own sake and out of respect for the people who were part of it. I'll just say I hit a bottom I wasn't sure I'd climb back out of.

At some point, I stopped fighting it. I remember the moment clearly: okay. I surrender. I'm listening. I'm sufficiently humbled. I get it now — or at least, I get that I'll never fully get it, but I can keep aiming for the truth, for the light.

What I've described here is maybe 60% of what actually happened during that period. The rest I'm keeping to myself, because sharing it would mean sharing other people's private lives without their consent, and I won't do that.

The dust has settled, and I'm rebuilding — but differently than I ever have before. So many layers of who I thought I was have shed. So many identities have died. And there's a wisdom in me now that didn't come from retreats, or books, or hours of silence, though I've done plenty of all three. It came from being tested — pushed to the very edge of what I thought I could handle — and coming out the other side with a real understanding of what we're actually capable of.

I understand now, in my body and not just my head: how what exists on one layer of reality moves through every other layer. How our inner state is a spectrum we can learn to work with, not just something that happens to us. How much choice and agency we actually have, once we start dismantling the beliefs and limitations we were trained into.

We are so much more than we've been led to believe. My mission now is to help other people wake up to their own power, and find the same freedom I've found.