It did not happen all at once.

It started with therapy. Then more therapy. Three rounds of EMDR. Reiki. Shamanic work. Not because I was broken. Because I was finally committed to finding the thing I could not see.

And what I found was this: every pattern I had been living traced back to a belief I had formed before I was old enough to question it. I am not important enough.

That was not a fact. It was a belief that other people placed on a little girl before she had the words to refuse it. Seeing it clearly did not fix everything overnight. But it gave me something I had never had before. A choice.

I have spent ten years doing this work. I am still doing it. And that ongoing commitment is what I bring to every stage I stand on and every client I work with.
The work is not a finish line. It is the most important practice of your life.

And it starts with one honest moment of stillness.

Learning to see my
blind spots

My life has been shaped by two very different realities.

The first was instability. I spent part of my childhood in foster care after my mother was deemed unfit to raise me. Eventually I lived with my father and grandmother, both of whom struggled with alcoholism. Along the way I experienced verbal, physical, and sexual abuse that left me questioning my worth for years.

The second was determination. Despite that start, I became the first person in my family to graduate from college. I joined the Army my senior year of high school and never looked back. Six years of active duty service, a deployment to Baghdad, and a position on the personal staff of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army at the Pentagon. After leaving the military I spent 18 years climbing the corporate ladder in the tech and manufacturing space, the last decade in senior leadership.

From the outside, the life looked successful.

And it was. But it was built on a foundation I had never examined.
I was running on survival mode so long I did not know what it felt like to stop. I managed everything, handled everything, and rarely stopped long enough to ask what I actually needed. My nervous system was on high alert so consistently that high alert felt normal.

That is what performing "fine" actually costs.

The life I built

My story