About

I almost missed my own life.

Not because anything catastrophic happened — though plenty has — but because I spent years being very, very good at everything except feeling at home in my own skin or truly connected to the people I loved most.

I grew up knowing how to get it right. Good grades, good behavior, the child who made things easier rather than harder. I learned early that love felt safer when I was useful, when I didn’t ask for too much, and when I felt responsible for everyone around me.

It worked. And it cost me everything it worked on.

By the time I was an adult I had a divorce, a separation, two daughters, a chemical engineering degree I never used, and a growing certainty that there had to be a way to actually live — not just perform living — in relationship with other people. I had been sacrificing aliveness for functionality my whole life. I was tired. And lonely.

So I went looking.

I trained formally — attachment theory, trauma healing, somatic work, platonic touch therapy, the Wheel of Consent, Relational Life Therapy. And I trained the other way too: in women’s circles and ceremony, in the kind of love that takes you further into yourself than you knew you could go, in grief that doesn’t resolve on schedule. I kept doing the work from the inside. I still do.

And then Life took everything I’d been learning and invited me to live it — all at once, at full volume, with no exits.

It began with my arms — both of them, breaking, one month apart. The second break was the real test. With both arms compromised, I could not get myself a glass of water. I could not take a shower alone. And the thing that undid me most wasn’t the pain — it was having to say, “I need help.” Having to risk being a burden. Having to depend on other people and being afraid of what it would cost.

I returned to a question that had been guiding me:

What if you knew that Life had sent this to me with surgical precision as an act of love and initiation? What would the gift be?

The gift of breaking my second arm became clear: Learn to receive. Stop white-knuckling your own care. You cannot pour from a place you’ve never allowed to be filled.

I didn’t master it. But I practiced it. And that question guided me through the gauntlet that followed — my mother’s death, my father dying under my care, love that took me further into myself than anything before it then broke my heart.

I came back not always into brightness and ease, but into a depth, a rootedness I hadn’t known before. I got to welcome the priestess, the dragon, and even the young exiled part who had learned that being big was dangerous, that her love was too much, and that staying small was the price of belonging. They all get a seat at the table now.

I tell you all of this not because my story is the point.

Your story is the point. You living the life you are here to live is the point.