I get asked the same questions a lot. This is a brief history of not landing softly. I share it for anyone who recognizes parts of themselves here, so you know it isn’t your fault, and you’re not alone.
My past is layered.
There isn’t one clear explanation for who I am.
I was born in 1984 in New England to young parents. They divorced when I was four, and I became the messenger in their conflict. Everything ran through me. I learned early to manage adults, to adapt, to anticipate reactions. I didn’t develop a stable sense of self. I learned to become what was needed.
That may have been my first experience of rebuilding my life. Whatever had existed prior was taken away, and my new normal was managing the people around me.
My skills in becoming what was needed didn’t always translate well to school and social situations. I resisted rigid systems and arbitrary authority. I asked questions, which weren’t rewarded. My health issues were dismissed as attention-seeking: weak joints, frequent bruising, and chronic ENT problems. I was often told to keep going.
Performance became an outlet.
By 10, I was obsessed with old Hollywood and theater. By 12, I was emceeing school events. By 13, I found a sense of belonging on stage.
The purity of that didn’t last. Around the same time, I experienced an intense early attachment I now understand as limerence, while my father planned to move me two states away. He made me promise not to tell my mother. I carried that alone for nearly a year. My chronic headaches began around then, as well. They were attributed to my menstrual cycle and quickly forgotten.
My father and I moved to a remote area in the White Mountains during his second divorce. We lived in a one-room apartment attached to an abandoned farmhouse. I was isolated and anxious, and again felt responsible for everything.
At 14, after prolonged bullying and being left alone at home for a week, I assaulted a boy. He was hospitalized. I was arrested and placed on juvenile probation. Then, I began failing classes, despite having nothing but time on my hands. Still, no one asked any questions about my home life or mental state. If I wanted things to change, I had to do it myself.
At 16, I tried living with my mother. It lasted less than two months. After a trivial argument about me being in the shower too long, I left with a garbage bag of clothes and returned to my childhood home, now occupied by other relatives. My mother didn’t call or try to find me. I lied to my school district about my living situation. My father supported the lie in order to let me live separately from him. I didn’t feel wanted anywhere.
During that time, I started drinking.
I missed over 60 days of my junior year and was briefly hospitalized for mental health reasons. I even tried to admit myself, but as a minor, I couldn’t without parental consent. I was estranged from one, and the other was 250 miles away. At the conclusion of that school year, my family told me to live somewhere else, advising me to simply go back to the farmhouse with my father, not understanding what the living conditions truly were.
At 17, I stayed with a friend’s family until it became clear I wasn’t welcome. Her parents had been very kind, but my friend had not offered out of real kindness. After that, I rotated between sleeping in my car and a moldy hotel room where I worked. I was exhausted and hallucinating from lack of sleep.
Eventually, my former stepfather’s parents took me in. They didn’t have to, but they did. Years later, I learned I had effectively been a runaway who avoided the system. It was the first time I had language for those years as a teen.
I graduated from high school in 2002 with a 1.9 GPA. The high school treated me (and kids like me) as a problem to manage, not a student to support. An advisor told me I would never amount to anything without a four-year degree, then dismissed me when I had no way to pursue one.
I went to community college and reconnected with theater. For the first time in years, I believed I could rebuild on something solid.
That belief took me to Los Angeles to rebuild my life.
I got there through a corporate university program later found guilty of misrepresentation. Many campuses closed mid-enrollment, but I stayed and finished. I worked in restaurants, earned my BFA in 2007, and that same month, I started stripping at a x-rated club in Culver City.
It was practical. It paid. During the 2008 recession, it gave me stability. I earned enough to cover expenses, pay down debt, and stay afloat.
In 2009, after being pushed out of a club when an owner didn’t care for my body type, I moved into private sex work, specializing in fetish services. It was risky and unstable, but I at least I controlled my earnings.
Around that time, a daytime talk show approached me. They claimed they wanted to help. They didn’t. I thought the story was about the economics of overeducated 20-somethings in a recession. Why else would a college graduate with no kids, no drug habit, and no pimp be in sex work?
Their theme was actually demonizing Craigslist as a place for sex work. My story was reshaped into something more convenient to fit their narrative. I wasn’t clued in before taping, and I wasn’t paid to appear. Producers resented why I hadn’t been more emotional during the taping, as if that was what they had “cast” me for. The “resources” they offered were superficial or false. They never meant to help.
My family saw the episode.
I was blamed and shamed. No one asked about the reasons why or the reality of what was happening. At the same time, I was dealing with harassment at my apartment complex. A dispute escalated, and I was targeted by management. Under pressure, I reacted with rage. It echoed what had happened when I was 14. I was arrested again and spent 48 hours in jail. I later completed anger management through the court system.
That combination—legal trouble, public exposure, instability—pushed me to leave the West Coast. I returned to New England and tried to rebuild my life on something more stable. I attempted to reconcile with my mother. It didn’t work. Seven more years of estrangement followed.
On paper, things improved. I worked in customer service, then finance, eventually managing a $1 million scholarship fund at an Ivy League institution. I met someone. I felt like what rebuilding your life is supposed to feel like.
In reality, I wasn’t stable enough to sustain it. I had a panic attack at work and quit. I took another role at a major publisher that lacked structure, which triggered many of my same fears of being out of control. I left within weeks, convinced I would be exposed.
I leaned further into audio work.
By 2017, I transitioned into commercial voice work and built a consistent portfolio. I was rebuilding my life again, mostly professionally, and slower this time.
I also became very involved in special event live performance. I married my partner. We built a life together. Unfortunately, both of us struggled with alcohol dependency.
After our wedding, my drinking escalated. I was diagnosed with PTSD and began trying to get sober. I was open about it professionally with my colleagues and management, mostly for practical reasons. We often worked around alcohol. Initial support didn’t last.
The performance environment became exploitative. I worked without pay under unclear arrangements, and was even encouraged to collect unemployment while illegally working full-time hours with one studio. At the same time, other creative partnerships collapsed, and smear campaigns circulated about me in the local creative scene each time I walked away from upholding the unspoken agreements.
I kept encountering the same pattern: unstable environments, abuse of power, and substance issues. I started focusing on a hard question I’d been asking since I was a child.
Am I the problem?
I always felt like I was in the way. That I caused the conflict I found myself buried in.
I began EMDR therapy during COVID. It helped me take a step back and see patterns more clearly. Around that time, I stopped speaking to my father. What started as space became permanent distance. I have slowly accepted that I was never a priority to him. In a drastic role reversal, he has often only utilized me when he needs something.
As I improved, my husband declined. His drinking escalated, and our home became unstable. I couldn’t trust what was real. I kept trying to fix it.
He eventually entered rehab. I drove him there. Listening to him minimize the situation while I knew the dangerous reality, clarified many things.
In December 2023, we sold our home. I left.
I moved to Tennessee to stay with a close relative. Within 90 days, I realized it wasn’t safe or stable. I left and cut off most of that side of my father’s family. I had been writing under this name, a pseudonym, and they attempted to doxx me, even making a fake IG account and friending my contact list, posting their oun rebuttals to my experiences. This relative even filed for an order of protection, which was dismissed, as I wasn’t contacting her or identifying any of these people in my public writings.
Over the next year, I moved through temporary housing, which was hugely draining on the resources I’d tried so hard to protect. In 2025, I attempted a structured move to Missouri in exchange for housing and caretaking for a medical professional. It collapsed due to dishonesty and unsafe conditions, requiring police involvement for me to leave. This, of course, drained even more resources.
Adding more insult and injury, during that move, a fraudulent moving company extorted money and damaged or stole around $20,000 of my belongings. I am still pursuing legal action. This is a new version of rebuilding my life I haven’t experienced before.
As I was moving forward to rebuild yet again, life shifted in a way I never anticipated. My husband, from whom I had separated, passed away in April, 2026.
Grief is complicated under the best of circumstances. Grieving someone you loved deeply, while also grieving the life you hoped to have together and acknowledging the realities that ended the marriage, is something else entirely. I knew this was a possibility, but never expected it this soon, and I never expected it to happen now. I never expected him to refuse medical care at the end. I felt so angry. I felt so helpless. There are no clean narratives for losses like that. There is only learning to carry both love and truth at the same time.
His death forced me to confront another difficult reality: endings do not arrive in the ways we imagine. Often, there is no final conversation, no future reconciliation, no opportunity to rewrite the story. There is only acceptance, grief, and the decision to continue living.
I returned to our home state to clean out his apartment, the remaining belongings that we had accumulated together, and hold his services. It may have been the most difficult thing I had ever done. Certain key people showed up, and the rest I had to do by myself. I wish I could have helped him. I wish I could have known more of what he needed, but I don’t think he knew himself.
There’s a pattern I can’t ignore.
Many of the most unstable environments I entered involved substance abuse and exploitation, starting from when I was born and right up to the moving scandal I experienced in 2025. Had social tools or safety systems been in place for any of my caretakers, peers, or me, any number of my outcomes could have been drastically different.
As of 2026, I live in the coastal South. I’m rebuilding my life again, this time with more clarity. I’m focused on my health, which now shows signs of autoimmune and neurological issues that went unrecognized for years.
I’m also continuing to build my work in voice, performance, and design, with a clearer understanding of what I will and won’t tolerate.
So what will you find here?
Social commentary shaped by lived experience. Observations about systems that fail people. Reflections on trauma, identity, and behavior. Thoughts on money, power, sex, and art.
If any of that resonates, you’ll probably feel at home here.
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