Why?….because life doesn’t pause for mystical experiences. And because I was not going to be someone who had extraordinary inner experiences and nothing to show for it.
So I built things. Real things. In the real world.
I became an office manager across multiple industries — utilities, restaurants, government projects. I learned early that systems either serve people or they don’t, and that the difference matters enormously. I became a full charge bookkeeper, and as a chamber of commerce member, I helped build local businesses from the ground up, and watched what made some thrive while others quietly collapse under the weight of improper structure.
I managed high-end construction projects as a General Contractor Project Manager — in San Francisco and on the Las Vegas Strip — coordinating complexity, holding vision under pressure, learning that the most important thing on any project is rarely what’s on the blueprint.
I built websites and designed business systems, and I stay current with technology not because I have to but because I genuinely love it — the way it extends what’s possible, the way it keeps changing the rules.
I was displaced by two hurricanes and rebuilt from scratch — twice.
I raised a daughter who earned her master’s in business and runs her own successful company. That one matters to me in ways that go beyond pride. It means something was transmitted — about resilience, about possibility, about what a woman can build.
I’ve lived all over this country and kept going, kept getting back up and brushing myself off.
I am active, healthy, and deeply in love with the natural world — not as a hobby but as a practice. Nature is where I do my clearest thinking, my deepest listening, and my most honest living.
Through all of it — the building and the dismantling, the succeeding and the starting over — I experienced my nervous system crash and rebuild itself. I followed intuition before it made sense. I learned through lived experience how meaning, biology, belief, and embodiment intertwine to create lasting change.
I’ve also watched what happens to people — and to myself — when we abandon that truth in favor of what the world says success should look like.
I’ve been a success by every measure society uses to define the word.
And here is what I know about that, with absolute certainty:
I’ve done all the things society said needed to be done. I’ve been a success. And it was a shallow victory without the magic.