How I Came to Be Here

I've rewritten the beginning of this more times than I'd like to admit. Not because I don't know what I want to say. But because I'm not sure there's a clean way to explain how I came to be here.

My life has been beautiful. And my life has broken so many parts of me.

Both things are true. I have spent years in the wellness world. I became a yoga and Pilates instructor, a wellness coach, a breathwork facilitator. I studied the body, the nervous system, emotions, movement, healing.

I learned how to help people come home to themselves.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I needed to learn how to come home to myself, too. I was a wife. A mother. A coach. A teacher. A caretaker. A woman building a life.

I loved those identities.

But slowly, almost invisibly, I disappeared inside of them. And then life changed everything…

I lost my husband, Adam.

There is a version of me that existed before that day and a version of me who exists now. I don't think one is better than the other. But they are not the same woman. Death has a way of stripping life down to what is real. The things you thought mattered suddenly don't. The things you barely noticed become sacred. A morning, a song playing at exactly the right moment, someone laughing in another room, having a body that can move, a friend sitting beside you without trying to make anything better.

Being alive starts to feel like an extraordinary privilege. And strangely, the closer I came to death through losing someone I loved, the more intensely I began to feel life. That may be the greatest contradiction grief has given me.

I thought grief would only teach me about loss. Instead, it has taught me about living. I don't want to spend my life trying to heal anymore. For years, so much of wellness was about becoming better. And I still believe deeply in the practices that support us. Movement has carried me. Breathwork has carried me. Meditation, somatic work, journaling, community, nature, ritual — all of it has given me somewhere to put what sometimes felt impossible to hold.

But lately I've been asking myself a different question:

What if I'm not a project I need to work on?

What if there isn't some perfectly healed version of me waiting on the other side of enough work?

What if this version of me — grieving, joyful, complicated, sensual, uncertain, strong, exhausted, hopeful, sometimes completely lost — is already worthy of experiencing her life?

I don't want healing to become another way of postponing living… I want to dance, I want to travel, I want to laugh until my stomach hurts, I want to raise my children with presence instead of perfection, I want to sit at long tables with women who make me feel more like myself.

I want to fall in love with places, people, ideas and versions of myself I haven't met yet. I want to notice signs, I want to change my mind, I want to trust what I cannot control, I want to let life surprise me.

Maybe life isn't about being someone new, but about remembering who you are beneath everything you've carried. It's realizing you no longer want what you once begged for, releasing identities that once kept you safe, saying no without explaining yourself, saying yes before you have everything figured out.

It's understanding that grief and joy can exist at the same table — that I can miss Adam with every cell in my body and still feel excited about my future.

LIVING is not betrayal. JOY is not forgetting. Moving forward is not leaving anyone behind.

Instagram has given me a beautiful place to share the moments, but I want somewhere to share the spaces between them too… the thoughts that don't fit into a Reel, the things I'm still figuring out, and the conversations around grief, wellness, motherhood, womanhood, spirituality, identity, relationships, and creating a life that actually feels like mine.

I don't know exactly what this will become, and for once, I love that.

I spent so much of my life believing I needed to know where I was going.

Grief taught me otherwise.

Life unfolds whether we grip it tightly or meet it with open hands — and I'm learning to choose the open hands.

So this is me — opening up differently to everything life has to offer, with open arms and an open heart.

If you made it this far… WELCOME!

I'm so happy you're here — exploring this new version of expression.