Raised in chaos.
Built in fire.

Rhode Island at 5. California at 9. Missouri at 16. Back to California at 17 — and then all the way through it for the better part of two decades. Aspen to Oceanside to Escondido to Carlsbad and eventually here, Arizona. I am a gypsy at heart. Not reckless. Responsive. I move when something calls, and something has been calling my whole life.

I was raised by a single mother in the 1980s who worked constantly just to keep a roof over our heads. She always did. But her time was the one thing she couldn't give me. So I raised myself, mostly. In my bedroom building fantasy worlds. On the street, teaching the neighborhood kids to dance. At 9, I was running what amounted to the apartment complex's unofficial dance school — choreography memorized like scripture, always in the center, always the one getting the special parts.

That feeling — of being prepared for something and rewarded with connection — I spent the next thirty years trying to find it again. I just didn't know yet that I'd have to build it myself.

I got pregnant at 20 by someone I knew was wrong for me. The red flags weren't just waving — they were on fire. But I stayed, because consistency, even painful consistency, felt better than the freefall of walking away from the only thing I had. What followed were years of survival. Bartending through nights so my mother could watch my daughter during the day. Relationships that looked like security from the outside and were something else entirely on the inside.

Three kids. Multiple co-parents. Moves every year or two. I lost jobs because no one showed up when they were supposed to. I rearranged everything — holidays, meals, bedtime — to absorb the chaos of people who moved through life without cleaning up after themselves. Eventually I stopped fighting for structure. I started floating. Or maybe it's more honest to say I drowned for a while.

I drank through some of it. Not because I was addicted to the alcohol — but because of what it gave me. It took me away from my pain. From my reality. From the version of my life I couldn't figure out how to fix yet.

It started before I had a name for it. I invented products to help my kids — including a corner-weighted blanket to keep strollers from flying away at the beach. I built a business called The Buzz Ladies specifically to get myself out of my own house when agoraphobia had me locked inside it. I taught myself web design, SEO, and digital marketing from the ground up — took the courses, got the certifications, became the fuel behind a digital marketing campaign that won multiple international awards.

I have tried corporate. Twice. Desperation took me there both times — I needed the lights back on, literally. I was a team lead. I delivered. But I couldn't play the game long enough to stay, and I finally stopped pretending I could. I quit when I realized that no amount of stability was worth becoming someone I didn't recognize in the mirror.

There were years my personal life was too chaotic to hold anything I was building. I spiraled in ways I'm still a little amazed I came back from. But I did come back. And when I did, I built differently — slower, more honest, more mine.

I live in Arizona now — the wash behind my house, the wide-open desert sky, a kitchen I actually cook in. My youngest is still home with me. I have three kids total. They are the through-line of every hard year and every good one.

My days look like: making something from scratch, writing something I actually mean, building something that doesn't exist yet. I am passionate about living without big-business intervention — knowing what's in what I put on my body and into it, learning from the land, making things by hand the way they used to be made. I am healing out loud, not because it's comfortable, but because I was so lost in the silence that I refuse to go back there.

I am growing stronger and closer to my best self every single day. Not in a straight line. In the only way that's ever been available to me — forward, honest, and completely my own.

Everything I build comes from something I've lived — not a trend, not a market gap someone told me to fill. A need I had, a gap I fell into, a thing I built for myself first and then couldn't stop sharing.