— I know this from the inside.
— My Story —
I was the Good Girl
who didn’t make waves,
the one who knew
how to make herself useful
in service of everyone else’s happiness.
What I had built looked like adulthood from the outside. On the inside, it felt like a slow and disciplined disappearance. I had spent years making myself useful, self-controlled, and easy to keep around. I couldn’t have named it that way then. I only knew I felt farther and farther away from myself inside the life I was living.
At the time, I was piecing together a life that looked more stable than it felt to me. I was teaching photography and Art Appreciation as a part-time adjunct at multiple community colleges, carrying a full-time workload without the pay, benefits, or status of a full-time job. I had worked hard and followed the path I believed in, but I was growing disillusioned—not only with photography as a profession, but with the larger promise that meaningful work would add up to a financially sustainable life if I only kept working hard.
Grief was also a huge part of the landscape. I had lost my dad, and a few years later my mom was suddenly pulled from her independent life into a cascade of care needs that led to assisted living and later nursing care. It was a lonely kind of grief, made lonelier by the fact that most of my peers had not yet lost either parent, or if they had lost one, the other was still there to hold some part of the world steady. Whatever I was trying to build in work or love was happening inside that larger reality. By then, I was already living with a kind of exhaustion that was bigger than being busy, and quietly losing faith.
Then, in the span of a single month, two things happened that cracked the illusion. When travel threw my cycle off just enough to raise the possibility of pregnancy, my partner panicked and forced a choice: him, or the possibility of a family. In that same month, the full-time teaching position I had spent six years working toward went to someone fresh out of school who had never taught a single class.
I still remember packing up my teaching supplies after class while the guy who got the job stood at my desk telling me how nervous he was and that he had never taught a class. I remember summoning enough spunk to tell him, “Good luck,” before I left the room and walked to my next class.
With painful clarity, I could see how much of myself I had handed over to the ideas of stability, approval, and survival. I had become so devoted to keeping others happy, making myself useful, and making myself easy to keep around that I had abandoned so much of who I was.
I didn’t know what came next. But I knew I could no longer remain devoted to a life that required my disappearance.
That was the threshold.
The work I do now came out of that season: losing the life I thought I was building, grieving what I lost, and finding my way back to the parts of myself I had given up to survive.
And because this kind of crossing cannot be forced or formulaically fixed, the work I offer is not a blueprint for becoming someone else. It is a return to the self beneath the conditioning, the performance, and the survival patterns that once kept you safe.
