I’ve been a born advocate for as long as I can remember. I have a strong sense of justice and a long history of speaking up.

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When I was eleven, I saw a woman being assaulted in a churchyard in my hometown. Kids were throwing rocks at her and she was bleeding. I was furious at the cruelty. I ran for help. Then I went home and wrote a letter to the newspaper editor about what I had witnessed and the horror of such cruelty in the world. It was my first published work, entitled "What Would You Do?"

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I wanted new skills and to advance my education, but I never actually yearned to be a nurse. I went to nursing school during a time when I was so chronically ill I felt I might be dying. It was a last stand of sorts—a way to prove to myself that I could do something I wasn't' sure I could. If I could complete one thing before I go...

 

But my relationship with health and healing began long before nursing school. I grew up in a  non-religious, nature-based household where crystals and sweat lodges were considerably more familiar than church and medication. Homeopathy, whole foods, and traditional approaches to health were part of my world long before I was giving blood thinners or knew how to put in a Foley catheter.

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I’ve spent more than twenty years moving between conventional healthcare, holistic health, mental and behavioral health, advocacy, education, entrepreneurship, and writing. I’m interested in what happens where those worlds intersect—and especially in what gets lost in the gaps between systems, experts, and the actual people trying to find their way through them. I notice where people get lost in the machinery, where things don’t quite add up, and where the lived experience is infinitely more complex than the boxes, categories, and labels we use to make sense of people and things.

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And I write. I’ve been writing since I could hold a pencil. Once I discovered that writing was a way to say what I thought, to make my interior legible, there was no going back.

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