My work is deeply personal to me—it comes not only from years of clinical training, but from having lived through my own dark night of the soul. In my early 30s I burned out working in a fast-paced healthcare environment, caught in cycles of perfectionism and anxiety. Eventually I crashed and got sick—really sick. Beyond debilitating back pain and migraines, my ability to focus on even simple tasks became almost non-existent. The thought of responding to a day’s worth of emails would often send me into a spiral of anxiety, frustration, and tears. Over time, stress ultimately exposed an underlying condition: Lyme disease.

The truth was, other than my mother, I was the only person who knew how sick I was becoming—how quickly I was deteriorating. I bounced from doctor to doctor, not knowing who to trust or where to turn.​ And the hardest part was not what I was going through—it was the judgment from people in my life. Because at the time, Lyme disease wasn't understood or taken seriously and I was often met with judgment about why I couldn't work or why I was so dependent on my family. ​

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At a certain point, I stopped trying to explain myself and turned inward. I came to understand that I had unconsciously chosen this path for my own evolution. I came to understand that life isn’t about having the perfect job, relationship, or family—it’s about learning to embody the emotional states we believe those things will give us: freedom, connection, and joy, regardless of what our external life looks like. And as I began to embody those emotions, my life started to reflect them back to me in ways I could have never planned.​