A Deeper Look Into My Own Story: Loss, Grief and Becoming
A Few Words Before I Begin
Before I share my story, I want to pause and acknowledge you.
If you’re here reading this, you’ve given your time and your attention to something personal. Whether or not our paths ever cross beyond this page, that matters to me. I don’t take it lightly.
I don’t believe people arrive places by accident. Being here says something about you. About a part of you that senses there is more available. More ease. More joy. More aliveness than whatever you might be navigating right now. Even if that knowing feels faint or buried, it’s still there.
I’m sharing my story not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s human. And because I know how easy it is to feel lost inside your own life.
My Story
For much of my early life, survival was the organizing principle.
I grew up as an only child with young parents struggling with addiction. Chaos, instability, and fear were part of the landscape. My father died by suicide. My mother’s addiction led to periods of homelessness, poverty, and abuse. From a very young age, I learned how to stay alert, how to adapt, how to endure.
Somewhere along the way, survival turned into striving.
I became determined to escape the life I came from. I followed the script that promised safety and success. I excelled academically, earned a doctorate in clinical psychology, built a successful practice, and created a life that looked solid from the outside.
Inside, it was a different story.
Despite my professional training, I was deeply disconnected from myself. My relationship with food and my body was fraught and disordered. My marriage was unraveling. I was exhausted from holding everything together and quietly ashamed that, of all people, I couldn’t seem to fix my own life.
In 2017, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Watching her decline forced me to confront something I could no longer ignore. The systems I had worked within were not designed to hold the full complexity of human suffering. They treated symptoms, not lives. Bodies, not histories.
After my mother died, grief cracked me open. I began exploring healing in ways I never had before, including working with plant medicines and psychedelics. These experiences didn’t “fix” me, but they did something just as important. They showed me that healing is not linear, singular, or owned by any one modality. There are many doorways back to ourselves.
I began to understand that what I was searching for couldn’t be found by mastering one system or another. Healing had to be relational. Embodied. Honest.
The Breaking Point
In 2021, a series of administrative errors, still largely unexplainable to this day, resulted in the loss of my licensure as a psychologist.
What makes that moment even harder to explain is that the year before, I had already told myself, and my clients, that I would not be renewing my license. I believed I was choosing something new, as I was fully committed at that time to my online business, where I coached therapists on how to build a successful private practice. I believed I was walking away with clarity. And yet, when it was taken from me in the way it was, the impact landed far deeper than I expected.
It wasn’t just professional. It was existential.
Even though I had made the decision to step away, losing my license triggered a level of shame and fear that caught me completely off guard. That piece of paper held far more of my identity and worth than I had realized. Without it, I felt exposed, unmoored, and suddenly unsure of who I was allowed to be in the world.
With time, I can see that this loss didn’t stand alone. It landed on top of years of grief that I had never fully let myself feel.
I had lost my marriage and the life I once thought I was building, even though leaving was the right choice. I had lost my mother, even though our relationship had been fractured and complicated for most of my life. And now, I had lost my professional identity and my livelihood in a way that felt public, disorienting, and deeply personal.
At the time, I didn’t have language for how much I was carrying. I kept moving. I kept functioning. Like I’ve always done. And, don’t get me wrong, there were absolutely moments of real joy in that season, including the most beautiful wedding day I could have imagined. But joy and grief are not opposites. They can coexist. And they did.
It would take me years to understand just how much loss lived inside that decade of my life.
But my body understood it before I did.
After stepping away from my psychology practice, my body collapsed in ways I couldn’t ignore.
Over the course of two years, I experienced unexplained weight gain, severe anxiety, brain fog, chronic fatigue, and dangerously low blood sugar. I did everything I had been taught to do. I sought medical care. I followed recommendations. And still, no one could tell me what was actually wrong.
There were moments where my blood sugar was so low, I was afraid I wouldn’t survive it. Afraid of what would happen to my children if I didn’t.
Out of necessity, I began dismantling much of what I thought I knew about health. I studied metabolism, blood sugar regulation, and physiology with a level of urgency that only fear can bring. Slowly, through trial, error, and deep, deep listening, my body began to stabilize.
That experience changed me.
It made it impossible to believe that human health could be reduced to isolated systems or singular explanations. It also showed me how easily people fall through the cracks when their suffering doesn’t fit neatly into a box.
Transformed by my own health crisis, and in awe of a newfound love for nutrition and the role it played in my story, I returned to school to pursue formal training in nutrition and integrative health, not because I wanted another credential, but because I needed language and structure for what I was already living.
And yet, even there, I encountered limitations. New boxes. New blind spots. New ways of fragmenting the human experience.
When I returned to school, I genuinely believed functional medicine would be the place where everything finally came together. I imagined myself running labs, analyzing data, uncovering hidden patterns, and designing precise nutritional protocols based on what the body revealed. I loved the complexity of it. The mystery. The critical thinking. The problem-solving. It felt alive and intellectually honest in a way I had been craving.
For a while, it was exhilarating.
But slowly, something familiar began to surface. Beneath the language and the labs, I recognized the same structure I had spent my life inside of. Identify the problem. Name it. Fix it. Treat it. Even with the best intentions, even with more sophisticated tools, the orientation was still the same.
Diagnose and treat.
Functional medicine had given itself a new name, a broader vocabulary, and a promise of hope that conventional medicine no longer held. But at its core, it often asked the same question: What’s wrong, and how do we correct it?
What it rarely made room for was the emotional, relational, and existential terrain that lives inside the body. The history. The meaning. The ways people learn to control food, optimize health, or chase healing as a way to feel safe in their lives.
I began to see how easily a new system can become another place to perform wellness. Another place where people try to be compliant, perfect, and “good,” just this time with supplements, protocols, and lab results.
Once again, I couldn’t make myself fit.
Where I Am Now
Today, I live and work from a place that is far less certain and far more honest.
I don’t believe healing is about optimization, fixing, or arriving somewhere final. I believe it’s about relationship. The relationship you have with your body, with your emotions, with your history, with yourself. Every aspect of our life asks us to be in relationship, and when we tend to our life through this lens, honest change can happen.
I share my story because I know how lonely it can feel to carry pain quietly. To look more than capable on the outside while feeling completely lost on the inside. To keep searching for the thing that will finally make you feel whole.
This work isn’t something I teach from a distance. It’s something I live into every day. My life has been shaped by loss, resilience, collapse, and rebuilding. And because of that, I hold other people’s stories with deep respect.
If you’re here because something in you is tired of striving, fixing, or performing wellness, I see you.
You’re not broken, and you never have been.
You’re not too late, because it’s never too late to make a different choice.
And you’re not alone.
This story is still unfolding. And if nothing else, I hope sharing mine reminds you that yours is allowed to unfold too.