Before I became a coach and consultant, I spent more than two decades building a career in higher education, leadership, and social justice. I led institutions. I mentored emerging leaders. I advocated for women's rights, immigrant rights, and children's rights. I served as an advocate in Texas and a community organizer. I was a professor, a director, and an academic who loved the work deeply.

​

And then, in the span of a few years, almost everything fell away at once.

​

A season of profound loss arrived; illness, endings, grief, and injustice all converged. My health. My marriage. My home. My career. My identity. Roles I had carried for decades dissolved almost overnight. Professor. Partner. Leader. All of it.

​

What followed was not a clean, linear recovery. It was fire and water meeting in a violent, generative collision that produced something neither fire nor water could create alone.

​

In that crucible, I remembered who I was before the roles. I returned to the wisdom of my ancestors. I rebuilt. Not to who I was before, because that person no longer existed, but to something truer, deeper, and more aligned than anything I had built in the seasons when I was still discovering the full magnitude of who I am.

​

I am still in that crossing. Almost on the other side. And it is precisely because I am still in it that I can guide others through theirs with radical honesty, earned compassion, and the kind of presence that only comes from having been there yourself.