Returning With Water

For a long time, I kept parts of my story quiet.

People meet me today and see a calm woman running a small business in Encinitas, offering facials, talking about wellness and self-care. They see the present moment.

They don’t see the road behind it.

And that’s okay.

But with the news on Cornell, lately I’ve been in deep thought mode.. and I subsequently feel the responsibility to share my story to help you know it IS possible to heal- don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise, tries to disempower you, or asks you to outsource your own power in place of their healing you.

In spite of the faux gurus, I’ve been reflecting on how many good human beings helped me find my way back to myself when I had completely forgotten who I was. And I’ve realized something important.

Sometimes sharing the story is part of the healing.

Not because the story is extraordinary, but because someone else out there might need to hear that the path back to yourself is always possible.

Even when you’ve wandered very far away.

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Ten years ago, my life looked very different.

I had built what felt like my biggest dream into reality: I took my innovative food truck design and brought it to fruition, opening a manufacturing business in Chula Vista with in-house employees.

Blood, sweat, tears, and relentless belief.

It was everything to me.

But there was already a story behind that story.

I had been sexually assaulted in college.

Before the assault, I had been a straight-A student. Afterward, something changed in me. My ability to think, focus, plan, and trust myself seemed to disappear. It took years of work, meditation, healing, and slowly teaching myself that I was safe before I began to feel like I had reclaimed my intelligence and myself.

It took nearly ten years.

Right as my business launched, in 2016, I was sexually assaulted by someone I trusted. A neighbor.

I never told anyone.

I buried it because I believed nothing could get in the way of the dream I had fought so hard to build. I kept working. I kept pushing forward.

From the outside, everything looked like momentum.

But trauma doesn’t disappear just because we ignore it.

It waits.

Eventually, it begins to surface in ways we cannot control.

Inside, my world slowly started to unravel.

I stopped feeling safe. I couldn’t trust the people around me. Managing my team became impossible when I could barely manage my own mind. Around the same time, my relationship with my father fractured in ways that shook me deeply.

Eventually something inside me broke.

I let go of everything I had built.

Everything except one last food truck.

I couldn’t sell it. That truck represented my biggest dream. Letting it go felt like losing a piece of myself. So I stored it away, telling myself that one day I would come back to it.

But my mind and spirit collapsed further than I expected.

I ended up in a homeless shelter.

Even writing that sentence now feels surreal.

When people see me today, they don’t imagine that chapter. But homelessness can happen faster than most people realize.

Sometimes it isn’t laziness or addiction that brings someone there.

Sometimes it’s trauma. Sometimes it’s heartbreak. Sometimes it’s the collapse of everything you thought was stable.

I arrived there sober and determined to hold myself together.

I did my best to maintain a joyful persona to help boost the morale of the people around me. We passed time playing hacky sack and flying kites, but we also had to dodge predators who seemed to lurk at every corner, waiting for an opportunity to strike.

I learned how to become stronger there.

I knew these predators were watching, so I kept asserting myself when I wanted to hide. I kept being strong when I felt weak.

And when I lost the strength to fake it, I prayed.

Shelters can be frightening places. The stress and uncertainty wear down even the strongest people. After about thirty days, I remember feeling so overwhelmed by fear that my mind just wanted escape.

When you are living inside chaos and heartbreak every day, the mind looks for relief anywhere it can find it.

What saved me was vulnerability.

A friend had reached out. I hadn’t told anyone I was there, but suddenly I felt compelled to tell him everything.

He came immediately.

Picked me up. Helped me clean up.

And most importantly, reminded me of something I had forgotten:

Who I was.

And the potential that still lay before me.

Within days he convinced me to sell the last food truck and buy a one-way ticket to Bali.

Letting go of that truck was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It felt like surrendering the dream I had fought for with everything I had.

But sometimes letting go is exactly what opens the next chapter.

Three days later, I woke up on the other side of the world.

It was surreal. From the streets to what felt like a castle, almost overnight.

And strangely enough, the weeks that followed were some of the most beautiful moments of my life.

I had nothing left to lose.

No expectations. No plan.

Just the freedom to breathe again.

I felt brand new as I walked the streets of Bali, yet still smelled like cigarettes laced in grace and luck.

I knew I was lucky.

I couldn’t believe I was still alive.

Grateful is an understatement.

At the retreat where I stayed, they randomly assigned roommates and beds. When I walked into my room, my roommate had already chosen hers.

The other bed was mine by default.

On top of the bed sat a small locker key.

The number on it was 91585.

My exact birthday.

I am a total math nerd. This is probably my favorite moment in my entire life.

There is a .00001% chance that is a coincidence.

In that moment, I felt a huge reassurance that somehow I had been guided exactly where I needed to be.

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The years that followed were messy.

There were moments of deep spiritual clarity and moments when I wondered if I had completely lost my mind.

Healing rarely happens in a straight line.

It moves in waves.

And I wasn’t healing from one thing. I was carrying layers. Trauma from college. Trauma years later. The collapse of a business and an identity. Family wounds. Medical trauma. Homelessness. Fear.

Accumulated trauma can make a person wonder why they aren’t “over it” yet.

But perhaps the better question is:

How much have they actually survived?

I was also physically ill. I weighed 200 pounds and my body looked puffy from medication and all the stress hormones surging through me.

Eventually, my prayers for help led me back to Encinitas.

Ironically, I had been here once before, years earlier, driving my food truck around trying to keep the dream alive.

I had forgotten that memory until recently.

Back then, nearly 10 years prior, I remember now the night I wandered into the Meditation Gardens with my dog, completely broken. I placed my last twenty dollars into the donation box and prayed for healing.

I had no idea how that prayer would be answered.

But somehow, years later, I found my way back here again in 2020.

And this time, I stayed.

For the next 6 years and to present day, Encinitas became my anchor. My hope in love was also my anchor. I followed both with a tenacity, faith, and dedication I’d never known before.

Over the past six years, this community has quietly held me while I rebuilt myself piece by piece.

Through diligence, devotion, and a lot of personal work, I slowly became grounded again.

The people I met here were the loving and vulnerable containers I needed.

Thank you.

We spotted the monsters together. And somehow it felt like our hearts were all so big together that the negativity naturally dissolved.

I’ve watched us heal so many wounds together through intuition and pure love.

We all have a story here.

And so many of us are working incredibly hard to find better days after trauma.

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Today I live a life that once felt impossible.

I run a small business. I serve people in my community. I wake up with clarity instead of chaos in my mind.

Changing careers became part of my healing, too.

After years of trauma disconnecting me from my body, working with my hands in peaceful surroundings became an embodiment practice of its own. There was something deeply healing about creating serenity for other women while learning to feel safe and present in myself again.

I thought I was changing careers.

In many ways, I was returning home to myself.

And when I look back at the woman I used to be, I don’t feel shame.

I feel compassion.

She made mistakes. She held onto dreams too long. She probably appeared absolutely and unapologetically insane at times.

But she was also unbelievably brave.

And she was held by a community filled with grace and healing.

She kept going.

Even when everything in her life had collapsed.

⸻

That experience changed the way I see homelessness.

So often we imagine people on the streets as fundamentally different from ourselves.

But many of them are simply people whose lives collapsed faster than their support systems could catch them.

Sometimes all it takes to change the trajectory of someone’s life is one person extending a hand.

That’s what my friend did for me.

Even in my deepest drowning moments, I’ve had complete strangers reroute my entire life based on a single sentence they said.

And if you take the moment to at least try to redirect a lost soul, they might fear you or they might hear you.

To me, it’s worth continuing to try even when it seems like it’s falling on deaf ears.

A seed you plant today might become a garden tomorrow.

And that’s what communities can do for each other.

Ram Dass once said,

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

I believe that deeply.

We don’t need to carry each other forever.

But sometimes we can remind someone who they are when they’ve temporarily forgotten.

⸻

For survivors of trauma, I’ve learned something else.

Empowerment is medicine.

Healing does not come from pretending the past didn’t happen. It comes from reclaiming your voice, your strength, and your agency.

And perhaps the hardest lesson of all is learning how to let go.

Sometimes we hold onto dreams, relationships, or identities long after they have already served their purpose.

Letting go can feel like losing everything.

But on the other side of that surrender is something unexpected.

Freedom.

And the deep belief in one’s own self.

True empowerment is an anchor within that will never let you be completely lost again.

When I finally released the dream I had clung to for so long, life opened in ways I never could have planned.

Today I feel calm, grounded, and deeply grateful.

Grateful for the friend who lifted me when I couldn’t stand on my own.

Grateful for the community that embraced me even when they didn’t know the full story.

And grateful for the woman I used to be, who somehow kept walking forward through the darkest chapters.

If you are struggling right now, please remember this:

Your story is not finished.

The moment you are living in today is not the final chapter.

I pass onto you what strangers once told me:

This chapter is just “a blip on the radar.” And another moment that hit me like a ton of bricks: “You don’t belong here. Don’t stay too long and get sucked in.”

Sometimes the hardest thing we will ever do is let go of the life we thought we were supposed to have.

But when we do, we may discover the life that was waiting for us all along.

And if we’re lucky, we won’t walk that path alone.

We’ll walk each other home.