my story

A long read for anyone who needs proof that life can break you clean in half and you can still stand back up.

My life didn’t start with fire, but it didn’t start soft either. I grew up in a world where survival came before childhood. Trauma wasn’t something that happened once. It was the air I breathed. Men came and went. Some were gentle. Some were violent. My mother chased love she never could find. My father, the sweet one, loved us the best he knew how, but chaos had already rooted itself deep in our family.

By the time I was a teenager I had already learned the first truth that shaped my entire life. No one was coming to save me.

I became a mom way too young. I was still a kid myself trying to raise a baby in a world that had never raised me. I was neurodivergent before I even knew the word. ADHD. Dyslexia. Autism. CPTSD. A brain wired like a wildfire with nobody teaching me how to control the burn.

Then came the man who would almost kill me. He was older. I was vulnerable. That is how these things begin. What followed were years of abuse that I mistook for love because I had never seen anything different. And then one day, while I was holding my tiny baby with another one growing inside me, he shot me in the face.

There is before the gunshot and after. My life split down the middle that day.

Some people don’t survive trauma like that. I barely did. I woke up in a hospital bed with machines breathing for me, a bullet lodged in my neck, and a world that assumed I would go right back to the man who pulled the trigger.

And I did. Because that is what trauma does. It teaches you to normalize the unthinkable.

I survived, but I didn’t heal. Not yet. I ran. I hid. I chased safety that didn’t exist. And I unraveled.

I fell into addiction the way most people fall asleep. Slowly at first, then all at once. I wasn’t trying to get high. I was trying to get quiet. Trying to silence the memories. Trying to disappear without dying. Alcohol became my solution to everything. Joy. Pain. Fear. Loneliness. I was functioning on the outside, dying on the inside, pretending motherhood alone could save me.

It couldn’t.

I lost homes. Relationships. Jobs. Years I can never get back. And the worst pain of all was watching my kids get dragged through a storm they didn’t create. There were moments I didn’t recognize myself. Moments I was sure I wasn’t going to make it. Moments my kids deserved far more than what I could give.

Addiction turned my life into a revolving door. Jail. Rehab. Court. Trauma. Pain. Repeat. I was trying to outrun the past while the past was still living in my bones.

But rock bottom is where the truth finds you.One day I woke up and realized I was either going to die or I was going to change. And for the first time in my life I picked me. I picked my kids. I picked life.

I went to treatment, I fell a million times the first few years, but eventualy found and maintain sobriaty. I rebuilt myself from the absolute ground up. It was slow and ugly and confusing and painful, but it was the first time I ever chose myself with intention.

Fourteen years later, I’m still choosing.

Sobriety didn’t hand me peace. It handed me clarity. And clarity showed me the truth. I had reparations to make. Real ones. To my kids. To the people I hurt. To the girl I used to be. To the women still living the hell I walked out of.

So I started rebuilding my family one moment at a time. I learned to listen. To apologize. To stay. Logan my son, my daughter Destany and I rebuilt each other. We created art together because creativity gave us stability when nothing else did. Art saved us. Then we built a business. A mural company that gave my kids dignity, purpose, and a future. We didn’t just paint walls. We rebuilt lives.

My son grew into a steady, grounded man. My daughter found her voice through creating. We learned how to work together, live real life together, and rise together.

And somewhere in the middle of all that rebuilding, I met a man who loved me without trying to fix me. A man who gave me safety and softness. A man who helped me breathe. I call that part of my life icing. After everything I’d survived, finding love like that felt like a miracle. His little daughter, was the cherry on top of my messy little life.

But not everything gets tied up clean. Not every wound heals. My middle daughter, my T, has been missing from my life for years. Addiction took her the way it once tried to take me. She came home for a brief moments over the years. Sick. Fragile. Scared. In 2023 my heart cracked open all over again. I thought she was coming home, I thought it was our turning point. I thought we were going to get her back.

And then she disappeared again.Gone without a goodbye.Gone without a trace.

That is a kind of pain you don’t recover from. You just learn to walk with it.

Her absence follows me through every project, every mural, every journal entry. Every night, I light candles for things I can’t control. She is the reason the Vibe Recovery Co-op exists. She is the reason I show up for strangers the way I wish someone had shown up for her. She is the reason my story is not just mine.

Today my life looks nothing like the one I survived. I run a recovery community in San Marcos. A real one. A place where people rebuilding their lives can live with dignity. Where backgrounds don’t matter. Where relapse doesn’t mean eviction. Where we teach gardening and art and coping and community because healing takes more than meetings. It takes connection.

I run a business with my kids.I run a co-op with my community.I write.I podcast.I show up.

I’m not polished. I’m not fancy. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m a survivor who decided to stop surviving and start living. Everything I create now is a living amends. Every person I help is me reaching back for who I used to be.

This is my reparations chapter.This is the part of the story where the healing finally sticks.

I am forty eight years old, sober, stable, loved, and building something I never thought I’d have. A family that is finally safe. A community that is finally growing. A life that feels like mine.

And now I’m telling my story because someone out there is living the life I barely escaped.

If you’re reading this and you’re still in the storm, hear me.You can crawl out.You can rebuild.You can become someone you never believed you could be.

I’m not done evolving.I’m not done fighting.I’m not done rising.

This isn’t the end of my story.It’s the part where everything changes.

Thanks for following this wild adventure.

X-Rays: Description: These scans show the damage from the gunshot I survived as a young mother. The bright, solid mass you see near the base of my skull and upper neck is the bullet that entered my face and lodged itself deep in the cervical area. The surrounding white fragments are pieces of shattered bone and metal that spread on impact. You can see them scattered through the soft tissue and near the upper spine.

The bullet never left my body. It sits at the top of my neck, pressed into the area behind my jaw and under the skull. The placement is dangerous and impossible to remove without risking my life, which is why the surgeons made the choice to leave it there. The scans also show how close the path came to major arteries, the airway, and the spinal cord. A few millimeters in any direction and I wouldn’t be here today.

These images are the medical proof of what I lived through. They show the force of the injury, the trauma my body absorbed, and the violence I walked away from. I was holding my baby when this happened. I had another child growing inside me. These scans are not just pictures. They are a record of survival. They show the moment my life split in two and the reason my entire story changed course.