The story is the credential.
I'm 39, and I live in Brooksville, Florida, with my daughter Valentina, who is 8 and wiser than most adults I know.
I left a narcissistic marriage with sole decision-making authority for her and a journal full of timestamps. That sentence took me years to be able to write without shrinking. I write it now because somebody needs to hear it.
In the meantime — in the same years I was rebuilding from the studs — I built a florist. A real estate brokerage with 30+ properties under management. Two boutique hotels, the Blue Bayou Inn and the Meranova Guest Inn. A microschool out of my garage called Hope Grove Girls Circle. And then a national accelerator that has now reached 300+ microschool founders across the country.
I'm Dare to Lead trained under Brené Brown's framework. I'm a graduate of the Jim Moran Institute Entrepreneur Cohort. I have a balloon mortgage, a Solo 401k, and an identity theft situation I'm still untangling in real time. I don't hide the hard stuff. I learned the hard way that pretending it isn't there is what keeps you stuck in it.
Why I do this work.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I said the sentence out loud that became the spine of everything: I have always been chasing my worth with all my life changes. The renovations, the launches, the new businesses, the new chapters — they were the receipt I was trying to hand the room as proof of being enough.
"You Are Magic" wasn't coined in a branding session. It came out of me, the way the real things do — in the middle of a sentence I wasn't planning to say, to a woman who needed to hear it. The memoir came the same way. So did the founder program. So did this site.
One through-line.
The memoir series — Before You Knew Better — and the coaching, and the founder accelerator, and the content services people hire me for: they are all the same work. They are all me handing you the thing I had to make from scratch because nobody handed it to me. Systems if you're building a business. Truth if you're building a self. Words if you've forgotten how to say what you mean.
I'm not the most polished person in the room. I am, almost always, the most capable one. I'd rather be useful than impressive. And I'd rather meet you in the actual mess you're in than pretend either of us has it all figured out.
If you've made it this far down the page, I think you already know you're in the right place.