Wild Roots: The Path That Brought Me Here

This isn't a job... It's a calling carved into my bones

Long before I had a title, or a website, or a price point, I was doing this work.

I was the high school friend who my classmates joked would become "a slutty lounge singer by night and motivational speaker by day." They weren't wrong about the essence. I've always been the one who sees both the shadow and the light, who can speak truth with enough honey to make it go down easy.

I was the stranger on the next barstool over who somehow became a mirror for people to remember who they were beneath their collected identities. The one whose casual conversation somehow led to life decisions being unmade and remade by closing time.

I was the manic pixie dream girl who received messages from her ex-lovers that began with "you taught me..." and "you helped me see..."

I was the hairstylist whose chair became an unofficial confessional booth for 13 years, where customers would reveal the parts of themselves they showed nowhere else. Listening. Witnessing. Reflecting back to them the courage and wisdom they already carried.

I've been a professional mentor for over a decade, helping people liberate themselves from inherited narratives that have nothing to do with who they are, what they truly want, or what it looks like to live well. I've guided clients through career transitions, relationship reckonings, creative awakenings, and identity transformations, always with an eye toward what truly matters beneath surface-level goals.

Through all these conversations - whether in salon chairs, bar stools, or coaching sessions - a pattern emerged. The places where people felt most stuck weren't merely external barriers but internal landscapes colonized by a world that profits from our disconnection, perpetuates impossible standards that make us feel less than, and champions the myth of more at the cost of our sanity and health.

I witnessed the quiet confusion in eyes that had reached the summit only to find emptiness where fulfillment was supposed to be. I heard the tremor in voices recounting achievements that looked impressive on paper but felt hollow in the marrow. I felt the unnameable grief when someone finally whispered what they'd been afraid to admit: that the life they'd built with such effort didn't actually belong to them.

Some constraints wore practical disguises: "My family depends on this paycheck." "I've spent fifteen years building this career." "What would people think if I walked away now?"

But beneath these were the deeper entanglements – the ways foreign values had become mistaken for personal truths: "I keep reaching the goals that were supposed to fulfill me, but the fulfillment never comes." "I'm exhausted from striving for outcomes I'm not even sure I want." "When I'm honest, I don't know who I'd be without these things to define me." "I'm afraid the real me might want something so different it would undo everything I've built."

I recognized these prison bars because I'd built many of them myself.

My own path of undomestication

For much of my life, I alternated between rejecting the system entirely and trying to contort myself to fit within it. I found both 'success' in capitalism's terms and spectacular 'failures' as well. I built the white picket fences and crafted the promised lands with my bare hands. I chased external validation while secretly knowing it would never be enough.

I've worn the golden handcuffs and the invisible leash. I've tasted the hollow victory of achievements that never land in the body. I've felt the flavor of exhaustion that comes from living someone else's definition of value, success, and responsibility.

I've wandered down dogmatic paths that masqueraded as freedom but were nothing of the sort: spiritual bypassing, manifestation culture, toxic positivity, hustle ideology. I've survived the particular heartbreak of realizing that what promised liberation was just another pretty cage.

The real breakthroughs came through experiences of losing everything that propped up my sense of worth: the income, the lifestyle, the possessions, the attention. These were the kind of reckonings that strip a gal bare and leave her standing in a field of charred remains, face to face with only herself. In that rubble, kissing the dust, I've found what couldn't be taken: my intrinsic, non-negotiable value as a living being on this earth; my most valuable asset. I became no longer willing to let the machine steal it and sell it back to me as gilded carrots dangling on sticks that grow like Pinocchio's nose.

That's when the real undomestication began.

I've studied power, hierarchy, and the insidious systems we dwell within, not as abstract concepts but as lived reality. I've schooled myself on the psychology of human behavior through rigorous research and in the raw classroom of experience. I've devoted myself to unanchoring my self-worth from money, detaching value from productivity, and questioning every "should" I've ever swallowed.

This work breaks you open before it puts you back together. It's messy and nonlinear. It doesn't photograph well for Instagram, but it leads to a kind of freedom that can't be packaged or sold; the freedom that comes from remembering what your body always knew before the world taught you to forget.

Why this matters now

We're living in the late stages of a system devouring itself, like a snake eating its tail. The old maps don't work anymore, the promises have fallen flat, and the rewards for compliance are shrinking while the costs keep rising.

More and more people are waking up to the emptiness of achievement without meaning, success without sovereignty, wealth without wellbeing.

This isn't just personal pain, it's a collective reckoning. And in this moment of unraveling, we have an opportunity to remember a different way of being human. One that honors our wild nature, our deep belonging to the earth, our need for authentic connection over accumulation.

This work of undomestication and liberation from gilded cages is the most important work I can imagine doing right now. I can feel it in my bones... this is what I'm here for.

Not to sell freedom as a product, but to walk alongside others as they remember it's their birthright.

Not to offer a five-step system for success, but to create space for the beautiful, messy complexity of becoming real again.

Not to position myself as having all the answers, but to ask better questions. To listen. To witness. To reflect back the wisdom that's already there beneath the noise.

If something in these words calls to you - if you feel a recognition beyond logic - I invite you to trust that knowing. The wild in me recognizes the wild in you, even if it's been sleeping for a long time.

It's never too late to remember.

If you're ready to explore what liberation from these systems might look like in your own life, I offer private mentoring for those who find themselves on the dusty road of remembering.