Suffering in silence meant showing the world I had it all together. I didn’t need anyone. People respected me. I was a responsible, intelligent, and trustworthy leader. There was an angst, that something was wrong. The distance between internal truth and external strength was enormous.

I had studied Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, and followed leaders in mindset and spirituality. Still, no matter how deep I went, I hit the same wall. The pain was too great to face—until life forced me to. It became a choice: see the truth or die.

At the core of my struggle was the belief: I am unlovable. I carried it from the womb, where I absorbed my mother’s fear about money as rejection. Her actions reinforced it—like the day she left me out of her Will despite promising everyone would be included. Unworthiness became my shadow. “Why bother?” became my mantra. For years, I flirted with suicide, convinced no one would care if I was gone.

Both my parents beat me. At 11, my father caught me playing with matches. He whipped me with a leather belt until I collapsed against the refrigerator, while my mother stood by, silent. I lost count of the blows, but I remember the shame of neighborhood kids watching from the backyard. When he demanded an answer, I finally whispered, “Because I was fascinated.” He stopped. Days later, I saw my bruised body in the bathwater and thought, How could you do this to your little girl? In that moment, he stopped being my father. He became a monster.

The next time he came after me, I stood my ground. “If you ever touch me again, I’ll call the police. I have the bruises to prove it.” He threatened to rip the phone from the wall. I said, “I’ll use my friend’s.” He backed down. At eleven years old, I became the protector of my siblings. The rage I carried from then on was mislabeled by others as “anger.”

I grew up never feeling safe. I trusted no one, always looked over my shoulder, and feared rape without understanding why. That drive for safety shaped my choices—I became a paralegal to argue, predict, and prepare for every possible threat.

Marriage, I thought, would bring security. Instead, I married a man just like my father: an alcoholic, jealous, controlling, with a violent temper. The day after the wedding, I knew it was a mistake. Years later, he cheated, blamed me, and the marriage collapsed.

Divorced and broken inside, I still wore the mask of strength. I helped others, smiled, carried responsibility—while inside I was raging, bitter, crying, and wishing for death. The disconnect had only grown wider.

I turned to angels and spirit guides for companionship. They loved me when I felt no one else did. They whispered to me when the world was cruel. I devoured self-help books and seminars, but always felt the real answers were being withheld, sold at impossible prices.

In 2008, I moved to Chicago and began writing the Dancing Souls trilogy, a spiritual allegory of awakening. Those books captured the process of remembering that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. They were the wake-up call, the roadmap of my unfolding awareness.

Yet even as I wrote them, the deepest piece was still missing.

It wasn’t until years later, through a 1:1 Alignment Session, that I finally uncovered my unmet need: safety. For decades, I had tried to create it for others—saying “You’re safe” to people and animals—without realizing I was soothing my own wound. Then came the realization: safety is an illusion. Spirit cannot be harmed. I had always been safe. I was never alone. That truth closed the lifelong gap between my inner reality and the mask I wore.

Alignment transformed everything. I rebuilt my podcast, The Journey of an Awakening Spirit, into an authentic expression of who I am. I shifted how I led, how I made decisions, how I treated others. Opportunities began flowing. I stepped fully into my work of helping others release their burdens, rediscover their worth, and align with who they truly are.

And then, as if life itself was confirming that the circle was complete, my father died the day before this final chapter was due to the publisher. The very man whose violence had fractured my sense of safety left this world at the exact moment I claimed it back.

The Dancing Souls trilogy was the awakening process. It was the journey into the dark night, the wrestling with shadows, the remembering of who we are. But this chapter—this story—became the homecoming. The missing piece finally revealed itself, and with it, I returned to myself.