I have struggled with myself for a very long time. I think it’s because I am a Virgo. We are perfectionists, after all. I have tried very hard to be good enough, pretty enough, thin enough. The nineties get glamourized, but if you think people are skinny now, you’d lose your mind at the bone-thin normalization back then. “Heroin chic,” they called it. Jessica Simpson, a size four, was scrutinized. That’s the kind of pressure we grew up with—simpler in some ways, but with far less accountability, far less protection.
I grew up an elder millennial, shaped by the expectation that if you just did everything right, everything would fall into place. But as a middle child, I never felt like I did anything right. There was always something to improve, something to fix, something to shrink or reshape. Over time, that expectation became internalized. It stopped being something the world said to me, and started being something I said to myself.
So it makes sense that I have always felt like I had to keep becoming something. I’ve been incredibly hard on myself, trying to meet each version of “enough” as it shifted in front of me. I worked as a preschool teacher, learning patience, structure, and care. I moved into administrative work in a physical therapy office, where I learned systems, organization, and how to support people in the middle of their healing. Eventually, I found my way into NASA as a Secretary II—one of my proudest career moments. It felt like proof that I could reach something I once thought was out of my grasp.
And yet, I didn’t stay there. I pivoted, because something in me has always been guided by purpose as much as by achievement. I have a deep heart for veterans, and my current work allows me to use my skills in a way that directly supports them. That matters to me in a different way. Even if my head was in the sky with NASA, my heart has always been on the ground, with people.
We work with charities, churches, and programs that matter. Not that NASA didn’t—I loved my job there. But I have always been drawn to work that feels human. Work that touches lives in a tangible way. Work that reminds me that I am part of something larger, but also responsible to something very close.
I think about the journey. The girl who used to eat from food pantries, because there wasn’t enough left over from a preschool teacher’s salary for groceries. To becoming a Secretary II at NASA. To the woman I am now, working with charities and programs that support veterans. It has not been a straight path. It has been a river—twisting, shifting, carrying me through landscapes I never could have imagined.
Sometimes calm. Sometimes rushing. Sometimes white water, where everything moves faster than I can process, and I have to hold on and trust that I will make it through. Sometimes it is messy. Ugly. Strange. I follow tributaries I never would have chosen. And just when it feels like life is finally getting better, something shifts—the undertow pulls hard, and I am swept away.
That is when steady arms matter. Friends. Family. The people who reach in and pull you back to the surface. And if you don’t have that, you learn to reach for something else—a branch, a handhold, anything that can help you steady yourself long enough to breathe again.
Because even in the strongest currents, survival is not just about pushing forward. It is about holding on when you need to—and knowing when to let yourself be held.
And we all are rivers.
Sometimes it is exhausting. There are moments when you are fighting against the current, your arms ache, and it would be easier to let go. But the river continues. Not because it is forced to, but because it is alive. Because it carries everything it has touched, and in carrying, it transforms. Because it is still needed. Because it is still becoming.
I am not one fixed thing. I am a river. And I am still becoming.
I look at myself—not just as someone involved in aiding veterans. I am a “cat lady” (Honey, the Russian Blue, says hello and insists on her importance, thank you very much). I am also an auntie. An entrepreneur. A writer. A survivor.
I have been through things so difficult, so ugly, that my hair should be grey. And yet, it isn’t. It’s a shade of cinnamon “bronde,” as I’ve been told—something in between, something that doesn’t quite fit into a single category.
And maybe that’s the point.
Because I don’t fit into a single category either.
None of us do.
We often define ourselves by religion, by politics, by gender, by orientation—by the labels we are given or the ones we choose. And while those can matter, they are not the whole of who we are.
At the end of the day, I think we are something simpler, and something far more complex.
We are human.
And being human means we are layered. It means we carry contradictions. It means we change, we grow, we break, and we rebuild. It means we are allowed to be more than one thing at once.
We are allowed to be soft and strong.
We are allowed to be certain and still questioning.
We are allowed to be exactly where we are, even as we move forward.
Like a river, we are always in motion—shaped by where we have been, but never defined by it alone.
And maybe that is the quiet truth beneath everything:
We are not meant to be contained.
We are meant to keep flowing.
That is what I will hold in my heart.
That parts of us will be eroded, shaped, and changed by life.
And still, it is us.
Just… a little different than we ever could have imagined.
Because we are not static. We are not fixed in place. We are shaped by time, by experience, by what we survive and what we choose to carry forward.
Like a river meeting stone, we soften in some places, sharpen in others. We carve new paths. We widen. We narrow. We shift.
And through it all, we remain.
Not as one single version of ourselves, but as the sum of every version we have ever been. <3
