I'm not a guru. I never wanted to be.

I've always been the person people come to when everything falls apart.

Growing up on the north side of Edmonton, my home looked normal from the outside — my mom, my step dad, my little brother, and me. Dad worked, mom stayed home, and there was enough tension under the surface that I learned early how to read a room. Outside my house, most of my friends were dealing with addiction, neglect, or abuse in their own homes. So mine became the safe one — not just for feelings, actually physically safe. I was absorbing other people's pain before I even had the words for what I was doing. I didn't know it was coaching. I just showed up.

By the time I was in my twenties, I was building a different kind of life. I went from the youngest credit counselor in Alberta at 24 to COO at 25 — while becoming a single mom, leaving an abusive relationship with a newborn in my arms, and rebuilding from nothing. I moved cities and raised my kids somewhere better.

The years after that weren't a straight line. A handful of jobs that had nothing to do with each other on paper — but somewhere in the middle of it all, I found my spirituality and started learning who I actually was, underneath who I'd been told to be.

That thread led me to years of work as an in-home private developmental aid, specializing in early intervention for children with neurodiversities. I used play therapy to help kids reach goals — fast — that people had told their families were impossible. I started teaching other practitioners how to get those same results. And I'm still building on that foundation now, finishing my BA in Psychology.

Then came the ADHD diagnosis. It didn't shock me — it validated everything. All the things I'd been told were wrong with me — talking too much, asking too many whys, feeling everything a little too hard — turned out to be exactly the tools I needed.

I'm not a guru. I don't have it all figured out. I'm a fellow spicy brain who's done the work, lived the chaos, trusted my gut when it made no sense, and found a way through. I've been through enough of it myself that I don't judge — I understand.

What I want more than anything is for the people I work with to feel understood, not judged — safe enough to actually learn about themselves, heal, and grow. That's the space I try to hold, every time.

The square peg stopped trying to shave her edges to fit. Now she helps other square pegs do the same.