When I said I wanted a divorce, I expected relief. Instead, the world shut down. I chose myself… and then the pandemic hit. Schools closed. Gyms shut down. The future evaporated. Nothing changed, except everything changed. In this episode, I talk about what it actually feels like to choose yourself without a safety net.

Living together while separating. Grieving a marriage while raising kids. Getting certified as a personal trainer, just as the world closed. Questioning whether I had made the wrong choice. No one talks about this part. Choosing yourself doesn’t feel brave in the moment.  It feels reckless. Selfish. Exposed. Especially when you’re a mom. Especially when everything feels uncertain. This episode is about rebuilding without clarity. About choosing honesty over comfort. About learning to live with a decision that made everything harder, before it made anything better. If you’re in the middle of chaos right now, this one is for you.

After the year everything collapsed, I didn’t feel empowered. I felt empty.

And I think that matters, because choosing yourself doesn’t start with confidence. It starts with not being able to live the way you’ve been living anymore.

When the hospital stays were over and the emergencies stopped, everyone else moved on. But I didn’t. I felt like a married single mom, carrying everything. Feeling unseen. Unchosen. I tried to escape myself, drinking more, going out more, and feeling guilty every time. Until one small, radical decision changed something. I joined a gym. Not because I wasn’t strong but because I was desperate to feel like a person again.

In this episode, I talk about identity loss, the truth about my marriage, and the moment I finally said out loud what I had been avoiding. Choosing myself didn’t mean blowing everything up. It meant telling the truth. First to myself. Then to him. Relief. Grief. Guilt. All at once. If you’re standing at the edge of a truth you don’t want to admit, this one is for you. In the next episode, I share what came next: separation, the pandemic, dating… and meeting the person who changed everything. You don’t choose yourself once. You choose yourself again and again. And the first time is the hardest.

This episode might make some people uncomfortable. Because it’s about anger. Not explosive anger. Quiet anger. The kind you swallow to stay safe. I learned early how to be “good.” Responsible. Easy. Low-maintenance. Manageable. When you’re not allowed to express anger outwardly, it turns inward. It causes anxiety. Perfectionism. Control. Self-blame. In this episode, I talk about:

Staying in relationships longer than I should have. Tolerating what I didn’t deserve. Feeling resentment in motherhood and hating myself for it.And the quiet rage women are taught to suppress.

For a long time, I thought anger meant I was failing. That I was ungrateful. Selfish. Too much. I was wrong. Anger isn’t the opposite of healing. It’s information.

It tells you where a boundary was crossed. Where something wasn’t okay. Where you mattered, and weren’t protected.

And learning to listen to that? That’s freedom.

This was the year everything quietly fell apart. Not in one dramatic moment. But in layers. My son’s emergency surgery. Two months of isolation before the pandemic ever happened. A cancer scare with the same oncologist who treated my mom. My Daughter's Hospitalization. Borderline sepsis. And doing it mostly alone. From the outside, I was “handling it.” From the inside, my nervous system was unraveling. This episode isn’t about blame. It’s about what happens when you carry too much for too long. It’s about being strong past the point of sustainability. And what happens after survival mode ends…and you finally collapse. In the next episode, I share what came next,  the beginning of the end of my marriage, walking into a gym, and the first time I chose myself again.If you’ve ever held it together for everyone else until there was nothing left for you…this one is for you.

Motherhood didn't soften my anxiety, it exposed it. I share my experiences with birth trauma, postpartum anxiety, and identity loss, and how becoming a mother amplified everything I hadn't healed yet.

After addiction and loss, I built a life that looked stable on the outside. In this episode, I talk about recovery, responsibility, and trying to become someone "better" without fully processing what I'd lived through.

Grief doesn't always arrive loudly. Sometimes it settles in quietly and changes how you move through the world. In this episode, I talk about loss, the death of my grandmother, and how unresolved grief stacked instead of healing. This is where survival became my default.

In this episode, I talk aboutmy first serious relationship and how love, chaos, and addiction became intertwined. This isn't about blame, it's about how self-abandonment can look like devotion, and how being yourself often happens slowly, not all at once.

This episode is a pause placed intentionally. I step back from the timeline to name the patterns that were already forming beneath everything: anxiety, control, attachment, fear, and survival. These patterns didn't come from nowhere, they were learned early and carried forward quietly.

This episode explores how I followed the script: stability, partnership, family, and responsibility, even when it didn't feel right. I talk about choosing the "right" life over the aligned one, and how ignoring my internal signals slowly cost me my sense of self.