Yearning: From Poverty and Abuse
to Empowerment and Love
I grew up deeply below the poverty line surrounded by drug addiction, alcoholism, verbal, mental, physical, and sexual abuse all at the hands of my father. When he suddenly died from a drug overdose I was then found in a single-mother household with two younger sisters, forcing me to become co-parent at 7 years old.
I craved love and support I had never known. A yearning so deep within me that I didn’t yet have words for it, only the ache of it, constant and unnamed.
Always with a diary.
Healing: A Journey to Self-Discovery
and Acceptance
After becoming co-parent I was angry, and spent my adolescent years feeling never good enough, as though my dreams didn’t matter, as though my innermost self had to stay hidden. It’s hard to think about what you want to be when you grow up when you’re too busy answering phone calls in the middle of math class from your younger sister telling you the house had been broken into, our jewelry boxes ransacked…again.
I met my now-wife when I was 17. We moved into our first apartment at 19. I was still confused, still navigating poverty but for the first time in my life, I was safe and loved. I had never been so seen.
Held by her, I finally had the space to explore my spirituality. And everything began to open.
Credit: The Witchtographer
The Untamed Priestess
For the past fifteen years, I have been learning to heal from my past trauma and I continue to do that work every day. I have leaned deeply into the Divine Feminine as a Priestess of Badb.
As a certified spiritual coach, Pagan Ordained Minister, and Reiki Master, I created this space and my practice to hold others who walk similar paths and who are ready for support.
The healing I have lived became the work I offer. And the work I offer has, in turn, become the words I write. Every offering, every class, every circle has deepened my understanding of what women carry and what they are capable of releasing.
Credit: The Witchtographer
The Author
I’ve been writing for years, but was always hesitant to call myself a writer. As a child it was diaries; as a teenager, poetry scrawled in the margins of notebooks. Writing has always been how I made sense of the world and my place in it.
Over the years that private practice became a public one. My work has appeared in Bella Grace Magazine, Witch Way Magazine, The Helix Literary Journal, Womancraft Publishing, and a prayer published in Stephanie Woodfield’s Dedicant, Devotee, Priest, among others. I have been a published poet, essayist, and affirmation writer across more than a decade of work… and yet I still hesitate to call myself a writer. I still feel as if I am not accomplished enough to claim that title. This next chapter is me publicly working through this piece of shadow work.
The thread connecting all of it is the same thread that runs through my priestess work and my healing: a deep belief that women’s stories matter, that the untamed voice deserves to be heard, and that words, when crafted with intention, can be their own form of magic.
You were never meant to be tame. Welcome home.