When I grew up I had two parents, separated and co-parenting from different households, who were drowning in their own inability to handle the emotions and tribulations of life. My mother grew up with unaddressed sexual abuse and nursed Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa throughout my adolescence. When I turned fourteen she had developed an invasive brain tumor that forced her into surgery, of which she never fully recovered. She stayed in the hospital for months, was diagnosed with late-onset of an unnamed form of Schizophrenia. She was also diagnosed with Bi-Polar Disorder, Thyroid disease, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from going into a coma for three days due to mixing medications together that overdosed her on Tylenol. While in the hospital my mother had visions and dreams that communicated to her that in a past life she was a young child in the Holocaust. She believes that in her past life she watched her mother, father and child brother get shot through the head by Nazi soldiers. My mother from her bed at the psyche ward had me over the phone in the middle of the night searching archives available online for names of her family members. My mother today wears a cross of Christ and the star of David.

My mom was bed-ridden from the point she came home when I was about 15/16 and her dependance on opioids was dominating the living room and the lives of her and her boyfriend/caretaker (this man told me when my mom was in the hospital that he thought him and I were soul-mates...which adds another layer to this already sad situation). My mom had many episodes where she was checked into psyche wards, after scratching with her own finger nails the skin off of her arms and legs. One time while chopping lettuce in the kitchen she blacked out and started waiving the knife around the kitchen while her boyfriend chased her around the house trying to make sure she didn't stab anyone. She made some deeps cuts, but everyone was okay.

My dad was in the periphery while this was all happening. He was and is the best father anyone could ever ask for and my mom kept him at a distance for a lot of my upbringing because of his past with alcoholism and his behavior during that time. He has been sober since I was seven months old, the same time my mom left him. I only saw my dad every other weekend but his presence in my life was defining. While my dad is the closest person in my life today, he had his own debilitating struggles that he was afraid of sharing openly with me at the time. My father was in and out of "behavioral" centers (also psyche wards?) because of unending and frequent panic attacks caused by stress. I would always find out about his visits to these centers weeks after they had taken place. My father was afraid of the impression his mental illness would have on me as my mother's situation was so dyer.

Drug abuse runs through my family, and my siblings have all battled with addictions to alcohol, meth, heroine, and whatever they could get their hands on. Two of my siblings have abandoned their children to live a life on the streets. I was surrounded by sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and drug abuse. I didn't want to live that life anymore. I knew I needed to get out so I put a lot of effort in school. I took advanced classes, hated the social aspect as my home life was awful and I wasn't allowed to go to a lot of fun things because of my mother's need for control. I felt like a loner my entire life and knew I was going to take a lonely and long path to success, a fish swimming upstream. I went to college, took a lot of drugs (mostly of the psychedelic variety), experienced life in the real world, confronting two different pictures of the world: the one my mom painted for me, and the reality of the world as it is. I fell in love, made and lost friends, got my first bad grade in school, lived in downtown Portland, then lived in my own place where I paid rent, worked many jobs, read lots of books, made lots of art. In this new life, I was growing but something deep down was still unaddressed, I stopped keeping in contact with my mother, left my younger brother behind who still lived in the house with her, and went my own way.

My college experience led me to working on a pot farm in Northern California (I had studied Evolutionary Biology and Agriculture in college), where I was working as a weed trimmer for a large and very illegal operation. I was two hours down a dirt round in the hills of Northern California and I was the only young female in the group. I only knew one person when I went down and then they had departed and it was just me. Hours and hours of trimming with the same 5 or 6 people takes a toll on you. Music starts to fade into the background and people in the circle start repeating stories. I dove deep into myself and those unaddressed and repressed emotions from my childhood and teen years started to unfold in my mind--I had realized that my entire life was undirected, chaotic and I had no one or nothing to look to to change my life except the people who have written words that have brought me to my knees, or those who have created music that is like candy for my ears and brain, or the people who create movies that recreate your understanding of the world and force you to think--they kept me inspired, and searching. Most of all, I believed in something beyond myself.

I became obsessed with self-improvement while working on the farm. I read online about changing your life through changing your habits and downloaded an app for bodyweight workouts. I had no idea about fitness or working out. I did my first burpee in the dirt outside of my tent in Northern California in my hiking shoes and the stink of marijuana resin on my clothes. I HATED EVERY SECOND OF IT. But it was something that symbolized my ability to overcome resistance and pain in my own life. So day by day, I forced myself to get in exercise. I had major anxiety about it, it was hard, I felt stupid doing it, and the only time I had available to do it outside of work and also when it isn't 105 degrees outside was in the early morning. So I woke up in the dark, hiked up to the trimming cabin with my headlight, fired up the space heater, could see my breathe those mornings in the hills it gets brutally cold, and did the best I could.

When I left the farm I had moved in with my dad and spent every morning in the garage doing workouts on a scrap of rolled up carpet. I still have that dirty carpet in the same place in my garage! I purchased weights and fell in love with strength training. I got stronger, looked the best I have ever looked, started changing my eating habits, felt more able to handle the harder aspects of life like bad friendships and unhappy job situations or developing romantic relationships with grace and a clear mind. I knew that I had really done something good for myself, and for my future. Now, I am here to share that with YOU and REASSURE YOU that your commitment to fitness is a commitment to creating the BEST VERSION of yourself, as fitness starts in the mind and translates to the rest of your life.