This is the honest part of my story.
Not the highlight reel and not the polished bio. It's the version I've kept in the locked drawer most of my life, and the version I am finally choosing to set down here, because I believe my willingness to set it down is part of what gives the next woman permission to set hers down too.
And I want to say this clearly, before you read another word. I am not sharing this for sympathy. I am not sharing it to be seen as heavy, or broken, or brave. I am sharing it because I want you to see, really see, that I have lived it, so when I tell you I see you, you know I'm telling you the truth from a place I had to live in to know.
If anything I say here helps you exhale even one breath deeper, that is the whole point of telling it.
A note about what's ahead: I share some heavy parts of my life on this page, including childhood, adoption, an assault, a pregnancy I did not choose, a car accident, COVID pneumonia, a head injury, and the years I spent staying in places I should have left. I'm telling you only what feels honest to tell. Please take care of yourself as you read.
I am not different from you.
Every line of what I'm about to tell you, I am sure, has lived in someone else's life. The trials. The pressure to be smaller. The losses no one warned us about. The strong face we wore in public while we were quietly falling apart in private. The shame we carried for things that were never ours to carry in the first place.
I am simply the woman who finally said out loud what most of us have been holding in silence, and decided to build a quieter place for the next person who needed it.
It is part of the soil this grew in.
I was adopted. That isn't where my story starts, but it is part of the soil it grew in. I was a child who did not always want to be here. I carried weight I did not have words for. I knew that something inside me was different, and the world around me did not know what to do with that.
It wasn't a movie. It was us.
Before college. Before any of what I am about to tell you next. My older sister and I were in a car accident so bad that both sides of traffic stopped, because the people watching genuinely thought they were watching a movie being filmed.
The car went through a cement barrier, dropped, threw my sister and me out, and landed on top of us. Part of my forehead was torn open. My stomach was opened from my breastbone past my belly button. A piece of my ear was cut. A piece of my leg was gone. And we both lived.
I was a young girl carrying a body that had already been through more than it should have been. That accident is one of the early moments where my body started talking to me in a way I did not yet know how to listen to.
I have lived with what you have lived with. And I am still here.
I went to college the first time as a young woman, the way you're supposed to. With plans. With hope. With a future in front of me I had not yet questioned. It was during that first try at college that I was assaulted. And from that assault, I became pregnant.
I carried that pregnancy alone. I had my baby alone. I did not tell my parents until after the baby was born. That sentence has lived in me for a long time.
I spent decades after that looking for acceptance in the wrong rooms. Looking for titles I thought would prove I was worth something. Looking for the one person who would finally choose me. Listening to what everyone else thought I should be, and giving them the version they wanted no matter what it cost me. That's the soil this work grew in.
That's where the dimming starts.
There was a day. You were small. You finally got to pick out your own clothes. You put on the things you loved, the colors that felt like you, the combination only a child would put together, because a child is not yet trying to be acceptable to anyone. You walked out feeling like you had done the best thing ever.
And then a grown-up looked at you and said: “You're not trying to wear that, are you?” Maybe for you it was that. Maybe it was something else. For me, it was a lot of things. It was being told what I saw, what I felt, what I knew, was wrong. It was the outside noise of what was proper and acceptable and expected coming in louder and louder, until the small voice inside me could barely be heard.
It got quieter.
The light never goes out. Even when it gets so dim you think you've lost it, it doesn't. I believe the dimming was my angels, my spirit, the quiet of the divine, protecting my light against the darkness that was trying to reach for it.
But I could not hear the whispers back then. There was too much noise. Too much noise to hear that I was already enough. Too much noise to hear that I was not the problem. Too much noise to remember who I had always been.
Two names for one woman.
Barbara is who the world told me to be. The one who performed strong. The one who was acceptable and professional and fine. The one carrying everyone else's weight while pretending it was nothing.
Babs is who I have always been. The sensitive child. The deep feeler. The wisdom-keeper. The one who saw things, knew things, felt things. The one whose light was getting dim under all the noise.
For a long time, I thought I was crazy, because there was too much noise to hear Babs clearly. So I rejected her. Barbara took the wheel for years. And Babs got quieter. And quieter. Until life got loud enough that Barbara could not hold it anymore.
You were never the problem.
Not metaphorically. Literally. People. Relationships. Stability. Versions of my future. The entire story I had been telling myself about who I was supposed to be.
I stayed in places longer than I should have. I gave more chances than I should have. I kept performing capable long after my body was telling me to stop. And eventually all of it came apart at once.
“You were never the problem. You were buried under everyone else's expectations of you.”
Three boys. One mama. Keep going.
This time I was older. I had been through more than most people knew. And I was a single mother of three. Three boys. One mama. One income. One whole life being held together with whatever I had left at the end of every day.
Something in me said keep going. Keep growing. Even when you cannot see the road yet. So I went back. I studied hard. I earned honors. I took the LSAT. I did all the things, while raising three sons, because I really thought I was supposed to be a lawyer.
What it didn't account for was the whisper underneath it, the one that kept saying: “That's not the way your voice is meant to be used.” I didn't listen for a long time. And then life, in its own way, started making me listen.
My world became very small.
All of the things I just told you came before what I am about to tell you next, because those were the years I was being silenced, and what I now believe to be protected. The whispers were trying to be heard, but still patient, and I kept pushing them down because I had so much to carry above ground.
And then 2020 came. And I got COVID pneumonia. The isolation. The fear. The exhaustion. The emotional unraveling that happened quietly behind closed doors while most people probably assumed I was just taking a break. I was going through something. I just did not fully understand yet that life was stripping away the versions of me that had been built entirely around survival.
The pain was the truest thing in the room.
In 2022, I was in another accident. I got hit head on while sitting at a light. And nobody could see the injuries. The doctors did not listen. They could not see what I was telling them I was feeling, so they treated me like the pain wasn't real.
And I went to a dark place, because the doctors not believing me made me start to wonder if maybe they were right. But the pain kept telling me that it wasn't in my head. The debilitating, body-wide, day-after-day pain that does not lie. The pain was the truest thing in the room. And the only one listening to it was me.
That was the moment everything I had been silencing in myself for decades came up to the surface and said: you cannot keep handing your authority to people who cannot see what is right in front of them. You cannot keep abandoning yourself to be agreeable. You cannot keep performing fine when you are not fine.
I have been here the whole time.
After COVID. After the spinal injury. After the doctors. After the dark place. I had no choice anymore. There was no rescue coming. There was just me, and a body that needed me to listen, and a whisper underneath all of it saying: “I have been here the whole time. Are you finally going to come and find me?”
That was the awakening. Not a dramatic flash. A slow, quiet, sometimes humbling, sometimes painful coming back to myself. I started listening to my body for the first time in my life. I started honoring the things I had been calling crazy for years. I started saying out loud what I had only ever said in whispers to myself.
Once you wake up, you cannot go back to sleep.
Once the whispers got loud enough to hear, once my body finally got the room to speak, I could not go back to being the version of me that didn't know. I could not unsee where I had been silenced. I could not unsee where I had silenced myself. I could not unsee what I had been carrying. I could not unsee what I had been told was nothing but my body always knew was something.
And I could not pretend not to see it anymore. That is the part that is sometimes the hardest to live with. Once you really wake up, you cannot put yourself back to sleep, even when life would be more convenient if you could.
The kind of love that doesn't perform.
This part of my life is the part I hold most quietly. The names, the details, the love, all of that stays with me. But I will say this: my sons have taught me about the kind of love that doesn't perform. The kind that stays even on the hard days. The kind that asks you to show up exactly as you are. They are why I refuse to pass down what I was trying to outrun. They are part of why this work exists at all.
Shame keeps you small. Honesty sets you free.
For a long time I kept the hardest chapters in a locked drawer. I thought hiding them was protecting me. It wasn't. When I stopped being ashamed of my story, when I let the locked drawers breathe in the open air, that's when I started to heal. Because shame keeps you small. Honesty sets you free.
It took me almost fifty years to feel whole.
Not all at once. Not in a single moment. Slowly. Quietly. Whisper by whisper. I remembered my voice. I remembered my light. I remembered my wisdom. I remembered who I had always been before the world told me to be someone else.
It took me almost fifty years to feel whole, for the first time, after everything. And in that remembering I chose me. I chose my peace.
My peace is what allows me to do this work.
I do not choose peace because everything is solved. I choose it because if I let myself live in noise again, I will not be in a quiet enough place to hear the whispers. And if I cannot hear the whispers, I cannot walk beside the next sensitive soul as they remember their voice, their light, their wisdom. My peace is not just for me. It's what allows me to do this work at all.
I still get pulled back into the noise sometimes, I would not be telling you the truth if I said otherwise. But every move I make now, I make with intention. Every yes is honest. Every no is honored. That is the work. It is not done. It is continuing.
Just because I do not wear my scars on the outside does not mean they are not there.
Some people look at me now and assume I have had it easy. They see the woman in front of them. They do not see the years behind her. Sensitivity is its own kind of carrying. The empath. The deep feeler. The intuitive. The one who notices.
And honestly, I think we all started this way, and under all the noise, I think all of us still are. The sensitivity doesn't leave us. It just gets buried. If you are one of the ones still hearing it: hello. I see you.
I don't mean it as a kindness. I mean it as a fact.
I know what it is to be told you are too sensitive in a too-loud world. To perform strong because no one ever gave you permission to fall apart. To carry your wisdom in private because you were not sure anyone wanted it. To be ashamed of a story that was never your fault. To stay too long in places that were already over. To think you are crazy for hearing what you hear. To be told your pain is in your head when your body is screaming that it isn't. To lose everything and still be told you have it easy.
So when I tell you I see you, I don't mean it as a kindness. I mean it as a fact. I see you because I have been you.
For recognition. Not sympathy.
Somewhere out there is a person who has been told their sensitivity is the problem. A mother too tired to keep performing. A young woman carrying something she did not choose, terrified to say it out loud. A person whose body is hurting in ways the doctors cannot see, starting to wonder if they are making it up. The child you used to be, still living inside someone who is just now starting to listen for the whispers.
Your story might be the one someone needs to hear to keep going, no matter how big or small you think it is. Sometimes the story you almost did not share is the exact one that gives someone else the room to finally share theirs.
You do not have to share the whole story.
What I have shared with you here was already a lot. Honestly, more than I thought I was ready to give out loud.
This is what the whispers guided me to share with you, in this moment, for the woman or the soul who is reading this and needs to hear it. Not the polished version. Not a strategy. Just what was asked of me.
And the same goes for you. You do not have to share the whole story to be honest. You only have to listen to your own whispers about what to set down out loud, when to set it down, and what stays sacred.
It came from a real life.
Not because anyone asked me to. Because the work I needed, the place to remember, the words for what I was feeling, the company on the path, did not exist in the way I needed it to. So I started writing the books I wished I had read. I started recording the songs I wished someone had sung to me. I started shaping a framework, Wisdom-Wired™ and I.N.T.U.E.R.I.™, that would have helped me find my way faster. And then I let other people in.
That's what Purposeful Transformations is. That's what The Intuitive Remembrance Movement is. That's what The Whisper Letters and Remembrance Sessions are. Every single piece of it came from a real chapter of my life.
You did not stumble onto this page by accident.
Something in you, a whisper, a pull, a quiet knowing, brought you here. Listen to it. Remember your voice. Remember your light. Remember your wisdom. Choose you. Choose your peace. And know that you are not walking this alone.