AUTHOR. SCIENTIST. MOTHER.

My Story

For most of my adult life, I’ve studied water. It fascinated me, even as a young girl, that the same substance that could carve out landscapes could also be the gentle soundtrack of a rainy Sunday afternoon. It had an order to it I could understand. It was hydrogen and oxygen, its shape determined by its temperature.

But after my mother died, the world and its orderly facts no longer seemed like enough. Honestly, back then, I’d never really thought about what happens to us when we die. I’d grown up in a family without organized beliefs and my scientist’s mind required tangible proof.

It was more than just the loss that left me untethered. It was a lingering feeling that I didn’t really know her. I knew her patterns and her habits. What made her laugh and how she liked her coffee. But I didn’t know what had made her the way she was, and I felt like I couldn’t really grieve her without that knowledge.

Through that exploration, I turned the mirror on myself. As much as I needed to understand her, I realized I had an even more intense desire to understand myself.

So I went to therapy and yoga, read psychology textbooks, and even visited a psychic. I did a past life regression, an experience that cracked my mind open. I saw flashes of a female gladiator fighting alongside a white tiger. I saw a woman drowning in the ocean as a ship burned nearby. I couldn’t explain these things, and I couldn’t stop wondering about the women I’d seen.

From this place, I began to write. First came the stories of the women I saw in my past life regression. Then I began to unravel my own story—the winding path that led me to become an over-functioning mother of four with a demanding career. Along the way, I discovered the quiet voice inside me that had been insisting there was another way to live beyond the version of what I thought a mother and a woman should be. I’d always heard it, but I’d become very good at ignoring it.

These stories eventually morphed into my debut novel, States of Grace, a story of one soul’s experience as three women across centuries. Though it’s fiction, it’s inspired by my own journey to become someone who listens to herself first and trusts her gut. I truly believe now that we are all capable of transformation if we only learn to listen.

Because just like water, nothing is ever truly gone—it simply changes state.