The proof
No degree. No safety net. No quit.
My mom had me when she was sixteen. She died by suicide when I was three months old. I grew up bouncing from home to home, raised on welfare, with no stable education. I got kicked out of tenth grade and earned my GED instead.
I have worked since I was fifteen, fully supporting myself from about that age, and I never stopped for thirty straight years. I had my first baby at nineteen. People judged. I did not care. By my twenty-fifth birthday I had four kids, five and under. Where I came from, government aid was common, and I hold zero judgment for anyone who has used it. It is a tool, and that is what it is there for. For me, choosing not to rely on it as an adult was personal. As a child I sometimes felt like a welfare check, taken in by people who took me in for the money it brought them. So staying off it as an adult was how I took my own power back. I raised them all in the same safe neighborhood their whole lives. They are adults now: good people, and we are close. I am most proud that I gave my kids the stability I never had.
With no degree, I climbed for 25 years to Director of Payroll and Business Systems at Stanford Children's Hospital, eventually earning over a quarter million a year. But the price I paid for that income was not in alignment with my values. I was burned out, so I left. I spent two and a half years in therapy, healed what I had been carrying since I was a baby, and learned to work with my ADHD and dyslexia instead of hiding them. Then I rebuilt my whole life with AI.
I have always had this quiet, divine knowing that I was meant for more. Here is what I learned: you can create the life you want simply by choosing to, and then doing it. You can do the same. I can teach you.
And the love story? I have been with my husband since I was seventeen. Our first interaction was him holding my hand and our first kiss, and we have been inseparable for twenty-nine years, twenty-four of them married. Fairy tales do come true. Mine is just the ghetto fabulous kind.
If I can heal, reinvent, and learn AI at this stage of life, differently-wired and self-taught, so can you.
Featured in Success Magazine · Phoenix Magazine · Marquis Who's Who Honoree
