In recent years I have been exploring how what I lived through early in life shapes my experience of reality as an adult. My history includes a mother with severe addiction who left me with my grandmother when I was one and a half. There I had a childhood that was both loving and challenging — my grandmother struggled with alcoholism, something that was passed down to me as well.

I carry a calling: to break the line of trauma that has run through my family tree for a long time. Along that path I have had to look at and transform addictions, shutdown, and difficulties in close relationships — the feeling that life "just happens to me", of standing on the sidelines. Slowly daring to feel deeply and come into contact with my heart. Understanding that I have the right to exist even when I say no. Building a more robust sense of who I am, beyond strategies and identities formed early on.

It is from this lived experience — not despite it — that I meet you in the room.