As Samuel Taylor Coleridge is alleged to have said, “prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals the best words in their best order.” Whether or not Coleridge actually spoke those words, the quote speaks to the beauty of writing. I have found, in my life so far, that writing is a magical pursuit. Stephen King, in On Writing, refers to the practice as an act of telepathy. To me, writing is the transmutation of the intangible stuff of which dreams are made into something concrete and replicable. Writing is alchemy, and every form of storytelling is an act of re-creation.
On both my mother’s and father’s sides, my family mostly subscribes to the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) brand of Christianity. I grew up believing that life was created by an intelligent being who was as loving as he was vengeful, as forgiving as he was judgmental. I was taught that humans are inherently sinful and that I had to follow God’s law to be counted among the few who would be saved at the end of the world (which could happen any day now). As a queer teen, I internalized the belief that I was bad and that I had to constantly pray for forgiveness for every thought and action that did not align with what I was taught to believe God wanted. I was full of anxiety and my mind did not know rest.
When I was 16 years old, I was terribly depressed. My family had moved away from Silver Spring, Maryland and settled in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the culture shift knocked me off my feet. During those high school years, I bounced from school to school and struggled to form meaningful friendships. I isolated myself. I avoided moments of vulnerability and true connection with other kids. I engaged in self harm and worried every day that my soul would fall short of worthy in the eyes of God.
Writing was my refuge. In my darkest moments, writing was my escape from what I believed to be a cold and dangerous world. I learned to write poetry and lost my desire to spill my own blood. Once I started writing poems, I didn’t stop. I would write to release emotions, to explore new ways of seeing the world. I joined a poetry club, and enrolled in poetry classes in high school and university, which opened my mind to a world full of writers like me who were fearlessly sharing their magic with the world. I studied journalism at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School, one of the top-rated schools in the country at the time. There, I polished my writing talent and learned key skills like editing, researching, and public speaking.
At the same time, I struggled to navigate my transition away from the SDA church and the personal existential questions that everyone must face. I wondered: what was my true purpose in life? I studied spiritual traditions that I had once been taught to fear and condemn. I completely opened my mind to new ways of thinking and spent years confronting a mountain of fears, rational and irrational, which I had developed as a result of religious teachings.
A bit More about me
As a child, for a girl so shy around strangers, I was a natural storyteller. I would lose track of time telling my mother complicated tales studded with mythical characters and countless surprise twists. My young heart overflowed with narratives I had not yet found an outlet to explore. Then, I learned to write.
Throughout my grade school years, I enjoyed a habit of writing down any story that came to mind — and the stories came often. I had stacks of loose leaf pages and half-filled notebooks which carried a bounty of aimless descriptions and bits of dialogue for which there was no plot. When I was in high school, I wrote my first chapter book: a complete narrative with a full-fledged plot. I oozed with pride as I typed the words from my frail notebook pages into a document on my mother’s laptop. My teenage imagination soared as I stapled together the printed pages of my very first “published” book. In that moment, I confirmed in my soul that I was meant to be a writer.
After college, I stayed in Ohio and worked as a newspaper reporter at The Athens NEWS for a couple years. I picked up an addiction to cigarettes and worked myself to the point of burnout before quitting my job to relocate. Shortly thereafter, the Covid-19 pandemic turned my life upside down and set me on a completely different path. I realized the life of a reporter was not my speed, and I found myself searching for a new way to bring meaning into my life. All the while, as I drifted through a haze of uncertainty and depression, I continued to read, listen and learn from every resource I could find to identify the spiritual truth that rang true in my heart. Surrounded by chaos in my external world, I knew that my inner peace had to be a priority.
In 2022, Reiki found me. I first encountered the Japanese healing tradition while working with a Reiki healer and YouTube creator by the name of Kiki Cinza. From there, I found myself pulled into initiation in 2023, and my life has been so beautifully enriched since I began practicing Reiki. I quit drinking. I quit smoking. I went from buckling under overwhelming anxiety to managing my nervous system like a master botanist in the U.S. Botanical Garden. Though Reiki is not a religion, my personal practice opened my heart to an expanded relationship to the force I call God. Connecting with universal life force energy is only one of many practices that opened my eyes to new ways of understanding a God I first met in my youth. Abandoning religion set me on a course that led me to an ongoing spiritual practice of deep listening, self-discovery and conscious creation in my life.
Returning to God from a completely new angle taught me so much about myself and about faith. In the same year I started my Reiki journey, I found the courage to publish my first book, Prayers In Reverse, a collection of poems I wrote during the darkest, dankest times in my transformation process. I sewed the first seeds to launch Divine Anarchy, the podcast spotlighting conversations about the nature of God and spiritual truth, and the show’s sister blog The Divine Anarchist, devoted to sharing insights and prompts to help others expand. Walking away from religion pulled me closer to God and I was obsessed with helping others find their own way to the Source of All Love.
I’d accidentally found a new passion.
That same year, I began learning more about life coaching. I had personally benefited from courses and books created by life coaches who inspired me to change my mindset and I knew I had to pay it forward. For the first time in my life, I discovered tools and techniques that helped me become the person I saw in my most beautiful dreams, instead of simply wishing for change. I started training to become a coach the moment I realized that I could use what I had learned in my own life to bring others to a place of clarity for themselves. In 2024, I published S.U.R.E.A.L. Faith: How to Find Spirit in a Sea of Confusion, a playbook for cultivating an authentic personal spiritual practice without relying on dogmatic, oppressive or politically motivated systems in traditional religions. The book poured through me like water through a riverbed, and all of the insights I had learned in my short time as a budding coach aligned beautifully with the learnings I’d gleaned from the school of life. A few months later, I launched the virtual S.U.R.E.A.L. course to guide others through the practices and perspectives that helped me unravel the toxic threads of my first religion and weave together a trellis of faith that nourishes my soul from the roots.
Today, I feel blessed to help people like me re-write their own stories.
As a little girl, I fantasized about publishing my own books. Making my dreams a reality was far from easy. Despite feelings of inferiority and fear, one memory fueled me to publish my very personal poems and claim the title of “author.” A high school classmate of mine, who had taken the same slam poetry class that I did, once asked me about a poem that I had performed for the class. That poem, she said, resonated with her own experiences and she asked if she could keep a copy. At that point, I was too insecure to receive her feedback and I never shared the poem again. I felt ashamed and afraid to be seen then, but I’ve never forgotten that interaction.
I’ve come a long-ass way! I can’t count the number of times someone has told me they were moved by something I wrote or something I said. When I remember that my work can empower someone, make someone feel seen and understood, or impact another life in ways I might never imagine, I am compelled to keep sharing.
Now, as a writer, a coach, a communications specialist, a Reiki Master Teacher and a critical thinker, I spend the majority of my time unearthing new ways to share stories that activate and inspire others. I created The Harmonic Spirit, a virtual spiritual community center, for people like me: people who walked away from religion without letting go of faith, people with a natural curiosity about the true origins of life, people who love God and people who leave room for the mysterious unknown, people who practice spiritual tolerance and choose to love others regardless of their religious affiliation.
By creating space for others to discuss and develop their own spiritual paths, and creating content that allows me to explore and express my own ideas, I believe I have only just begun the work I was born to engage.