When the Fire Becomes Light

For most of my life, I wore survival like a second skin.
I knew how to hustle through grief, how to hold everyone else’s pain, how to build a life out of sheer grit and self-forgetting.
I knew how to carry the weight of others — children, patients, partners, stories that were never mine to begin with.
But I didn’t know how to carry myself.

And then, somewhere around the edges of midlife, I began to burn out — not just in my work, but in my bones.

It didn’t happen all at once.
It was a slow undoing —
a quiet forgetting of who I’d been before the world demanded so much.

That unraveling, painful and necessary, is what led me here.
To Savage Grace.

My memoir is not a tidy tale of triumph.
It’s a reckoning.
With trauma.
With silence.
With the lies I told myself to keep going.
And more than anything, with the longing I buried beneath competence and care.

I wrote Savage Grace not just to look back,
but to speak directly to the woman — maybe you —
who has spent decades showing up for everyone else
and now finds herself wondering:
Who will show up for me?

What I’ve learned is this:
there comes a moment, often after midlife, when the masks begin to slip.
The old roles stop fitting.
The titles — mother, nurse, partner, provider — no longer tell the full story.
And the voice we once silenced begins to stir, whispering:
There’s more.

Not more to do.
More to become.

Savage Grace is about that becoming.
It’s about remembering the girl inside who once danced, or dreamed, or dared to speak.
It’s about healing not just from what happened to us,
but from the way we learned to disappear inside of it.

In these pages, you’ll find stories — raw, poetic, sometimes hard to tell.
But they are true.
And my hope is that in reading them, you will remember your own truth.
Not the polished version.
The holy, unfiltered one.

This memoir isn’t a map,
but it is a mirror.

It’s for the woman on the edge of reinvention.
The healer who forgot she was human.
The artist buried under the weight of duty.
The survivor who is ready to become more than her scars.

If you are standing at the threshold of your second half —
not sure whether to leap or retreat —
know this:
you are not alone.
Your voice still lives in you,
your fire is not gone,
and grace — even the savage kind —
is waiting for you to rise.

Welcome.