The Importance of Love & Irreverence

"I am carrying all my hatred and contempt for power, its laws, its authority, its society, and I have no room for guilt or fear of punishment." – Diego Rios, Chilean Anarchist

 I stumbled upon Rios’ quote in my last year of University, tying together a blog piece by Mandy Hiscocks, an activist who spent much of 2012 in jail for her activity in the G20 protests. Since then, it has remained a staple in my thinking, whether it be a disdain for corrupt power, a desire to eradicate and change systems, or the unquenchable need to create anew: I have never had room for guilt, nor fear.

Rules are made to be broken.

It has constantly reminded me why it’s important to be a shit disturber – and to make my irreverent characteristics work for me, and to use them to do good. Shit disturbing has been my best quality as a marketer – when used properly, with love and compassion.

But first, I need to back it up a bit.

How did I get so fucking irreverent? As an undergrad, I engaged with fringe societies, traveling to Montreal for the Carré Rouge protests, bussing to New York for Occupy celebrations and sleeping in parks. I studied critical politics, closely investigating the happenings of the day through a critical gender lens, with a precise focus on the political events of the late 2010’s. I incorporated my learnings from these radical groups and my academic critical investigations of power dynamics into my daily life.

Throughout my education and working life, I have steadily climbed a ladder of radical and critical thought, rather than a corporate ladder.   

At the start of the Occupy movement (following the 2008 harsh economic downturn), the prospects of real social and global change ignited a passion for causes I had cared for my whole life.  I organized, I wrote, I volunteered, I worked.  I investigated the limits of societal comfort to expand the human capacity for fairness and just systems.

I have always known about the power of words and the power of an impassioned few, from a young age.

When I reflect back, I realize that my irreverence and ability to disrupt the shit didn’t start only after I got a fancy education. It started long ago.

From my earliest work experience, I knew normal power structures weren’t going to work for me.  In my first job at age 14, I was sweeping popcorn and selling movie tickets, and seeing free movies whenever I wanted. I was told any normal 14-year-old would leap at working at the local movie theatre. Then I happened across Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and it provided a language to identify what I deemed unfair processes that alienated myself and my colleagues -  all of us, young teenagers from low-income and immigrant families - from our labour and its profits. I brought this language to my workplace and colleagues. We threatened to strike and begin a union for fair treatment, just wages, and non-exploitative work with unprejudiced chances for advancement.

I was banned from the property for five years. 

Later I became a student of Critical Sexuality Studies at York University and worked to disrupt the structures of “space” within the university. I organized campus Feminist Porn Film Festivals and panel discussions on HIV and AIDS stigmatization. I founded a bursary for sex workers in academia and published the University’s first queer zine, ‘Grey Zone’. I became accustomed to conceiving bold, new ideas and bringing them to life, while getting other students engaged and active. 

I have always been compelled to call others to action and to create change. It has always been important to me to question, to dismantle, and to eventually recreate.

Hearing of my work with the York University Wendy Babcock Bursary Award, Maggie’s Sex Workers Action Project called me for an Indiegogo fundraising campaign in 2014 to increase their street-workers safety, while raising general awareness, and fighting Bill C-36, a Bill detrimental to their workers’ safety. Avoiding the pitfalls of any regular A-B campaign, I took risks and aimed high: I gained the support of one of the adult entertainment industry’s most notoriously outspoken performers. The campaign went viral across Canada, the US and Europe, and raised more than 130% of its fundraising goal. 

People in the media caught wind of our work, and important spokespeople from Maggie’s argued the Bill on television.

At that time, Bill C-36 failed to passed.

In 2015, a film studio offered me an internship in their Canadian office. It was difficult for me to understand the complexities of corporate life – there were so many things left unsaid, untouched, undiscussed within corporate culture. Corporate life felt like swimming in a fishbowl while no one would acknowledge that we were indeed just fish. I engaged with my work as best as I could. Invariably, I came up against superiors with my big ideas and plans. One or two big ideas, from the part-time intern, is good. But when will they give up and just pack boxes? Eventually, I burned out.

I left and began working with documentary films – I felt as if my creative contributions would be able to drive positive change in the world. Bringing awareness to important issues was always important to me. I felt like I had placed myself in a sea of other shit disturbers, their method was film, mine was marketing and publicity. With this newfound position at a documentary festival organization, I worked with my team to bring awareness to all of the films we were working with. With my guidance, we launched a new video campaign across North America. It was a record-breaking year for the marketing team.

But, my spirit felt quiet. Dampened. Constricted. There had to be more.

After multiple working experiences that taught me the value of my own skills as an innovative strategist and systems designer, I decided to launch my own business. As time had gone on in my career, I started to feel as though I wasn’t contributing to a changing world. The positive changes that I wanted to see in the world weren’t happening. I had given up my disruptive and rebellious nature to try to fit into a corporate culture that didn’t fit.

I shook the poorly fitting corporate clothes from me and launched into the next phase of my career, one that would also be my longest job yet: CEO and founder of AlphaPR.  

I started a publicity agency in Toronto based solely on both my shit disturbing nature, and my capacity for compassion and empathy – a deadly but gentle mix, in my opinion.

At the forefront of my work with Alpha was always the desire to bring historically marginalized stories to the masses. I used my clout and connections from my time at big studios and with popular festivals, to help women, survivors, queer folks, and creators of colour tell their stories – through film, through art, through books and music.

It was an exceptionally fulfilling time. I never faltered on my convictions, and my morals.

Over time, I softened. I have learned that, with irreverence, must come compassion and gentleness. I have had to do so without fear.

In a world where it is imperative to act with conviction, even if and especially when I am disrupting the status quo, I have to be unflinching as well with my gentleness.

I have to be unforgiving with my kindness.

I can rebel, I can question, I can challenge. I can do so without guilt.

But I must love. And I must love without fear.

Telling Stories, Undoing Shame

Shame and surviving trauma go hand in hand. Sharing our stories about who we are undoes the work of shame. Shame survives in secret.

I remember the first time I told someone my story. I was in a recovery program for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I had just “remembered” my repressed trauma about eight months before finding the Gatehouse, a government-funding centre with programs for survivors of childhood sexual assault (CSA). I was sitting in a room with eight other women, most around my age.

 Our first exercise required us to write out a big secret, one we wouldn’t want anyone to know. I scribbled my secret down on a ripped piece of paper and folded it as small as it could go. I squeezed it in the palm of my hand, praying that it would disintegrate through my skin and remain stuck inside my body for another thirty years.

That didn’t happen. Instead, we all passed our ‘secrets’ to the person to our right. We each took turns reading each other secrets out loud.

When my secret was read aloud to the room, I broke into tears - the tears of thirty years came pouring out of me.

The facilitator asked me how do you feel now?

And I told her I felt ashamed. Then everyone in the room, told me about their experience with the very thing I wrote down: it wasn’t my fault; I didn’t cause it; it happened to them too; the didn’t judge me, and it was okay.

For many years – almost thirty to be exact – my body and my brain kept my childhood traumas a secret from me. For the most part, I always told people I had a pretty good childhood. That my parents, for all their flaws, tried their best.

Then, approaching my thirtieth birthday, I woke up with night terrors, repeatedly. I kept reliving what I call my original ‘big T Trauma” for nights on end. Eventually, I reached out to people in my 12-step community for guidance in what became yet another life-altering journey.

Indignantly for the first while, I weaved my survival of CSA into almost every conversation, every Instagram post, every chance meeting with a friend; I desperately needed to be witnessed and validated. I needed someone to say “yes this happened to you. This happened to me too. This is how we find freedom”. I asked myself, every day following my remembrance did that really happen? How do I know? Am I imaging it? How come I didn’t remember earlier? If it was true, wouldn’t I know?

I was at an AA meeting one evening, sharing my story from the front of the room to a group of about 100 other drunks. I shared that I am a survivor of CSA and incest. At the end of the meeting, a kind, older friend told me she understood. She recommended I look into the Gatehouse, and come over for tea sometime.

Thrown onto a waitlist (as is the case with all Ontario mental health services), I held on tight until the first program opened for me in January – three months later.

On the first evening of our program, there I sat, together, with eight other survivors.

In AA, people always say they find a “tribe”. Family groups belong to each other and know each other intimately. Groups of friends stay connected in high school, university, and beyond. Me? I never felt like I belonged anywhere, with anyone. Until I was in this room, until other women opened their mouths and shared their stories. Then I shared mine.

Once I heard their stories, and once they heard mine, all of the pain in my body began to melt away. The shame I felt over simply existing, began to unfurl itself from my bones. The disgust I had for my own body that, in my early teens manifested as an eating disorder, began to become clear to me, and began to lift.

Sharing our stories about who we are undoes the work of shame. Shame survives in secret.

Shame is isolating. It cuts me off from my body, myself, and my ability to connect with others.

After 16 weeks with these women at Gatehouse, I finally understood what it meant to be in a ‘tribe’, how it felt to finally belong. 

From that time, being a CSA survivor no longer was the centre of the world. Instead, writing and telling my story, speaking my truth become the central refuge of my life and my recovery.

This is why I write. Writing and speaking the truth can be costly. It has cost me friendships, family relationships, and even relationships with different parts of myself.

Undoing shame is an ongoing process. I encounter it in the wildest of moments: when I’m sitting on the bus and listening to music on my headphones, when I make a mistake or feel like I’ve done something wrong, when I hear someone’s response to something, or when I’m relaxing on the couch in the evening time and just watching TV.

Shame, after CSA, becomes who we are. It takes on life as a big black hole inside your stomach and eventually, encompasses your whole mind and body. Undoing the tangled web of shame is a long and arduous process. But it is lifesaving.

Talking about the things we feel ashamed of is the only sure way to find freedom.

Talking about shame is the way we find ourselves again.

Growing Up Poor: Money and Shame.

I grew up poor and in poverty. I grew up with intense shame about my lack of money. Poverty completely fucks up one’s relationship with money (I mean, obviously, right? You’d think so – but I didn’t know that!).

I’m not going to give you some spiel about how ‘money is energy’, and ‘all we have to do is manifest and believe’. That is for a Karen who can’t acknowledge how privilege functions in the world. What I will say is that, I am sitting here, having just paid the most I ever have in taxes because I just had a 6-digit year. In the past year alone, I cleared a personal debt, all credit card debt, a medical loan, and my student loans. And yet, I was able to save some money as well and start investments in a TFSA and RRSP account. 

This might all be normal or obvious to you but, to me, to a girl who grew up poor and had no idea what a savings account was until she hit her 20’s, this feels like a moment.

I grew up watching my mom live pay cheque to pay cheque, and struggle to feed and clothe us. While there were always presents under the Christmas tree, we always knew my mother was crushed under the weight of her surmounting debt, while buying dollar store finds to make sure Santa still visited. I heard about her debt and her money woes often, and by the time I was a pre-teen, I had to pitch in.

Money, and my lack thereof, was a great source of shame. Both growing up and into my adult years.

My relationship to money went from ‘I don’t have enough’ to ‘I finally have some, so I have to spend it all on other people’, to ‘holy shit I don’t owe anyone anything for the first time in 15 years’. (Are these the official three stages of changing your money mind? Yes, I’m sure of it.) I had to work hard to get to this moment: a moment where my relationship with money has completely revolutionized.

It’s not a pretty story. (reader: I cried a lot) 

I’ve written about starting work at 13, and eventually starting my own business at 27. So naturally, my relationship with money would have to evolve.

As a young teenager, watching my mom work multiple jobs throughout childhood with no spousal support and not taking any government support, I resented money. Money was my enemy: it sucked the life out of my mother, it took all my after-school hours away from me, it stole my weekends. I hated it, and I resented that I didn’t have enough of it, that we didn’t have enough of it, ever. Filled with so much rage and resentment towards money, when I got my hands on some (at $6.70 an hour – the minimum wage when I started working), I had to get my hands off of it.

So, I spent it.

I would dutifully hand some money over to my mother for rent, food, and phone bills and the rest would be spent on making me feel better. During my high school years, I worked four days a week, while managing a full course load. The outlet for my resentment was cute new underwear from La Senza (it was cool back then, okay?), lattes at Starbucks with friends, and on-the-go meals in between my busy work and school schedule. I lived off of Subway sandwiches and had a wicked smoking habit, spending $10 a pop on Belmont’s every few days.

At that age, and with that intense resentment, saving money had never occurred. Only when I wanted or needed something (a cute new dress, shoes, a larger cell phone plan, or my tuition for University), did I momentarily think about saving my bucks. None of it went into a savings account, and I was often in the red. After all, I used to think, why shouldn’t I spend it? It made me feel so bad, wasn’t it time it paid for me?

I’d love to say that by my twenties these attitudes shifted and I began to realize how much being alive cost. But they didn’t. Instead, these attitudes shifted over to spending money on drugs and alcohol. I remember one day waking up and literally thinking ‘you know what’s a good idea to make some fast cash? Being a bartender’. So, I saved up my pennies from working at the HMV (it was cool back then, okay?), and took a bartending course to get fully licensed and smart-served. Within weeks, I had a new bartending gig and started making bank.

 Here’s the not-so-fun part: My intense hatred and resentment towards money did not dissipate. It grew stronger.

Now, I was serving people who had more money than me. Getting them their fancy steaks, and making them their mojitos. How dare they have more money than me? And here I was, the backbone of their fun night out, making eleven dollars an hour. I felt like I was conning people into tipping me, and that was my retaliation against their cruelty for having more money than me. Fuck you for having more than me, I would think as I smiled and asked if they wanted another bottle of red wine.

With my foray into bartending, my addiction to lubricating the life experience also grew stronger.

Obviously, I couldn’t stop using and abusing money, when I was using and abusing alcohol. My abuse of money was an abuse of myself. I felt I did not deserve wealth – because I had no inner wealth. I was too busy being drunk AF.

By the time I got sober, I had little money or possessions to my name. I had been working for ten years in rudimentary, basic skill level jobs, bursting at the seams with wanting to be significant, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Not even a savings account.

The pinch of being poor really hit me once I was sober. My resentment towards money and everyone who has it was ever-present, glaringly obvious to anyone who had eyes. But for me, I could no longer drink it away.

When I started my business at 27, I thought things would naturally just be different in my relationship with money. I thought, maybe if I had some, then it wouldn’t be so bad, and I wouldn’t be so angry and enraged – I wouldn’t feel ‘less than’ all the time.

 My business was successful. Within my first year of business, I broke the six-figure mark and gained international clients. I had clients contacting me from all over the world, inquiring about my business and my work. I scaled my business up, secured a strong team, and focused on steady, easy-does-it growth.

But within a year, I found myself without, once again: No savings account, a racked-up credit card, and no idea how to save, prepare for the future, or invest. All I knew was want. I was eyeball-deep in debt, between my personal and business credit cards, and unsure of the way out of the dark, high-interest rate tunnel.

I realized at this time, that maybe I had been approaching the money thing all wrong. My very loving boyfriend sat me down and said: just because you have some money, it does not mean you need to treat everyone to dinner.

Pardon me?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to. That means buying your friends their coffees when you go out with them every other day.

Excuse you?

This entire time, I had been afraid to hold on to money of any sort, because I learned very early on that money always seems to leave any way.

Growing up poor, you have no choice but to spend the little money that you make: groceries, bills, electricity, rent. I remember scraping together money for friend’s birthdays thinking ‘I hope I will have enough to eat this week’ – but never once did it occur to me that it doesn’t have to be like this. I would throw $200 in a card on my way to a friend’s wedding, feeling the intense shame that I was down to five dollars in my bank account. I was raised living pay cheque to pay cheque, and I did not understand that it could be anything else. (I’m not the only one with poverty shame, see? It’s a real thing. I’m not making this up.)

For the past twenty years, I have never once been without a job.

And it is only in the past two years that I started saving any of my income. I am not proud of this fact – but I am no longer ashamed to talk about the poverty I have lived in.

Starting, having, owning, and running a business taught me a lot about the value of money. It taught me about demanding what I am worth, and not taking on pittance where pittance feels unacceptable to me.

The truth (for me) is and always has been that money isn’t just energy. Money is a conditioned relationship and response, typified by my past experiences. My understanding of money is inherently connected to the money blueprint created in me in my formative years. With this blueprint, I continued to build a house, once I began to make my own money, reinforcing everything this blueprint taught me. The unfortunate fact is that the foundation built from this blueprint was either completely unsteady, full of cracks, or like that half-assed job your cousin does as a favour.

In my late twenties, I had to rewrite my foundational understanding of money and its relationship to me before trying to earn some.

Only then, was I able to demand my worth, and see the value in saving and investments. I had to get uncomfortable in investigate the stories I told myself about how much I deserved such as the following hall of fame winners: money will come but it will go faster, going in to debt will make you happy because you can buy things, debt is normal and you will always have it.

After astute investigation, a couple of big, snotty cries during a few tax seasons and calls with my accountant, I began to feel the release of poverty shame.

Revolutionizing what money means to me is, of course, ongoing. I haven’t veered completely in the opposite direction where I don’t buy ANYTHING, but I will say I cook more meals at home. I have learned that I can nourish myself with money and my savings habits. I can handle my investments as a way to nurture myself. I can stop hitting the panic button when a letter from the CRA comes in the mail. I can find a reasonably priced course online and consider my options.  

After living in poverty for almost three decades, I can, and do, believe in the value of investing in myself.

Being ‘The Problem Child’, or: Growing Up With Narcissism.

Six years into my journey of recovery from narcissism and childhood abuse, I understand with a comforting familiarity what Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘it was not that I didn’t remember, it was that I could not bring myself to remember.”

I grew up in a home that was constantly praised by people on the outside for its charity, its strong women, and its endurance. My mom liked to ‘take in strays’ as she called it, and express that she didn’t need a man to support her. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like an advanced, modern, feminist home in the ‘90’s, wherein my mother was raising two strong, young women to be independent and self-determining. But my mom was (or I guess, still is) a covert narcissist.

On the inside, my childhood home was a condemning, violent, shame-filled and unstable place. Police officers frequently knocked on our door during yelling matches. I was forced to work as early as 12, and hand money over to pay for rent and food, instead of my mother seeking proper governmental support for being a single parent. Where people saw my mother claiming she never needed a man to fulfill her, I heard constant vitriol about my father and how terrible all men are. Where people saw a supportive mother who wanted to be close to her children, I had a mother who asked if she really had to show up to my school plays, concerts, and recitals and wasn’t I a little old to need so much attention? Where people thought I was spoiled, I experienced a mother who, each year, told me this birthday was going to be my last. I was manipulated, scapegoated, gaslit, physically and sexually abused, publicly humiliated and blamed.

By 13 years old, I was suicidal. By 14, I was drinking and smoking heroin. By 16, I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and I rarely made an appearance at home during evenings, weekends or holidays. I quickly became what any dysfunctional family unit would call ‘The Problem Child’. Afraid to face their own truths, most of the negative attention of the family was directed at me. I took on the blame for the general misery and toxic environment that was my childhood home.

 This is manipulative work of a narcissist: the projection of an outward image of perfection while creating a cruel and cold environment with their families.

For many years, I felt very confused. Once I got sober, the confusion seemed to intensify: Drinking was an amazing way to numb the pain of lost memories and a short-lived childhood riddled with neglect and abuse.

 It has taken me thirty years to come out of the fog of narcissistic abuse. I am still emerging from the fog on a daily basis. Sometimes, I will simply be reading a book that triggers a realization and suddenly, I am in a black hole of grief. For three days, I will be thinking to myself ‘how did I not remember that?’, then I am left reliving and re-feeling all the pain that was not safe for me to feel as a young child.

After being in the work of untangling my life from abuse for the past six years, I realize there were signs that there was significant abuse in my childhood all along. I just didn’t know how to read them. 

1.     My childhood memories were all hazy

For many years, I only remembered what I would call ‘black spots’ in my childhood. Before the age of 13 or 14, there were big swaths of time that seemed to be completely erased from my memory.

I would try to look back and think about my childhood, or what it was like growing up and I couldn’t. Not only could I not recall what I now know to be abuse with any clarity, but I could not recall ‘the good times’ either.

My entire childhood was a black hole that I could not see through until I gained some physical and mental sobriety.

Outside resources such as ACA, therapy and reading about CPTSD has helped me to identify the abuse. They’ve also helped me to recall memories from my own childhood.

2.     Something felt ‘off’, but I never knew what

Things always felt terrible when I was a child. There were countless days that I would be ‘sick’ and not go to school. I frequently missed class in high school. I was constantly exhausted, suffering severe migraines, stomach pains and intense body aches. I would have mystery illnesses for days that no one could diagnose. They would just one day disappear. I had an eating disorder.

Going home always felt like a death sentence to me. After a day of school or a weekend at work, coming home felt like crawling into a coffin. Coming home after spending a weekend at a friend’s place felt like burying myself again and again. And I spent many weekends at friends’ places.

I could never put my finger on why I hated being at home so much, or why being around my family caused so much anxiety. I could never figure out why I had such severe panic episodes, depression, and dissociation.

Eventually, I learned about covert narcissism and the dysfunctional family unit. It was as if someone pinned my life on the donkey’s ass, for the first time ever.

The gnawing feeling in my stomach that I have felt my whole life, intensified until eventually it moved into my throat and came out as I spoke my truth.

3.     Alcohol and drugs felt grounding to me

The only thing that got me through the things I could not bring myself to remember was drugs and alcohol.

Growing up, I was often stuck in a day dream, not grounded in reality. Day dreaming was a huge escape for me as a child. I had to be able to dream that somewhere, somehow, life was better and easier than this.

Once I found drugs and alcohol at 13, I felt my feet touch the ground. My shoulders relaxed. My jaw unclenched. I laughed easier. Not only that, the thoughts of dying and hating myself started to float away.

It became my only ark in a flooded plain of abuse and terror.

Alcohol brought me to myself before it brought me to my knees. (But after that, I needed community-care of course).

In recognizing the signs in the past few years, much of the fog created by abuse and narcissism has lifted. I am still pulling on strings and seeing what belief system or memory unravels with a simple tug. I am constantly amazed at the well of memory in my body that needs to be released.

When you begin to heal from growing up in a narcissistic home and undo the damage of being the generational Problem Child, you begin to see them everywhere: in the grocery stores being ignored by dad, on the streets being shamed by mom, even in your friends homes, being bullied by their older sisters. Each time I encounter one of my own, I pass on an immense amount of golden light, casting a protective shell around them.

I pray that they too will be lifted from the fog. If not today, then tomorrow, or the next day. But I pray for them that it happens, just as it happens to me, and that one day they can speak the truth that is silenced inside them for years to come.

Being An Addict Made Me A Better Business Woman.

I always tell people I have lived two lives in one: one of a drunk; one on the other side of addiction. 

I was just over a year sober when I first started working in the entertainment industry. There were glitzy parties all the time, and glamorous film junkets to put together: networking, film festivals, mega stars and talent visiting from all over the world, including Hollywood. People in this industry worked hard and they played hard. 

I hid my recovery and my sobriety like it was something to be ashamed of, I thought - no, I knew, that it would be a major damper on my career in a star-studded, drug and alcohol fuelled industry. 

Once, at a party at a festival in Toronto, a loving co-worker suggested "I might want to leave" as the evening began to turn. She was right. There's always a point in the evening when, as a sober person, your tolerance for being around people who are drinking fades. People begin to spill drinks. Their words slur. Everyone is a VIP and they no longer want to hide it. Your tolerance fades fast.

I was 25 when I started in the industry and I was just getting my feet wet. The last thing I wanted was the be branded as ‘different from other workers’, let alone a liability. My sobriety made me more reliable, I thought, more trust worthy. Didn't it? But it also made me a black sheep: Why aren't you toasting at the office Christmas party? Where is your champagne? No wine at the lunch meeting?

At almost a decade into my recovery I've come to learn a few things about alcoholics and addicts - myself included in this category. We are resilient, resourceful, feisty, and rebellious. It just depends on what side of the journey you're on in order for these qualities to be deemed good or bad. When we are deep in our cups, these qualities wreak havoc on those around us. We ruin relationships and lives. 

When I started my small business at the age of 27 - in my 5th year of recovery, all of the qualities I picked up in my years of surviving as an addict, and that I was able to really practice in my recovery from alcoholism became incredibly useful. My bandwidth for stress? Massive. My resourcefulness? Ask me to find something, I will. No money? Don’t worry, we will get it. It was all the qualities of me as addict: resourceful, rebellious, feisty, head-strong, that I was able to put to good use.

I made my alcoholic qualities work for me.

It doesn't hurt that I've seen shady "business deals" on the streets - I can now spot them a mile away, even in a boardroom.

On the other side of recovery, I also began to grow my spiritual life. This has undoubtedly aided in developing my business with values of integrity and grace. Flexing my spiritual muscle daily - from spiritual readings, to daily meditations (which have been ongoing now for almost ten years), to grounding myself and my business in my spiritual values and integrity, has helped me to form the basis of my business, and all the relationships that have flourished from it.

None of this would have been possible had I never been a drunk who had hit their bottom.

Being a drunk taught me survival and resilience in struggle. Recovery taught me integrity and faith. No money in the bank? I had a reliance in the universe that everything was going to work out. That next business deal is around the corner. Not sure this meeting will go well? Suit up. Show up. Put your best foot forward and bring a bucket of unconditional love. Someone screwed you over? Well, pray that they find peace and contentment… That one is still hard sometimes. 

What I thought to be a big burden in life, my decade-long, black-out drinking career, has become one of my greatest benefactors in business. Being a recovering alcoholic and addict has widened my lens in life. While I may be rebellious and resilient, my capacity for vulnerability continually grows; I am able to connect with a wide range of people from a vast background of experiences and places; I can hold space for pain and art and openness more than had I not had the experiences I have had in this life so far. 

Being an addict robbed me of ten years of my youth and early adult life.

But recovery has been a bountiful adventure, which has returned the gifts of a sober life in multitudes.