For over a decade, I’ve helped other people build. Nonprofits, founder-led companies, online businesses—I’ve scaled strategy, clarified voice, ghostwritten for leaders, and set up backend systems that still hold up. But through all of it, I stayed small. Quiet. Professional. Hidden.

After the fire, that wasn’t an option anymore. I didn’t want to disappear behind someone else’s clarity. I didn’t want to edit myself to stay safe. I didn’t want to keep showing up with only half of who I am. So I started building publicly—for the first time. And I started designing a business that works for me, too.

After my best friend died, I didn’t know what to do with myself. But I knew I couldn’t keep doing what I had been doing.

I wasn’t lost exactly. I was very clear that I wanted to move forward. But forward, for the first time in a long time, didn’t look like scaling, performing, or pushing. Everything inside me had rearranged.

I had already built a business. I had already built systems. I had already survived things I don’t say out loud in professional spaces. What I hadn’t done—what I’d been too exhausted, too smart, and too strategic to risk—was show up publicly as myself.

But in the silence that followed her death, I made a quiet promise: I would stop hiding.I would stop performing other people’s power.I would stop waiting for a moment when it would feel safe to be seen.

She saved my life when I was sick. I couldn’t save hers.

And just like that, everything changed. Not just emotionally, but structurally. That kind of grief doesn’t just break your heart—it breaks your life open. It forces you to reconfigure everything around the absence.