If You Found This, It's Probably For You

Maybe you're Googling something at midnight and you ended up here somehow. Maybe you've been trying to figure out how to build something but you don't come from money or connections or a family that thought this was a good idea. Maybe you're just tired.

I just want you to know I get it. In a slept-on-my-cousin's-floor way.

I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Third of five kids. My parents were young and addicted. My father was abusive. We got removed by DCF when I was around seven and my brothers and I were separated in foster care. Eventually we were all adopted, which sounds like the happy ending but wasn't. Our adoptive parents were controlling and verbally abusive, converts to Russian Orthodoxy who kicked each of us out at seventeen or eighteen.

I'm at peace with all of it now. Years of therapy will do that. But I want you to know where I started because I think it matters when I tell you where I ended up.

I spent my twenties doing whatever it took. Banking. Caring for an elderly woman named Doris on weekends and overnights because I needed the money and had worked in a nursing home before so I said yes. I loved Doris. She was a French Catholic memere who couldn't really talk after her stroke and we played cards and watched TV and I brought my puppy Bacon to visit her in the hospital. She wasn't my grandmother but she felt like she could have been. When she passed I grieved her like she was.

Her granddaughter asked me to manage her wellness center after that. So I quit banking and I did. It was a crystal shop with angel cards and a self-proclaimed medium and I got my Reiki master certification there and learned tarot and learned that my visual memory is wild because I can still name almost every stone I ever held. I also learned something that has shaped everything I've built since:

So many people are sad and broken and willing to pay a lot for peace. And a lot of people will take advantage of that.

It’s not right.

I left a six-year relationship that had been making me smaller. Slept on my fourteen-year-old cousin's bedroom floor until a rental opened up in Westport. Moved in with my best friend Amanda. Got quiet for a little while. Hiked. Breathed. Started to feel like myself again.

And then Mike.

We went to elementary school together. Matched on a free dating app, couldn't message each other, so I found him on Facebook. Third date was July Fourth. Engaged by Labor Day. Married October 28th in a yoga studio with all four of my biological brothers there- the first time we'd all been in the same room in years, maybe ever as adults. I was pregnant with Atlas by New Year's and we launched our first business in that same four month stretch.

It felt like catching up on lost time. Like finally landing somewhere.

We had talked about working for ourselves since high school. Building something on our own terms. But I don't think we would have had the guts… not without Atlas.

He was diagnosed with X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy. He had cranial surgery for craniosynostosis. And when your kid needs things the conventional world wasn't built to give them, you stop waiting for permission to do things differently. The dream was already there. He just made sure we couldn't keep putting it off.

We homeschool our kids now. We build things slowly and honestly. We don't use fake urgency or manufactured scarcity because I watched what that looks like up close in a crystal shop in a small town and I decided I'd rather just tell the truth even if it means growing slower.

Acadia Thorne came from all of it. The stones I still remember. Doris. The floor. The four months in 2018. Every hard thing that turned out to be pointing somewhere.

This is just me leaving small beautiful things in the world in case one of them finds the right person at the right time.

Kind of like this post.

I'm glad you're here. You're going to be okay.