Invisibility hurts. I help with that.
Once the king of holding myself back, now I help quiet warriors find the courage to speak up while remaining true to their reserved nature.
MY STORY
I WAS BORN QUIET, BUT THAT DIDN’T MEAN I COULDN’T SPEAK…
I was surprised to learn that I had been a quiet baby who never cried or made noise unless I needed something. I was the kid who was always being told I was too loud and when I didn’t get my way I was infamous for temper tantrums that lasted forever.
What nobody told me then was that I was trying to learn to use my voice.
I didn’t know then that I was a quiet warrior, someone who is soft-spoken and shy but if I get pushed too far or see some sort of rage-inducing injustice, it’s ON and I will fight to the death for what I believe is right.
As I grew older, I grew more frustrated, and that meant more cycling back and forth between being silent and being angry. HIgh school was a disaster for me socially. I literally had no friends! I felt like I had nothing in common with anybody, whether it was that I didn’t like the same TV shows and movies they did or I liked teachers that they hated. I kept finding myself accidentally in the center of controversies when I stated my opinion.
My inner frustration turned to depression and I didn’t know that it was, in large part, due to the fact that I didn’t know how to speak up for myself AND still be liked. I always prided myself on being someone who was unashamed to be different, yet secretly I was the opposite, too afraid of what other people might think or say to be who I really was.
I kept waiting for things to be different. Elementary school… high school… two different colleges… the only thing that changed was my school environment and then once I went off to college I began falling into one toxic relationship after another… one relationship after another where if I spoke up I was ridiculed or my voice overpowered by someone who thought they knew better…
My story could have ended there. I fell hard for someone addicted to drugs and alcohol, someone who loved me when he was sober and abused me emotionally and later physically when he was high or drunk. When I was 28, I looked hard in the mirror and realized in two years I would be 30 and wanted more out of my life than working at a minimum wage job and keeping my partner’s addictive behavior secret. When I decided to move across the country to study teaching, he got so violent that there were several times I didn’t think I’d make it through the summer alive…
And then I did and he didn’t. He died of a drug overdose 2 days after I successfully escaped and haunted my dreams for the next two years.
Becoming a teacher didn’t solve my problem either. I had plenty of opportunities to stand up for myself and didn’t know how to do it effectively. The teaching assistant who was never in the classroom… the principal the next year who wanted me to babysit instead of teaching non-verbal kids… students who were just as rude to me as the bullies when I was a kid…
The common denominator in all of this was that I needed to understand that I was a quiet warrior, that I was introverted until I got pushed too far and then it was ON. I needed to harness that energy effectively instead of trying to fit myself into the world’s boxes.
Coming out as transgender forced me to begin to reckon with my voice and my true nature. People often think that transition ends when you begin to express yourself as who you are and do whatever medical procedures you and your doctors decide to do to help the outside match the inside better, but that’s not true. My gender transition was only the beginning of my true transition into the powerful quiet warrior I am today.
See, I’d carefully built up my nearly-silent alternating with explosive persona over the years. I’d built a system around making myself feel invisible, not using my voice, and going back and forth between expressing what I really thought and trying to make people like me. Coming out as transgender meant I had to speak up and stand up for who I really was no matter what anyone thought, and it meant I had to do it in a way that WORKED instead of fighting in a way that accomplished nothing but alienating me from others and making me feel bad about the way I’d behaved.
It was a long, hard journey, and that’s why today I help YOU find a way to stand up for yourself and for the causes you believe in without changing your quiet nature. What I understand now is that I was born quiet and that there is nothing wrong with that, and I help people to embrace and take pride in their introverted nature while ALSO using their voices and fighting for a better world in ways that fit them.
WHAT I DO
I coach quiet warriors — people like you who want almost desperately to change the world but are afraid that because they are so quiet, their voice can’t possibly make a difference. I also write books and stories about young people — usually women — who refuse to let themselves be defined by traumatic experiences and turn their pain into power. Finally, if you also fight for a better world through writing, I offer consulting services to help you make your stories, articles, and social media posts as powerful, accurate, and inclusive as possible.
