Welcome to Grief on Purpose

As a kid, I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. For my first twenty years of life, I floated around aimlessly – working in restaurants and retail.

One morning, when I was 21, I woke up to my mom calling to tell me that my dad had died by suicide. It was shocking, and yet not surprising.  My dad had struggled for many years, and he had talked about suicide before. In hindsight I can see that I dealt with his death by avoiding it – I moved out of state, moved in with my long-distance boyfriend, and proceeded on with my life without truly acknowledging the loss and its meaning to me.

A few years later, I finally finished college with a BA in Art History and a minor in Italian, and went about my life waiting tables. When I was 26, I woke up to another phone call. This one was more shocking and more devastating. My on-again/off-again boyfriend and best friend in the whole world had died of a heroin overdose. In that moment, my world collapsed. He was my everything. He was my person. To say I was devastated and destroyed was a huge understatement.

I truly believed there was absolutely no way I could continue to live in a world without him.

In the months and years that followed, I sought out all different kinds of support. I tried many different therapists, but really struggled to find a therapist who I felt wasn’t trying to “fix” me. It felt as if my grief was problematic to others, as if it was something that made people uncomfortable and that they wanted to fix or shut down. This felt wrong to me.  I thought we could do better to support the brokenhearted, and I decided that, one day, I would try to do that.

I see my own professional evolution and my personal healing journey as my greatest assets in the work that I do. I deeply understand grief and trauma on both a personal and professional level, and I am able to offer a truly compassionate, supportive, and loving hand, while also creating a clear, direct, and accessible road to transformation.