I built a life once. I lost all of it. I built it again from nothing.

I did not take the direct route to this chair.

I grew up in poverty. I became a mother young. I survived domestic violence, and later I lost years to addiction. I had already built a whole life back once, and then I watched all of it go: my home, my footing, and any version of a future I could still name out loud. There was a stretch when I was homeless with almost nothing left to hold onto, and I did not believe there was a way up from where I was.

The turn came on April 26, 2016. It started with my son's prayer, and it came down to one decision, which was to stay in treatment instead of walking away one more time. That single choice to stay is where everything I have now began.

What followed was not a transformation. It was a long line of hard decisions made one at a time, on days when I could not see what any of them were building. I started over at the very bottom, painting address numbers on curbs for cash. Then entry level work. Then a promotion, and another one, and another, climbing the corporate ladder while I worked my way through a bachelor's degree and then a master's.

Seven of those years were at Stratatech. I came in through admissions and finished my first year as the top admissions rep in the company. I spent most of my time there directing Student Services, first in Phoenix and then across the organization, and my last chapter was an executive role on the B2B side, where I learned how to walk into a room full of strangers and leave with a partner.

People ask me how it happened. The honest answer is that I was so grateful to be given any shot at all that I gave my whole self to every one of them. That is the whole secret, and every bit of it came after 2016.

Today I am the CEO of Chrysalis, a Phoenix organization whose programs meet domestic violence across the whole arc of it, from emergency shelter through the long work of rebuilding a life. I serve on the board of St. Joseph the Worker. And I founded The Other Side Ministry, which is building toward recovery and sober living work in Kenya.

I tell you all of that not as a résumé but as evidence. None of it was guaranteed. All of it came after.

The rest of the story, the parts that do not belong on a webpage, is in the book.