I'M GOING to evolve.

I never felt alone as a kid. I was blessed enough to grow up in a home where we were allowed to play by ourselves: doors closed (I know right!?!), deep in our imagination creating worlds. It's why I have so much whimsy in me now. It's easy for me to go back there. And for as long as I can remember, I would sit in front of the mirror and talk to myself. If my brother didn't want to play, if it was just me and the barbies, I'd find my own eyes and keep myself company. The girl in the mirror was my most loyal friend. I've been doing mirror work my whole life. I just didn't have the name for it yet.

The first lesson came at thirteen, in the seventh grade, in Washington State. My school had a gymnastics team, and I was obsessed. Dominique Dawes, all of it. My family couldn't afford classes, so I taught myself: books, manuals, VHS tapes rewound until they wore thin, and every set of bars on every playground I could find. When tryouts came, I wasn't even pressed. I just thought: if I make the JV team, that's basically free gymnastics classes. Win win!

I made varsity. One of only two seventh graders. Never professionally trained a day in my life. Chosen, my coach said, on potential. We went undefeated that season. And I walked away with the lesson I've been living off ever since: we don't have to be perfect to get started. We can take the step and see what comes next, if we're feeling called to it (aligned actions).

There was a second lesson hiding inside that one. The kids who never noticed me before the team suddenly knew my name. The power of being seen — and the weight of it. I never forgot that either. Both lessons will matter later in this story. (Also: then we moved to North Carolina at the peak of my runway into "popularity." Haha. Remember that pattern. It has a part to play.)

Years later, after college, New York was calling me. Every time I visited, there was this light that would turn on inside of me. Then came the download that would become my first true bet on myself: you just gotta go. I couldn't wait until the savings were perfect and the plan was airtight (believe me, I tried). Anyone who knows New York knows the opportunities only land when you're already there. So I went. A friend's couch, and in under 30 days, I had a job and a tiny studio apartment. Imperfect. Alive. Mine.

The beauty job paid in incredible people but not much else, which is how I became a professional dancer. I could see myself as one before there was any evidence. I tried out for the TopCats and made the finals. The Knicks: semifinals. Then I went to the New Jersey Devils tryout on a whim. Wasn't planning to go, wasn't trying to be perfect, so of course I made the team. Thirteen-year-old me could have predicted it. It was her lesson all over again: I just showed up, and the movement made sense to my body.

Go-go dancing found me next. Extra money, good music, and costumes I didn't have to invent. I was introduced to deep house and techno in the best era of all time, while getting paid to dance thirty-minute sets with the biggest DJs in the world (Tommie Sunshine is still one of my favorites), floating home at 4 a.m. and clocking into the 9-to-5 by morning. And here's what I understand now that I couldn't name then: I was using my body to regulate my nervous system. After a set I'd feel relaxed and empty. Not a sad empty. A release. I felt free. I was practicing the medicine I'd teach a decade later. In a nightclub skybox.

Then came the hoop. When professional dance stopped resonating, I found aerial, and the Lyra has been, hands down, one of the most beautiful partners I've ever danced with. Freestyle, always: my body has never kept choreography that didn't make sense to it, and by then I'd stopped apologizing for that. I have videos that still mesmerize me, because the movements that version of me created with her were purely divine. I still tap in, even now, even at this age. I never forget her. She never forgets me.

The era people ate up ran from 2014 to 2016: my multidimensional era. I'd come out of a hard chapter and a forced move, rebuilt from the ground up, and landed in a gratitude so total it has never left me. Natural hair after years of chemical straightening. Comfortable in my sexuality, open to people's energies, not just their genders. Aerial before work, style director by day, dancing in the middle of the dance floor at parties and leaving in the clouds, having the best time of my life. In my bag. And people, light and dark, gravitated to me.

From the inside, the applause felt invigorating at first. People can see me. People love me. No one could ever hurt me. What I didn't know yet: when you're in your authentic magnetic energy without boundaries, you don't only attract light. That pulled me onto another timeline. (Timelines are what I call our experiences: every choice we make activates one, and this one activated a heavy one.)

Here's where the fool's errand began. Somewhere along the way I decided that if people believed something about me, it was mine to fix. That if they really got to know me, I could prove I wasn't the person they'd projected. So I chased. I morphed. I dimmed myself to make my light easier on other people's eyes. What I know now: people can only see the version of you they understand within themselves. I have no power in anyone else's projection of me if they aren't willing to look at why it triggers them first. The projections were never mine to hold. Never in my control. Only in theirs.

The performing against projections lasted almost a decade, because I didn't want to believe it: that most people only wanted the projection, what being near me could bring them. But not the soul version of me. And the thing is, I actually see people. I see the soul version of them. I notice a fellow neurodivergent soul letting the mask slip as they start to trust me. It's why "I see you" is something I mean literally. I just wasn't receiving what I was giving. Until I'd had enough.

(A soft note before this next part: it walks through grief and losing my mom. If today isn't the day for that, skip ahead freely. The essay will still love you.)

And then grief remade me. When my mother passed, anxiety, depression, and an overwhelming grief took me all the way down. What brought me back to my light was one realization: the only one who was going to get me out of it was me. So I dressed for her — the version of me I was calling in. Clothes for the 5 a.m. meditation. Rituals and routines to move in. Clothes to work from home in, so I felt put together and held. That's the gold blazer era, if you've seen the photos. It looks like fashion. It was a resurrection.

Which brings me to the clothing rack, because moving through this many versions of myself is exactly how I learned my trade. Since high school, everywhere I've lived, I've kept a rack. Clothes visible, never buried, each piece telling me what it allows me to do and be. I dressed my transitions, work to practice, practice to home, enough options to feel comfortable, safe, and seen in every in-between of my life. It's how I build my clients' closets to this day. My clothing has always been a bit of armor for my soul. But mostly it's for embodiment: dressing the version of myself I am actively being (not fighting with) and the one I can already see in my mind's eye.

When I look in the mirror lately, I see so many versions of me. It depends on the day. I'm always searching for myself in my eyes, same as when I was small. Some days I smile. Some days I cry, and I talk to her: you're doing a great job. this has been a hard timeline. it's leading you to the next version. I tell myself how strong I am. How beautiful. How brave, mostly. That one I feel in my heart space.

And here's my ordinary-Tuesday proof that the daydream became my address: old me would be taken out by the mere sense of someone not liking me. I feel projections. I always have. Old me would morph into a dimmer version of myself to make someone else comfortable. Me now? Could never. I acknowledge it. I smile at it. Sometimes, when I'm in the mood, I challenge it. Mostly, I let it go. Being a bright light triggers shadows, and that was never mine to prevent. It's my purpose.

If I could pass one folded note back to every era of me (the girl at the mirror, the seventh grader on the bars, the dancer in the skybox, the woman rebuilding herself from grief) it would be the same note every time: Keep going. Take the tiny step. You are the light, a living embodiment of the divine. Keep going, and be you.

And if you're reading this from the middle of your own shift — standing in a closet full of a past version's clothes, looking into a mirror you don't quite recognize — here is what I want to hand you before we get up from this table:

You are exactly where you're meant to be. You are on the precipice of change. The chaos has arrived — the chaos of the mind, the closet, the unfamiliar mirror — and the chaos is the sign. It's time to shift. You're in the perfect place. Get excited. It's time to BE a new version.

And you know exactly how to do this.
You just have to remember.