The Lives I’ve Lived

I’ve lived so many lives it’s hard to keep track.
Some people grow like roots, steady and downward, pushing into the same soil their whole lives.
I’ve never been that kind of woman. I’ve been fire. I’ve been flood.

Every time I thought I’d found my place,
I burned it down just to see what else I could become.

The first half of my life was the story of “the good girl” …Florida at sixteen, feeding the homeless. College volunteer trips and lesson plans taped to the wall. Serving with Peace Corps Botswana, sweating under the sun, praying to purpose. Public health, policy, legislation, classrooms, tiny hands clutching mine.

Every version of her worked so damn hard to be good. I remember the smell of chalk dust, the weight of lanyards around my neck, the way people looked at me with admiration and said, you’re doing something meaningful.

And for a while, I believed them.
I built my worth on it. My goodness became my currency, my cage, and my identity.

Then one day, something cracked.

There wasn’t a breakdown or a grand epiphany. Just a small, splintered, and  precise snap somewhere deep inside.
And just like that, the woman who fed the hungry and saved the babies and smiled for the camera was gone.

The coin flipped.

On the other side was hunger.
Raw. Sexual. Reckless. Alive.
A woman who had spent her whole life serving suddenly wanted to taste what it felt like to take.

That’s how I found her. The woman who didn’t wait for permission. Who stood in dark rooms wrapped in leather and power. Who learned the art of dominance not from men, but from survival. I became a dominatrix. And it wasn’t performance. No part of me ever has been. It was freedom.

For the first time, I wasn’t giving myself away. I was claiming something.
I was the one who wrote the rules, just to feel the blood rush to my head as I broke them. There was control, precision, a strange kind of beauty in the transaction.

Power became prayer. Pleasure became language.
It terrified people and saved me.

But that life had its shadows too.
Behind the confidence was chaos.
Behind the lipstick, the strangers, the pills.

I watched myself dissolve into mania, the world tilting sideways. Hospitals. White sheets. Plastic cups with tiny tablets inside. Half-written suicide notes folded into drawers.

I starved. I swallowed. I came back.
And no one ever really knew how close I came to disappearing.

There were mornings I woke up soaked in sweat, heart pounding from dreams that felt too much like memory. Nights where I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I’d already died and just hadn’t noticed yet.

I didn’t have obligations. There was no pretending, no polished smile.
Just a woman stripped down to her rawest, bloodiest truth.

I’ve been all of them.

The girl who served.
The woman who dominated.
The one who lost her mind.
The one who crawled out of the wreckage, shaking but still breathing.

Every life had its purpose. Every version was me.

And if I’ve learned anything from all of it, it’s this:

Redemption isn’t found in goodness. It’s found in survival.
Here I am.
Every woman I’ve ever been. The one that I am, and all that I will be.
Alive. Dangerous. Unforgiven.

Next chapter.