Love is alive.

I raised myself. I don’t say that for sympathy — it’s just the truest sentence I have about my life. The connection I needed wasn’t there, and nobody taught me what to do with feelings. So I figured it out alone.

I grew up in the country outside Jacksonville. No neighbors. No car until I was eighteen. Far from friends, far from everything. Most of what I remember is being alone in my bed on the second floor of our house, scrolling Pandora for hours trying to find a song that understood me. Reading books to pass the time. That was my whole world for a while.

And honestly, that’s where Voltage started. Not the business — the instinct. When nobody shows you who to be, you learn to follow hunches. A song. A book. A question you can’t put down. I built a self out of those hunches, one at a time. Years later I’d give it a name — Energetic Architecture — but back then it was just survival.

The first hunch that changed everything was a zodiac t-shirt at JCPenney.

I was in high school. I asked my mom what it meant and she shut that down fast — which, if you know anything about me, guaranteed I was going to learn everything about it. (She’s since come around.)

I looked up Virgo. Then birth charts. Then transits. And for the first time in my life, something gave me language for what was happening inside me. I felt understood by a chart before any person had ever managed it. I’ve spent the fifteen years since trying to understand people the way I needed to be understood.

At eighteen, two weeks into my first salon job, they told me I’d have to pay commission and provide my own products. Something in me said no. So I left. No backup plan, nobody telling me it was a good idea — I went independent and built my own clientele from scratch. And here’s the thing: it didn’t feel brave. It felt obvious. Every big decision in my life has been that same move. Trust the gut. Go alone if you have to. Build what you can’t find. Voltage is just the newest one.

By then I had done years of therapy, coaches, courses, every modality I could get my hands on. I could explain my patterns better than most professionals. And I was still running them.

That gap drove me crazy. If insight was enough, I would have been free a long time ago.

Then one day it hit me:

My nervous system literally could not hold what I was feeling — never mind process it. You can’t out-think a body that doesn’t feel safe. I had to stop collecting insight and start building capacity.

Then, on a hunch — always a hunch — I found a man through his podcast, applied for his retreat, got in, and went. A few days with nothing to do and no one to be. And for the first time in my entire life, my nervous system regulated.

I didn’t have words for it at the time. Spacious is the closest one. My head felt clear. The people around me felt safe. I felt whole — like myself, instead of a hundred fragments trying to manage each other. Do you know how strange it is to feel like yourself for the first time as a grown woman? I remember thinking: I want to feel like this always.

Everything I build now comes from that glimpse.

Growth, for me, stopped being about knowing more. It became capacity — being able to watch a feeling move through me without getting sucked into the spiral. Letting it pass. Still standing after. That’s the work. Honestly, that’s the whole thing.

I was a hairstylist for twelve years. Which means for twelve years, I was the person women told the truth to. In my chair, with watery eyes, women told me things they’d never said out loud to anyone. Thousands of hours of real human psychology, up close. What people fear. What they avoid. What they actually need. How different everyone’s ceiling is.

I believe sometimes all a person needs is to be seen, heard, and loved in their heaviest moment. If I can be that for someone, even for an hour, I’m fulfilling my purpose on this earth — not just doing my job.

But there was a cost. I held space all day, then went home to an empty house where nobody held space for me. Tired in a way sleep couldn’t fix. And painfully aware that knowing myself better wasn’t changing how I lived.

When energy work found me, it moved what a decade of talking couldn’t. Months of sessions got underneath things insight never touched — stuck emotion I’d been carrying in my body for years, finally letting go. It was the most profound shift I’d ever felt. So I got certified in it. Not to start a business — I wanted the tool in my own hands. I’m a certified Emotion Code practitioner, and I use it the way it was used on me.

Last year I left Jacksonville for Miami.

I’m sensitive to environments — rooms, cities, light, people. And I had maxed out what Jacksonville could grow in me. The old me didn’t exist anymore. The new one didn’t exist yet. So I rented out my house, packed up my two cats, Tobi and Tchalla, and moved to a city where I could actually become her. Molting, basically.

Someone once pointed out a pattern I’d never named: I keep choosing the harder, lonelier road because it’s the honest one. Independent at eighteen. Walking away from an entire friend group over integrity. Ending a nine-year relationship. Building this company completely alone — no funding, no mentor, no safety net, every page and tool made by my own hands, paid for with money I earned doing hair.

When they said it out loud, I cried.

Maybe loneliness was familiar because of how I grew up.

But it’s my life. And I refuse to be eighty, looking back at a list of regrets.