On an incredible journey.
I was told everything I would never do again. I’ve spent every year since proving what is still possible.
I’m a certified coach, a U.S. Army intelligence veteran, a speaker, and Mrs. California United States 2015 — and this is the whole story, in my own words.
From the front lines
I joined the United States Army in 2005. I served in Military Intelligence as an interrogator and linguist, studying Arabic. It was work that asks everything of a person and gives little of it back in plain sight.
By the time I left the service in 2008, I carried injuries that few people could see: a brain tumor, heart failure, a partially paralyzed leg, and the first of multiple traumatic brain injuries. Then, just days after my discharge, while I was planning my wedding, the left side of my face was crushed and rebuilt in emergency surgery. My left eye was barely saved.
The choice to live
Recovery was not quiet. It was years of relearning, of being handed a list of things that were now impossible and quietly refusing to accept the word never. On Memorial Day in 2012, still carrying the tumor and the pain, I jumped out of a plane at fifteen thousand feet. In 2013, a vocal cord that surgery had silenced began to work again.
What I thought had taken my dreams away instead brought me to a destiny beyond my wildest dreams.
A story worth telling
For a long time, I kept my story to myself, certain it would only bring the labels I didn’t want. When I finally shared it, the opposite happened: people were encouraged, whether or not they had ever faced an injury of their own.
I began speaking for survivors of traumatic brain injury, the invisible injuries, across California and the country. I worked with Stanford University and the Department of Veterans Affairs, helping medical staff understand what women veterans carry home. A recording of my story, In Her Own Words, was placed in the Smithsonian archives.
Crowned, after six years
Pageantry became an unlikely engine of my recovery: a reason to keep showing up, to keep getting stronger. After a six-year journey, with my husband Erick beside me every step, I was crowned Mrs. California United States 2015. I’d had half my face rebuilt in emergency surgery, and somehow I also took home Mrs. Photogenic. I still haven’t gotten over the grace of that.
A calling to coach
Somewhere in all of it, I noticed what I loved most. I loved people, and I especially loved communicating with them. But by far, what I loved most was helping people get somewhere they wanted to be. That became the work.
Today I’m a Certified Professional Coach and an Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner — more than 150 hours of training through iPEC, alongside crisis training with the Sacramento Police Department, suicide-prevention certification, and chaplaincy training for walking with people through grief. My own road through trauma, recovery, and reinvention sits underneath everything I do, from coaching to speaking to advocacy. It all comes back to three words I return to again and again: compassion, grace, and love.
- Certified Professional CoachiPEC · 150+ training hours
- Energy Leadership IndexMaster Practitioner
- Crisis & suicide-prevention trainingSacramento P.D. & government agencies
- Chaplaincy trainingGrief & loss support