And if you know me, that probably sounds strange because I’m not really someone who leads with my feelings. I feel everything. Deeply. I just tend to process most of it internally. I compartmentalize. I adapt. I figure it out. Then I keep moving. It’s probably one of my greatest strengths and, if I’m being honest, one of the reasons very few people actually know me.

People know my work. They know the designer. They know the beautiful homes, the pretty pictures, the places I travel, the things I create. They know the version of me I’ve been comfortable sharing. But there has always been a whole lot of life happening behind that. And lately I’ve been thinking about her.

The girl before the designer. The mother before the business. The woman underneath all of it.

I think I’m finally ready to talk about her.

Over the years, I’ve shared pieces of my story with people curious enough to ask. You know the story. The innocent, semi-sheltered girl with big dreams and aspirations that everybody believed in, who somehow became the poverty-stricken teenage mom statistic.

Not once. Twice.

I was 18 with two children, trying to figure out how the hell I was still going to accomplish “the dream.” Whatever that was. Because the truth is, I had absolutely no idea. So I tried everything.

I enrolled in college to become the obstetrician I had always imagined I’d be growing up. Then, boom. Never went. I went to real estate school. Finished. Then decided, nope, this isn’t it either. I’d rather be a broker, and honestly, I didn’t have the time to continue the education. I worked at the post office on and off for five years, following in my grandmother’s footsteps. Again, absolutely was not interested.

At one point, I was working at my dad’s restaurant while simultaneously enlisting in the Navy. I passed my ASVAB. Passed MEPS. Met all my requirements. Then it came time to choose my job and actually leave. And boom.

NOPE. Never mind.

I thought about my babies and knew I couldn’t leave them that young. So I didn’t. Eventually, all those starts and stops landed me in interior design. And that wasn’t by design either, might I add. It was just something I could do. Raw talent. Something that existed in me before I had the language, education, connections, or even awareness to understand what it could become.

By 23, I was single parenting two children with literally a dollar, a dream, and free will. And I was grieving. I had lost my grandmother the year before. She played a huge part in raising me, and losing her took something out of me that I didn’t immediately know how to replace.

Back then, grief was easy to identify because something had actually been taken from me. Someone I loved was here, and then she wasn’t.

I didn’t know yet that grief could be much sneakier than that.

I was lost for a while. Not the dramatic kind of lost where everything falls apart and everybody knows it. My kind of lost. The kind where you still get up. Still handle shit. Still take care of everybody. Still laugh. Still figure out what needs to happen next. But internally, you have no fucking idea where you are.

That has always been my way. I learned very early how to adapt to whatever circumstances I was in. I could put things in boxes. Grief over here. Motherhood over there. Money problems in this box. Dreams in another. Handle whatever was directly in front of me and come back for the rest when I had the capacity. Sometimes I came back. Sometimes I didn’t.

But by the grace of God and my children, I eventually found my way back to myself. And when I did, I went. Chin up. Chest out. I had babies to raise and a life to build. So I built it.

I worked my ass off for a decade straight. I built a business. Built a career. Built beautiful homes. Built relationships. Built stability. Built a life for my children that looked very different from where we started. And through most of it, I kept my head down and my eyes on “the prize.” Until recently. Because lately I’ve been still enough to ask myself a question that genuinely shook me:

What was the prize?

Seriously. What the hell was I chasing all that time? The obvious answer is my children. As parents, we have this mentality that we always seem to reduce to one sentence, one rhythm, one sound:

I want my children to have everything I didn’t have.

Rolls eyes. I mean, duh. Of course. But when I started really interrogating that statement, I realized something. What exactly didn’t I have?

Because before life got complicated, I had a pretty good childhood. I was loved. I was supported. I was protected. I had both of my parents. Grandparents. Siblings. Aunts. Uncles. Elders. We had holiday cookouts with extended family. Frequent trips. Good friends. For most of my childhood, at least until around 14, I honestly can’t name much of anything I desperately wanted that I didn’t have.

Except maybe a better environment. And the older I get, the more important that distinction becomes. Because I don’t remember dreaming about money. I remember dreaming about the world.

I was a kid who lived in fantasy. Not because my actual life was terrible. I was just deeply curious about what else existed. For instance, I became obsessed with San Francisco because I watched The Princess Diaries and Mrs. Doubtfire entirely too many times. The hills. The trolley cars. Those houses. The views.

For years, I said I wanted to live in a converted firehouse. I wanted this beautiful, interesting home without realizing that Miranda from Mrs. Doubtfire was an interior designer with her own practice. Imagine that. I didn’t even know interior design was something people did professionally. I had never seen that world in real life. But apparently something about it resonated.

Then there was Total Recall, The Fifth Element, and Smart House. I wanted a house with all this insane modern technology before I even understood what a smart home was.

And I was curious about things that had absolutely nothing to do with houses too. When I was around seven, my retired veteran uncle used to babysit me while my mother worked. So there I was, sitting on the couch watching Armageddon, Men in Black, Star Trek, and Stargate, fascinated by space and the universe and asking questions about things I definitely didn’t understand.

I wanted to know what was out there. I wanted to know how things worked. I wanted to see places I had never seen. I wanted to experience things nobody around me was talking about. I wanted a bigger world.

And when I look back at that little girl now, I realize she wasn’t fantasizing about wealth. She was fantasizing about possibility. That’s different.

So I keep coming back to the question. What was the prize? Was it a better environment? Different lived experiences? A beautiful home that made me feel comfortable and safe? Better financial circumstances? Giving my children access to things I desired but hadn’t experienced? Proving that becoming a teenage mother didn’t mean the rest of my story had already been written for me? Maybe.

But when I really strip all of that down, there was always one feeling underneath it.

Ease.

That’s what I wanted. Not money for the sake of having money. I wanted what money, stability, and autonomy could make possible.

Choice.

I wanted to move through the world freely. I am a Sagittarius centaur after all, haha. I wanted to travel. I wanted to create beautiful environments. I wanted to be able to say yes. I wanted to be able to say no. I wanted to change my mind. I wanted to experience things. And I wanted the people I loved to experience them with me.

I wanted enough money to make choices without panic, enough time to actually enjoy the people I loved, enough support to know I didn’t have to carry everything alone, and enough freedom to enjoy my life while I was actually living it.

And I think that’s why, very early in my career, I understood something about myself that I didn’t always know how to explain. I never had this burning desire to have an extraordinary career. I preferred an extraordinary life.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t ambitious. Please. I worked my ass off. I still have enormous ambition. But I never wanted my career to become the most interesting thing about me. And I definitely didn’t want to wake up one day with a wildly successful business and realize I had missed my actual life building it.

So I moved differently. I didn’t overextend just to say I was busy. I didn’t chase every opportunity. I allowed myself to be present. To travel. To be a mother. To spend time with people I loved. To build work around my life instead of building my entire life around work.

And not for one minute did that mean I wasn’t making sacrifices. I made a million of them. I still had responsibilities to honor. I was mothering my children while, in many ways, mothering the work and business I was trying to build too. I thought I understood what I was doing. And then, boom.

Lately, something shifted. I’ve felt strangely disconnected from my own life. That’s the best way I know how to describe it. I’m here. I’m doing all the things. I’m working. I’m laughing. I’m exploring. I’m providing. I’m solving problems. I’m showing up. But lately, I feel like I’m watching parts of my own life from a distance.

The strange part is, I’m not unhappy. I love my life. I value what I created for myself and my children. So I’ve been trying to understand what this feeling actually is. Maybe it’s watching my children get older. Maybe it’s realizing how many versions of our lives have already come and gone. Maybe I’ve been moving so quickly that I never noticed I was changing too.

Motherhood, in particular, has been sitting differently with me lately. Because my children weren’t just part of the life I was building. They were the reason I started building it.

I became a mother before I really had the opportunity to know myself as a woman. That means almost my entire adult identity developed while I was responsible for developing two other human beings. While I was raising them, I was raising myself. We grew up together. And there is something beautiful and slightly heartbreaking about realizing that.

The 23-year-old with two babies, a dollar, and a dream doesn’t exist anymore. Neither do those babies. The woman trying to figure out how to turn raw talent into a business doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does that version of our family.

There have been entire versions of us that have already come and gone.

And I think that’s what I’ve been feeling lately.

Grief.

Not the kind I immediately recognized when I lost my grandmother. This grief is sneakier because nothing terrible has happened.

My children are alive. They’re healthy. They’re growing. They’re becoming independent. I’m watching the very thing I spent my life preparing them to do actually happen.

And somehow, there is still grief in that.

I’m grieving babies who grew up exactly like they were supposed to. I’m grieving versions of our family that I didn’t know I would miss until they were already gone. I’m grieving the mother I was when they were small. The woman I was when our whole little world could fit inside the walls of one house.

Maybe that’s why I’ve felt disconnected from my own life. I thought something was wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong. Maybe I’m just finally present enough to notice time.

And grief is sneaky like that. Sometimes it doesn’t show up because something went wrong. Sometimes it shows up because something beautiful changed.

When I tell people my story, sometimes I can see them hearing tragedy, trauma, and motivation. Teenage mother. Twice. Single parenting. Poverty. Grief. Wrong turns. Starting over. Trying to build something from practically nothing.

And yes, there were painful parts. There were really fucking hard parts. But I’ve never looked at my life and thought, what a tragedy. Some of it was tragic. But the life that came out of it wasn’t. More than anything, I feel blessed and grateful.

I’ve always said I was fortunate enough to be a woman who got to have it all. Not the bullshit version of “having it all” where the house is perfect, the children behave, the business is booming, your relationship is amazing, and somehow you also drink eight glasses of water every day, haha. I mean something much simpler.

I never had to choose between motherhood and becoming myself.

There are women who, because of money, timing, support, circumstance, or just life, have had to choose. The opportunity or the children. The career or the family. Going or staying. I was fortunate. I had support. I had family. I had people who loved me and my children. I had a village. I had enough autonomy to raise my babies and still figure out who the hell I was. That is not lost on me.

There were still things I put on hold. Partnership. Companionship. Spontaneity. Certain risks. Certain versions of myself. There were choices I didn’t make because my choices didn’t only belong to me. My children needed me grounded, so I stayed grounded. They needed stability, so I built stability. They needed their mother, so I was their mother.

I understood the assignment. And I don’t regret it. Not for one second.

Those children gave my ambition somewhere to go. During years when I felt lost, they gave me a reason to stay in pursuit of myself. But I was never the kind of mother who wanted motherhood to become my entire identity. I loved being their mother, but I never believed loving them required me to disappear inside of it. They were never standing between me and my life. They were part of the reason I built one.

But from where I’m standing now, I can also see that I built a life where I was always needed. My children needed me. My business needed me. There was always someone or something requiring something from me, and for so long, I never stopped to consider where my value would lie beyond those walls.

And then it hit me. Maybe this was one of the same truths my mother struggled with.

There was a time when my mother and I went no contact. When we eventually reconnected and she attempted to offer me an apology, one of the first things she said was, “Listen, I know you don’t need me.”

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what she said after that.

I was so baffled by that sentence. What does me needing you have to do with anything? I couldn’t understand why that was her point of entry. Why “need” was even part of the conversation. And who the hell doesn’t need their mother? I don’t care how old you are.

In the moment, I didn’t dive deeper, but I did instinctively attempt to psychoanalyze what she meant. However, standing where I am today, that sentence is starting to crystallize differently.

Maybe when you’ve spent so much of your life being needed, you can unknowingly start attaching some of your value to your usefulness. Maybe being the person everyone calls, relies on, comes home to, or needs something from becomes part of how you understand your place in their lives.

And then those relationships change. Children grow up. They become independent. They build lives that don’t require your constant presence. And suddenly, you’re confronted with a question you may have never needed to ask before:

Who am I when nobody needs me to be anything?

I don’t know if that’s what my mother meant that day. I can’t speak for her, and I don’t want to rewrite her feelings through the lens of my own. But I can finally see something I couldn’t see then.

Maybe she wasn’t telling me something about me. Maybe, in her own way, she was trying to tell me something about herself. And maybe it took becoming a mother of grown children for me to even consider that.

And now there is space. One child is going to college. Another is spending these next couple of years with the other side of his family. Suddenly, there is room in my life that hasn’t existed this way for most of my adulthood.

My room.

That is a wild thing to experience when you became somebody’s mother before you really got to experience adulthood as just yourself. For most of my adult life, I knew exactly who needed me. There was always something to solve, somebody to pick up, a bill to pay, a decision to make, a business to build, a child to raise, a life to create. Now I’m looking at all this space and realizing I get to decide what goes there.

Maybe that’s part of the disconnect I’ve been feeling. Maybe I’m not disconnected at all. Maybe I’m standing between two versions of my life. One is changing, and the other hasn’t fully introduced itself yet. For someone who has spent most of her life knowing exactly what needed to happen next, that feels uncomfortable. But it also feels exciting as hell.

Because I still want so much. I want to design hotels and eventually own one. I want to get deeper into hospitality and retail design. I want to design furniture. I want to open a beautifully curated vintage consignment showroom and start a vintage jewelry business. I want to explore fashion. I want to write. I want to mentor. I want to travel the world.

I want to open and operate a tiny wellness resort somewhere beautiful and obsess over every detail. The architecture. The furniture. The food. The scent. The landscape. The music. The way people are cared for. The way they feel when they leave.

I want companionship. Romance. Adventure. I want to spend a month somewhere simply because I can. I want to walk into rooms where nobody knows me as an interior designer. I want to learn things I know absolutely nothing about and become a beginner again. I want to follow things simply because I’m curious about them.

For a while, I wondered if all of that meant I wanted to pivot. Maybe I was bored. Maybe the economy was getting to me. Maybe residential design wasn’t enough anymore. But the more I sit with it, the more I realize I don’t think I want a hard pivot.

I want expansion.

I’ve spent the last decade focusing so intensely on one expression of myself that even I started mistaking it for the whole person. When I look at everything I want to do, none of it is actually random. Design, hotels, furniture, vintage, jewelry, fashion, travel, wellness, writing. They all come back to the same little girl fascinated by people, places, objects, beauty, culture, ideas, and how environments make us feel.

Interior design was simply the first place all that curiosity had somewhere useful to go. It gave me a language. It gave me a career. It gave me access. It changed my life. It changed my children’s lives.

But maybe I’ve been treating the thing that opened the world for me like it was supposed to become the boundary of it. It isn’t.

Design was never the destination. It was a portal.

Then and now. No labels, no captions if the pairing speaks for itself.

Maybe that’s another thing I’m starting to understand.

A big part of who I am is who I’m not anymore.

I’m not the 18-year-old trying to figure out how to raise two babies. I’m not the 23-year-old grieving my grandmother and trying to find my way back to myself. I’m not the woman wondering if this little talent of mine could actually become something. I’m not the mother whose children need her for everything. I’m not even the designer I was five years ago.

Those women are gone. But they’re also everywhere.

In the way I make decisions. In the way I love. In what I’m afraid of. In what I’m no longer afraid of. In what I tolerate and what I absolutely will not. In how quickly I can adapt when life changes. In how deeply I value freedom now that I understand what it costs to create it.

Maybe that’s one of the strangest parts of getting older. You don’t just become more of yourself. You become a collection of everyone you’ve already had to be.

And maybe becoming isn’t always about adding something new. Sometimes it’s realizing which versions of yourself have already done their job.

There’s this thing I always say:

I raised babies, a business. Now third quarter is mine.

I’ve said it casually before, almost like a joke. But lately I’ve been thinking about what I actually mean when I say it.

I became a mother so young that there really wasn’t much adult life before motherhood. I was raising children while I was still becoming a woman myself. Then somewhere in the middle of all that, I started raising a business too. Both required something different from me. Both needed my attention. Both taught me discipline, patience, sacrifice, resilience, and how to keep going when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And somehow, while I was raising babies and building a business, I was raising myself too.

Now my babies aren’t babies anymore. The business exists. And I’m looking at this next stretch of my life differently.

Third quarter is mine.

Not because I think the best parts are behind me. Quite the opposite. I think the first half of my life gave me everything I needed for this part. I know myself better. I trust myself more. I have experience. I have discernment. I have a little money. I have a whole lot more confidence.

And most importantly, I have something I didn’t have at 18 or 23.

Choice.

So when I say third quarter is mine, I don’t mean I’m walking away from everything I’ve built. I mean I finally have enough room to ask what else I want to build, experience, love, learn, see, create, or become.

And when people ask me what I’m going to do now, what’s next, what I’m going to do when the kids are gone, I finally have an answer.

Whatever the fuck I want. Respectfully.

And I don’t mean that recklessly. I mean it gratefully.

I spent most of my adult life making decisions through the lens of responsibility. What do my children need? What does the business need? What makes sense? What’s stable? What’s smart? What happens if this doesn’t work? There was a purpose for that version of me. She got us here. I love her for that. But I don’t need her running every decision anymore.

I want curiosity to have a vote now. I want pleasure to have a vote. Love. Adventure. Rest. Risk. Wonder. I want to see what happens when I stop demanding that every interest become a strategy and every dream become a five-year plan.

Maybe I’ll design the hotel. Maybe I’ll own it. Maybe I’ll open the vintage store. Maybe I’ll build the wellness resort. Maybe I’ll fall madly in love. Maybe I’ll disappear somewhere beautiful for a month and write. Maybe that vintage butter-yellow Porsche 993 Turbo will land in my driveway somewhere off the Pacific Coast. Maybe I’ll do all of it. Maybe I’ll change my mind about half of it.

I can.

And that, I think, is the point. Growth is a journey, not a destination. I’ve heard that my whole life. I think I’m just now understanding it.

There was never going to be some final version of me waiting at the end of all this. The teenage mother wasn’t the final version. The grieving granddaughter wasn’t. The struggling 23-year-old wasn’t. The interior designer wasn’t. The entrepreneur isn’t. Even the mother I’ve spent all these years becoming isn’t.

Every version got me to another version. Every version knew something the next one would need. Maybe the goal was never to finally become somebody. Maybe it was to build enough freedom to keep becoming.

And that brings me back to the question I started with. What was the prize? I thought about money. The career. The beautiful home. The experiences. Providing for my children. Proving something to myself. And yes, all of those things mattered. But I think the answer is much simpler.

The prize was autonomy.

The freedom to choose. The freedom to stay. The freedom to leave. The freedom to build. The freedom to mother. The freedom to love. The freedom to change my mind. The freedom to become something completely different. The freedom to live a life that belongs to me. After all, that had always been my definition of success.

Maybe that’s the other thing grief has been trying to show me. I can miss who we were without wanting to go back. I can grieve the life that’s changing and still be excited as hell about the one that’s coming.

Both can be true.

Maybe that’s what little Ajia was trying to tell me all those years ago. She wasn’t asking me to become an interior designer. She didn’t even know what an interior designer was. She was asking me to stay curious and go see the world.

It took me a while. I had some things to do first.

But, I’m listening now and i’m hearing "It’s MY TURN". 

The first thing I noticed about Joshua Tree wasn’t the landscape.

It wasn’t the architecture, the endless desert sky, or even the reason I’d booked the trip in the first place.

It was that nobody seemed to be in a hurry.

Not the staff.

Not the guests.

Not even the wind.

Somewhere between the Atlantic Ocean and the desert, urgency had simply not been invited.

I spent three days in Joshua Tree at the new RESET Boutique Desert Hotel during its soft opening weekend expecting to critique every design decision—an occupational hazard—admire the aesthetics, hike the canyons, enjoy the amenities, and chase the sun.

Instead, I found myself captivated by something much harder to photograph.

But somewhere between my audacity and appreciation…

the desert critiqued me.

Not with words.

With silence.

Not the absence of sound, but rather the absence of urgency.

No notifications.

No FOMO.

No invisible expectation that every moment should be filled with content, productivity, or proof that I was having a good time.

Just wind moving through the desert.

Sunlight quietly making its way across the bed.

The kind of morning that didn’t care what time it was.

Hours that didn’t seem interested in competing with one another.

It made me wonder if somewhere along the way we’ve confused luxury with accumulation.

A larger home.

A bespoke kitchen.

A grossly expensive slab of stone.

The vintage chair everyone says you have to own.

As a designer, yes, I appreciate beautiful things.

Craftsmanship matters.

Materials matter.

Thoughtful details matter.

But standing in the middle of the desert, I found myself asking a different question.

What if we’ve been measuring luxury with the wrong ruler?

Because the most valuable thing I experienced all weekend wasn’t something I could specify on a finish schedule.

It was spaciousness.

Not physical space.

Mental space.

The kind that quietly reminds your nervous system it doesn’t have to stay “on.”

That realization followed me everywhere.

Over breakfast.

On morning walks.

While stargazing.

While sitting outside doing absolutely nothing.

Which, if I’m honest, is something I’ve become surprisingly bad at.

It also made me realize how quickly we’ve learned to ask every space to perform.

Today, we want restaurants to have “Instagrammable moments.”

Hotels have to impress us within the first thirty seconds.

Homes have to earn a “wow” before we’ve even taken off our shoes.

Rarely do we ask the quieter question.

How does this space allow me to feel?

I’ve believed for a long time that ambiance is the most overlooked element of design.

Not because it’s visible.

Because it’s memorable.

There was a time when I didn’t have the biggest house.

Truthfully, I didn’t even live in the best neighborhood.

I was a young mom raising two children, building a business, and doing my best to make whatever space we had feel like somewhere we’d want to come home to.

Looking back, I can honestly say no one remembers what the furniture looked like.

They remember how my home felt.

The music.

The candles.

The lighting.

The ambiance.

The conversations that somehow lasted longer than expected.

They remember walking through the front door and forgetting, if only for a little while, everything that existed outside of it.

I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t decorating at all.

I was designing refuge.

Maybe that’s why the spaces that stay with us aren’t always the most expensive.

Think about your grandmother’s house.

Exactly.

They’re the ones that quietly change our behavior.

A chair positioned exactly where the morning light arrives.

A hallway that somehow makes everyone lower their voice.

A window brave enough to frame nothing more than open desert and a dusty canyon.

Those moments never announce themselves.

They whisper.

Now, funny enough, I dragged my teenage son with me on this trip—against his will, might I add.

Partly because I didn’t want to be in the desert alone.

Mostly because I’ve always believed exposure leads to expansion.

However, what I wasn’t expecting was how much sleeping he would do.

Literally from the moment we arrived until the day we left, he managed to sleep in for hours, wander outside for a bit, then disappear back to bed, only to repeat it all over again.

At one point I walked past him, laughed to myself, and thought,

“There’s no way he’s still asleep… like, no way.”

Listen…

Maybe it was jet lag.

Maybe it was the desert air.

Or maybe it was the first time in a while his mind, body, and spirit collectively decided,

“We’re okay here.”

Either way…

Silence won.

Oddly enough, that moment stayed with me more than any mountain view because it made me wonder how many homes are beautifully designed…

…yet never actually allow the people living inside them to exhale.

That thought followed me all the way home.

Maybe that’s because I’ve spent years helping people create beautiful homes.

Joshua Tree reminded me that what people are really searching for isn’t a beautiful home.

They’re searching for relief.

Relief from chaos.

Relief from decision fatigue.

Relief from visual noise.

Relief from walking into a home that no longer reflects who they’ve become.

Relief from feeling like every part of life is asking something of them.

Maybe that’s why, even before I had the language for it, I wasn’t just decorating.

I was designing refuge.

As designers, we spend years obsessing over scale, proportion, texture, materials, and light.

And we should.

Those things matter.

But lately I’ve been wondering if one of the most transformative things we can design around isn’t a material at all.

It’s stillness.

When I returned home, I didn’t find myself wanting another project.

Or another piece of furniture.

Or another destination.

I wanted something much less tangible.

More room for light.

More dinners that linger.

More conversations uninterrupted by phones.

More mornings that begin without immediately reaching for one.

More opportunities to simply notice.

Maybe that’s where luxury has been waiting for us all along.

Not in having more.

But in creating spaces that ask less of us.

Spaces that don’t perform.

Spaces that allow us to become fully present inside them.

Maybe the most luxurious thing a home can offer isn’t something you can buy.

It’s permission to exhale.

I left Joshua Tree with fewer photos than I expected and a perspective I’ll probably keep far longer than any souvenir I could’ve brought home.

Maybe that’s what the best places give us.

Not just memories.

A new way of seeing.

Now I’d love to know…

Has a place ever quietly changed the way you see the world?

Not because it was extravagant.

But because you left seeing your own life a little differently.