About Me
You Deserve to Feel Great. I’m Here to Help.
I survived an eating disorder and I want you to know that you can too. I hope you find hope in my story.
Coming from a line of family from Los Angeles area.. My Grandparents and Dad were raised in Ventura country California. My Mom moved there as a third grader and met my Dad when she was older working as a waitress at Sambos in Ventura. He would come in and sit at the same spot to see my mom after work, doing camera work for a local television company. They married and had my older sister and moved to Oregon. They moved along side my grandparents when they made the move to Oregon after purchasing some large property in Banks, Or. and they built a house on lots of beautiful property.
The plan was to build a house for my parents next to them but zoning issues stopped that from happening. Nine years later, after my older sister, I came along in 1983 and a couple years later my younger brother. My parents ended up getting a divorce and we lived the life of divorced parents. (Which is what my song “Upgraded 2.0” was written about) Still seeing my Dad a lot, we went back to California a lot to see my family that still lived in California and that became one of the main trips of my childhood going back to California. A special time of my childhood because it was time with my Dad and it was time with my Dad’s special family that was unlike any other. A huge family bond that we grew up with and always around my Dad’s family. He had 7 sisters and he was the only boy. I grew up with 32 cousins and very close with my Dad’s parents, my Grandpa and Grandma, that have instilled a lot into me today that I now understand as a grown adult with three children of my own.
My dad is a musician, a very good one, a private one. He always had me around music, him and my step mom always were working on music, always listening to the greats, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, the Beatles, Boyz 2 Men, everything! I would love to dress up and sing, especially to Mariah Carey, Amy Grant, etc.. I love it but It was annoying to me though ’cause my dad loved it too much and I didn’t get to see my dad enough already. So besides singing to Mariah Carey I didn’t want anything to do with it.. but it was instilling the love the music in me at the time even if I didn’t realize it… because music ended up being what I always ran to, alone in my room, crying for whatever reason over a boy or through my hard times with my disorder or for reason I don’t even know why but it was always my comfort away from everyone. Lyrics always had a way of pulling me in and touching me so deep. The lyrics are always what I remembered or pulled my heart strings.
While I laid in my hospital bed I would see the curtain closed and hear Dr’s nearby with a little whisper in their voices, So scared what they were talking about, because it was those Dr’s that would tell me I’m going to die. So I feared those white coats coming in through those curtains, but a very special girl came in trough those curtains I had never met though, just a girl that was planting a seed for the rest of my life. She came in and just talked to me and was so loving and provided encouragement and hope that I could be okay and I could beat this eating disorder. Saving her Anne Green Gables card she wrote in for years to come. She was one of the most important people I would ever meet, little did I know!
Eventually I was discharged and sent home but under super supervision and very late into the new school year which was starting a new high school on top of it all! I had to be on a specific eating plan and had to drink ensure for so long to get back to a normal weight. That was the beginning to recovery for a year and a half until I relapsed again senior year after all that, It happened again. Hanging pictures on my wall that said “Stop throwing up!”, I couldn’t, I would just lock myself in my room listening to music, thats how I got though trying to maintain a social life, school, work, and I couldn’t do it all. My life consisted of a controlling eating disorder. I had to answer to that.
I knew there was a God but that was the only degree of that I understood, I understood nothing but that. Did not know who He was or what He was but I knew my grandparents loved him, and my mom would throw nuggets about how she was raised, and my dad took us to Mass sometimes, but thats all I knew. When I was little I would stay at my grandparent’s house and fall asleep looking at a picture of Jesus on the wall, just looking at him in awe thinking, “He must be someone special”, but the very little I knew I cried out screaming “I need help”.
Eventually Josh and I met and I started to be in a different place, I was happier and I eventually got pregnant and I was responsible for someone else now, it was not about me anymore. I could not hurt my baby I could not throw up anymore. It helped me stop, It transitioned my thoughts to a different place. I had no choice anymore. I could not go back to the toilet. Something that would be looked at as bad in one area, getting pregnant before marriage helped save my life and turn my life around. God can use anything for good. He know what I needed, He knew how to take this problem away. Something I could not do on my own trying many times before. I was killing myself, that was what was going to eventually happen. I had just been screaming for help and in desperate state to be better. Madi, our daughter, was the blessing that changed everything. I have been free from struggling with bulimia nervosa and anorexia for almost 20 years now. God heals and He healed me of an eating disorder, whatever truly causes eating disorders/mental illness is still there but he took that disorder away. God answered my prayers, even before fully understanding Jesus and being saved, I just believed in Him enough to be heard and eventually truly became saved after becoming a mom. Treatment is different for everyone, and treatment works, its just is not my story that put an end to my suffering with an eating disorder, it’s Jesus. My whole life is pointing people to Jesus, with my life and in my songwriting and I think about the teenager I used to be mostly throughout my writing and my songs tell the stories and I hope and pray it will be a help to anyone hurting.
Through experience I can say it seems like these kind of disorders change and mold into other things, some things worse than others. I don’t have an eating disorder anymore but when my kids were little it transitioned into bad OCD phobias I started to deal with and I was back in treatment and back on medicine which greatly helped me get better, which its now been 10+ years.
It’s my life mission to help those who are sick and also fight all the stigma surrounding the words “mental illness”, and what it really is, regardless if its one of the disorders I’ve had or not, because we all suffer from the same stigma. We need to just be love to the sick. I have been loved, and I have been mistreated, I’ve been through it all. My Christianity has even been questioned, with having fears and phobias in the past, and its something that needs to be better understood in the church. Jesus was my only true help with anything I have gone through, that made a true difference in my life, with the kinds of strength that was needed to pull through those kinds of things. He was always there, and I hope to point people to Jesus through their problems.
