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Breaking Free from Societal Expectations: A Story of Coming Home to Yourself
The smell of grilled chicken and weed smoke mingles with the distant thrum of guitar. The Allman Brothers Band is playing somewhere beyond the food stands, their sound carrying across the festival grounds where my parents’ booth sits, serving up burritos and BBQ to hungry concert-goers. I’m twelve, manning the cash box while my brother preps more chicken on a stick, both of us working with the practiced ease of kids born into this life. This was my normal. Weekends spent trailing behind food booths at music festivals while my classmates played soccer or took dance lessons. But “normal” is a complicated word when you’re splitting your life between jam…
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From Burning Out to Breaking Free: Why I Created Gentle Nook
There’s a moment when everything breaks. Except for me, it wasn’t really a moment. It was a slow undoing that unfolded over months in a fluorescent-lit office, staring at case files while my capacity quietly dissolved. I couldn’t concentrate. My executive functioning had vanished. All I could manage was going to work and coming home. That’s all the energy I had left. Then my psoriasis flared worse than it ever had, angry red patches spreading across my skin like a map of my stress. The inflammation triggered psoriatic arthritis, and suddenly my joints were screaming along with my mind. I was 37, a therapist, a single mother. And I was…