My bio, as it relates to what I’m doing now, is the result of my life-long journey of self-discovery. I am a mother, a grandmother, an author, a writer and a feminist (or as I like to affectionately refer to myself these days – a feminista).  I am also a uniquely evolving individual, an advocate for compassion and a believer in the passionate pursuit of bliss.

Over the course of my life I have affiliated myself with circumstances, situations and choices that were, in hindsight, quite fitting for my evolution as a human being.  Thankfully, I stayed the course because I realize now that leaping with abandon, to avoid the challenges, would have meant bypassing those lessons that were most relevant to my personal growth.

In particular, I was a wife, a workaholic, a corporate executive, a business owner, an overachiever/perfectionist and a rebellious advocate for women’s inalienable right to have a voice in how our lives unfold. I was devoted to the American dream of having it all and I walked out of near poverty to claim my place in a world where, like so many others from my generation, I measured my success by my material possessions.

During my 25-year career in the escrow industry and a few other entrepreneurial pursuits, I learned my most important lesson – I am more than my job. That revelation came about when my executive status and accomplishments just could not fulfill a burning desire to pursue my purpose in life.  Thankfully, I was blessed to receive the rewards of my hard work in a corporate buyout that enabled me to semi-retire in my mid-forties.

Even as I recognized that I was suffering from burnout, I didn’t immediately let go of my overachiever mentality with that buyout.  Instead, I was compelled to fill this new found void in my life – probably out of habit – by immediately setting my sites on pursuing a law degree. As I acclimated to college after 20 plus years, I quickly realized political science no longer appealed as my chosen major. I think I knew intuitively, if not consciously, that I couldn’t wrap myself around a science that espoused, among others, a larger model of the structure I had just left.

English seemed a better fit.  In the process of writing papers and reading quality literature written by icons like Jane Austen and Virginia Wolfe, I discovered my sense of purpose – a passion for writing fiction.  Goodbye law school! Hello bliss!

This passion for writing was complemented by another discovery.  I will always be a feminist, but I discovered my feminista as I gradually allowed my feminine side to blend with and temper the masculine persona that had sustained me all those years as I climbed the ladder and crashed the glass ceiling.  I realized my feminista had been buried, for safe keeping, within my psyche and only pushed to the surface when I no longer had anything to prove at the corporate level.

As I enter this next phase of my as yet unwritten bio, my feminista is alive and thriving; and it is she whose voice I have unleashed as I passionately embrace and share the story of the divine feminine.