About Me

Hi there and welcome to my website!

You're here to learn a little bit about me, so let's get to it.

My short story is that I'm a retired opera singer / budding software engineer / active crafter. I always include the retired opera singer bit because it's a novel tidbit.

Now, onto the long story.

I grew up in a urban suburb in the East Bay (of the San Francisco bay area -- the same side of the bay that Oakland is on, for those who are unfamiliar with that geolocation). I'm the youngest of five biologically related siblings and one (unofficially) adopted sister. Big family, big feels. Big disfunction. It didn't help that we were strongly conservative in a pretty not-conservative area. I definitely had some embarrassing moments with friends because I shared what I was told by my parents and my church. Awks.

I was an anxious, bratty, giftie kid with a chaotic upbringing. By the time I was born, my parents had made their way out of the poverty my siblings knew, but I still inherited their buy-nothing, hoard-everything mindset. I'm slowly trying to work myself out of that way of being. Later, when the death of my parent's first child (that they had together) passed away, our lives changed drastically from the chaos of disorganization to the chaos of emotional trauma and poor coping skills.

I could talk for eons about my family's dynamics and the story of "us", but let's bring back the focus to me.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a ballerina. I attended a single ballet class and wasn't immediately accepted by the other kids (mind you, we were all very young and learning how to do leaps). I came home, sobbing, and decided that nobody there was nice and I didn't want to go back. To say I'm sensitive is an understatement.

I delved into my imagination, since that was a much happier place and emotionally safer place than my home. For awhile, my life was manga, anime, and fanfiction. Who can survive without fanfiction?

In middle school, when I begged my mom to homeschool me so I wouldn't have to be bullied anymore by classmates, I discovered the glories of David Bowie and other cult classics. I don't really remember much from that time other than obsessively listening to his albums and watching Labyrinth, wishing the entire time that I could lose a baby brother to a well-endowed Goblin King.

This was also around the time that my sister's choir put on a performance of Phantom of the Opera. I fell in love with the music, the story, and, consequentially, opera -- leading me to my life-long love of the art and my continued desire to just be Christine Daae. Or maybe just the leading lady, preferably one in distress who gets rescued by someone who loves her and wants to take care of her.

Highschool was difficult. I spent most of it in pseudo hiding. I'm a social butterfly and had been interacting with people exclusively over the internet for the duration of middle school; I was awkward and weird, and very anxious. The only joys I had were choir and french class, and being able to go home at 3:15pm.

I definitely dressed the part of a socially maladapted poor kid; I wore exclusively dressed and skirts, in part because I wanted to dress like someone from the victorian era and in part because I wanted to hide my shameful thunder thighs. (Note: I'm no longer ashamed of them, nor am I hiding them)

So, my friends were few and far in between. That is, until senior year when I joined the musical. I had friends somehow, and they seemed to like being around me. It set off a feedback loop of me feeling confident enough to let my walls down and to trust others, and thus making more friends because of my greater self-assurance and willingness to trust. It also meant I was emotionally and socially behind 6 years. We all have our problems.

Finally, college.

College led to a lot of self discovery and growth. I did a lot of things I shouldn't have, a lot of things I wouldn't do again, and so many things that I'm grateful for and would repeat in a heartbeat.

The biggest change was that I started to think for myself, and started to dress in clothing I felt good in. I made what I thought would be life-long friends (and I even ended up keeping one of them! Wild.) and earned all of my trauma cred, all while earning a degree!

Post-college, I struggled. Very much. Career struggles, losing friends, lonely-cat-lady struggles. After getting lost in my own pointlessness enough to want to end my life, I got therapy and started to face my problems. Many changes happened, the biggest being that I chose living over surviving.

And here we are now! I left my parent's house and abadoned everything I knew and moderately liked to follow my partner to the PNW. I'm attending school (now online due to COVID-19) at ADA and trying to get my life to a sustainably happy place.

It's been a long, rough ride, and I'm down for what life's got in store for me.