The $70 Girl

I pride myself on being self-sufficient.

It is one of the first things I would tell you about myself — that I do not need much, that I figure things out, that I carry what I carry without making it everyone else's problem. I learned this early. Growing up, I was surrounded by women who wore life well. Women who worked hard, who laughed loud, who seemed entirely unbothered by the heaviness that seemed to slow everyone else down.

Maybe I was too young to understand the full weight of things. Maybe they were protecting me from the truth of it. But what I took from them — what I carried into my own life — was this: you hold yourself together. You keep going. You wear it well.

And so I did.

In 2023, I quit my job.

I had just gotten my first ever studio apartment — a moment I will never forget, because it meant something. It meant I had done it. Quietly, independently, on my own terms. And from that place of momentum, I decided to try something bigger. A small business. In Chicago.

I will spare you the long version of how it ended.

It ended badly. Horribly. In ways that left a mark — not just financially, but in the part of me that believed in myself. I was, for a while, genuinely traumatized by the idea of trying again. The word business made something in me flinch. Even though I knew, somewhere deep down, that this was not the end of that chapter — just a painful detour inside it.

After the fall, I moved to New York City with $70 in my bank account.

Seventy dollars.

I remember sitting in Central Park, calling my best friend, telling her where I was. She went quiet for a second and then said — "What? Oh my God. I can't believe it." She had been there through all of it. The failing business. The homelessness. The season where I was working three jobs simultaneously just to get an apartment in Brooklyn without drowning.

And yet there I was. In Central Park. Starting again.

I worked three jobs for months. I rebuilt slowly, the way you rebuild when nobody is watching and there is no audience for your resilience — just you, and the next thing, and then the thing after that. There were failed attempts. Several of them. There were nights I questioned everything I thought I knew about myself.

But I kept going. Not because it was easy. Not because I was fearless. Because I did not know how to stop.

Eventually, I wanted more.

That is the only way I can explain San Francisco. It was not a plan. It was a pull. A knowing that there was a larger version of my life waiting somewhere, and that I had to be brave enough to move toward it. So I did.

And somewhere in that city — in that creative, open, alive version of myself that finally had room to breathe — ideas started to come. Conversations started to spark. For the first time in a long time, I felt like myself again.

I am in a better place now. Not a perfect place. Not an arrived place. But a more creative space — one where I can look back at the $70 girl in Central Park and feel something other than grief. I feel proud of her. I feel grateful that she did not quit, even when quitting would have been so much easier than continuing.

Where She Blooms was never meant to be just a journal.

It was meant to be a place for women like her. Women who are in the in-between. Women who are rebuilding quietly, without applause. Women who were taught to wear it well and are only now learning that they are also allowed to put it down.

You are allowed to fall.
You are allowed to sit in Central Park with $70 and not know what comes next.
You are allowed to want more.

And you are allowed to bloom — slowly, messily, in your own time — into exactly who you were always meant to be.