In 2015, I did the thing most people only daydream about: I walked away from a stable career as an award-winning educator and moved to Paris to follow a dream. I had no idea I was walking straight into both the hardest unravelling of my life, and its deepest becoming.

Before becoming an expat, I’d built a career rooted in excellence with a master’s degree in teaching and was named Best Teacher in the State of Maryland in 2013. Teaching wasn’t just my profession, it was my craft, my calling and proof that transformation is possible when given the right tools to see yourself.

Arriving in France full of hope, I was grateful. I was building a life in the city I loved. But the constant pressure of one-year contracts, the uncertainty, and the feeling of being easily replaceable… it wore on me. When I finally secured a permanent contract in 2017, it came at the price of dimming my standards and settling for far less than my worth.

That same year, everything collapsed.

Through no fault of my own, I fell into the black hole of French bureaucracy and became a sans papiers—undocumented in the very country I was committed to. The irony? I was volunteering, teaching French at my local city hall. But none of that mattered. 

Then a letter arrived informing me of my pending deportation. Overnight, I became someone who had to avoid the very authorities I’d always respected.

Lost paperwork, deliberate delays, bureaucratic indifference. I became one of thousands stuck in an administrative hell designed to keep people out, not help them through.

Regaining my residency would take more than three years.

Those years stripped me bare.

Without legal papers, I couldn’t work—I was cut off from my own vocation.
I couldn’t leave the country without involuntarily deporting myself.
I was afraid of getting stopped by the cops.
I lost my savings.
I lost my stability.
I became financially dependent in an unsafe relationship.

And I was denied legal exit—forced to stay in France while my mother was dying in the U.S.

I had even petitioned the American Embassy. They didn’t care.

I was bitter. Anxious as f*ck. Furious. And so deeply depressed. 

But love defies laws.

I left anyway. I made it home in time to be with my mom in her final hours. The system had taken three of her final years from me, but being with her at the end was a profound gift. In those final moments, I found a strength I hadn’t known was mine—one that would return later, exactly when I needed it.

After her passing, I was stranded in the U.S. for four months with no legal re-entry to my home in Paris. I fought my way back through an impossible tangle of applications, fees, interviews—eventually making it back to France as a long-term visitor, an illegal workaround that was my only path to reclaim my rightful residence. 

But just as the administrative battle was nearing its end, my body collapsed. 

In 2021, I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease alongside Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and became essentially bedridden for over two years.

In 2022, I finally got my papers back. That same month, just as I was legally allowed to work again, the company went bankrupt and I lost my job.

I figured I’d just settle into my “best bedridden life” in Paris. I truly believed that was all my future held.

Chronically ill. Exhausted. Suddenly unemployed. But while buried in the ashes of everything I had known, I finally made the right decision that changed everything: I chose myself. 

I built my own business from the ground up—alone, no safety net, no guarantees, just the certainty that after everything I had survived, I would never hand my power over again.

The expat story is never one of defeat. It is of bravery.
A story of resilience, sovereignty, and relentless self-trust.
This is my story of an expat who rebuilt her life, her purpose, and her sense of worth—on her own terms.

I healed myself, and in doing so, I mastered the tools to help others heal, too.

Now I use that lived mastery to help others reclaim their power and rebuild their lives.

All along, beneath the chaos, something deeper awakened in me. I began to see the subtle patterns beneath people’s crises—the emotional mechanics, the energetic misalignments, the real truth under the story you tell yourself. I became attuned to the resonant grid that connects us all, and to a higher guiding system.

Now, an adaptive crisis manager and mechanical healer, my gift is precision.

I read the undercurrents beneath your experience, sense what’s unspoken, and guide you through change with the the same security, fluidity and grace that a fixed star embodies.

My work is rooted in compassion, adaptability, and an uncanny ability to navigate the emotional and energetic waters most people avoid—creating access to a joy and expansion that feel so good it’s almost beyond language.

Out of this precision came the Vertical Expat Framework™, a grounded, practical method designed to give expats the structure, clarity, and direction they need to shift their lives immediately.