The Chandelier & The Blessing In The Breaking.

What buying a laundromat during a recession, and a baby at 39 taught me about who I was always meant to be.

I put a chandelier in a laundromat.

Not because the business plan called for it. Not because anyone suggested it. Because I walked into that space — a recession-era bet I made on myself at 32, single, Latina, flight attendant by day — and I felt it needed one. The chandelier was not decoration. It was a declaration. *This place belongs to someone who believes in more than what’s practical.*

People thought I was too much, odd but nice.

I ran that laundromat the way I ran everything — full body, full force, full belief. I was charismatic. I had the gift of gab. I sprinkled what I can only describe as unconventional magical energy into everything I touched. And it worked. By every measurable standard, it worked.

Except something was quietly, persistently wrong.

Sixteen-hour days. Open seven days a week. Wash and fold. Counting money became a chore. Getting supplies became harder. The dream I had fought to build was running me instead of the other way around. The harder we worked, the more we made — and the emptier it felt. I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew that success, in that form, was not what I had risked everything for.

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Then, against all odds, I met my husband.

Against even further odds — I was in my late thirties, what the doctors politely call *advanced maternal age* — I became a mother. Three times. And the woman I had always known myself to be went very, very quiet.

I remember the feeling clearly. Overwhelmed. Unacknowledged. Overworked. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. I had gone from a woman who put chandeliers in laundromats to a woman who couldn’t remember what she had been reaching for.

I thought I couldn’t be all of it at once. Entrepreneur and mother and wife and — and — and. I thought the version of me who believed in more than what was practical had been retired. I resented everyone around me. What I didn’t yet see was that the resentment wasn’t proof that something had been taken from me.

It was an invitation.

The blessing is in the breaking.

-T.D. Jake

The breaking crept in like a dense, smelly, big, brooding, powerful nothingness that started consuming my heart and all its dreams. The resentment grew with the responsibilities and what I thought was the definition of motherhood.

I co-created a workbook — I think I channeled it before I had language for what I was doing. It was meant to help me give myself whatever I needed in order to heal + become the best version of myself.

I held space for my unacknowledged three-year-old self.

And something woke up.

Not the old version of me — charismatic, ambitious, full-force. Something newer. Something that had been waiting underneath all of it. Healed. Expressed. Creative. Intuitive. A mother who was also a builder. A wife who was also a visionary. A woman who had not lost herself in the becoming — who had, in fact, finally found the self worth becoming.

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I am still in this. I want you to know that.

This is not a story I am telling from the other side of a mountain. It is a story I am documenting as I climb. The Self Trust Portal, the audios, the songs, the essays — they are not products I built after I healed. They are the tools I built *in order* to heal, and then looked up and realized other women needed them too.

The woman who put a chandelier in a laundromat because she felt it needed one?

She is still here. She just knows now what she was always reaching for.

*Different is your superpower. Expression is key. Safety is your strategy.*

Thank you for the honor of your time.

— Alexa

*The Quantum Mermaid* 🦋