I grew up in Guyana as the firstborn grandchild in a household that made me feel like the center of the world. I was cherished, protected, and completely rooted in who I was. When I went to school and the bullying started, it didn’t touch me — not really. I knew what I was worth because I felt it every time I came home.

Then my grandmother passed, and I stayed in New York. And everything that had held me together was suddenly very far away.

Brooklyn was a different kind of hard. I was in every environment and present in none of them. The adults in my life didn’t see me the way I needed to be seen. I wanted to go back to Guyana — back to the version of myself that felt solid and real — or disappear from where I was entirely. I didn’t know yet that those two impulses were the same one: the need to find my way back to myself.

Years later, during COVID, I finally did. Alone and quiet for the first time in a long time, I went inward. I found a therapist who specialized in inner child healing, and the work we did together changed everything — my relationship with myself, with my family, with what I believed I deserved. Out of that work came a question I couldn’t stop asking: what would it look like to help other women do the same thing?

Soul’n Bloom is my answer to that question. I spent nearly a decade in human resources watching talented, capable women move through institutions that were never designed for who they actually are. I watched them shrink. I watched them perform. I recognized it because I had done it too. The coaching work I had always loved most — the conversations that cut through to what was actually going on — was pointing me somewhere. It took me a while to follow.