I​was never doing one thing at a time, and certainly not doing anything the way anyone else around me was. This means I had lots of friends–and lots of frenemies. I have always felt that ‘winging it’ was THE WAY FORWARD and have been chronically allergic to practice making anything other than a headache.

I had to earn– to show I understood the immigrant culture in America, early. I ran a babysitting ring at twelve. Not a lemonade stand. Multiple sitters, multiple families, scheduling, payroll, quality control. We even had hand-made stationery and a phone tree with ‘while you were out’ pink message pads and incentives for repeat business and customer expansion.

I may or may not have also begun a long and more clandestine career at this time, much in part because of these and other clever “magic tricks” I had displayed without care. That experience cost me a few near death experiences (NDEs), and more than a few treasured relationships. Nobody likes secrets. It can be difficult to maneuver life as a young adult not knowing who the good guys are.

Many schools, many hobbies and teams at the same time–just to keep my mind busy. Taking apart the computers from my Dad’s polymer labs to help ‘hack into’ them, editing clinical monographs at 50 cents a page, jumping off cliffs and riding motorcycles on the sides of mountains. Normal stuff, right? I spoke and lived across time zones, religions, languages and cultures as somebody who grew up inside the intersections rather than visiting them. Fitting in nowhere and everywhere somehow was my thing.

So, by my later teens and early twenties I was also now a journalist in local papers and then for the Associated Press– though I never took a journalism class: “It’s like writing a paper, but shorter, right?” I actually said in my interview. I could work a camera, spoke fluent Spanish and had an eidetic memory. Somehow again, I got hired.

By my mid twenties I was also inside big tech and big pharma, building the first customer relationship programs that treated patients as people rather than compliance rates. Fifteen years of private work ran alongside it. Behavioral psychology sits underneath all of it, and I still think the babysitting ring taught me more about how humans decide.

S​o…lots of stuff happened, and lots of crazy accidents and NDEs over my life, but those stories are for another time.

Let’s skip to 2015…I was paralyzed from the waist down because of a severe accident. My family and I were told in no uncertain terms that I likely will not walk again. I underwent several surgeries and forsaked others for experimental treatments that were slowly coming to light including: methodologies using the mind, deep mediation, electroceuticals and photobiomodulation, breathwork and yoga.

It took a year to take a step.

I had recently given birth to my twin daughters. I was severely depressed and of course pretending not to be, and food was my crutch. I ran a multi-milllion-dollar business from behind the curtain, maybe even better than Frank Oz himself could imagine. I sent people to speak on my behalf and hid from the world. My former colleagues seemed to forget I existed. That was fine by me at the time.

I was trapped in my bedroom for over a year. I became 298 lbs at my heaviest. That overall timing was not great. Then some small shifts started when I could finally take ONE STEP on my own and not fall over.

And if you’re wondering…(most people ask) No, I didn’t get a settlement or even try to pursue a lawsuit once I realized they were not going to help me–or even admit responsibility. It was caught on film, in front of thousands of people, and they saw me taken to the hospital (there were four hospitals in the end). They know what they did. Just because I seem ‘OK’ does not mean this was not life-altering in many ways. That is what I choose to focus on, and the long-lasting effects are still unknown. They have to live with themselves.

I decided to focus all my energy on healing, not fighting the bad guys counting their money and pretending I don’t exist. I am now participating in the Neuroscience20, part of the G20 in Miami in December, 2026 as a guest of the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics, who work the the NIH, NSF, NASA and more to understand and support brains and trauma like mine, to make treatments available and recovery possible.

That near-death-experience day, or better yet, my ‘rebirth’ day, I left my body and this world for a little bit of earthly time that felt like a LOT of time for my consciousness. What was my parting gift? In part, traumatic brain injury, a broken arm, months in a neck brace, and a threshold I crossed and came back from that I am still finding language for.

In between there were years of being misdiagnosed inside a system that nearly lost me, and a travel bag of medication that became a research lab. Vagus nerve work. Light. Ancient practice and current science, braided, because my body was on fire and the textbook was three trials behind.

As I shared, I have been both the two hundred and ninety-eight pounds and the fittest woman in the room, inside the same few years. I put lipstick on from a hospital bed, because flair is proof of recovery rather than the opposite of it.

I do not trash doctors, or pharma, or lawyers (mostly). I believe in all tools in the toolbox. I have had to use more of the toolbox than most people get handed.

There is much more to this story…so stay tuned, please.

This is what has in part, led to The #Merge™ Campaign and Platform.

A​nd now…some obligatory ‘humble brags’… yes, I had built some of the first behavioral-science powered programs and technologies approved by the FDA chronic disease, and many for global household brands. It was fun and difficult and more work than most people can ever imagine.

Being ‘first’ to market in technology, and female, was not always best or without envy and deception and defeats. It was the real hunger games in a way. I did all this starting new life, new family, and also still writing for major magazines and newspapers and working additional clandestine projects in tandem. Yep. Just an everyday cat-in-the-hat balancing all of those spinning plates, and a goldfish, while standing atop the giant rubber ball.

In August 2008, in the middle of an eleven-day billable week that was eating me alive, I built a new company in one night.

It began as the New Solutions Factory, and recently became known as New Solutions Network™.

There is now a full network of companies under it, and people who have built beside me for decades. That was the plan. I make things designed to keep going without me in the room, which is a strange ambition for someone whose name is on the door, and it is the only kind of building I am interested in.

I have rebuilt it every time my life caught fire since. That is more times than I would have chosen.

It maps who a person is underneath the version they built to stay alive. Strengths, scars, patterns, pressure, readiness. It is the thing I kept looking for across two decades of clinical research–and never found on a shelf. So I made it, with my bestie and nerdy partner-in-crime, and then we made it reachable by people who perhaps were never going to get an hour with us 1:1.

• SuperYOU™ turns the map into motion for you or those you support.
• SuperTEAM™ does it for a whole group without flattening anybody on the way through.
  

I did not build any of it from a theory. I built it from the inside of the experiment.