I’ve come to think of myself as an ordinary woman with just a few idiosyncrasies. After an unusual and misguided childhood, I grew up aspiring to all of the co-called normal milestones, achieving most with varying degrees of success, until one day I reached a precipice and had no choice but to jump off into uncharted waters. In my late forties, you could say with most of my best years behind me, I had a nervous breakdown. It was the beginning of the end of doing things by the book. In order to persevere, I had to start doing things my own way. The conventional way just wasn’t working for me anymore. So, instead of being a part of a couple or a corporation, I remained single and took early retirement. I traveled the world and started a nonprofit animal rescue. I wrote books. I got in touch with the free spirit that lurked inside me. I had to. The alternative was to stay miserable and stay crazy and to never to accomplish anything to the best of my potential. Somehow, amid all the chaos of midlife, I found the courage to let myself off the leash.

I was born in the Los Angeles community of San Pedro in 1954 in the midst of that great midcentury dystopia. My father was a career army man and my mother a German war bride. I have one sibling, an older brother. I was married for a brief period back in the 1970’s. From that union, I am fortunate to have a wonderful daughter. It all sounds so idyllic, doesn’t it? Believe me, it was far from that. But I have found myself now at this one moment in time, none the worse for wear, and poised on the publication of my first book. The book really tells most of the details of my earlier life. I don’t need to repeat them here.

The writing life has sustained me since childhood. In the process of writing about the world, I have learned a lot about myself over the years. As a person who is neurodivergent and creative, I know well the pressures to comply with the norm. And I haven’t always measured up to those standards at work, in relationships, and in my inner dialog with myself. What I know now is that it is more important to be true to ourselves than to adapt to any preset, and often arbitrary, rules for how a woman should behave. I know that it’s absolutely okay that I love dogs, have a penchant for over-the-top horror movies, am obsessively peripatetic and that I stay in my room for hours on end typing. I like to think everyone should develop and feature their aberrations rather than apologize for them, hide them, or try to change them. At the same time, it is only through baring ourselves that we can expose the real weaknesses that we need to address and to differentiate those from the merely and truly odd.

Toward that end, I offer you a glimpse into my world through my writing. Not because it’s a more fascinating place than your own interior landscape but, because of that, I want you to explore your own authentic worldview. I want you to discover who you are and what makes you tick. I want you to burrow beneath and around life’s “shoulds” to the place where the real you resides. I want you to be free to be peculiar, as it were, in a sensational and individual sort of way. Since you’re reading this, I know you are already a member of my tribe and for us the sky’s the limit. So go for it. To paraphrase the motivational writer William Arthur Ward, whatever you can imagine you can achieve!

I didn’t always believe that but I do now.

It is my hope that my story will become your story in the sense that it will guide you through rigorous self-discovery.