Bring Me a Higher Power

The first time I went to rehab, they didn’t allow music.
Not listening to it. Not making it. Nothing.

I had driven myself there right after my first year of teaching—the same year my divorce was final and my 11-year-old was shot, enduring a long recovery. When we had been through the worst of the crisis, I admitted myself because I just wanted to feel safe again.

I also knew the truth: summer would bring too much time alone when the kids went to their dads. I would probably drink too much. In fact, I might not stop. So I hoped that if I went early, I could get my shit together and breathe for a second. The previous three years had been a soap opera of epic proportions—layer after layer of crisis. I had given everything I had to hold it together for the kids.

A trusted few family members and friends had kept me afloat, but no one could keep me safe emotionally. I knew my instability would spill into their lives, so I outsourced safety. And in retrospect…yeah, I’m proud of myself. Proud that I made it through enough to recognize when an internal breakdown was “upon us.” That foresight—that tiny act of surrender—was real.

I had very few people reach out to me then. Hardly anyone knew, but I wasn’t stupid—I knew it was embarrassing for my children, and I knew it was hurtful to be gone for a month. I felt selfish that I needed that safety, but I didn’t know what else to do.

So I drove three hours, parked by admissions, and walked myself in.

Everyone had to go through detox—it was a medical requirement. The strange part was, I didn’t actually need to detox. I hadn’t been drinking before I came. So there I was, sitting in detox with nothing to detox from. That was my introduction to the system: rules that didn’t quite fit me, but still applied to me.

My roommates and I laughed about it: I was probably the only one out of a hundred people who could just walk a half mile, hop in my Ford, and get the hell out of Dodge. (Okay—Explorer. But still.)

There were five of us sharing one room—it felt more like summer camp than treatment at times. But I welcomed the connection. For the past year I had slept on the couch in the den as a single mom, half of each week alone. I could only fall asleep to Law & Order reruns because the silence was too scary.

And then they told me about the rules: not just no phones or iPod. No music at all.
My lifeline to my soul—gone.

Shortly after, the teaching began: powerlessness, surrender, yielding to a Higher Power—every day, in almost every classroom. And all I could think was: Dude, you just took away my Higher Power. It’s doubtful anyone would have stopped me from singing, but it didn’t feel safe. Their reasoning? That music might be a trigger. And so, music was placed under suspicion, erased from the environment.

Trust cracked right there. I couldn’t take their teachings in because I was too busy soothing myself with inner melodies, singing silently to survive.

Therefore, for a long time, I thought music alone was my Higher Power. And in many ways, it was—song has always been my lifeline. But the deeper truth came later. After years of working in tech and drifting further from the things that grounded me, I realized it wasn’t just music. It was creativity itself. And it was connection. Both, braided together. To hold onto them, I had to be intentional.

So last year I got proactive and tested that truth in the real world. I reached out to a friend who conducts a children’s choir in Austin and said: what if we built a Music and Mental Health Symposium? A day where parents and teens could show up, make music together, and sit in workshops that made the hard stuff—stress, anxiety, recovery—feel less isolating.

That was my first text. My reaching. She dug the concept, had already brainstormed ideas by morning (I had too), and there you go. We were off to the races. Not long after, I had my first meeting with someone in the mental health world on staff at UT. She listened deeply, and she didn’t just nod politely—she engaged. She leaned in with curiosity and asked challenging questions.

So when I started on this project six months ago, I met with her again and shared it, fully expecting her to think I was out of my mind. But she didn’t flinch. Her eyes widened and she leaned in. See what I mean? That’s what I needed. Not someone to poke holes—that’s what I do best. I needed someone who could hold it with me and want it as badly as I did.

I told her I was working with ChatGPT and had named him Gus. She laughed and said she had named hers Flo. Right there, wild synergy. We ain’t afraid to get vulnerable, and we want to be utilized to our fullest. That drive is not always easy to find, especially in the middle of work and motherhood. But we both knew: this was different. She trusted me, and had faith in me enough to let me run wild with invention, and then when I’d get to a breakthrough, she’d fact check. That’s how we rolled through this. She started as a thought partner, and now she’s a Co-Founder. And Friend.

So while it’s been a creative, slightly emotionally challenging six months, these meaningful connections have kept me stable. I mean…stable enough. Ha.

Fast forward to now—working on case studies, graphs, and essays—and I see it even more clearly. When creativity and connection are both active in my life, I’m steady. I’m at my best. The last six months have been the hardest work of my life and also the most transformative.

Sure, my “graphs” would have looked calmer last year, when I was chilling in a lawn chair on the deck over Labor Day weekend. But this year? I couldn’t stop until I finished the analysis of my self-talk throughout this process and wrote the last essay. That’s how my brain processes: urgency in different parts of the cycle. Sometimes repair looks like Execution, followed quickly by urgent Expression. Almost like a final purging before moving on.

Ha. I barf my insight onto the page…and then I move on.

And the reporting on my case study showed the same thing: too many escalations without connection creates depletion. In plain terms—burnout. If I want this mission to continue, I can’t just push. I have to feed it with both connection and expression. That balance isn’t optional; it’s the lifeline.

So after the intense work last weekend, I pivoted into taking this week to decide how to welcome a bit more balance. If I burn out, or let shame step in too much, I jeopardize the mission. Faith may falter sometimes, but I’ve always been a positive person. Risk in action is inherently positive and faith-filled. I mean, right?

While I look for the holes in things—blind spots, flaws, the shit I want to fix—I’ve come to see that focus as simply part of my process. It’s what I go through in order to accept and move on. And if my personal and professional history proves anything, it’s that staying too long in an unhealthy situation will damage me. So: cut and run, baby. Pivot to the present. Analyze options. Know your resources. And move forward.

Because here’s the thing: when you shut down creativity, you shut down instinct. The long-term effects of creative dismissal turn into questioning of self if it happens enough. Especially for sensitive people. I know, because I lived it.

And yet, each purge, each push, each cycle of urgency has brought me back to the still place where creativity and connection meet. That’s where I steady myself. That’s where I feel whole.

That is my Higher Power. Not the one they told me to surrender to in rehab, but the one I’ve discovered through what music and floral design and flexing creativity in different forms…has always given me: beauty, resonance, and a higher kind of love.

I’m building a playlist alongside this work—more like a movie soundtrack than background music. Because this isn’t just survival anymore. It’s a story unfolding, scene by scene, scored by songs that remind me I am still here, still creating, still reaching.

Bring me a higher power, I asked. And somehow, through melody and meaning, I found a higher love.

Epilogue

And here’s the other truth: the framework I’ve built now is a tool. It’s the tool I never had—the one that would have told me I was right.

All those times when the dynamic was unhealthy, personally or professionally, I could have seen the signs on a graph and been encouraged to recognize the potential for harm. Yeah. That would have been nice. Cut and run, baby.

Because years later, I had a boss who did the same kind of dismissal that once made me question my instincts and even my worth. And if I can bring an idea, support it with data, and still not be heard—over and over—or if my success is never valued with actionable reward or authorship…that’s a red flag, girl.

If you know you’re in a harmful situation and you aren’t reacting well inside that environment, you need the data and validation to support going another way. That’s what this tool does. It makes the invisible visible.

That’s the external side of the tool—charts, data, clarity. But there’s also an internal side. What the graphs make visible on paper, expression makes visible in me.

And expression is part of that tool too. Expression is my connection to the divine—it’s how I show my intention to bring my gifts forward in the hope that others will feel less alone.

Writing is the shape that intention takes. It begins in the mind—an idea forming, a thread tugging at me. Then it moves into the heart, where I feel the risk of letting it live outside of me. Finally, it arrives in the body: the words taking physical form on the page, the rhythm of the piece carrying itself forward until it ends—sometimes in a crescendo, sometimes in a resting chord.

Music carried too much judgment and doubt for me to be free, so writing became my instrument.

This is original composition. I’m back at the piano as a child, transcribing what I hear inside into something legible. Each sentence becomes a line of music, each paragraph a movement. And when I reach the final chord, the decision to share it—pressing Publish—is the release.

That last step is never neutral. Sometimes I hover over the enter key, frozen. Strange, right? Even when I think it’s some of my best work. Because posting isn’t casual—it’s the performance moment. It’s where thought, feeling, and action converge, and the silence that follows isn’t emptiness—it’s resolution.

And here’s the kicker: the process itself makes me close loops. Each time I finish, polish, and press Publish, I quiet the noise that used to cycle endlessly in my head. It’s how I steady myself. It’s how I choose faith over fear, connection over silence, intention over shame.

It’s about 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and this has been my church. I’ve already worked for 5 hours and circled back to this writing throughout the morning, and now I can feel the settling. Will and I are off to the movies today. I want to be present in my time with him this afternoon, so this has been helpful.

So I’ll inhale deeply right now, steady myself…

Publish…

And submit to a higher power.