Before I was a trainer, I was a Peer Support Specialist. The job was simple to describe and almost impossible to do well: walk alongside people in the earliest, hardest hours of their recovery and remind them, by my presence, that the door swings both ways.
I took that job because I'd been on the other side of it. I started using substances at nine years old. By the time most kids were learning long division, I had already enrolled in a different curriculum — one that taught me how to disappear inside my own body. I spent the next decade and a half studying every method humans have invented to numb the volume.
The decision to coach didn't arrive in a flash of inspiration. It arrived in an empty room. I was standing in a one-bedroom apartment with a desire to see my kids again, and the slow, heavy realization that if I didn't rebuild my physical and mental discipline from the ground up, I would never be the parent they deserved. Therapy wasn't enough. Meetings weren't enough. I needed something my body could do that my mind could be proud of.
I picked up the bar. Then I picked it up again the next day. Three hundred days later I was someone my kids didn't flinch from. Six hundred days later I was someone they sought out. Somewhere in there I realized the thing that had saved my own life was the thing I was supposed to hand other people. So I got certified. ISSA Personal Trainer. ISSA Nutrition Coach. UNC-credentialed Peer Support Specialist. And I built Whole Life Wellness.
The transformation that confirmed I'd built the right thing came early. A client walked into my gym convinced their body was broken — past trauma, past injury, past the weight of having been told for a decade that they were a "before" picture. Twelve weeks of the Phoenix Protocol later, they pulled a number off the floor that they hadn't believed was in them. They stood up out of that lift, looked at me, and said, "I think I can be a parent again." That was the day I knew the work was real.
I coach the whole person because that's who shows up. The body that's been through it. The mind that's tired of negotiating with itself. The spirit that knows it was built for more than this. You don't get to leave any of those in the parking lot when you walk into my gym, and I don't pretend you can.
