It all began in a secret garden.

When I was in the fifth grade, I was cast in my first lead role: Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. My drama teachers showed us this movie in class to prepare us for the school play they were planning to produce that fall. I remember when audition sign-ups rolled around. After I put down my name, a certain distress followed me. The story followed Mary’s new life, and she befriended her cousin, a boy who believed he was dying. With my newly developed health anxiety, I didn’t know if I could handle being a part of this story.

I will always be grateful for the courage I had to keep my name down. It was one of the foremost and most rewarding experiences of my life. Not only do I believe it was my “gateway drug” into the world of acting, but it also allowed me to experience my authentic self in a way I never had before. For what felt like the first time, I could be all parts of myself, even the selfish, little-kid parts that got angry and screamed, and it was all okay. The stage gave me a place to be unconditionally loved, and to unconditionally love all parts of myself.

This story (The Secret Garden, and my own) became something incredibly special to me, a metaphor that has represented my journey beautifully to this day, in ways I am only still fully realizing. It gave me a place to alchemize and transmute my anxiety. When I was 18, I experienced a tremendous initiation. I began having panic attacks every day, and at the time, I had no idea where they came from, or how to stop them. My life started feeling unreal, in a deeply unsettling way. I left my job. I stopped driving. I was completely and utterly lost, and experiencing some sort of existential crisis. I worked hard in therapy, but even the breathing exercises she gave me triggered my panic. Eventually, I was able to become functional again, and the turning point was my first trip to LA, where I really began to transcend some of my anxiety and panic after attending an acting camp.

A few years later, during the pandemic, my panic attacks returned. I didn’t understand. I had done all the work I was supposed to do in therapy. I even went on Prozac for a year, reluctantly. Everything I had learned told me I needed to fix my thinking, so I wondered if there was something wrong or broken with my thinking, or perhaps, even with me. Yet that didn’t account for what I was experiencing.

I began to notice that my panic attacks tended to arrive amidst great transformation. That spring, stretched across the couch in what felt like a breakdown, I experienced what I later realized was a breakthrough: the deep conviction that I must find a way to California. And I began to wonder: What if I was not having all this anxiety and panic because it was meant to destroy me, but because I was not where I was meant to be? What if the purpose of it all was not to provide me with challenging obstacles in the way of where I wanted to go, but instead, the anxiety and panic were a calling to reunite with my authentic self?

These questions ultimately led me to Los Angeles to pursue my career as a professional actress, and to a PhD in Psychology, specializing in Creativity Studies, where they became the foundation for my dissertation, The Magic of Anxiety. My research drew me deeper into somatics and the nervous system, and into the trauma-informed coaching I now offer alongside my work as an artist.

At the heart of it all, the message is clear to me: anxiety, panic, and our deepest struggles are the calling, authenticity is the answer, and courage, from the Latin cor, meaning heart, is how we find our way home.

The magic of the garden helped Mary find the power within herself to heal her deep loneliness and the feeling that she was unlovable. It helped her cousin heal the illness he believed would take his life. The key to your own secret garden lies within you, because you are the magic.