The first step to healing is accountability and accountability is only a beginning. Like the rooms of AA tell us, alcohol was only but a symptom (to the root of our troubles). I was raised in Laguna Beach with two loving parents, a loving community, and a privileged lifestyle. My parents were both executives in the corporate world - true workaholics. I was fairly disciplined with a childhood dedicated to competitive dancing; however, with privilege came a lack of responsibility.

At 14, my friends and I tried alcohol for the first time at the beach at a bonfire. From that small moment, all of my social anxiety and insecurity began to leave me. I was no longer worried about my negative thoughts of not being good enough. When drinking with my friends at the beach, all of that slipped away.

From 14 to 21, the only coping skill I had was alcohol. I graduate high school and went off to college to study business where, let’s just say, college culture was very much alive. Fraternities, sororities, students and young people. set out to find themselves. Overtime, every occasion and celebration involved drinking and toasting.

At 21 in the height of the pandemic, everyone I knew - including myself - moved home from school. A month later, the boy I thought I was in love with died. Now, I was using alcohol to grieve. In the isolation of covid and experiencing the death of a loved one, my alcoholism worsened. I sought out therapy but never got further than a google search and a few phone calls.

In December 2020, it was finals week and I went out to celebrate completing my finals. the next day, I woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed notified by a nurse I had driven under the influence and hit a family of 5.

Everything I thought I knew turning 22 was now horrifically wrong. There was nothing. And from what I understood, there was nothing positive worth doing. Simultaneously, I needed to understand the life I was walking into. I knew nothing about incarceration, let alone rehabilitation. In the isolation of Orange County Jail, I started reading self-help books, bibles, magazines, dedicated to recovery and mental wellness. I built empathy through asking questions. I started learning about Henry and Gabriela, the family they grew up with, and the family they were just beginning.

A few months prior to my sentencing, an unexpected opportunity arose. I had the privilege of having an in-person conversation with Henry and Gabriela’s family in a closed setting. No one knew what to expect, but when we all got there, that day every person’s eye filled with tears. I realized the sudden humanity of it all: sitting down and talking from one human being to another… when one short year before I killed the people they love most. Now, the most important people in Henry and Gabriela’s life were sitting with the young girl who killed their brother and sister. Sitting with Henry and Gabriela’s sisters, brothers, and loved ones so early in my time caused me to break any bit of denial and selfishness I was living in. I was honest with myself and the family I had destroyed. My attorneys told me this was something many do not ever experience. Much later I learned this was an act of restorative justice.

When sitting in the confinement of prison walls, I cannot always find what I need most, and I refuse to use and abuse alcohol or drugs. Without the proper mental wellness, I dove into the first two things I fell in love with in life: reading and writing. In Holly Whitaker’s book “Quit Like a Woman,” she talks about how “the opposite of addiction is connection,” and to live disconnected and barely existing doesn’t create any sort of meaning or value. In Stephanie Covington’s “A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps,” she taught me our internal world is much more important than our external world. I learned life wasn’t about how successful I could be but about living a life of selfless success. I had to dig in and open up the barriers within myself still in need of healing.

Creating sustainability in my recovery means unity throughout my communities. It means wearing my scars instead of wounds. It means sharing my experience, strength, and hope with other women who walk through these walls in order to prevent future harm. It’s establishing a space in our societies where women’s sobriety can thrive. Where we are not merely surviving but thriving in womanhood. We are women who are fighting.

The “R” in CDCR isn’t presented to us on a silver platter - or a silver bunk - but through initiating change that matters and creating spaces for healing throughout the process.