Preview: On the Other Side of the Street
The Courage to Take the First Step
On the Other Side of the Street is a deeply personal reflection on illness, addiction, loss, recovery, and the courage to begin again. Through the metaphor of the curb, the crosswalk, and the other side, I share how the life I knew fell apart—and how I slowly created a life that felt honest, meaningful, and my own.
The following passage is from Chapter 1, “Sitting on the Curb.”
From Chapter 1: Sitting on the Curb
“Sometimes the hardest place to be is exactly where you are. But it’s also where change begins.”
You may never have faced illness or addiction, but maybe you’ve sat in your own kind of darkness—when loss, change, or heartbreak made everything feel uncertain.
There’s no graceful way to describe rock bottom. It doesn’t tap you on the shoulder or announce itself with a sign. It crashes into your life in ways you can’t predict—sometimes in a single shattering moment, sometimes in a slow, merciless unraveling.
For me, rock bottom didn’t begin as a crisis. It started as an erosion. An erosion of the person I thought I was, the life I believed I was living, and the future I was sure was waiting for me.
I used to think of my life as a well-built street. I had laid it brick by brick: my master’s degree in Child Life, my career supporting children and families in hospitals, and my identity as the dependable one—the strong one, the person everyone could count on.
I believed that if I just kept building, kept showing up, and kept doing everything “right,” the street would carry me safely forward.
But then the cracks appeared.
I was in my thirties when I received the diagnosis: HIV-positive—November 1993. This was before the lifesaving medications we have today, before any real hope of long-term survival. Back then, an HIV diagnosis felt like a death sentence.
The day I heard those words, something shifted inside me. It wasn’t just fear. It was the dawning awareness that the street I’d built wasn’t as solid as I’d believed.
I tried to hold everything together. I told myself it was only a phase. That I could outwork the dread. That if I kept pretending, maybe my life hadn’t really changed.
But pretending has a price.
This is where my crossing begins—not with certainty or a clear path forward, but with the recognition that the life I knew had changed. On the Other Side of the Street follows what came next: the struggle to stand, the courage to enter the unknown, and the gradual discovery that survival was only the beginning.
Your life may have changed. Your story is still becoming.
