My Story

​I grew up in a small mountain town where nature wasn't a backdrop — it was how I made sense of the world. The forests, the seasons, the way a river finds its way around every obstacle — these things taught me more about growth than most classrooms ever did. Nature was also, though I didn't have words for it then, the place where my nervous system could finally exhale.

I was identified as gifted in elementary school. I was in and out of gifted pull-out programming by choice — sometimes it just didn't feel like the safest space, sometimes I simply liked what was happening in my regular classroom better and didn't want to leave. Even then, I understood something that took me years to fully articulate: giftedness is not a room you go to. It's the way your mind works everywhere you are.

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School was a difficult place for me to exist. I loved learning — deeply, voraciously, in the particular way gifted minds tend to — but I did not love school. It lacked the zest and excitement I found in books, in nature, in the questions that kept me up at night. And underneath all of that was something I wouldn't understand until much later: my sensory world was intense in ways I had quietly learned to push aside. The fluorescent lights. The noise. The way a crowded hallway felt like walking into weather. I had become very good at ignoring what my body was telling me. I survived school. I did not thrive there. From the outside, everything appeared fine: I carried a very high GPA, was ranked in the top ten of my class and succeded acadmically with ease. The world only saw the grades. Internally was a very different story. It was learning and nature that pulled me through — not the institution.

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The world only saw the grades. Internally was a very different story.

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I remember the moment I told my mother I wanted to drop out of high school.

Her response was not what most parents would give. There were no slammed doors. No flat refusals. No dismissal of the request and no immediate commitment to anything either. What she said was something like: okay. Let's talk about why. You need to find some kind of education that's equal to or better than what you'd be leaving — find it, think it through, and present it to me. Then we can discuss.

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She handed the question back to me. Validated. Supported. Trusted me with the weight of my own decision. Didn't solve it for me and didn't shut it down. Just: let's explore. Let's discuss. Let's problem-solve. Let's plan. Let's move forward toward what actually matters — to you, and to this family.

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I didn't know it then, but that conversation was the founding Brain Spark of everything I would eventually build. Every coaching conversation I've had since, every parent group I've facilitated, every workshop I've led — the philosophy underneath all of it traces back to that kitchen table. A problem named. A space held. A young person trusted to find her own way through.

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She didn't solve it for me. She trusted me to find my own way through.

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I left high school without a diploma — not as a failure, but as someone who had finally run out of reasons to stay, and a mother who had helped her figure out what to do next. At fifteen, my best friend's son drove me to my first day of community college. I was done with the small-town social maze. I wanted to think, explore, question everything. By seventeen, I had my associate degree.

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Those first two years of college were mostly online or hybrid (I checked out VHS tapes from the library for some courses!)— unusual for the late 1990s, and quietly transformative for me. It meant I could learn on a mountaintop. Literally. Surrounded by rocks and wind and trees, I found a different way of learning — one that allowed my brain and my body the experience they needed to heal and regrow. My sensory system, starved of the natural world by years inside institutional walls, finally had what it needed. My intellect, freed from the social and institutional pressures of a traditional classroom, could finally stretch. I didn't have a name for what was happening. I only knew that for the first time, learning felt like breathing.

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For the first time, learning felt like breathing.

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From there I started a physics degree — not because I wanted to become a physicist, but because I loved understanding how the universe worked. Eventually I found my real home in philosophy and comparative religion, fascinated by the oldest question I knew: why do people think the way they think?

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I never stopped asking that question.

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Graduate school brought me to gifted education and curriculum design. I spent over fifteen years teaching elementary and middle school as a gifted specialist. I came to that work carrying something most educators don't: I knew what it felt like to be the gifted kid sitting in a classroom that didn't quite fit. I wanted to give my students the kind of support I hadn't had — environments with real zest, real depth, real permission to be exactly the kind of thinker they were. I earned a second master's degree in special education and gifted education because I kept seeing the same thing: giftedness and complexity almost always travel together.

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Over those years the work grew beyond the classroom. I mentored new teachers finding their footing in gifted education, led professional development workshops for school and district staff, and facilitated SENG Model parent groups — those evidence-based support circles that give parents of gifted children language for what their child is experiencing, often for the very first time. I presented at state and national gifted education conferences, and I kept returning to the same question: what would it look like if every educator understood gifted and neurodivergent learners the way the best ones do?

Then my own family became my greatest teacher.

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After my eldest daughter — who came into the world with her own beautifully complex medical and developmental profile — began receiving early intervention services, I shifted my work to support families with young children. And somewhere in that process of advocating fiercely for her, fighting for her to be seen as the whole, capable, extraordinary person she is, I turned the same lens on myself.

In my forties, I received late diagnoses of autism, OCD, and ADHD.

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I had spent my whole life being called gifted. I had no idea I was also twice-exceptional.

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Everything clicked — and broke open — at the same time. The exhaustion. The way life had always felt like an uphill climb even when I was succeeding by every external measure. The way school had felt impossible to inhabit even while I excelled inside it. And the sensory experiences I had spent decades pushing aside — the intensity, the overwhelm, the way certain environments had always cost me more than they seemed to cost anyone else — I finally understood those too. They weren't weakness. They were information my nervous system had been sending me my entire life, and I had learned, very early, to ignore it just to get through the day.

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The late diagnosis didn't rewrite my story. It finally explained it.

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I spent the years that followed doing two things simultaneously: learning and unlearning. I dove deep into sensory systems, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, neuroscience, neuroplasticity, the history of autism, and what autistic experience looks like — particularly in women and girls who spent decades masking. And I began, slowly and deliberately, to honour the experiences I had spent a lifetime ignoring. To listen to what my body had always been trying to tell me. To build a life with room for what my nervous system actually needs — quiet, nature, rhythm, enough space between things. I remembered what it felt like to learn on a mountaintop. I understood, finally, why it had worked. That understanding now shapes how I parent, how I move through the world, and how I show up for every family I work with.

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Learning to honour my nervous system didn't slow me down. It finally let me grow.

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I also have two daughters to raise. Understanding the nervous system — mine and theirs — has changed everything about how I parent. Not perfectly. But intentionally, and with far more compassion than I was ever shown. And when they come to me with hard things, I try to remember what my mother gave me at that kitchen table: a space held, a question honoured, a young person trusted to find her own way through.

Growing Tree Gifted and Nova NeuroFox are the result of all of it — my philosophy background, my love of nature and science, fifteen years in gifted classrooms, my own lived experience of what it costs to survive a system that wasn't built for your mind, and the years I spent learning to finally listen to my own. My deep belief is that every learner deserves to do more than get through.

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Focused on thriving - not surviving. Come grow with us.

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I'm glad you're here.