Before Dissent in Bloom, There Was the Girl Who Kept Asking Why

How I became the writer behind Dissent in Bloom... the making of a writer who never planned to be one.

Talking about myself isn’t usually how I begin. My work has never been about me. It’s about the systems that fail us, the corruption that robs us, and the people who pay the price. That is where the fight is, and that is where I’ve kept my focus.

But if you’re here, if you keep showing up to read this work, then you deserve to know who is behind it. You should know where these words come from, and why I refuse to stay quiet.

The truth is, I am not better than anyone else. I am not special. I do not have elite degrees, powerful friends, or billionaire donors. I am not backed by a network or shielded by a safety net. I don’t even have a professional headshot.

I am just another person trying to survive in the same broken world as you. I got tired of being lied to, and I started writing to fight back.

That is why I think it matters to tell you how I got here. Because every story has a beginning, and mine looks a lot like yours. This is not a hero’s tale. It is the story of one ordinary person who kept asking questions. Consider it my origin story, and maybe a reminder that we are stronger than the systems trying to break us.

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The Little Storm

I learned from a young age that I had to fight, if not only for myself, then for the people around me. Justice was never abstract to me. It was a pulse in my body, a knot in my chest when I saw someone mistreated, a voice in my head that would not let me stay silent.

Even as a child, I felt it. I was the kid who built little houses out of sand for ants because even the smallest creatures deserved shelter. I was the kid who begged my parents for quarters at the gumball machines, not because I wanted candy, but because I had already spotted the man sitting outside on the curb and I wanted to slip those coins into his hand. I could not walk past suffering, not even then.

Empathy was not something I had to learn. It lived in me, wild and restless. I felt other people’s pain like it was my own and every time I saw unfairness, every time I saw cruelty dressed up as order, it lit a fire in me.

I may have been small, but even then I knew the world was not right, and I knew I had to push back against it in whatever ways I could.

My mother always told me I should become a judge or an attorney. Why? because I’m mouthy, and debates have always been my battlefield. But I didn’t want to do that because it was all part of the same system. Cops. Attorneys. Judges.

I still remember the day I told my father I hated the cops. That sounds harsh. But do you want to know why? I had just spoken with a homeless man outside a grocery store, a man who was gentle and kind to me, and only minutes later I watched officers slam him against a wall for the crime of sitting in public space. I remember the confusion, the anger, the sense that something precious had been violated.

That was the day something in me broke open or maybe it was not born that day at all. Maybe the radical in me had always been there, waiting for the world to give her a reason to stand up.

But most of all… I wanted to know why. Because if I knew why, I would know how. And if I knew how, I could change things.

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What Pulling Yourself Up Really Looks Like

Life gave me no easy road. My parents struggled with substance use. Home was unstable. By the time I was a teenager, I was already a mother. People lined up to tell me I would be a failure, that I would never finish school, that my story was already written. I refused to let that be true.

I graduated early because I would not hand my child the same hopelessness I grew up with.

Then my mother died when I was sixteen. I was suddenly homeless, working my first job just to survive. The world showed me its sharpest edges early. I was wronged by people who should have cared. I was treated as disposable.

I was fired from Walmart at seventeen for having a kidney infection. That was my introduction to the working world. Being part of the working class is not just part of my story, it is my origin.

I worked wherever I could. Fast food. Thrift stores. UPS. CNA shifts. Eventually I made it into college, and from there into medicine. I became a registered nurse.

Some people would call that “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” But survival is not a slogan. It did not make me hard. It made me empathetic. Because I know what it feels like to live on the edge of survival. I know what it means to be dismissed, unheard, and treated like your life has no value.

I did not grow up in a safe zip code.

Gunshots and crime were not something I read about in the paper. They were the soundtrack of my childhood.

To this day I still hit the ground when I hear them. That instinct never leaves you.

My story is not one of privilege or protection. It is one of survival, of refusing to become what the world told me I would be, and of carrying that empathy into everything I do now from my job, to my work here, to my non-profit work.

Nursing Made Me A Stronger Advocate

Nursing shaped me as much as survival did. At the bedside I saw the best and the worst of humanity. I held hands with people in their final breaths, and I listened to families beg for care they could not afford. I watched patients cut pills in half to stretch prescriptions because insurance denied them the full dose. I saw addiction treated as a moral failure instead of an illness. I watched hospital administrators balance budgets on the backs of exhausted nurses and patients who deserved better.

Nurses are wronged too. We are told we are heroes while we are underpaid, overworked, and stretched past the point of breaking. We are asked to risk our licenses because staffing ratios are unsafe. We save lives and are told to get over it, that it is just our job. We are expected to move from one crisis to the next without pause, without grief, without humanity.

When we cry in the supply room, when we collapse after a code, when we break down in the parking lot after a shift, we are told to toughen up or find another career. I have seen nurses injured, burned out, and discarded like they were disposable. I have felt that myself. I know what it is to pour everything into care and then be treated as if your life, your safety, and your dignity do not matter.

Those years taught me more than textbooks ever could. They showed me how policy becomes pain, how numbers on a spreadsheet turn into a human body gasping for air, how slogans about “heroes” mask a system that grinds both patients and caregivers into dust.

Nursing did not just make me compassionate, it made me furious. I could not unsee the way profit hollowed out care, or the way the vulnerable were treated as expendable whether they were patients or the nurses fighting for them.

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Writing Was Not in My Plans

All of that shaped the person I became. The child who built houses for ants grew into the teenager who refused to accept failure, and she became the woman who carried empathy into every job, every patient, every story. Nursing gave me a front-row seat to the ways our systems fail people. I saw patients ration insulin because they could not afford it. I saw families torn apart by addiction while politicians used their pain as a talking point. I saw people die not because they were sick, but because the system treated their lives as less valuable.

That is why I write the way I do now. I have lived the things I investigate. I know what it feels like to be disposable in someone else’s math. I refuse to let the people in power decide whose story matters and whose story disappears.

My path into writing was accidental. I joined Substack because I was following a creator from TikTok. At first, I thought I was only there to read. Then I realized something I could not ignore. We were never getting the full story. We were being handed pieces. Headlines arrived without context. Scandals were explained without history. Often it felt like the writers assumed we already knew the backstory, that the dots were obvious, or that we had the time to go digging. Most of us did not, and that gap kept gnawing at me.

I began writing the pieces I could not find. I started filling in the connective tissue between events. I uncovered the quiet moves happening behind the noise. I searched for the stories that were buried under silence. I was not writing as an expert or someone with elite access. I was writing as someone who was tired of being lied to and refused to stay quiet any longer.

Every word I write is rooted in survival. It is rooted in my fight to be more than what the world said I would be. It is rooted in my refusal to stay quiet while others are crushed under the same weight I carried. I am not an outsider looking in. I am someone who lived inside the brokenness and clawed my way out of it, and I cannot stop pulling at the threads that bind others to it still.

That is why I will never write with detachment, neutrality, or polite distance. I am not here to be a spectator. I am here to be a witness. I am here to fight.

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If you are here reading this, it means you already feel the same pull I do. You sense that the world is not as it should be, that the stories we are given are incomplete, and that silence is complicity. I am only one person piecing together what I can, but this work is not mine alone. It belongs to everyone who refuses to look away, who refuses to accept the lies, who refuses to let the powerful write the record unchallenged.

Your presence here matters. Every time you share, every time you question, every time you refuse to swallow the easy version of events, you are part of this fight. The systems that break us are strong, but not stronger than all of us together.

I will keep writing as long as I have a voice. I hope you will keep standing with me, because the truth is worth it, and so are we.

Yours Truly,

Dissent in Bloom ♥