Driving down the coast line on Highway one, LA bound. “I was leaving this old town.” I guess somehow I knew that would be “no going back”, not for me. I had clear vision of “what” I wanted to be, but really no thought payed to “who” I wanted to be. Blasting my portable radio in my brand new, shiny red, hatchback Toyota Tercel, the only car I could afford with my dad’s cosign. I remember driving that brand new car was an honor. Even without air-conditioning or any bells and whistle‘s it elevated me somehow knowing it was brand new. I would look around when I pulled in somewhere, hoping people would be impressed with my seeming success. After all such a young person with such a shiny new car, surely people took notice. Funny I never started out thinking about this, it was this feeling that came over me, it just did. I remember thinking, now I have something to prove, I am someone.

I remember looking at my dad‘s face and how proud he was of me and my accomplishments. I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I had started to train my brain for acquiring things for recognition and reassurance. I believed I was someone who was going to be someone. I wanted to feel like I could make a difference in the world, to prove I can make something out of nothing. I was deathly afraid people would see through my façade and find out I didn’t really deserve to have a voice people would listen to. I believed that I had to keep achieving so that I could show that I was worthy. Unfortunately I had a key missing link, a naïveté about the big city life, I was driving straight for.

It’s fair to say, I’d come from a small town, but didn’t know it. I confidently drove down the coast line just knowing, with every part of me, that I was going to make it. I was going to be an actress on “The Young and the restless,” my lifetime dream. Just a nice juicy, long-term role playing and heiress of a cosmetic industry corporate honcho. You’d have to have seen the show to understand how absolutely perfect it was for me. I mean I trained at “STARS the School,” even paid for it with my own money. Proved to my parents I could get a job doing hair while I was waiting for my big break. Nothing was holding me back, or so I thought.

I drove, I sang, I cried, I headed south, flashing back on my life, I realized I’d overcome so much. Not to mention, being born a second child to unwed teenage parents, which didn’t make for an easy start. Imagine being the second child in a shameful oops. I learned the word shame first from my father‘s mother. She told me, “You are not able to go to heaven, because you were born out of wedlock.“ I can still see, my five year old blue eyes staring back at her as I learned again what shame felt like. It had become embodied in my flesh by that point in time. These words were a burden I carried, a secret, a worry I had to bare most of my life. I weep now as I write this, not because I still believe this, I weep for the pain that little girl had to bear. I weep when I think how she’s not alone and how powerful that story became for me in my life. I weep for the wasted time, the suffering because all along the truth was just the opposite. I was a gift from God, a gift to come for my parents and my family’s legacy. I was on my way to prove it, without knowing it, I was just nineteen.

Arriving in Los Angeles was like a shock to the system. The job I had arranged with my previous employer from up north turned out to be in a department store on Glendale Avenue called Robinson’s May. When I arrive to report for duty I looked into the doorway and all I saw was a room full of elderly women with blue hair in rollers. It felt like I had gone right back to beauty school and Napa I was stunned. Here I was in the big city working in a salon where I knew I would just be miserable. I was scared to face my dad and tell him that I turned down the job. So I headed to the mall to “pound the pavement,” searching for a job. No one would even consider hiring me if I didn’t get an assistant position, none of which seemed to be available anywhere.

I had rented a room with a stunt man and his girlfriend. I remember coming back to the apartment doing the walk of shame, for three straight nights, having to report I’d had no luck finding a job. I cried myself to sleep the first two nights and on the third night I remember thinking I was going back to the mall and I was just going to get a job at the cosmetic counter at the big department store. I decided I would give up on doing hair for the time being and just get a paycheck so I could pursue my dreams.

The next morning I’m headed to the mall and straight for the department store and couldn’t even get a single person to look at me seriously. They point-blank told me there were no positions I could fill out an application but honestly they didn’t see any possibilities for the near future. I took the application and walked out. What struck me that day was how all of the girls had their hair slicked back, just a simple bold red lipstick and mostly black blazers. I looked at myself in the mirror as I Crossed through the store, my bangs sat about 2 1/2 inches up off my forehead I had pink lipstick and blue eyeliner, purple eyeshadow. You could definitely say I didn’t look at the part. I remember feeling a sense of shame coming over me of what a fool I had been to give up on doing hair. I decided I was going to find a salon if it was the last thing I did. I knew I would be so unhappy not creating and cutting as well as pursuing acting too. I headed to the food park to get myself a sandwich before I was heading back to the apartment to decide on a new plan yet again. It was in line at the sandwich shop that I met a woman named Sandee she was ahead of me and I asked her what she was having, so I could get an idea of what I might want to order.

Sandee and I started a discussion which led to me telling her my story about not being able to find a job. I almost cried when she told me that she was a manager at a salon in the mall! It was one that I hadn’t seen in a corner by J.c. Penney! The salon‘s name was Great Expectations” , I’d thought it was a dating service when I read it on the mall store list. Back then there was a dating service by the same name. She asked me to come in with a model and do a blow dry, and the rest was like a dream. Sandee became not only my boss she became one of my best friends, my mentor, my big sister and my next salon owner. She absolutely adored me and took me under her wing teaching me everything she knew. I thrived under her leadership and learned so many incredible skills from the crew that was cultivated there.

Sandee was recovering alcoholic and an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. She had been sober for about 15 years when I met her. It was almost immediate that she recognized me that I was a child of parents of alcoholics and recommended that I go to Al-Anon. It was the organization honestly changed my life for the better. I attended meetings for a few months and started to see the work of a book I have been given years before by Melody Beatty called codependent no more.

To experience this kind of enlightenment about life and having someone take enough care to show me the way to get the help I needed to fix my self worth was a miracle to me. It was the first time a person had taken the time to actually walk me through the steps of becoming more loving of myself. The work of Louise he and all of the loving encouragement I had received all came together at that time in my life and I started to attract those kinds of people in my life, in my hair chair. The world started to blossom and open up for me I was able to pursue not only my acting career, start teaching fitness classes, touring Japanese students all over the United States, working for my friends mom doing data entry for a car dealership marketing team, and even a cleaning job on weekends cleaning the salon for extra cash. In the years I worked with Sandee, I learned the value of hard work, honesty, collaboration, integrity, team-building, leader ship, just a name a few. That is how important one person that you run into in the mall can become in your life.

I never took that for granted all the things I learned back about it. All the things I carried with me through the years. Unfortunately Sandee struggled with her sobriety in the years to come, inevitably I heard later she passed away due to organ damage from the disease. her legacy has lived on through all of us behind the chair and all of those who were so blessed to be her clients. She was truthfully the most talented hairstylist I have ever known. She knew how to touch people she knew how to listen in ways that I have tried to duplicate my whole career. I know some days that she’s looking down on me, watching me still wearing my heels 👠. I hope that I can make her proud I hope that she knows what she meant to me. I never got a chance to say goodbye, but over the years I made sure she knew how much she did for me.

Through the years that passed after I knew Sandee and I adventured on with my life, became a mother and a wife. I became exhausted in a spiral of an unhealthy dynamic of suffering and surrendering. Because of the foundation that I had from Al-Anon, the beautiful women who believed in me throughout my life like Sandee, the work of incredible people like Louise Hay I had enough strength to continue to change and grow and thrive and believe in myself and learn more self-love every day. And every day including this day today, as I write this, I work on my journey of self love and sharing that with others around me. It is a continuous journey, it never ends it is a nonstop constant connection with the present moment and the unfolding and the beauty of all of life even the contrast, even the pain. Just remember all of those people that have touched your life all of the people that touch theirs before then we are standing on the shoulders of all of them shining a new light on self acceptance. Be your own kind of beautiful, be YOU, you are so ENOUGH. monixo