Most of you know my fitness story, but fewer know where I come from. 

If you found me on my blog, you might not know me at all.

Either way, let’s consider this a reintroduction.

I’ve lived in many homes, but the most pivotal was the one in Port Chester, NY.

It was a tiny apartment on the second floor of a four-family home.

In that home, I first felt the weight of my parents’ stress around money.

Around the age of ten years old, I started asking my mom to drive me to my friend’s house. Often the answer was no, as she only had enough gas to get to work the next day

I could see the guilt behind my mother’s eyes when she told me ‘no,’ and I began thinking that maybe I could fix this for her.

I started browsing on apartment.com for a cheaper place to live so that my parents didn’t have to stress about paying the rent every month.

Things got bad. I didn’t let my friends come over because I knew my parents couldn’t afford to feed another mouth.

When I was twelve, I heard my aunt tell my mom I was more than welcome to come live with her.

My aunt and uncle were a middle-upper-class family living in upstate Connecticut in a home with a big yard and a swing set.

My aunt and uncle had two children, Sam and Alec, whose lives I secretly envied.

They were a Disney World family if you know what I mean.

To me, at the time, it felt like a utopia, and I wanted so badly to be a part of it.

It took a lot of convincing, but eventually, my mom said yes.

Although this meant I would be moving into a home two hours away, and spending most of my teenage years with parents that weren’t my own, my mom agreed it was best for me to go.

At age thirteen, I moved out of that tiny apartment in Port Chester and into my version of utopia, in Suffield, CT.

This opportunity, given by both my mom and my extended family, provided me the privilege to enjoy my life, and not have to worry about just surviving.

This privilege is one that most people who grow up in low-income families don’t get.

For most of my adult years, I’ve felt pressured to do something extravagant to make my mom’s pain and my aunt and uncle’s generosity worth it.

But I realized recently, that doing something “extravagant” to appease other people, didn’t provide much meaning.

Like many other twenty-something-year-olds, I’m still trying to figure it out.

I started a podcast, Maximize Your 20s, so you and I can sink into our confusion and search for meaning together.

Listen on Apple Podcast & Spotify 🙂