Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City life was pure chaos on a daily basis. It was hardly the little kind, but honestly, it was exactly what I needed. I learned how to survive, think on my feet, count change without consulting a phone screen, walk through a crowd without getting trampled, and ride the subway without allowing anything, or anyone, to mysteriously “poke” me. Lol.
That fast-paced life prepared me for the one I live today. Absolutely and completely.
Three years ago, I was being sentenced for a crime I maintain I did not commit. But I knew nothing about the justice system. My parents were so scared. I was completely scared. My public defender was so certain I would lose at trial that I accepted the charges rather than risk something worse.
My faith in God, and in justice, was tested beyond anything I could have imagined.
The chaos of that chapter, the life I lived with my ex-husband, was definitely not the kind I needed. That chaos landed me in jail. It tore through my sanity, my safety, my freedom, and nearly everything I had left.
But the life I have built beyond that conviction has its own kind of chaos, and this time, much of it is welcome.
There is the chaos of church work: solving little-old-lady problems, bringing Communion to people who cannot attend Mass, speaking Scripture from the podium, helping at fiestas, novenas, pancake breakfasts, fundraisers, celebrations, and whatever else someone suddenly needs five minutes before an event begins.
There is the chaos of reading on the radio for people who are blind or visually impaired. There is the chaos of chasing a big break in voice acting, figuring out equipment, recording lines, correcting mistakes, and trying again when technology decides it personally hates me.
That kind of chaos means I am participating in my own life. It means I have somewhere to go, something to contribute, and people who count on me.
Life is substantially harder with a criminal record, though. There is a particularly painful kind of chaos in filling out job application after job application and reaching that condemning little box:
Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
God help me, that question burns every single time.
There was no mercy for the alcoholism, the crack use with my ex-husband, or the severely manic state I was in when everything happened. The system reduced an entire human collapse to a charge, a conviction, and a box that will follow me for the rest of my life.
Before all of this, I had never lived a criminal life. I had built a twenty-year career in Human Resources and Finance. I knew payroll, systems, numbers, rules, deadlines, and responsibility. Then suddenly, one terrible period of my life seemed to erase all of it.
It felt like a professional death sentence.
But that is often where God shows Himself, in the places where every ordinary route appears closed.
Far away from New York City, in a small North Carolina town, a modest Catholic church opened its doors to me, baptized me, and changed the entire direction of my life.
I am a woman who has always lived and breathed numbers. I want things to add up. I want the equation to make sense. So, when Jesus came to me on the floor of that jail cell, Muslim-born, broken, terrified, and completely lost, I followed Him the way He asked me to.
And I mean that quite literally.
I followed Him to His Church, the Church I believe He entrusted to His apostles. I chose the Catholic Church because I see it as the apostolic Church, reaching back through history in a direct line to Jesus and the people He first sent out into the world.
That is how I understand it. That is how I live it.
Now my life is filled with the joyful chaos of Catholic community: crowded parish halls, children running around at fiestas, prayers being whispered through novenas, trays of food appearing from every direction, elderly women asking for help, volunteers scrambling to find missing supplies, and somebody inevitably wondering who has the church keys.
That chaos is most welcome.
When I first thought about whether we need chaos, my mind also wandered, somewhat disturbingly, to Norman Bates.
“We all go a little mad sometimes.”
Granted, Norman Bates is not exactly the ideal spokesman for emotional wellness, but the line still has a point. Life can become so still, so repetitive, and so numb that sometimes something has to shake us awake.
I would never call everything that happened to me a blessing. Some chaos is destructive. Some of it leaves scars that do not disappear simply because the story eventually improves. I would never recommend the road I took to get here.
But I also know that if my life had never been shaken apart, I might still be trapped in that room at my parents’ house, surrounded by liquor bottles, buried under a decade of depression and repeated hospitalizations, believing that nothing would ever change.
My ex-husband pulled me out of that room, although the life we created together eventually became another kind of prison. That relationship broke open a life that had already gone numb. What followed was terrible, but it forced everything hidden into the light. There was nowhere left to run, drink, or sleep my life away.
And now?
Now I live independently in a beautiful apartment that belongs to me. I have friends, responsibilities, faith, purpose, and a social life so full that sometimes I need to schedule time just to sit down and breathe.
I have parents who crossed states and rebuilt their own lives to help save mine.
I have a church family that trusts me to stand at the podium, carry Scripture in my voice, and bring the Eucharist to people who need comfort.
And I have the love of a man who is complicated, gorgeous, sexy, bashful, hungry for me, and somehow still shy enough to ask whether I truly believe he is as beautiful as I tell him he is.
“You think so?” he always asks. Yes, sleepy bear. I really do.
So, do we need a little chaos to shake things up?
Absolutely.
Not the kind that destroys us for sport. Not the kind that traps us in addiction, danger, or despair. But the kind that interrupts a life we have stopped living. The kind that pushes us through a door we were too frightened to open. The kind that scatters the old pieces so we can finally see what is worth putting back together.
Chaos may have shattered the life I once knew.
But grace taught me what to build in its place.
And apparently, I needed a little madness to discover just how much life was still waiting for me.