jersey / austin / boulder / still me
theoriginstory.
naaah. start from the beginning.
okay. how the f✘ck did we get here.
i’m sam. jersey girl, mom, business owner, longtime yoga teacher, and law student. we’re in boulder with our german shepherd, sammi. i’m raising my daughter, finishing my degree, and trying to process the last wtf before the next one clocks in.
before the marriage and the court dates, there were jobs, continents, studios, and people who helped make a life. i wanted to be a mom, too. i got my beautiful daughter. now i’m trying to explain what happened to our family while keeping that family fed. (the explanation is long. dinner is apparently still tonight.)
look. this marriage has catastrophically f*cked my bank balance and financial security. i’m raising our daughter, working, and trying to finish law school. meanwhile, my still-husband appears to have pressed the f*cking redo button. (still married. fascinating detail to leave out of the reboot.)
you’re getting the whole story because a few posts cannot explain what this has done to my life. the mortgage. the childcare. the work. the cost of trying to get safe and stay afloat. i’m still living the consequences people would prefer me to stop discussing.
so, hi. i’m sam. before any of this, i had a whole-ass life. let’s start there.
jersey / austin / an extended absence
big plans.
deeply questionable
footwear.
i’m a ’90s kid from jersey. my mom taught public school, money was tight, and my dad made home unsafe. i wanted a life where i could make my own choices and relax in my own house. (nothing extravagant. indoor peace.) getting there would involve jobs, an education, several continents, and a deeply optimistic assessment of men.
my mom worked hard to keep us going. getting out would require money. (“i cannot fucking do this anymore” remains, tragically, a feeling. you cannot pay for things with it. i have checked.) so i worked. the good part—the part a survival story can accidentally edit out—is that i also found people i fucking loved.
i started working at fifteen. vans shoes for years, waitressing, retail, whatever paid. at vans, i was the punk-lite little sister of the entire store. i thought everybody was so old and worldly. looking back, this was an absolutely unserious assessment of age. (teenage me apparently believed adulthood began somewhere around having a shift before mine.) i remember all of them. i loved them then. still do.
the free warped tour tickets came from working at vans—every year from 2004 through 2009. employee benefits for a jersey emo kid. obviously i fucking went. they also took me to forever 21 for the first time, back when that felt like a major cultural development, and let me give them emo shag haircuts at work when the store was dead. (sneakers. bangs. a profoundly casual approach to scope of practice. sup melissa, ilysm.) that store gave me more than a paycheck. i got a little crew who let me be their weird kid sister. i adored them.
austin. god, i loved those people.
texas already had a place in my life. my uncle and cousins are from galveston, and i spent summers there growing up with my cousin ashley. so when i got to UT, i wasn’t arriving with absolutely no connections. ashley’s friends—slightly older, still in college—basically adopted me. i got to go all over texas with them on weekends. i remember it all so fucking fondly.
most of that group grew up in austin. they had this distinct energy, this whole sense of themselves and the place, and i was besotted with all of it. the people. the weekends. being somewhere that felt like possibility. (i had escaped jersey and my childhood. returning did not feature prominently in the strategic plan. lmfao.) ava, morgan, abi: i will love you until i die. yes, even if the facebook albums survive me.
austin gave me people i still love and a bigger idea of what my life could be. i had good years. whole, ordinary, ridiculous good years. i’m keeping those in the story.
at UT austin, i studied government, minored in anthropology, and earned a great books certificate. who had power, whose history counted, how profoundly f✘cked arrangements became everybody’s idea of normal. my kind of questions. parts of anthropology also left me wondering how much colonial bullsh✶t becomes respectable once it arrives with a bibliography. (academic racism? hear me the f✘ck out.) finished the minor. remained unconvinced by several premises.
i helped start iCARE with other students and served as volunteer coordinator. i also tutored middle- and high-school students after school with breakthrough austin and tried to get our club involved. i liked teaching, cared about people getting a fair chance, and wanted somewhere to show up and be useful.
austin also introduced me to chopped-and-screwed music, two-stepping with frat boys, and dating at a school with a D1 football team. ayyeee. (the jersey emo kid had acquired extracurriculars. please don’t make me explain the full f✘cking syllabus.) i studied abroad in ireland for half a year and loved those people enough to seriously question the return flight. an office career was giving me existential dread. i wanted to see the world. my bank balance suggested i see considerably less of it. (respectfully, denied.)
so there i am, backpacking europe and teaching english online to japanese students to keep it going. in naples, i’m asking a hostel if there’s somewhere i can work early in the morning with a little privacy. (yes, babe, we’re in italy. we still have a fucking shift.) everybody else booked a bed. i’m trying to establish a classroom. beautiful country. fascinating history. does the fucking wi-fi reach or am i going home.
new zealand was a separate monthlong trip with a friend. WWOOFing means work exchange for lodging, so we worked on a farm in the central north island, traveled farther north, and kept going by hitchhiking and couchsurfing. we were not simply floating around on vibes; we were trying to provide for ourselves. (the plan was employment, lodging, and trusting strangers with our entire itinerary. technically resourceful. spiritually, what the actual f✘ck.) mad love to the people who fed us, hosted us, and helped.
after college, i tried to join the peace corps and completed the prerequisites. then i shifted abruptly and moved to new york city with my best friend at the time, partly to outrun dating a guy who played upright bass in a folk band. (fuck the 2010s optimism and hats. i panicked and relocated.)
the futon-to-madonna situation.
new york with that same friend meant sharing a futon with some irish b✶tches in a one-bedroom in hell’s kitchen. the best b✶tches. i worked at frames bowling lounge and served the jonas brothers there. yes, those jonas brothers. (they’re having a night out. i am financially dependent on the evening going well.) famous people are bowling. i’m trying to keep my half of the futon. new york, baby.
the next job has me living in madonna’s apartment across from central park as a live-in nanny. my boss was tiffany olson, associate director on the MDNA tour. baddie max pro. i looked after her two-and-a-half-year-old and f✘cking loved that job. tiffany, huge shoutout. bad b✶tch for real. (futon. madonna’s apartment. i have not left out the normal job in between. there wasn’t one.) we lived there before going on tour. still clocking in. deeply unreasonable address.
when the MDNA tour opened in israel, our private flight from israel to abu dhabi stopped in turkey on the way. wild sh✶t. then came abu dhabi and rome, and i was still looking after tiffany’s little boy. that is how i ended up alone with a toddler in turkey before i had an iphone. (sam. babe. the bowling alley did not prepare you for this sh✶t.) in abu dhabi we ran out of diapers, and a victoria’s secret model yelled at me for being too unhurried with the toddler. excellent. i’ve received a performance review. the child remains out of f✘cking diapers.
afterward, my friend and i stayed at my granny’s in jersey while i did my first yoga teacher training. tiffany asked me back for paris and london, but i couldn’t make it work with the summer intensive. madonna was touring. i had attendance requirements. (can’t. have yoga school. possibly the most unhinged scheduling conflict i have ever handled like it was normal.)
the next trip was six months with that friend: fiji, hawaii’s north shore, then glebe in sydney. a hottie broke my heart in hawaii. beautiful location for a completely ordinary humiliation. in glebe, i worked in a cafe the whole time for a guy who insisted i mopped the floors wrong. (the future cleaning-business owner would like a word.) the australian men did not improve my confidence in the species. we worked, hitchhiked, couchsurfed, and kept finding ways to stay. i loved it. now that i’m a mom, i review the itinerary like an incident report. where were the adults? us. fuck.
also, actual vibram fivefingers. i was wearing the f✘cking toe shoes. before this starts sounding too glamorous, every individual toe had its own accommodation. incredible experiences. regrettably extensive photographic evidence.
bodhi / more than a decade of teaching
professionally calm.
personally, lol.
the yoga thing got serious. after my first training on the jersey shore, i went to the himalayas for another two hundred hours, studied at laughing lotus in new york, and got deep into ashtanga. years of primary series. mysore trips to study with saraswathi jois. breath, posture, drishti—where you focus your gaze—and bringing my attention back when it wandered the f✘ck off. history and philosophy, too. i wanted to teach responsibly. (the warped tour girl was voluntarily getting up for this. before breakfast.)
back in jackson, new jersey, tess mcdaniel and i opened bodhi movement in a tiny room at the back of a building. joell lanfrank was part of our first teacher training; tina bock and i built bodhi yoga academy. two-hundred- and three-hundred-hour trainings, intensives, retreats, summer programs, winter weekends. we built a little f✘cking yoga empire. from that room. with those people. (immediately uncomfortable accepting my own compliment. lmfao. moving on.)
before long, people were booking flights to attend our trainings. i’d gone from asking a hostel where i could teach online to helping run the fucking school people traveled for. ubud in bali, koh phangan in thailand, santa teresa in costa rica, nicaragua, morocco, the amalfi coast, santorini, berlin, iceland, washougal. jersey and boulder in between. new groups, returning students, shared houses, early practice. (“ask sam.” oh, fuck. i am sam. right.)
my friends were the fucking faculty.
my best friend irene pappas, @fitqueenirene, became my studio partner and a lead teacher at bodhi. victoria renfro, tess, tina, hannah haller on the bali team, and so many other absolute legends were part of that life.
irene took me to south africa on a yoga tour. my bestie. south fucking africa. we’ve taught and traveled all over together; a lot of the duos in this archive are us. (“we should do something together” got slightly the fuck out of hand. there were continents.) studio partners, teaching partners, friends through a whole era. irene, i love you. we have been fucking everywhere.
i moved to boulder in 2016; irene and i opened our donation-based studio in 2018. sliding-scale tuition, scholarships, making practice financially possible. later we formed boulder yoga society, supporting community access and organizations in india we knew through sunaina rangnekar. trainings helped keep the studio running. we wanted people to practice. the landlord wanted money. both parties maintained their positions.
these people gave us their time, money, and trust: two hundred hours in twenty-one days at ubud yoga centre; a monthlong advanced training in santa teresa with irene, tess, and me. six a.m. practice, philosophy, anatomy, sanskrit, meditation, pranayama, learning to teach. the jersey syllabi have quizzes, contraindications, practice teaching, homework due sunday. (yes, homework. babe, you booked teacher training. get the f✘ck up.) we worked hard, laughed our asses off, and left with more people to miss.
50k followers. still a fucking person.
i taught for over a decade, busiest around 2015–2020. retired micro-influencer, too. peaked around 50k on instagram while my besties were properly famous. loved sharing the practice, making sh✶t, and getting opportunities that still sound made up. did i piss people off? lmfao, yes. (universal appeal? babe, i’m from jersey. let’s set achievable fucking goals.)
i did it for the love of the game. the people and the work still matter to me. the app and i can see other people.
the influencer culture got to me, though. work, friendships, your body, your self-esteem, everybody’s opinion of you—all in one app. i’d go in to share something i loved and come out waiting for strangers to tell me whether i was allowed to love it. (excellent. outsourced my self-worth to a refresh button.) teaching still mattered. living inside the performance of it was another job entirely.
i wanted to love the practice without checking how it performed. (you can just do a handstand and not upload it. i have looked into this. apparently it still happened.)
wait. who the f✘ck are we following.
the 2018 #MeToo reckoning in ashtanga had also shaken me. the sexual-abuse accounts about pattabhi jois, the founder of the method i’d devoted myself to, made the reverence around him impossible for me to sit with. (am i in a cult? idk. would have been lovely to ask that before the repeated international airfare. jesus f✘cking christ.) i stepped away from that devotion and stopped going back to mysore. i kept teaching, with harder questions about authority and what we asked people to trust.
cultural appropriation, too. a white girl from jersey making a living teaching an indian practice, watching who gets famous and whose knowledge gets credited. (sam. babe. you are also the white girl in the picture. let’s not get f✘cking confused.) i was teaching history and power while benefiting from arrangements i questioned. i could not fix that discomfort with a more emotionally convincing namaste.
yes, the handstand came with homework.
my ashtanga workshops covered primary series, alignment, inversions, and strength behind transitions. i taught women’s history in asana and how our proportions affect practice. different bodies, bones, histories. maybe everybody’s pose isn’t going to look the f✘cking same. i loved students who asked why. (a tradition of doing something is, unfortunately, also how you get a tradition of doing something badly.)
i taught with carson clay calhoun for years through yoga with carson academy: trainee classes, feedback on cueing and sequencing, history. by 2021, my introduction to european colonization syllabus included walter rodney, eduardo galeano, and howard zinn. (yes, we need to discuss where to put your foot. we also need to discuss what the f✘ck happened to the places this practice came from.) huge respect to carson and the students for making room for that work.
i also contributed history teaching to authentic movements’ advanced training, in a module that includes dheepa sundaram’s work. getting to contribute to a program from erin kelly and stevi góngora meant a lot. mad respect for those people.
eventually i paused bodhi retreats and formal trainings. i needed to rethink the thing i’d built my income and identity around. (would love a less expensive conscience. this one has concerns.) proud of what we built, grateful for the people, still figuring out what i’d do differently. i owed the community that honesty.
boulder / rocky mountain clean & green
the relationship
was over.
the overhead
was not.
the yoga photos left out one major detail: i wanted to leave a long-term boyfriend, and wanting to leave was not paying for leaving. (emotionally available to leave. economically, please hold.) so in 2018 i started rocky mountain clean & green / bodhi cleaning co. people ask what inspired a business. sometimes you need to afford the decision you’ve already made. hope that helps, linkedin.
eco-friendly cleaning, an emphasis on paying people well, and a fairly direct philosophy: make the world a little less sh✶tty. do good work. pay people properly. don’t get weirdly superior to the person cleaning your bathroom. i’ve taught around the world and scrubbed somebody else’s toilet. both required me to show up and know what i was doing. pay your f✘cking people.
that work followed me into law school. at the beginning, i paid tuition out of what i earned working three jobs: bartending at the fillmore auditorium in denver, cleaning houses, and teaching yoga. three. plus the f✘cking degree. (at some point “i’ll pick up another shift” becomes your entire financial-aid package.)
the emo kid was still in the concert venue; now the shift helped pay for civil procedure. gangster status, humbly. by which i mean employed in three places and trying to understand a fourth.
the aura was mostly fatigue. still went hard.
i built the business to make leaving financially possible. later, i would need that income with a baby to support. i had imagined being done with this particular lesson.
motherhood / the marriage i agreed to / getting out
i wanted a baby.
why is there
a court reporter.
after all that, the thing i wanted most was to be a mom. my daughter was planned and deeply wanted. a husband was never the dream. after i got pregnant, he kept asking me to marry him, and i agreed. i cared about him and wanted a safe, stable family. (apparently there would also be exhibits. i had been looking at baby sh✶t.) i got my beautiful daughter. grateful for her every f✘cking day. the rest? pull up a chair.
he was my family. i wanted him clean, alive, and able to have the family he said he wanted. i believed he was trying and hoped treatment would help. (hindsight is extremely well informed for somebody who contributed absolutely nothing at the time.) you don’t get to make the decision with the sh✶t you find out two years later.
i was seriously ill through my second and third trimesters, still teaching and cleaning houses, paying household expenses, and helping fund the career plans i believed were supposed to stabilize our family. i was also writing that the mortgage had not been paid and my savings were being depleted. (making a person. doing the floors. carrying the budget. could somebody else make literally anything.) i kept working because being sick and scared did not suspend the bills.
the record gets more specific. unfortunately. my account is that on november 4, 2023, when i was approximately seven months pregnant, he manually strangled me with both hands and i could not breathe. then, about ten days before i gave birth, he knocked me down and punched me repeatedly in the head and face. i went to the hospital the next day with two black eyes, lacerations, a fat lip, and bruising and cuts to my head, scalp, and arm. these incident descriptions are my account. separately, the amended final restraining order records a civil finding that he committed an act of domestic violence; it is not a criminal conviction or a finding on every incident described here.
in the public post, i said i had fallen on icy stairs. i was also telling students i would be teaching. i look at that now and see how hard i was trying to keep an ordinary day running around something that was not ordinary.
open full-size artwork ↗source & context
this collage preserves the public explanation i gave at the time. my account above gives the context i am describing now. the appointment notification displays January 16, 2024, at 8:15 AM; it documents a scheduled appointment, not proof of attendance or a medical finding.
i told family, reported what happened, and sought protection. i wanted to be somebody’s mommy. i was afraid of becoming a murder statistic. (jesus mary and joseph. i wanted a baby shower.) i thought we were building a safe, stable family. instead i was trying to stay alive while checking what was on autopay. naaah. are we f✘cking for real.
three days before childbirth. excellent f✘cking timing.
three days before my daughter was born, he crashed and totaled the paid-off Crosstrek i depended on. we had already bought a Forester so he could use the Crosstrek for the Boulder-to-Denver commute and i would have a vehicle for paid work. now the paid-off car was gone, too. i was about to have a C-section and needed to cover replacement debt and more expensive insurance. abdominal surgery. newborn. find the money again. (i had paid it off. the whole f✘cking point was to stop paying for the car.)
the records also place a same-day $50 payment to brandon—memo: “house”—next to the wreck and my messages that we had $50, that i had told him not to drive around for no reason, and that i was giving birth in three days. his response was that he was trying to help dogs. i’m not turning that timing into proof of intent. i’m saying the payment, his use of my car, the wreck, and the approaching birth occupy the same ugly little window. that overlap is documented.
after she was born, i immediately went back to teaching yoga in new jersey and picked up house cleanings too, while trying to care for an infant and keep money coming in. i even tried teaching remote yoga courses back in boulder with my daughter, but without an affordable sitter it became impossible. i lost the whole business i had built in colorado while subcontracting in new jersey that year; colorado was my main business. (“work from anywhere” is a beautiful concept until the baby needs you everywhere at once. bless the students who gave me grace. fuckkkk.) i was also looking for safety and family support. he started more intensive treatment, and i let him join us because i hoped it would help. i still wanted him to get well.
after childbirth, the violence did not stop. i reported that on august 13, 2024, when our daughter was an infant, he tossed her toward me, raised a fist over both of us, and threatened to punch me while i was holding her. i was still hoping we could have a safe family life.
when he decided to leave for texas, i did what people do when a family member is exiting a household with an infant: i made a list. on october 2, i emailed about his forwarding address, our daughter’s care and last name, financial contributions, communication, custody, the marriage, and what exactly was happening before friday. i wrote that i was working the next morning and friday night and carrying a ton of schoolwork. (apparently the exit interview needed an agenda. sexy.)
on october 8, i sent a three-page document because the practical situation had not magically resolved itself. i wrote that he had left me with work, law school, and raising my daughter, and asked him to take responsibility. this was not a later memoir line. it was me trying to get a plan while everything was actively falling apart. then he went to texas, telling me the work paid better and still messaging about missing us and wanting to come home. eventually i went to court for protection. the new jersey judge found domestic violence and issued a final restraining order. i made it back to boulder with my daughter and sammi. (new location. same mortgage. impressively portable f✘cking consequences.) i wanted us safe. i would also have loved to sit the f✘ck down.
i believe the protection i received through the legal system helped keep me alive. i have enormous respect and gratitude for the courts and the people who took my safety seriously. i get to raise my daughter. that’s the whole f✘cking point. people heard me when i needed help staying safe. i do not take that lightly.
the aftermath acquired participants.
back in boulder with our daughter, i was keeping the house and degree going. in 2025, criminal charges were filed, and he was arrested and later released on bond. i began receiving the messages described here the next day. that timing is part of my account; it does not establish who operated the accounts. unfamiliar accounts started appearing. posts about women lying about abuse, wanting attention, being the real narcissist. a DM compares me to my father, by name—the same comparison my husband had used to hurt me. (fml. even my unresolved sh*t was networking.) language i knew. a username i didn’t. who the f✘ck is this.
around his release on bond, somebody asks in my tiktok comments whether i’m in immediate danger. another person says i’m not, he’s heading back to texas, there are two sides to every story. (oh, thank f✘ck. a stranger in the comments has cleared me for survival.) i didn’t know her. she appeared to know where my husband was going. i’m there with a restraining order and a child. why am i the last person getting the husband updates.
meanwhile, in texas. are you fucking kidding me.
then i see one of the accounts that’s been targeting me talking publicly with a woman i don’t know. she’s thanking it for material it’s been sending her. i follow that exchange to her public profile. there’s my husband. relationship photos. older posts. a whole life in texas i hadn’t been told about. this is how i learn about [ my husband's "girlfriend" ]. the harassment is how i found out.
(can we get a headcount. i was under the impression i knew who was in my marriage.)
i’m still legally his wife, raising our daughter and trying to make the money stretch. he’s in somebody else’s family pictures. naaah. bro has pressed f✘cking redo and i’m still paying for the original. yo, living this split screen felt diabolical.
i did not go looking for a second household as a hobby. i followed the activity arriving in my own life and found my husband in somebody else’s. then came the messages about my behavior. what i experienced was punishment for noticing. (the surprise is mine. the consequences are also mine. sick.)
these accounts had been coming at me for months before i knew this woman existed. now i’m finding out about my family while still having to feed it. my daughter needs dinner. (okay. we’re cutting up the food. with this information. sick.)
the messages, school reports & changing usernames / expand the detail
baby girl, why are you in my message requests.
i posted an instagram story reacting to the relationship she showed publicly. covered the kids’ faces. didn’t ask anyone to contact her. then her messages arrive in my requests, telling me to leave her alone. i hadn’t accepted the requests or started a conversation. (i’m being told to leave a conversation i have not fucking entered. outstanding.) she denies burners or getting anyone to message me, says she received requests and messages after my post, and accuses me of doxxing. that’s her account. (the recap begins at my reaction. convenient editing, tbh.)
she tells me, “From single mom to single mom, I thought you would have more class than that.” (oh, we’re doing class. [ my husband's "girlfriend" ] has arrived to assess my manners. tremendous.)
then it’s “Baby girl,” a claim that two police reports have been filed about me, and a warning to “tread very carefully” when i talk about stalking and harassment. she signs off hoping i find the support i deserve. with a kiss emoji. (a kiss emoji. girl, what the fuck are we doing.) i read it as a warning. saved the whole thing. kiss included.
oh, we’re calling my fucking school.
within roughly two days of me finding the relationship, her complaint lands at syracuse. her name is on it. she accuses me of harassment, doxxing, and making false statements, and questions the ethics of letting me be a law student. (i have barely processed the fucking family photos and we’re already contacting faculty.)
a separate anonymous report questions my judgment, emotional control, and fitness to become a lawyer. the writer speculates about drug use while admitting they can’t verify it. can’t verify it. sends it to my fucking school anyway.
then come the fucking updates: my stories changed “as recently as 10 minutes ago.” they’ll keep watching daily. the report even explains mean girls to my law school. (a close reading of regina george. while i’m trying to do the actual f✘cking reading.) my blog and burn book apparently require this much attention. i would like to shower without scheduling it like a deposition.
yo. this had reached my school. the place i needed to build a future for me and my daughter. her complaint and messages had her name on them; the anonymous report and unfamiliar accounts did not. i do not know who was behind all of it, or whether they were coordinating. what i know is how it landed: i felt watched, pressured, and stuck defending myself when i needed to study. (i had left the relationship. apparently the fallout had enrolled with me.)
i’m grateful to syracuse for taking personal expression seriously. i put the messages and reports before the divorce court because this was affecting my actual life. that is what i asked the court to consider; it is not a ruling in my favor. (classes, a toddler, and a second unpaid degree in explaining myself. sick.) i wanted that time back for my actual coursework.
same bullsh✶t. new username.
and the accounts kept coming. i made a private instagram. an account requested it. i declined. it came back under a different name and requested again. the old laughing reactions were still sitting in the same DM thread. (babe. you changed the handle and left the fucking conversation attached.) now the name presents itself as anonymous support. bro. i can scroll up.
later, another spam-looking account appears in my story views almost as soon as i post. content about abuse, victimhood, single moms keeps seeming to answer what i’ve just said. block, restrict, report, another account. a friend told the investigator she believed the newer account belonged to [ my husband's "girlfriend" ]. her belief; i haven’t proved who was holding every phone. (instagram does not display “operated by this particular asshole” under the bio. would save some time.)
[ my husband's "girlfriend" ] denied running burners. i could see recurring viewers, changing names, an account sending her material, and her thanking it. i told the investigator i couldn’t seem to post normal life without the account appearing and something apparently responsive going up. (i used to open this app to post a handstand. what the actual f✘ck happened to that arrangement.)
my emails from then hurt to read. sorry, another screenshot. sorry, it’s still happening. sorry to bother you with the thing i am actively living through. (why am i apologizing like i booked the fucking event.) i wanted to raise my daughter, earn enough, and post something ordinary without wondering who would turn up. i was scared and asking for help while trying very hard to make needing help convenient for everyone else.
back up. how long has this sh✶t been going on.
then the civil case turns up older messages involving the financial representative i’d trusted to help get our finances in order. the monitoring exchange is dated september 29–30, 2024. my husband asks her to watch whether i post about him, stories included. on september 30, she replies: “will do, there is nothing posted as of yet.” (my financial representative. my private instagram. bro, i thought we were discussing the fucking money.)
the later thread has its own little summer reading club. he talks about my supposed diagnoses; my former financial representative calls me “unhinged.” messages discuss my complaints, dismiss my mental health, and pass around my posts. (i thought she was helping with the money. apparently my credibility was also under management.) those are their characterizations of me. they do not become medical facts because two people agreed in an iMessage.
current context / september 2026: the criminal case was dismissed after he completed domestic-violence treatment under an agreement with the prosecution. that disposition was not a finding that my account was false. the civil protection order is separate.
the messages & the dates
the september 2024 exchange is dated. the later summer messages omit the year; their placement uses the surrounding case chronology and my account. the mass-reporting screenshot has no visible date. none of these records identifies every anonymous account or establishes when the texas relationship began. the financial-case page has the relevant redacted records.
other messages discuss recruiting friends to report my instagram and get it permanently removed. one says seven friends had reported it. (seven people. i cannot get one toddler to approve a shoe.) this was before i found the texas relationship. it doesn’t identify every burner; it does show people discussing how to get my account taken down.
apparently my wallpaper knew more than i did.
late in 2025, a woman i’d never met recognizes my bathroom in a tiktok and reaches out. my bathroom. she later puts her account in a signed declaration: she’d seen that room in my husband’s content; he’d introduced himself as “brad,” said he was single, and never mentioned a wife or child.
the time she’s talking about overlaps my late pregnancy and the first months of my daughter’s life. she hadn’t known about us. i hadn’t known about her. apparently the wallpaper was better informed than the people paying to live with it.
remember the paid-off car? she recalls him discussing a crash involving a white subaru, then asking the chat for cocaine money. she doesn’t know whether drugs had anything to do with the crash. neither do i. i know what replacing that car cost me. (i was figuring out how to get a newborn home. i would like everybody to return to that fucking detail for a second.) how many things were happening while i thought we were having a baby.
she also describes a later video: him with a woman who, to her, looked heavily intoxicated and confused, while he talked about making the witness jealous. she says she deleted the videos. her signed account doesn’t name the woman; i can’t verify who it was from a video i don’t have. alarming as f✘ck. (yo. i wanted to understand what happened in my marriage. how many more people am i going to end up worried about.)
some questions remain unanswered. living with that uncertainty has been its own kind of exhausting. i’m not filling the gaps with names or guesses. (my trust issues do not need a guest list.)
the screenshot starts halfway through.
now my later posts are being argued about in the divorce. we’re looking at screenshots of me furious, and i’m like, can we scroll the fuck up in my actual life. violence. money. raising our daughter. accounts showing up. discovering the other household. then me reacting. the rest of my life did not disappear because it wasn’t in the fucking screenshot. (i understand the screenshot is shorter. unfortunately, the experience was not.)
the story does not start at the part where i finally say what the f✘ck.
i still want him to get help. i said that in my deposition. he is my daughter’s dad. i want him alive, clean, and able to be a father. i need us safe. both. (would have appreciated a simpler emotional arrangement.) caring about him never made what happened okay. there was grief with the fear, and neither had the decency to arrive alone.
so, yeah. “just leave.” i left. still have a child to raise, a mortgage, money to replace, messages to save, and help to ask for.
(i have left. why is there still so much f✘cking leaving to do.)
i’m grateful for the protection, devastated by what getting here cost us, and trying to have a whole f✘cking life again. more time being my daughter’s mom. fewer evenings explaining why we needed to be safe.
syracuse / the actual learning curve
law school.
food stamps.
respectfully,
wtf.
while all this is happening, i still have class. the reading has not received the update. my daughter still needs her mom, groceries still cost money, and i’m a single mom on food stamps working toward a J.D. at syracuse. i’ve worked since fifteen. built businesses. taught around the world. still need help buying food. (the cashier does not accept character development. i checked.)
i’m grateful help exists. we need it. sometimes i look at the years of work, the businesses, the plans, and just sit there like, naaah. how the actual f✘ck. then i put the groceries away. the dairy has declined to process this with me.
the inconvenient thing is, i love law school. counterterrorism, government power, who gets protected and who gets caught in the middle—the government major is still in here. interested. taking notes. the rest of me would like to lie face down. (a terrible time to discover i still have intellectual curiosity.) i want the degree and the work that comes after it. i would also like a nap. these are not mutually exclusive ambitions.
i’m in the JDi program with residencies; last winter i brought my daughter to syracuse. my babe came along while her mom did something she loves. she’s also made regular appearances in criminal law. (not enrolled. has not done the reading. extremely willing to contribute.) honestly, good for her. one of us should be able to ask a question without first apologizing for fucking existing.
shoutout to my professors and everyone at syracuse who helped me stay with it. if you’ve seen me cry, hi, FML, thank you for being kind. if my toddler contributed to class, thank you for accommodating the unsolicited perspective. you kept something possible for me and my daughter. mad respect. i love being your student. (if this becomes another crying appearance, please know i also intended to remain composed at the previous ones.)
two cases. still have fucking class.
meanwhile, i’m representing myself in the civil case and dealing with the divorce. the civil case concerns financial advice, promises, and decisions i say harmed us—the sh✶t i trusted people with while keeping my family afloat. (i thought the case studies would be about other f✘cking people. small misunderstanding on my part.)
i’m a law student. i’m not a lawyer, and i need one. until i can afford help, i read, check, ask questions, and work to get the procedure right. knowing what happened and getting it properly before a court are different jobs. i take both seriously. (the syllabus did not mention doing this with my own f*cking life.)
people helped me afford filing fees and printer ink. i was excited to buy ink. (printer ink. the luxury purchase. the baddie budget has suffered a catastrophic f✘cking revision.) i’m grateful to everyone who helped and to the judges, lawyers, and court staff whose work makes it possible to ask for protection and be heard. i can mean thank you with my whole heart and still whisper what the f✘ck at another PDF.
i want to be useful to people who are scared, priced out, and wondering what the f✘ck they’re supposed to do next. i know that feeling in detail i never requested. (the backstory is extensive. still have to pass the f✘cking classes.) working on it.
boulder, again / current conditions
still here.
can we
f✘cking chill.
so now it’s me, my daughter, and sammi in boulder. parenting, working, studying, keeping our home together, mortgage included. (the mortgage has displayed absolutely no interest in the extenuating circumstances.) some days i can explain the situation. some days it’s just yo, wtf, and then i do what my kid needs. i love her more than anything. i’m tired as fuck. (both. please let a bitch have both.)
i still love music, being outside, making art, moving my body, and getting an unnecessarily specific shade of pink right. (good. something completely f✘cking irrelevant. i’ve missed that.) friends i adore. laughing hard enough to get a minute where i’m just laughing. i want more of those minutes, and time with my daughter that doesn’t have to fit around the next adult-generated f✘cking problem.
“unbothered”? bitch, i’m extensively bothered. our safety, my education, the mortgage. those are reasonable things to give a shit about. sometimes i’m quieter because i’m tired. (please don’t confuse a low battery with spiritual development.) i’m still from jersey. still doing my best. still very interested in having an afternoon that does not require documentation.
please don’t mistake the battery situation for enlightenment.
motherhood was the dream. it still is. i’d also enjoy the bonus feature where we get to live without another adult creating a fucking situation. (uneventful is starting to sound hot. i’m talking full commitment. long-term potential.) a little peace. my daughter. our dog. time to be a person. that would be plenty.
anyway. what the actual fuck, y’all. i’m raising the little girl i wanted, finishing the degree, and trying to have a life in the middle of all this bullsh✶t. still here. still giving a f✘ck. would like future character development to occur through hobbies. respectfully.
writing / art / further commentary
still have
some sh✶t to say.
the writing, the art, the questions i’m still trying to answer. if you came from @samseesworld, hi. yeah. a lot has f✘cking happened. (if you remember a handstand account, i understand the f✘cking confusion.) still me. considerably more to say.
