Meraki, a verb, or adverb, a Modern Greek word, derived from the Turkish “Merak” (Labor of love, to do something with pleasure), is applied to tasks usually, creative or artistic tasks but can be applied to any task at all. Meraki means to do something with passion, with absolute devotion, with undivided attention.
01. meraki , flood n. 01
02. meraki, open
erak
I didn't lose Meraki because it tanked or because I was shit at business; this wasn’t just a business closure. Meraki was stolen from me. It was a psychological collapse of the one solid ground I had built for myself, and it was violent in it's consequences.
It didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was triggered by systemic betrayal. RUPCO, their insurance companies - Erie and Ryan & Ryan - Saugerties courts, even my own attorney. It replicated patterns of past abandonment, manipulation, and powerlessness. What my attorney, Mike Bruno did? Appalling. Symbolic of sexism, chauvinism, bullying, and systemic rot. I'm not going to stop until he loses his license to practice law.
Because of the way Meraki was taken from me and what has followed, I've been thrown back into the very same powerless, dependent, controlled dynamic that I had finally escaped.
Back into financial dependency on someone abusive, living in fear, being controlled and manipulated, having no personal safety net or support system, being gaslit, silenced, ignored, dismissed, and invalidated by people in power, and having no agency or independence.
meraki,
i told the stars about you
i fall somewhere on the spectrum between proverbs 31 and Tupac.
I shuttled back and forth between Red Hook and Rhinebeck; my Mom's house in Red Hook, my Dad's in Rhinebeck. I attended Red Hook Central School District from kindergarten through 12th grade, and we never moved. "The House That Built Me" is where my Mom and Stepdad still reside part time, and my Dad lives in South Carolina. My Mom and Dad built our house themselves, and my stepfather added an addition after he and my Mom got married when I was 8 years old.
I grew up riding my bike around Rhinebeck with my best friends; waking up at the crack of dawn, going to the Rhinebeck Deli, getting a "Bacon egg and cheese salt pepper no ketchup", and a Sunny D. We didn't go home until it started to get dark out, our parents weren't home after school waiting to present us with organic apples and almond butter - and we're still alive today to tell the stories.
was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. My journey began at Northern Dutchess Hospital on April 12th, 1980 at 10:10 AM.
a blurb from my origin story
meraki outfits
a few of my
favorite
i could never explain the kind of grief i feel looking at these photos; i am grieving the future i thought i had, a healthy body, mind, and spirit, and a business that finally gave me freedom. the fact that i should never have been put in this position makes it all so much worse. every time i wake up early in the morning i think about the excitement i used to feel and all the plans i had for meraki. i think about what it was like the first day i woke up in my new apartment with so much goodness ahead. finally.
Find me floating around on social. Being antisocial.
Wanna help me fight the fight? Wanna talk about it? Lean into it.
hi there!
wh a day for a daydrea
ya right...
"Is that dust over there?"
wh a day for a daydrea
ya right...
me: is that dust i see over there?
I don’t go out during the day. I walk around shaking, in a fog, angry, ruminating, exhausted; trying to figure out how I'm supposed to co-exist in a world with people that are so driven by greed that they destroyed my life in a way that I would only expect from an enemy, and didn't give it a second thought.
Complex Trauma is a different kind of beast. It’s wicked. It has stripped me of every aspect of myself. I feel completely disconnected from myself and from life in general. I’m lucky if I get 3 hours of sleep a night, and there is nothing peaceful or restorative about it.
trauma
complex
I'm not a stranger to depression or anxiety; I've learned to live with the ebbing and flowing of my mind and body that it brings. I've figured out ways to cope so I can get through the days. I'm masterful at faking a smile.
My sleep is filled with nightmares which result in me waking up drenched in a cold sweat. I’ve developed sleep paralysis. I wake-up certain that someone’s in my apartment, unable to move for about 15 seconds. It’s terrifying.
Complex trauma - C-PTSD - isn’t caused by a single event — it’s the result of repeated, prolonged trauma over time. It often comes from relationships and systems that were supposed to feel safe: family, partners, medical providers, authority figures. It's the result of long-term trauma where there’s little or no escape. Having all of your energy poured into survival and self-advocacy, without institutional support, without any support of any kind, is incredibly depleting.
It’s not just what happened to you.
It’s what kept happening.
It’s what was never acknowledged, never repaired.
I cannot read any of the paperwork I have regarding RUPCO or my store without shaking. If I'm doing something - like cleaning for example - and I start to think about what happened with my store, I start to shake. I can't keep myself from spiraling down a rabbit hole of injustice and I become overwhelmed with grief, anger, and despair. My body feels like it's reliving it all over again. I always end up in the same place, screaming, "How the FUCK did this happen? How was this allowed to happen?" Even though I know, and I end up feeling like punching a hole in the wall. Until there are consequences and justice is delivered, I will never get over this.
It takes very little for me to frustrated. I have no patience.
Out of nowhere I feel this overwhelming wave of fear, shame, panic, or despair—and there’s no specific image or memory attached to it. It’s not like a movie playing in my head. It’s just this intense, physical reaction in my body. My heart pounds. My hands shake. My chest tightens. My mind start spinning, and I feel like I’m suffocating; like I need to run, or scream, or disappear. I never knew it had a name, and I never knew what to call it, I just knew it was from trauma. But it's called an emotional flashback - I always thought that flashbacks were just reliving something in your mind. Seeing something, smelling something, and having a flashback of the event that traumatized you. With emotional flashbacks your body feels the way it did during the moments that traumatized you. And for me, it doesn’t take much. It can be as simple as opening an email. Walking past a certain building. Hearing a specific tone in someone’s voice. Even something good happening can trigger it, because my body doesn’t trust safety anymore. It doesn’t believe it’s real or that it will last.
That’s what emotional flashbacks are. It’s not about reliving a moment visually. Your body feels like it’s right back in the trauma, and the same physical sensations you felt when the trauma occured is what you feel when you have an emotional flashback.
A Note If This Is You:
Complex trauma rewires your nervous system. It changes how you move through the world — how and why you make choices, how you breathe, how you love, how you survive.
You’re someone who adapted.
And every time you speak it, write it, name it — you reclaim a piece of yourself and help others do the same.
A few symptoms of C-PTSD
- Emotional flashbacks (reliving the pain without a clear memory)
- Hypervigilance (feeling unsafe even when it’s quiet)
- Dissociation (mentally checking out or floating outside yourself)
- Chronic shame and self-blame
- Emotional numbing or overwhelm
- Relationship struggles and attachment wounding
- A deep sense of grief for the life you were never allowed to fully live
What those people failed to think about?
When a caged thing finally breaks free, it doesn’t walk out.
It erupts. It devours.
It destroys everything that tried to own it.
I am not a silent casualty.
I am not a miscalculation.
I am the reckoning no one sees coming.
I am the truth.
I am the wild thing.
