Of Ash and Honey

January 30, 2026 In the early hours of February 27, 2020, my life changed forever.

I woke up around 2:00 a.m. PST to a text from my dad:

Rockslide destroyed our store!!!

We are out of business!

Really worse than I could ever imagine!

I was in West Hollywood when that message came through—attending an acting program I had spent years dreaming about, planning for, and finally made real.

The night before, I’d been talking with my classmates about creating an exit plan from the business so I could move to Los Angeles and pursue my dream of becoming a professional actor.

I flew home that morning.

I have hardly acted since.

Talk about an abrupt life change.

What felt like the death of a dream.

But it wasn’t just the loss of Tatsuda’s.

It was the loss of my home.

My purpose.

My connection to community.

My connection to my family.

And my identity.

For years, I had understood my role as taking care of people—showing up, providing stability, making sure the community was fed and supported.

When the store was lost, that sense of being the caretaker was lost too.

The last six years have been brutal.

Filled with what felt like nonstop loss, grief, and hard—all while actively healing, rebuilding myself, and trying to answer one persistent question:

What do I do now?

After Tatsuda’s, how do I put myself back into a box of normalcy?

How do I step into a new box—

with a new title and a reasonable salary—

after having transformed and led something so extraordinary?

And yet, even in the middle of that questioning,

I found myself once again entrusted with responsibility—

called to lead, to hold complexity, to serve something that mattered

to an entire community.

I take it seriously,

and it matters more to me than most people will ever understand.

2025 was the year I never wanted.

But I made sure it became exactly what I needed

as I moved forward in answering that question.

I left my new career as a financial advisor last September.

No solid plan for what would come next.

And that was scary.

No plan.

No big dream.

Just trust—in the universe, in myself—that what was meant for me would find me.

It turns out that was the greatest gift I could have given myself.

As time has passed, grief has softened.

And I have worked hard—for myself and for others.

I see myself more clearly than ever before.

And even though the path forward still isn’t fully defined,

I can see the markers in the treeline.

The new cairns along the way.

I feel the internal pull guiding me forward.

And my backpack is no longer filled with the heavy and the hard of yesterday.

Each step now is propelled by

a whole, healthy, happy, thriving

me—

one I built from ash and honey.