IMAGINE THIS:

You are 8,000 kilometers away from your family and friends, living an ocean and a continent apart from everyone who ever loved you. You moved because a dream called you louder than anything else — louder than fear, louder than logic, louder than you could ever resist.

You are utterly alone.
The only person you know in the city — in the country, on the entire continent — is the man who abused you.

You are in physical and emotional pain. Every movement triggers something inside your body, and the pain pulls you straight back into the trauma you barely escaped.

You are living two lives at once: hustling as a PhD student, working, and building a business from absolute zero.

You are exhausted, living in two time zones, unable to sleep, troubled with nightmares and flashbacks, constantly watching your back because your abuser still has eyes everywhere.

You carry your Order of Protection with you at all times, tucked into your coat or your bag as your life depends on it — maybe it does.

And just when you think it cannot possibly get worse, your 15-month-old service dog dies out of nowhere. The grief destroys you. It is unbearable.
It hits so hard you don’t know how to keep breathing, but you must — because her brother is still here, grieving too, and he needs you to stay a mom for him. You are doing your best, on autopilot.

Money is disappearing faster than hope. As if New York rent isn’t brutal enough, you are suddenly paying thousands of dollars to the vet bills — every transfusion, every minute of CPR, costing a fortune. You would give anything to go home with her — but you go home alone. In shock. In pieces.

You begin to wonder if this is the moment you finally broke.
If you failed. If there is even a tomorrow for you on this side of the ocean.

And then, the next morning, something unexpected happens.

Help arrives —not in human form, but in the shape of a tiny, feathered miracle.

How does a clinical health psychologist rebuild an entirely new life after experiencing a series of losses — the kind where even one would be enough to break someone — with the unlikely help of a tiny American kestrel that appeared every single day when no one else did?

In these Notes, alongside my personal essays, you’ll find beautiful photos of Rusty — the little bird who became my morning miracle — and a clear, step-by-step summary of everything he taught me.

Lessons you can hold onto when you’re going through a season so brutal, so disorienting, that you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. If you need stubborn hope right now, this is your piece.

If you’re in a season where everything hurts, where the days blur together, where survival feels like its own full-time job — I hope Rusty’s lessons give you something small and steady to hold onto.

🪶 Who is Soulbird for?

Soulbird is for you if:

• you’re rebuilding your life from nothing
• you’re lonely in a city that doesn’t care
• you’re grieving something unspeakable
• you’re exhausted from surviving
• you’ve been hurt
• you’re learning to trust again
• you’re searching for signs
• you believe, or you want to believe in magic (or if you don’t believe it at all)
• or you simply want to believe that the world, which is losing its mind, still holds love

If you do read it, tell me which part landed in your heart.
I think Rusty would have loved that.

Because wings are meant to stay open.
And every time Soulbird reaches someone new, Rusty’s wings travel a little farther than they ever could alone.

If this book finds its way into your hands, his story — and the quiet miracle he brought into my life — will fly beyond New York, beyond me, beyond the moment he first landed on my railing.

It means his tiny wings get to reach you, too, and I can not wait for that, because I know from firsthand experience that a spirit animal CAN change your life.

I made Soulbird pay-as-you-can so everyone who needs it can reach it.