How it Began
an origin story
Three-Year Anniversary!
It’s February 22, 2022, (yes, 2/22/22), and I'm in Denver sitting in my parked minivan at the School for Botanical and Medical Aesthetics, sobbing.
The loud, slobbery kind where everything leaves your body. Nose flowing, head in my hands on the steering wheel. My 47-year-old nervous system was in full collapse. I had just completed my tour of the esthetics school…
An hour earlier, I got the call. Our sweet little house in Milwaukee just sold. And the amount? Exactly what I needed for esthetics school.
To understand why that destroyed me in the best possible way in the face of the scariest fear, you need a little context:
We moved our family to Colorado about four years earlier with a plan. Within only three months, the plan was destroyed, and so was almost everything else. My husband's job evaporated. The condo we were living in (owned by the same person who'd promised him a business partnership) went up for sale.
My body had already been giving out. Just a year earlier, we were still in WI where I worked as an Executive Director of Special Education for a large urban school district in WI. My fissured, cracked hands would bleed all over legal documents and paperwork. I went through many boxes of band aids, and that was just a sneak preview of what my spirit was trying to warn me of.
I was struggling to be present in this CO school district with ailment after ailment. These rapid, life-altering collapses around our family felt like the last inch of oxygen gap in a flooding cave. Desperation.
Recovering from a newly diagnosed auto immune disease in early 2018
One morning I literally couldn’t catch my breath. Off and on, I fainted. That ER visit registered less than 60% blood oxygen and I was hospitalized for over a week while doctors scratched their heads. A rheumatologist finally walked in and named it -AntiSynthetase Syndrome with Interstitial Lung Disease. A rare autoimmune disease that had been quietly scarring my lower right lung. It also attacked my hands. “Mechanic's Hands” is what they call it. My skin crackling open.
I went home with an oxygen tank and a cannula in my nose around the clock. The hose had to reach from the living room all the way down the hall to our bedroom so I could sleep at night. My kids were in first and second grade.
I lost my job too. The district didn't renew my contract. Absence. I hadn't been there long enough for FMLA to protect me.
So I numbed it. All of it. For years.
Until:
2020 — I got sober the day before everything shut down.
2021 — My soul glimmered a little louder, and I asked myself one question: when was I last truly happy? Every single time I asked, the same answer. Hands in dirt. Plants around me. Quiet. The energy of the earth crawled up like gentle lightning through my fingertips. Up my arms…
The drinking stopped, but I still felt a constant, detached/untethered sadness, super far away from my soul. I needed to act on my vision of working with plants again. I began searching for herbalism schools and stumbled onto something I didn't even know existed — a school for BOTANICAL esthetics! My body literally shuddered. I can heal people THIS way? With plants?
I enrolled on February 22, 2022. Signed the papers after sobbing in the parking lot.
Somewhere in a practicum treatment — not long after enrolling — a name arrived like a download. “Vyleta”. An alter ego I'd carried since my early teens was built around my grandmother's middle name, Violet. It had always been there. Just waiting for this moment in my life.
Three years ago on April 8th, we celebrated the grand opening of Vyleta Aesthetics.
I opened this space offering EVERYTHING I learned, not quite knowing what my niche would be - yet.
