How did I get here?
There are moments in your life that split everything into a before and an after.
Mine started with Palestine.
Not because I woke up one day and decided to become an activist.
Not because I wanted controversy.
Not because I wanted to blow up my life.
I started asking questions.
And once I did, I could not stop.
I learned about the Nakba. I learned about displacement. Occupation. Settlements. American military aid. The political relationship between the United States and Israel. I started looking at the history I had been taught and comparing it to the history I had never been taught.
And something in me cracked open.
Because once you realize one story was incomplete, you start looking at every story differently.
Who gets to write history?
Who gets erased from it?
Whose grief is treated as legitimate?
Whose violence gets explained away?
Whose suffering becomes invisible because acknowledging it would make powerful people uncomfortable?
The more I learned, the less possible silence became.
So I spoke.
And that is where everything changed.
I knew people would disagree with me.
I was not naïve.
I knew Palestine was a subject that made people angry.
I knew some people would unfollow me.
I knew some would argue with me.
I knew some would decide they no longer liked me.
Fine.
That is disagreement.
What came next was different.
It felt targeted.
The conversation did not stay online.
Then the attack became public.
It was not just vague local gossip or people whispering about something I had said.
Posts began appearing on Twitter/X that were specifically about me.
They included screenshots pulled from my personal social media profiles — my posts, my words, my account — taken out of the space where I had originally shared them and repackaged for a much larger public audience.
Suddenly, pieces of my personal online life were being circulated by other people, attached to commentary about my support for Palestine, and presented in a way that invited strangers to scrutinize me.
Complaints were being directed not just at me, but at my employer.
My personal political speech became something people wanted my workplace to answer for.
And that is when I realized this was no longer just about people disliking my opinions.
They wanted consequences.
They wanted pressure.
They wanted my employer involved.
And eventually, my employer caved.
That betrayal is still one of the hardest parts for me to explain.
Because I had given years of my life to that company.
I had built my professional identity there.
I worked closely with senior leadership.
I handled executive priorities.
I helped with events, philanthropy, employee recognition, communications, customer initiatives, and the endless invisible work that keeps an organization functioning.
I was the person people called when something needed to happen.
I solved problems.
I remembered the details.
I held pieces together.
I made myself useful in a hundred ways that never fit neatly inside a job description.
And like so many women in corporate America, I became incredibly good at being indispensable.
That became part of who I thought I was.
Loyal.
Capable.
Dependable.
Needed.
And when the pressure came?
That loyalty was not returned.
That is the wound underneath the job loss.
It was not simply, I lost my job.
It was:
I learned exactly how disposable I was to an institution I had spent years helping hold together.
The gossip became pressure.
The pressure became professional.
And I became the cost of making the problem go away.
That is how I experienced it.
My support for Palestine became more visible.
The local backlash intensified.
My employer became part of the conversation.
And instead of saying, her personal political speech is her own, the company ultimately chose the path that removed me from the equation.
My employment ended after that controversy.
I believe the two were connected.
And I am not interested in pretending otherwise just because the truth is uncomfortable.
I also do not need to embellish it.
Where I have records, I have records.
Where I have my own direct experience, I will tell it plainly.
Where I am drawing a conclusion from the sequence of events, I will tell you that too.
But I will not erase myself from my own story to make it easier for other people to read.
What happened to me was meant to make me smaller.
That is what public pressure does.
It sends a message:
Watch what you say.
Know your place.
Do not embarrass powerful people.
Do not make your employer uncomfortable.
Do not say the thing that threatens your access, your income, your reputation, or your security.
It teaches silence through consequence.
And for a while, I understood the lesson perfectly.
I knew exactly what the safer version of me would do.
She would stop posting.
She would apologize without technically apologizing.
She would soften every opinion.
She would make herself palatable again.
She would become employable again.
She would prove she had learned her lesson.
There was just one problem.
I had already learned a different one.
I had learned what silence costs.
Once you have seen something clearly, pretending you have not seen it becomes its own kind of violence against yourself.
I could not unknow what I had learned about Palestine.
I could not suddenly decide Palestinian suffering mattered less because defending Palestinian humanity had become professionally inconvenient for me.
And I could not accept the idea that other people’s outrage should determine the boundaries of my conscience.
So I did not get quieter.
I got clearer.
Losing that job broke more than my career.
It broke an identity.
I had spent years measuring my worth through usefulness.
Through being needed.
Through being the person who made things easier for everyone else.
So when the job disappeared, I had to confront something much bigger than unemployment.
Who was I without the title?
Who was I without access to senior leadership?
Who was I without the inbox, the calendar, the urgency, the constant proof that somebody needed something from me?
Who was I when I was not performing competence for an institution?
Those questions were brutal.
Because I realized how much of my life had been built around being valuable to other people.
Not valuable to myself.
Useful to them.
Reliable for them.
Available to them.
That distinction changed everything.
At first, I wanted my old life back.
Of course I did.
I wanted the security.
The paycheck.
The familiarity.
I wanted someone to tell me there had been a mistake and restore me to the version of my life I understood.
But the longer I sat outside of it, the more I realized something:
I did not actually want the old life back.
I wanted the safety I thought it represented.
Those are not the same thing.
Because what kind of safety disappears the moment strangers make enough noise?
What kind of loyalty only exists while you are convenient?
What kind of professional identity requires you to surrender your own voice in order to keep it?
Eventually I had to admit:
That life had already shown me its limits.
So I started building something else.
At first, it did not look impressive.
It looked messy.
It looked like writing things down.
It looked like making things.
It looked like trying ideas.
It looked like rage.
It looked like grief.
It looked like rebuilding my relationship with joy.
It looked like remembering who I was before I became so committed to being useful.
And somewhere inside all of that, Charmed Phase began to emerge.
Not as a polished brand strategy.
As evidence.
Evidence that I could still create after everything had collapsed.
Evidence that I could build something that belonged to me.
Evidence that my voice still existed even after people tried to make it expensive.
That is why this work is so personal.
Charmed Phase is not just about starting over.
It is about what happens when the life that depended on your compliance falls apart.
It is about realizing that losing access to an institution can also mean gaining access to yourself.
It is about women who have spent years performing.
Being agreeable.
Being needed.
Being easy to manage.
Being grateful for crumbs because we were taught proximity to power was the same thing as having power ourselves.
I know that life.
I was very good at it.
Until I was not willing to do it anymore.
Palestine is part of this story because Palestine changed me.
Not as branding.
Not as a content strategy.
Not as a fashionable cause I attached myself to.
Learning the truth about Palestinian history changed the way I understand power.
And the backlash I experienced for speaking about it changed the way I understand courage.
Advocacy is easy when there is no cost.
It is easy to speak when everyone around you agrees.
It is easy to call yourself principled when your principles have never asked anything from you.
The real test comes when the room changes.
When people whisper.
When people complain.
When your name starts circulating.
When your employer gets dragged into it.
When silence could make your life easier.
That was my test.
And I know what I chose.
I chose my voice.
Not perfectly.
Not fearlessly.
Not without consequences.
But I chose it.
And I would choose it again.
Because whatever I lost, I gained something I had spent most of my life outsourcing:
ownership of myself.
If you are reading this and wondering where to start, start with learning.
Do not take my word for it.
Read Palestinian historians.
Listen to Palestinian journalists.
Study the Nakba.
Study occupation.
Study settlements.
Study U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Study lobbying.
Study American foreign policy.
Read human-rights reports.
Look for primary sources.
Ask who benefits from the version of history you were handed.
Then ask another question.
That is what changed me.
And if you want to put material support behind those values, support USCPR Action.
USCPR Action organizes for Palestinian rights and political change in the United States.
You can support their work here:
Contributions through that link go to USCPR Action, not to me or Charmed Phase.
So how did I get here?
I learned something.
I said something.
The town talked.
The pressure reached my employer.
My employer caved.
The career I thought was secure disappeared.
And for a while, I thought that was the tragedy.
It was not.
The real tragedy would have been letting all of that teach me to disappear.
Instead, I rebuilt.
I wrote.
I created.
I questioned more.
I stopped auditioning.
I stopped confusing being needed with being valued.
And I began building a life that did not require someone else’s permission to exist.
There are still parts of this story that hurt.
There are still things I am angry about.
There are still receipts.
There are still unanswered questions.
But there is one thing I am completely certain of now:
They were able to take the job.
They did not get my voice.
And maybe that is how I got here.
Not because everything worked out.
Because I refused to disappear when it didn’t.
Yet still, I persist.
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